Downtown Living

Hope you like commuting

This cartoon was drawn for the FXBG Advance. If you want more details, read here.

Downtown Fredericksburg has been undergoing a facelift over the past decade. I used to work downtown at my last newspaper job, the one I moved to Virginia for in 1998 and got laid off from in 2012. Why am I still here? I’ve been thinking about moving away every day since August, 2012.

I used to be a downtown person and even lived downtown for a brief time during my band and party days. I was the person you could ask for directions from about downtown. I can still do that for most of this area which is what happens when you live in a place for 26 years. FUUUUCK!….26 years? Now, I don’t know what’s going on downtown. It’s changing so much that by the time I learn of a new restaurant or bar, it’s going out of business.

Some of these places are cool, like Rebellion, a whiskey bar. I don’t drink whiskey but the bar is cool. Then there’s Sports Lounge where they pat you down before you can go inside and there’s a DJ. It’s the worst place ever. It sucks. But everyone’s favorite dive bar is still on the 800 block of Caroline Street, where a roach almost crawled on me the last time I was there. Check, please. Locals drink there, but only tourists eat there. Poor stupid tourists.

There’s been a lot of changes to this old town. The site of my old newspaper, where I and so many others have years of memories (the number of ladies I took there after the bars’ closing times is staggering. I only took them for tours…honest. It’s also how I found out the publisher/owner would sometimes roam around the building super early in the morning). This building where many of my colleagues spent decades is now a “boutique” hotel (whatever the hell that is) called The Publisher, where the name honors the building they destroyed to charge $300 a night and provide a chophouse. Across Douglas Street from The Free Lance-Star was an old-timey hardware store which is now gone too and in its place are condos. FLS took up an entire block and now on both sides of Amelia Street is another row of condos, some taking space where the FLS building sat. I wouldn’t be surprised if they continue building condos on the other side of the the block on William Street, but I really hope they don’t do it on Washington Street because that’s a Confederate cemetery…at least for now. From what I understand, racist Confederate ghosts are the worst. And there are more new condos downtown. My question is, who’s living in them?

We’re a small city of about 30,000. Even though some bars stay open ‘til 2 a.m., it’s the kind of place where they roll up the sidewalks at 5 p.m. Ask someone about our antique stores, not me…someone who goes to them. It’s a growing city. It’s an old city that was founded in 1728. George Washington was raised across the river in Stafford County and his mother and sister lived in the city. Hugh Mercer and John Paul Jones (the Admiral, not the bassist for Led Zeppelin) both lived here. We’re also a tourist city because there were a few Civil War battles here. We have buildings that still have cannon balls in their sides. If you get stuck behind a slow driver downtown, that’s a tourist. Feel free to honk.

Years ago, FLS wrote an editorial against tourists’ cars being towed and my editor wanted me to cartoon about it, but I refused because I wasn’t on board. I’m against tow truck sharks (I fucking hate them because they are sharks circling blocks to fuck someone over), but I don’t defend stupid and I didn’t want my paper to use an idiotic argument (I lost). We wrote a lot of stupid editorials (we once wrote an editorial arguing to limit how long paramedics could block traffic while helping car wreck victims. “Hurry up and move those bodies. The honey baked ham store closes at 4.!” (Yes, we have a honey baked store. My editor also nearly once used the expression “golden showers” in an editorial, not knowing the other term for it obviously, before some party pooper in the newsroom stopped it). The tourists’ arguments were often, “We’re not from here, we didn’t know we’d get towed even though there was a sign.” I argued to my editor, they know what the sign said even though they’re tourists. They’re from Fairfax, not El Salvador. And even if they were from Latin America, “no” in Espanol is the same “no” in English. I didn’t draw the cartoon and for once, my editor was actually cool with it. But I digress…

This is also a commuter city. A lot of people who live here spend very little time here because they have to get up at 4 a.m. to catch a train to their job in Northern Virginia or Washington, DC. And that’s what most the people of these new townhomes are doing.

I take long walks and just out of curiosity, I search for the prices of homes I see listed and over the five years I’ve lived in my apartment (about a mile from downtown), I haven’t seen a price in my neighborhood for less than $500,000. The condos downtown are between $700,000 and a million. An old high school downtown was converted to condos after spending decades as as vacant building used for hobo sex, and now some of those units are going for $1.2 million.

This area, and not just the city, has a housing crises. There are not enough homes for the people moving here.

And that’s what this cartoon is about. A lot of readers who don’t live here ask me to explain the local cartoons. I often send them a link to the Advance and tell them if they don’t get it, then just wait for my next cartoon. I do like that readers who don’t live here are interested in my cartoons for the Advance.

Drawn in 30 seconds:

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