City to Hold Sept. 11 Day of Service and Remembrance

In conjunction with the City of Richmond’s Neighbor-To-Neighbor Initiative and HandsOn Greater Richmond, the Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities will hold a Day of Service and Remembrance on Sunday, September 11, 2011 in recognition of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In addition, residents are asked to give back to the community by volunteering for various

Public Pools, Some Community Centers Closed

All city parks and recreation swimming pools are closed today due to power outages and storm debris. Site inspections are currently underway, and pools will re-open once determined safe for public use.       In addition, the following community centers are closed today due to power outages: Westover, Ann Hardy, Hotchkiss, Battery Park, and Creighton Court.

Tonight's Movie in the Park Cancelled; Park Trails May be Closed

Due to impending inclement weather, the Department of Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities has cancelled tonight’s Movie in the Park at Jefferson Park, “Dogs and Cats: Revenge of Kitty Galore.” the movie, which will concludes the department’s series of free family Movies in the Park, will be rescheduled at a future date.
       In addition, it is the department’s policy to close park trails

Seven Years Later

There are words we would rather skirt around,

when the sky becomes an excuse,

or this arrangement of ducks across sloping cobbles

distracts from what we talked of last night.

We were only hypothesising, weren’t we,

about a society of amputation,

the whole bloody foreign situation?



At the turn of the road, rage between drivers

who, moments ago, were merely strangers.

From here, from this angle, the headlines

behave like a cliché, precisely,

read: ‘Everything is wrong.’

They have worn us down – or out –

and we have no more choice than

to reach for another bottle or shout.



Tom Phillips

Department Extends Free Movies in the Park Series

Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities has added another free movie to its series of family films shown in parks around the city. “Cats and Dogs: Revenge of Kitty Galore” will be shown at 8 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 26, in Jefferson Park at 21st and East Marshall streets.  
     In the animated family comedy, cats and dogs join forces for the first time in history to take down Kitty Galore, a

City to Host First Friday Event Promoting Teen Arts

The City of Richmond in conjunction with First Friday’s will host RVA presents The Lounge at Center Stage (The Lounge).  This Teen Arts event will take place outside at Seventh and Broad streets on Aug. 5, 2011, from 6 p.m. until 9:30 p.m. The pilot project - coordinated by Parks, Recreation and Community Facilities; Richmond Police; CenterStage and SMG, with support from the business community

Through the outskirts

Almost precisely as you’d expect,
it's the wires’ thickening cross-hatch
across pocked tarmac, stained render,
comes closest to local authority boundaries.
Or, approached another way, the pale
concrete sweep of southerly ring-road
with its phalanx of 50s council housing,
TV dishes and double-glazing sun-glints:
the cusp of a city that will draw you in
through misnamed, treeless avenues
(Boer War victories, bird species, poets)
or up and over railway bridges,
past gravelled yards, construction sites,
the terraces’ gradual narrowing
to these fin-de-siècle cul-de-sacs.
With buddleia and footpaths
gathering to allotments, mesh gates,
there are marram grass patches,
sunk culverts’ mossy blockages,
and a security guard, arms akimbo,
pacing limits of occupied land.

From here then, best move on
through burnt ochre cars relapsing
to spare parts, domestic whims expressed
as pebbledash frontage, garden gnomes
and koi carp winking dirty orange
in the glaucous eye of a pond.
These, too, are part of the city:
indented chalk vale, schoolyard,
billboard, improvised belonging –
left around for decades in one place,
we’re hardly more at home than Russian vine
or this branch of Lidl opening late
beneath defaced factory buildings
and scaffolders joking, on overtime.
At a guess, it will only be months
before we no longer recognise
reconfigured thoroughfares,
arrangements of girders and plate-glass.

Tom Phillips, 2011