Bring your crappy business and your hair brain schemes to the City of Norfolk. We’ve got millions of our taxpayers’ money, and we’re just dying to spend it.

Let’s just get going and build this thing so I can actually spend my paycheck now rather then my social security later.

In all their glory.

Tomorrow should be a fun day for those of us oddly obsessed with the future of this far-too-holy port town they call Norfolk, Virginia…

Now is not the time to close the doors. Now is the time to be open. If Norfolk wants to be a grown-up city, it needs to start treating its citizens like adults. Let it start here, with Waterside.

To get you ready for the festival, we’ve put together a list of rules on how to maximize your experience at the Wine Festival.

A swell teacher in Portsmouth, DADT repeal party fun, an Asia Minor shout out, racism alive in VA, and more in Jay C. Ford’s If You Read the Paper.

You don’t have to settle for the mall. Local businesses have everything you need, so go ahead and day trip this summer.

Let Gay Pride tell a story, because if it doesn’t, it will fade into irrelevance.

Detroit got Juxtapoz’d, so we juxtaposed Detroit and Park Place. See what happens.

As chickens are a hot topic this week, I’d like to share the story of my Japanese chicken and the Buddhists who saved him. And more in today’s If You Read the Paper.

The City needs to identify a list of possible short-term uses and put those plans in action as soon as possible, while working toward the best long-term solution the best minds in the world have for the space.

“We’d be fine going in now even if it’s just for the short term to bring some life back into Waterside to see if we can have some influence to change the City’s decision. We want to show them, ‘Hey, we actually can do something with this space.’”

It’s easy to forget that the now-maligned strip mall was, at one time, a novel solution to the automobile and the suburbs that invention enabled. Before the car, the strip mall was less than impractical–it was unthinkable.

Stephen Richard offers a unique, however improbable, solution.

Architect and urban planner Lennie Araujo reviews what Norfolk is missing, how it can get it, where it could go, and why any of it matters.

It’s been around for just over 25 years, and now Waterside is going through (what we at that age like to call) a quarter-life crisis of identity.