The East End kids are alright—and they take cash

It is a time-honored tradition for a community’s elders to complain about kids these days. Kids these days! With their dang TikToks and Fortnites, and so forth! As your humble Lookout editor slouches towards 40, I’m embarrassed to say I’ve even caught myself indulging in the occasional intergenerational eyeroll. But broad generalizations about The Youth™️ never hold up to scrutiny. Case in point: The RVA Little Market.

Making its debut this Sunday in the lot of Challenge Discovery Projects on Jefferson Avenue, this brand-new bazaar will follow the familiar model of farmers markets, craft fairs, et cetera, with one whimsical twist. Namely: all its vendors are children from throughout the East End.

Sarah Blackburn, a Church Hill resident, mother of three, and the organizer of RVA Little Market, told The Lookout in a phone interview this week that the idea was borne from her kids’ relentless (cottage) industriousness. “They are forever trying to do, like, a lemonade stand on our front porch, and things of that nature,” she said, guessing her elder two tykes—Simon (10) and Fisher (7)—may have picked up their entrepreneurial inspiration from her own hobby of sporadically selling surplus that she collects as an amateur beekeeper. “This really came about from trying to find a venue for them to hawk their wares.”

Over the years, said offerings have included both goods—lemonade, baked goods, “special rocks,” and so forth—and services like marker tattoos. (These kids are growing up in one of the country’s historic hotbeds for body art, after all.) But having given her kids the community-commerce bug, Blackburn soon realized that the porch wasn’t big enough to contain their ambitions. “We were sort of feeling bad for our neighbors always getting solicited” to make purchases, she said. (Her youngest, Becker, is glad to eat Simon’s baking, but being four years old, he’s a little short on discretionary income.) They needed a more suitable venue. Her eldest, pitched a booth at the RVA Big Market to sell his baking, but Blackburn and her husband, concerned such a big commitment might strain both the family’s schedule and their youngsters’ ambition, decided something smaller, more local, and less protracted might be a better first step. “We live on [North] 21st [Street], just a few blocks from Pizza Bones, and they have pop-ups all the time,” she said. “We reached out, and they were down.”

Initially, Blackburn figured that Pizza Bones’ lot would be more than enough space for East End kid-preneurs to showcase the fruits of their creative labor. She quickly realized how wrong she was. “We really just did ‘vendor recruitment’ with friends and neighbors, but it kind of ballooned into something that was not going to be contained within” the area Pizza Bones could offer, Blackburn said, estimating the number of juvenile vendors (juvendors?) planning to participate Sunday at around 40. Thus, the Little Market’s will now take place on both sides of the street, in the lots of both Pizza Bones the Challenge Discovery Projects building.³

There, in roughly two days’ time, you’ll find on display the collective output of the neighborhood’s young hustlers. While the inventory is all “subject to the whims of children,” Blackburn warned, her sprawling spreadsheet suggests this crafty cornucopia may include:

• Minecraft stencils

• Custom fridge magnets

• Books

• Baked goods (some vegan!)

• Homemade applesauce

• Lemonade and apple cider

• Friendship bracelets

• “Figurines and fortunes”

• Face painting and temporary tattoos

• Buttons and bookmarks

• “Paper flowers and other origami”

And whatever else the East End’s kiddie creators come up with. Cash is king, but Blackburn figures most vendors’ business managers (read: parents) will be able to broker transactions via Venmo, too, if necessary.

Of course, running a small business is not without the occasional heartbreak, and as poorly as some adults deal with disappointment, it can be that much harder on kids. But Blackburn told The Lookout she’s not worried about having a bummed-out household if the first-ever RVA Little Market doesn’t satisfy her sons’ high ambitions. “If external foot traffic is reasonably low, this will morph into an ‘inter-vendor’ marketplace,” she said, laughing. “A lot of these kids know each other, and ultimately they'll be able to hang out with friends. If nobody buys their baked goods, they'll share it with their buddies.” Here’s hoping the East End’s future tycoons always remember that time-honored tradition.

📜 Possum Poetry

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to [email protected]. All submissions anonymous!

🤐 Newbille silent on accusations of silencing free speech

Contrary to the Trump administration’s ongoing and broad-based assault on the United States Constitution, it is still the law of the land, technically speaking. And its First Amendment very explicitly protects speaking, at least when it comes to criticizing government bodies. A watchdog group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)¹ , thinks Richmond’s City Council and its president, 7th District councilmember Cynthia Newbille, might need a refresher on that one.

Last Friday, FIRE sent a six-page letter to each of the body’s nine members expressing its concern for “repeated censorship of criticism during public comment portions of city meetings.” The document, first reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, mostly focuses on incidents last year when 8th District Councilmember Reva Trammell “interrupted or cut off” one speaker’s public comments before City Council, claiming they constituted “attack[s]” on employees of the city government in violation of the body’s rules. But FIRE’s Stephanie Jablonsky also notes that that “this is not the first time City Council has come under public scrutiny for violating its residents’ free speech rights,” referencing an April 2025 incident in which Newbille reprimanded residents for referring to Danny Avula by name in their criticism of the mayor’s apparent budgetary bait-and-switch on mobile-home repair funding. (A subsequent speaker at that meeting worked around her procedural objection by referring to Avula as “he who must not be named.”)

At the time, an associate professor of law at the University of Virginia told the RTD’s Samuel B. Parker that City Council’s rules were probably constitutional, but that Newbille was applying them in a way that might not be. In its letter last Friday, FIRE’s Jablonsky went further, arguing the rule itself was “unconstitutionally vague” and calling on Newbille and company to rewrite the rules and “affirm it will refrain from infringing speakers’ First Amendment rights going forward.” A spokesperson for City Council, Steve Skinner, issued a statement to the RTD saying “City Council is committed to fair, orderly and open meetings.”

Newbille did not respond to the paper’s request for comment, nor to The Lookout’s follow-up request.

🏗️ City solicits housing pitches for Shockoe Bottom lot

You know how the E. Broad St. corridor seems to be flanked by a crazy amount of surface parking lots through Shockoe Bottom? Turns out, at least one of them—the rectangular plot across E. Grace St. from the recently opened Bakery building—actually belongs to the city. And earlier this week, officials put it up for sale, soliciting proposals from real-estate developers interested in turning 212 N. 18th St. from an underutilized, expensive-to-maintain slab of asphalt² into more housing for a city that desperately needs it. (Check the full RFP here.)

The acre is worth around $2 million in today’s market, per a late October report from the RTD’s Eric Kolenich, but right now, Richmond taxpayers are coughing up $17,000 per year to maintain it—an absurd cost given a) I have never once seen it full, and b) it’s a fucking parking lot. What, man? Anyway, by selling the land to a developer, the city would turn a cost sink into a tax-revenue producer, and add housing units in the process. The RFP dictates that “[p]roposals must include at least 20% of all residential units as affordable housing, spanning 0–80%” area median income. (That’s ~$90,000/year for a family of four.) While the lot is currently zoned B-5, Richmond’s code refresh currently designates it MX-13—meaning a future building on the property could be up to 13 stories, one more than The Bakery itself.

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• Tee up some trees: It’s Richmond’s 34th year as a “Tree City USA,” so Public Works is planting a bunch of ‘em at Chimborazo Park, and holding a brief kickoff ceremony tomorrow (11/8) at 9am. More info.

• Clean-up the cemetery: Parks & Recreation is holding a clean-up at Oakwood Cemetery tomorrow, also at 9am. Details here.

• Listen to some tunes: Kind Hearted Goods is hosting Los Angeles musician Derek Skye for a pop-up concert next Tuesday (11/11) at 6pm. The info.

• Taste some wine: Union Market is holding a pre-holiday tasting of 35 wines next Wednesday (11/12) from 5-8pm. More info and tickets here.

• Get schooled on solar: The Office of Sustainability is holding a community engagement meeting about the proposed East End Solar Farm next Wednesday starting at 6:30. Register to attend.

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to [email protected] for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Email it to [email protected] with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.

1  When FIRE has made headlines over the past decade, it has mostly been for pearl-clutch-y “protect conservative speech on radical campuses” type schlock from Bari Weiss, Bret Stephens, or any of the other bad-faith dipshits that have turned the New York Times Opinion section into a right-wing grievance blog. But apparently it also just does rank-and-file free-speech watchdogging, too. Go figure!

2  Of interest: at the southeast corner of the property are two automated license plate readers (ALPRs). They are not Flock Safety devices; I think they’re manufactured by Motorola. Same basic function though. It’s not clear what might happen to this surveillance array if/when this land gets sold. I’ll look into it.

3  Correction 11/7: A previous version of this edition misstated where the market will take place. It will happen at both Pizza Bones and Challenge Discovery Projects.