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byline: Arrman Kyaw

Opening doors

The Hard Rock entertainment, gaming, and hospitality brand is solidifying its place in Bristol on Nov. 14 with the formal opening of its Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Bristol, a $515 million resort and casino.

The company has had a presence in the city for the last two years via a temporary casino facility, but the launch of more permanent facilities will mean the opening of the hotel, along with other amenities.

The facility — it spans more than 622,000 square feet — includes a 303-room hotel, multiple bars and restaurants, over 20,000 square feet of event space, a spa, a resort pool, an outdoor live music stage, and a pastry kitchen.

Hard Rock will bring its flair of music-related stylings to the resort, with an extensive memorabilia collection that focuses on country and western music genres. The Nov. 14 grand opening also will feature a concert by country music star and “The Voice” coach Blake Shelton.

Located at the former Bristol Mall, the casino is proving to be an economic driver for the city. Since July 2022, when the temporary casino opened, Hard Rock has paid more than $66 million in gaming taxes to the state and welcomed more than 3 million visitors.

“When we open, we’ll open with over 1,400 [employees],” says Hassan Abdel-Moneim, director of hotel operations for Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Bristol. “Our minimum wage in the casino is $18 an hour. This is really going to help spur growth and development in the area and provide people a standard of living that they don’t currently have.”

Northern Virginia

In Alexandria, what was once the George Mason Hotel in the 1920s reopened as Hotel Heron in June. The 134-room boutique hotel is part of Aparium Hotel Group and comes with more than 3,500 square feet of indoor event space and a rooftop bar overlooking the Potomac River.

The state is expected to get its first JW Marriott hotel in mid-2025. The JW Marriott at Reston Station will be a 243-room hotel that rests below 94 condominiums. Managed by Crescent Hotels & Resorts, the hotel will contain 25,000 square feet of event space and be part of The Row at Reston Station. 

Also coming to the Reston area at the end of the year is a hotel that’s a combination of two brands under the Marriott umbrella. The upcoming AC Hotel by Marriott/Residence Inn by Marriott Reston will consist of 147 guest rooms under the AC brand and 120 under Residence Inn. It will have approximately 11,000 square feet of event space and a rooftop lounge with a mountain view; both the AC half and the Residence Inn part are set to open in January 2025.

In July, The Publisher Hotel in Fredericksburg opened as part of Marriott’s Tribute Portfolio. The 98-room hotel stands where The Free Lance-Star newspaper’s former office was in downtown Fredericksburg, and includes 1,800 square feet of event space.

Central Virginia

The University of Virginia’s Virginia Guesthouse will be a hotel and conference center with 214 guest rooms, 29,000 square feet of meeting space and approximately 12,000 square feet of public space. It is expected to open in fall 2025 near the new School of Data Science in the Ivy Corridor.

Shenandoah Mansions, a 73-room hotel located in a building dating back more than a century in Richmond’s Fan District, is expected to open in February 2025. The fifth hotel from national hotelier Ash, the motifs of its rooms will pay homage to American folk art.

Southern Virginia

Located in Danville, the $750 million Caesars Virginia Casino and Resort, replacing the temporary casino, is expected to open by December, Danville officials say. The hotel is set to have 320 rooms, along with a 90,000-square-foot casino floor, a full-service spa and 12 restaurants and bars. It is slated to contain 50,000 square feet of meeting and convention space.

Hampton Roads

At the moment, new lodgings in Norfolk and Virginia Beach are mainly in the discussion stage. In April, Norfolk’s mayor announced the city’s MacArthur Center mall would be replaced with a mixed-use development that could include a 400-room, military-themed hotel known as The Anchorage.

Meanwhile, Divaris Real Estate Chair-man and CEO Gerald Divaris and former Gov. Robert McDonnell have proposed a 450-room hotel on 17th Street in Virginia Beach, according to city officials.  

Meeting of the minds

Inclusive narratives, a post-pandemic restaurant industry and artificial intelligence are just a few of the topics that will feature in this year’s VA1 Governor’s Tourism Summit, an annual gathering of tourism professionals from across the state and beyond.

Scheduled Nov. 13-15, the 2024 VA1 Governor’s Tourism Summit will take place at Hot Springs’ The Omni Homestead Resort, which officially reopened last fall after $150 million in renovations. Last year’s summit took place at the Greater Richmond Convention Center.

“It’s really just a chance for the entire industry, suppliers and vendors to come together for networking and sharing the most relevant ideas, technology and concepts for 2024, looking to 2025 and beyond,” says Rita McClenny, president and CEO of the Virginia Tourism Corp.

The VA1 Governor’s Tourism Summit provides attendees with an opportunity to network and share ideas, says Virginia Tourism Corp. leader Rita McClenny. Photo courtesy Virginia Tourism Corp.

Attendees and around 60 listed guest speakers will get the opportunity to discuss such ideas during the three-day event. Organizers say they expect strong attendance this year — approximately 450 state tourism professionals and Virginia Secretary of Commerce and Trade Caren Merrick.

“Tourism has grown,” says Eric Terry, president of the Virginia Restaurant, Lodging & Travel Association. “Tourism is growing at a pretty good clip. We’re anticipating that growth to continue in the current year.”

Virginia’s visitor spending in 2023 reached a record high of $33.3 billion, an increase of nearly 10% from the year prior. The industry also supported 13,000 more jobs in 2023 — more than 224,000 jobs total — compared with 2022.

The summit will kick off Nov. 13 with networking events and a reception themed around the 20th anniversary of The Crooked Road, Southwest Virginia’s 333-mile driving trail connecting more than 60 venues related to traditional Appalachian old time and bluegrass music.

The day after is when the summit will commence its opening general session. Keynote speakers include Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of the National Restaurant Association’s research and knowledge group, and Hilina Ajakaiye, executive vice president of Meet Boston.

“Despite a host of challenges this year, restaurant industry sales nationwide will reach a record $1.1 trillion,” Riehle says. For the commonwealth of Virginia, he says, 2023 sales were well over $27 billion.

The pandemic shook up numerous in-person activities for much of 2020 and 2021, including eating out at restaurants. And these drastic adjustments for the consumer and the industry have fundamentally altered routines today, Riehle says.

“If you look at restaurant traffic today, across all meal periods, industry traffic is still down for on-site visits compared to pre-pandemic levels,” he explains. “Conversely, what the industry calls off-premises traffic — take-out, delivery, drive-through and curbside — for all three meal periods is up compared to what it was pre-pandemic.”

Almost three-quarters of all U.S. restaurant traffic today is off-premises, a sharp hike from 61% before the pandemic, according to Riehle.

Throughout the summit will be a number of “super sessions,” where presenters each cover a different aspect of the tourism industry. Diversity, equity and inclusion, as it relates to tourism marketing and hospitality, will be center stage at a couple of sessions.

According to the event description, OutCoast.com publisher and LGBTQ+ travel content creator Rachel Covello’s session aims to “[explore] the shift in tourism marketing from emphasizing destination aesthetics to prioritizing emotional and mental safety, particularly for minority groups.”

Although leisure travel recovered after the pandemic in 2021, group travel — defined as people traveling together for some organization, shared purpose or agenda — took a couple more years to rebound, says Dan Roberts, vice president of research and strategy for VTC.

“If you look at overall the recovery of the commonwealth going back to 2020, business and group [travel] have had the highest hill to climb,” he says.

Roberts will take part in three sessions during the summit about the hotel industry, group business, success metrics and the group and meetings market in Virginia.

Also on the agenda is artificial intelligence, a growing influence in tourism.

Nov. 15’s schedule will start with a general session, where Todd Brook, founder and CEO of digital marketing agency Envisionit, will speak about how to use AI tools to increase team efficiency and productivity.

The summit’s exhibit hall opens Nov. 14 and will feature myriad exhibitors from both in- and out-of-state, including Amtrak Virginia, the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation, Disney Advertising, LeisureMedia360, Tripadvisor and the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission (VA250).

“It is an opportunity to update especially our tourism professionals from across the state on new things that are happening, things that are new to the industry as well as some statistical updates on what’s happening from a data point of view,” Terry says. 

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected from the print version to reflect that Virginia Secretary of Commerce and Trade Caren Merrick will be at the event, not Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

 

Under construction

Amazon.com fulfillment and delivery centers

Virginia Beach

As part of Amazon.com’s growing presence in Virginia, the tech giant is coming to the Virginia Beach area in the form of a 650,000-square-foot fulfillment center and a 219,000-square-foot delivery station. It is an endeavor with $350 million in investments and is expected to create more than 1,000 jobs. Construction remains on track, according to Amazon. The robotics fulfilment center, a five-floor facility with 55 loading docks, is expected to open in 2025. The delivery station, meanwhile, is scheduled to open near the end of 2024.

Photo courtesy Bon Secours

Bon Secours Harbour View Medical Center

Suffolk

After breaking ground in October 2022, construction on the Bon Secours Harbour View Medical Center — an expansion to the existing Harbour View campus in Suffolk — is still on track to be finished in March 2025, with plans to welcome the facility’s first patients in the second quarter of that year.

The $80 million, 98,000-square-foot hospital roughly doubles the size of the facilities on the Harbour View campus. It is a three-story building that will have 18 inpatient beds and four operating rooms, along with associated pre-operative and recovery spaces, and capacity to further expand vertically should need arise.

As of late June, installation of the hospital’s elevators and storefront and facility windows is complete, and the hanging of drywall and installation of sprinkler piping is in process.

 

 

 

Photo by Mark Rhodes

Atlantic Park

Virginia Beach

A $350 million joint project between music and fashion superstar Pharrell Williams and Venture Realty Group, Atlantic Park will span multiple acres and contain a surf lagoon and bungalows; a 3,500-person amphitheater; 300 apartments; more than 100,000 square feet of retail, restaurant and office space; two parking garages; and half a mile of upgraded public streets.

In late August, general contractor W.M. Jordan Co. laid the lowest depths of the Atlantic Park wave pool, which is expected to be open in May 2025. A wave machine is expected to be installed in October. Also, the $54.8 million amphitheater known as “The Dome” is set to be complete for a May 2025 opening.

 

 

 

 

Photo by Mark Rhodes

Fusion @ NEON Apartments

Norfolk

Norfolk real estate developer Marathon Development Group is building a 239-unit, $50 million apartment complex on West Olney Road, part of Norfolk’s Neon District. The apartment complex will contain studio, one-, two- and three-bedroom units ranging in size from 498 to 1,733 square feet. Construction was not yet complete in July, but the project’s developers expected to have initial residents arrive in August, and the leasing office had started accepting applications and offering hard hat tours.

 

 

 

 

 

Photo courtesy Virginia Department of Transportation

Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel

Hampton and Norfolk

The commonwealth’s largest transportation project to date — valued at $3.9 billion — is approximately halfway done with construction. The project entails construction, expansion and renovation along the 10-mile stretch of Interstate 64 from Hampton to Norfolk. Half of Hampton’s Mallory Street Overpass has been demolished and replaced with a new bridge of a greater span length. Traffic was set to be shifted there in late summer so work can begin to replace the other half of the bridge. 

Construction on the North Trestle — an eight-lane bridge between Hampton and the HRBT North Island — is also half done. The new four-lane eastbound North Trestle was opened for public use in May and is currently serving two lanes of traffic. North Island was expanded by 15 acres. Both the second halves of the new Mallory Street Overpass and the North Trestle are expected to be complete in 2026, in the fall and summer, respectively.

The South Trestle — an eight-lane bridge between HRBT South Island and Norfolk’s Willoughby Spit — is more than 70% complete. VDOT expects to make traffic shifts onto the structure starting in 2025. Road widening and rehabilitation of the Willoughby Bay Bridge, along with construction for Norfolk roadway spanning from Willoughby Spit to Patrol Road, is also in progress.

Mary, the project’s tunnel boring machine, has finished mining from South to North Island, meaning the first of the project’s two new two-lane bored tunnels is complete. So far, Mary has excavated 7,941 feet and installed 1,191 concrete rings. It will take approximately five months to rotate and reassemble Mary for her second tunnel boring back to South Island. The trip is expected to start late September and finish in summer 2025.

Finally, the expanded bridge-tunnel is expected to be open to traffic in February 2027, with final projects like landscaping expected to be finished in August 2027.

Rendering courtesy Seafood Industrial Park

Seafood Industrial Park

Newport News

The northern portion of the city’s longstanding seafood harbor is set to undergo a harbor dredging, dock replacements, and a seafood market installation. All of the projects are expected to commence construction between January and July 2025.

Demolition of existing 130-feet-long wooden docks and dredging will take place first, followed by the construction of new piers with concrete decking and pilings and safety features. The replacement docks are expected to expand capacity to 10 to 12 boats and have a recreational dock for transient boats visiting the upcoming market.

Designs for the dredging cost $123,000 and are now complete, with dredging work estimated to cost $1.75 million. Designs for the dock improvements cost $239,000 and wrapped up in July. Construction for the dock improvements — estimated to cost $5 million — are expected to begin this coming winter. The planned seafood market will be located near the piers and is expected to span roughly 7,800 square feet. The market’s design cost $802,000, and construction is estimated to cost approximately $9 million.

Kuhn continues moving Loudoun projects forward

It hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for Chuck Kuhn lately as he tries to rezone land for flex industrial use in Leesburg and Purcellville.

The CEO of JK Moving Services and JK Land Holdings, Kuhn is one of Northern Virginia’s most prominent data center developers and land conservationists, having purchased swathes of property in Loudoun County to keep the land rural. But his reputation as a data center builder has run into growing opposition from residents who oppose more data center development in Northern Virginia.

In Leesburg, Kuhn has proposed to rezone and redevelop the 7.6-acre site of the shuttered Westpark Golf Club hotel and conference center into an 86,400-square-foot flex industrial building. The site neighbors a golf course that Kuhn sold to Loudoun County in 2022 to be turned into a public park.

Kuhn’s development proposal — approved 5-2 by the town council in July — faced scrutiny over the project’s scale and appearance, as well as truck noise levels.

Another concern was whether the building would become yet another data center; Kuhn’s team later changed the plan to exclude data centers as a permitted use for the land.

Work on the building’s site plan and design are underway, and in mid-August, Kuhn said he expects both proposals to be presented to the town for approval by late September. “We’re hoping that we’re demolishing the old building within the next six months,” Kuhn said.

Progress in Purcellville has not gotten as far.

Town council members there voted 4-3 in late July to continue gathering information before deciding on Kuhn’s application to annex and rezone land outside town to develop the Valley Commerce Center. Like Kuhn’s proposal in Leesburg, he has offered a plan that would not include a data center.

Concerns with the Valley Commerce project include water usage, location suitability and traffic increases, according to Purcellville Town Council member Caleb Stought, who voted against the application.

Kuhn’s project will add an estimated 3,500 trips per day to roads “that are already prone to significant congestion and gridlock,” Stought says.

Kuhn has also filed a rezoning application with Loudoun County. In August, JK Land Holdings purchased the 25-acre Telos Corp. headquarters site in Ashburn for $60 million — and that could be a potential space to develop data centers, although Kuhn hasn’t said what he intends for the site.  

The other tunnel project

Despite complications including a run-in with an abandoned anchor, workers are now back at it, constructing the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel’s second tunnel across the Thimble Shoal Channel.

As of July, the bridge-tunnel’s expansion from one tunnel to two is set to be finished in 2027 — five years later than expected and 10 years after work started — and will cost about $817 million, up $60 million from original estimates.

The culprit? An antique anchor in the tunnel boring machine’s path. Nicknamed Chessie, the boring machine started excavating in the Thimble Shoal Channel in February 2023, and about 750 feet down in the tunnel, Chessie struck an anchor dropped more than 70 years ago, according to Thomas Anderson, deputy executive director of finance and operations for the CBBT project.

The anchor’s manufacturer was identified as W.L. Byers Co., a British anchor maker in the 19th and 20th centuries, Anderson says. The obstacle in Chessie’s way, though broken into pieces, was approximately 10 feet tall and five feet wide in totality. Larger pieces of the anchor were recovered.

“There’s a couple pieces that they haven’t accounted for, but they were all fairly small,” Anderson explains. “We figured they either got ingested by the machine and we just didn’t see them come out on the conveyor belt, or they got pushed to the side [by the machine]. … They were able to recover most of it, though.”

Back in action

The $3.9 billion Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel expansion underway — in which Mary, its tunnel boring machine, completed work on one of two new tunnels in April — is the larger and more high-profile project, but the CBBT expansion is also significant for both the Virginia Department of Transportation and Hampton Roads commuters looking forward to less gridlock.

The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel’s expansion, when complete, will have a parallel two-lane tunnel alongside the existing immersed tube tunnel that connects two islands along the Thimble Shoal Channel, with southbound traffic in the new tunnel and northbound in the older tunnel.

Having two tunnels makes life easier for commuters, whose drives are often impacted by accidents or road maintenance, Anderson notes.

Anderson says that Chessie’s anchor strike caused significant damage to the boring machine, and the majority of the tools on the machine’s cutterhead had to be replaced by the crew before it could start work again, as well as removing the anchor from the tunnel’s path, a $60 million cost that is expected to be covered at least in part by insurance.

“The final amount … is yet to be determined because that anchor strike is an insured event, so it’s not up to us necessarily,” Anderson explains. “It’s up to the contractor to settle with the insurance companies. The final amount of that settlement hasn’t been negotiated yet. But we expect to receive the majority of that cost back in insurance proceeds.”

The anchor issue came up after other complications and delays — including issues related to granite boulders used to build the CBBT six decades ago — had already pushed the completion date from 2022 to 2024. Now the expected completion date is late summer 2027, according to Anderson.

As of April, Chessie has resumed its intended journey, 14 months after the anchor strike, and the machine had completed about half of the digging required for the 43-foot-wide, 6,350-foot-long tunnel as of July.

Also, workers on the two channel islands — known as No. 1 and No. 2 islands — have finished constructing the launching and receiving pits where Chessie now enters and exits the new tunnel, and where traffic will one day flow. Other projects underway or recently finished include roadway slabs and engineered berms on both islands. Later in the process, workers will construct the roadway, the tunnel’s electrical and mechanical systems, and support buildings, according to the CBBT’s website.

Toll revenue, the CBBT’s general fund, and state and federal funds — including a loan of up to $338.6 million from the federal government in November 2021 — are funding the project. One day, the state hopes to expand the second tunnel further, connecting two islands on the Chesapeake Channel.

“We don’t expect to be able to afford to build the second [tunnel] at Chesapeake Channel until sometime in the mid-2030s,” Anderson says.  

All aboard in Hampton Roads

Amtrak Virginia — the state-supported Amtrak rail service — has been experiencing record ridership for more than a year, with passengers in Newport News and Norfolk making up the lion’s share of the traffic.

In March, with the state recording a high of 123,658 train riders, 79,158 came from Norfolk and Newport News. In June, ridership decreased to 111,489, with 73,303 riders coming from Hampton Roads and the Peninsula.

In 2023, Newport News and Norfolk logged 378,441 riders in the first half of the year, compared to 421,239 over the same period this year.

“We’ve actually had record ridership [statewide] for 12 of the past 13 months,” says Karina Romero, a Virginia Passenger Rail Authority spokesperson.

Some of that additional traffic is due to more roundtrips added to Amtrak’s schedule in Virginia.

In August, the Newport News Transportation Center opened for Amtrak customers and regional bus riders on Bland Boulevard, and also serves as a transfer point for local taxis and airport shuttles. The $53 million, 8,066-square-foot train station dwarfs the old, 750-square-foot station, Romero notes, and it will offer two daily roundtrips between Newport News and Richmond, Alexandria, Washington, D.C., and cities in the Northeast U.S.