News

Home Prices on the Rise — The average sale price of a single family home in Arlington rose 17 percent in March, compared to the same period in 2009, local Realtor Laura Rubinchuk reports. “Inventory is way down as we’ve sold through many of the properties for sale,” Rubinchuk writes. She notes, however, that the average price of condos and co-ops fell 6 percent from 2009. More from the Arlington Real Estate News blog.

Colorful New Signs for Shirlington Village — “The old ones looked like they were in an 80s business park,” a commenter quips on the Shirlington Village Blog.


Around Town

We stopped by the hotly-anticipated European brasserie over the weekend for one of the “soft opening” events and, despite the high expectations, left thoroughly impressed.

The first thing we tried was the mussels. Lyon Hall has two distinct mussel varieties: spring garlic/English peas/fontina/mustard and Hungarian lamb sausage/celeriac-apple-beer broth. We went with the Hungarian lamb and were not disappointed. You’d be hard-pressed to find a tastier plate of mussels anywhere in the D.C. area. And the $14 “large” option was more than enough for two people.


Around Town

There’s a section of Arlington National Cemetery, near the Iwo Jima Memorial, that contains graves unlike any other. The graves belong not to soldiers, but to freed slaves who lived on the grounds after the Civil War, in a thriving “Freedman’s Village.”

The village was home to more than 1,100 former slaves, including the black abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who spent a year there, on what was once the estate of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s family.