Retail report

Coming soon to Midtown: Chipotle Mexican Grill, the Vitamin Shoppe and Mattress Firm. Meanwhile, in Plaza-Midwood, Harris-Teeter will tear down and rebuild its store at the corner of Central and The Plaza.

Clean up our park

Kristan Magas writes:

As many of you know, we, the Elizabeth Community, have adopted Independence Park to help the city with maintenance due to severe budget cuts. You may not know that Hawthorne's Pizza is co-adopting with us! We each are doing a weekly trash sweep of the park and working together on a monthly maintenance project. Please consider signing up for this great opportunity to show how important our beautiful park is to us. We really need support from you all as we have struggled to get enough volunteers up to this point. Go to this link on our brand new website to sign up and for details:
www.elizabethcommunity.com/volunteer/park-clean-up-program

Great new ECA site

If you haven't yet, check out the snazzy new Elizabeth Community Association website. Very nice.

Our own farmers market

Hope you had a chance to stop by the inaugural Elizabeth Avenue Farmers Market Saturday. There was fresh fish, eggs, honey and bread as well as fruits and veggies in the parking lot next to 1900 Mexican Grill (not, as the wonderful new ECA website says, in front of Customshop). Traffic was light when I got there around 9 a.m., but the vendors were hopeful. The baguette from Chef Charles Catering was sublime. The market is scheduled to be there on Saturdays, 8 a.m. to noon.

Pre-show

Just before the fireworks July 4, the setting sun put on its own brilliant show. Late afternoon rain kept thousands of people from the Independence Park area for the fireworks -- I've never seen a lighter attendance. I thought it was one of the best shows I've seen, with several new boom-booms.