MonthFebruary 2015

This mini-post links to a post on Nostlgic Virginian's sister website, Byte Cellar, a vintage computing blog. It is included here becuase the post in question is significantly tied to happenings or locales in the state of Virginia.

LINK: Whither Radio Shack

“Beverley Hills — The Completely-Planned Residential Community”

Beverley Hills pamphlet coverIn March 2003, my wife and I moved to the Beverley Hills neighborhood in northwest Alexandria [map], leaving a townhome where we had lived since August ’98 in the Old Town area of Alexandria [map]. The house we moved into was built in 1939 as part of a later phase of the neighborhood, which was established a year or two prior.

Most of the homes in Beverley Hills (one of the planners was named Beverley) were of rather small and basic design, with expansions being added as new owners came and old owners went over the years. Our home saw five expansions between 1939 and today (thought it’s still of only moderate square footage).

Well, a few years ago one of our neighbors mentioned that she had located a 1930s brochure promoting the under-construction Beverley Hills neighborhood. Being one who is intrigued by the histories of things, I asked if I might scan the item to archive and share. The result is the PDF document you see here (click the photo to link over). The illustrations and the language within are certainly from a different time.

While the street my family and I live on cannot be seen in the included aerial photo — it hadn’t been laid yet — the area shown does happen to be the part of the neighborhood we first stumbled into and found so appealing in searching Alexandria for a larger home than our Old Town dwelling.

I was thrilled to find this little piece of history that hits so…close to home.

Related Links:

Related update: Two torn newspaper comic strips from the 1930s found inside of our kitchen wall in Beverley Hills during a water repair back in 2012. I imagine these are a construction worker’s lunchtime reading, accidentally left behind and walled in.

The Tiny Little Book Nook That Once Was My Library

York County Public Library pre-1984

Here in Alexandria, my family and I visit the local libraries rather frequently (we have an eight year old daughter). The libraries around here are excellent — expansive and full of books, audio / video media, and computers for the public galore.

When I was a kid growing up (long ago) in York County, however, things were a little less lavish. First of all, spotting a computer anywhere in public when I was my daughter’s age (that would be 1980) was an occasion to be noted. And second, the local library was, well, a somewhat limited resource.

Our local library, the York County Public Library in Grafton, was small. It was so small that it resided in a (small) strip mall along George Washington Memorial Highway known as Grafton Shopping Center [map]. It was roughly the same size as the ABC store next to it and smaller, as I recall, than the lovely Joe & Mima’s pizzeria and the Boulevard Cleaners that flanked them both. It was truly small.

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