Robin Rogers beckons visitors on a summer hard-hat tour of the expanded Chrysler Museum’s Perry Glass Studio into the primary theater space. Though the space with a catwalk and second floor raked seating will hold 220 people, twice as many as the old space, it will retain the intimacy visitors have enjoyed during demonstrations of Glass After Dark performances. “Right when you walk in, you’re going to see the action happening,” he says.
The new theater space has audio-visual improvements over its predecessor including giant screens, a sound system and a second-level space where a band can plug in, making it adaptable for a variety of uses, including business events and parties.
Rogers, the glass studio’s manager and program director, says the theater is one of two hot shops in the expansion, which triples the size of the facility and doubles the educational and program offerings. The other will be used for classes and collaborations with area universities and the Governor’s School for the Arts.
The museum dipped its toes in interactive art by opening the studio in 2011. “The glass studio itself was really an experiment,” Rogers says. “The museum built it to see what would happen if we brought glass making to life and the experiment went really well.”
Well enough, according to Erik Neil, director of the museum, that the demand for classes and for local artists to use the facility eventually exceeded capacity. The expansion will meet that demand and create dedicated classrooms for things like fused glass and stained glass.
“People have enjoyed having that interactive part of art either practicing themselves or witnessing the daily demos,” he says. “It enlivens the whole artistic experience.”
The museum raised $56 million for the expansion from about 300 donors, including a couple of dozen major contributors and the state and city of Norfolk.
Classes in the new space began in August, and daily demonstrations started in September. The renovation of the old studio is expected to be complete by January with an opening celebration for the expanded studio in April.
The entrance to the glass studio has been moved to the side of the new addition facing the main museum with a serpentine path between them, a symbol they are one institution.
“The Chrysler Museum really encompasses the glass studio,” Neil says. “I think it’s one of the solutions where the Chrysler has shown how we’re going to stay a relevant institution going into the future. People go to the glass studio and then they come over to Chrysler and they maybe visit an exhibition, they have lunch, all that kind of stuff. It’s really part of the whole experience.”
This is an online-only Hampton Roads Business story.
By late spring, surf will be up at Atlantic Park on the former site of The Dome, Virginia Beach‘s distinctive geodesic dome convention center and concert hall that was torn down in 1994.
Atlantic Park, a $350 million mixed-use entertainment venue and surf lagoon project at the Oceanfront, is the highest profile project in the Hampton Roads area, and it’s scheduled to open in May 2025 — partly due to the backing of music and fashion superstar Pharrell Williams, who grew up near the site — but there are other big developments on the horizon.
Atlantic Park shares a theme with other notable projects, including improvements to the Half Moone Cruise Terminal and Norfolk International Airport. They’re designed to raise the region’s international profile and attract new visitors. Meanwhile, improvement plans for other sites — including Fort Monroe in Hampton and MacArthur Center mall and the former Military Circle Mall in Norfolk — continue to run into obstacles.
Atlantic Park, approved in 2019 by Virginia Beach City Council and funded with $153 million in public money, has faced its own challenges — including funding delays — and earlier this year, groundwater containing high levels of iron and arsenic from the project’s lagoon excavation flowed into nearby Lake Holly. Ultimately, the project’s Virginia Beach-based developer, Venture Realty Group, removed the chemicals in March, allowing work to progress.
By May 2025, planners expect it will be time for visitors to get into the water at the 11.5-acre plot between 18th and 20th streets and Pacific and Baltic avenues. The development will feature a 3,500-seat indoor entertainment venue with room for an additional 1,500 people outdoors, as well as retail, restaurants, parking garages, apartments and 10,000 square feet of office space. But the attraction unique to the area will be the 2.67-acre surf lagoon.
Chuck Rigney, who stepped down as Virginia Beach’s director of economic development in late July amid a city investigation into his travel expenses, said earlier in July that Atlantic Park’s first phase — including the lagoon — was scheduled to open in late spring 2025.
“This is as significant a project as it gets, and it’s going to be a catalyst for redevelopment all in that area,” Rigney said, noting that the infrastructure upgrades will create development opportunities in the area. “It’s going to have an effect on a lot more development down there of, hopefully, a signature-type caliber, so we can raise the profile of Virginia Beach into more of an internationally known city.”
By land, air or water
Along Norfolk’s downtown waterfront, another project appealing to tourists is under construction at the city-owned Half Moone Cruise and Celebration Center. To prepare for weekly cruises by the 12-deck Carnival Sunshine ship beginning in February 2025, the terminal is demolishing its small escalator and building a sloped circular ramp to make exiting and boarding more efficient for an estimated 3,000 passengers per cruise. Customs stations are also being improved by introducing mobile kiosks.
Another project scheduled for completion in fall 2025 will be enclosing a terrace to create an air-conditioned seating space for 600 passengers waiting to board.
Nauticus Executive Director Stephen Kirkland, who also manages the cruise terminal, forecasts 300,000 passengers will move through Norfolk annually starting
in 2025. Carnival’s marketing to fill the ship weekly will increase drawing passengers from a wider area. “It’s a game changer for us and for the community,” he says, noting that passengers will fly or drive in a day or so early to be sure to make their cruise.
“That’s a big opportunity for us as a community,” he adds. “These guests really will be coming from much further afield, all across the mid-Atlantic and beyond, and they will, many of them, be staying with us the day before and the day after.”
Cruise passengers flying into Norfolk will also discover new amenities as Norfolk International Airport responds to dramatically increased demand growing by about a half-million passengers annually — from 4.1 million passengers two years ago to a projected 5 million this year.
Norfolk International, notes airport Executive Director and CEO Mark Perryman, hasn’t had major improvements other than upgrading parking structures in more than two decades. “What we’re doing now is modernizing the existing airport,” he says. “We’re redeveloping it in a manner that will re-life the airport for the next 25, 30 years.”
Several reasons are behind the increased demand. During the pandemic, people outside the area discovered the Outer Banks, Virginia Beach and Norfolk beaches when they couldn’t go to other vacation destinations, Perryman notes, and those traditionally drive-to locations became fly-to locations. Additionally, he says, the rebound in business travel also has contributed to higher traffic.
Norfolk International Airport Executive Director and CEO Mark Perryman anticipates that the addition of three gates at Concourse A will be finished in November. Photo by Mark Rhodes
At the airport, an addition of three gates to Concourse A is expected to be finished by November, as well as a new customs and border patrol facility that is likely to attract more international flights. By mid-2025, a new moving walkway connecting parking decks is expected to be operational, and a 165-room Courtyard Marriott with restaurants and a fitness center next to the departures building is due in early 2026. Perryman says those projects combined will cost about $80 million.
Further down the line is a new $400 million departures terminal, likely to break ground in 2026, and a $200 million rental car facility scheduled for a 2025 groundbreaking.
The airport is on a solid financial foundation, Perryman says, with a preliminary estimate of $98 million in total revenue for fiscal 2024, up from $77.7 million in 2023.
No local money subsidizes the airport, although it does receive relatively small grants from the state and federal governments. Also, the Courtyard Marriott’s developers are bringing their own financing, and rental car companies are doing the same for their on-site facilities at the airport.
“We are a growing, thriving airport, and that is good for the Hampton Roads region,” Perryman says. Chesapeake, Virginia Beach, and Norfolk supply most of the airport’s passenger traffic, but Norfolk International’s reach extends halfway up the Interstate 64 corridor to Richmond, west to Suffolk and Isle of Wight, and south to North Carolina.
Meanwhile, on the logistics front, Amazon.com is rolling forward with two large facilities in Virginia Beach, costing approximately $350 million and creating an estimated 1,000 jobs by 2025. A delivery station is expected to be open and in operation later this year in time for holiday deliveries, and a multistory, 650,000-square-foot fulfillment center is set to be open by mid-2025.
Real estate taxes on the facility will pay off the city’s investment of $22.5 million for a new road accommodating the two warehouses within 20 years, according to Rigney.
“Amazon, in the competitive world of home delivery, is trying to get the time that you buy a product to the time it gets onto your doorstep really shrunken down to within a two-hour time frame, so they need to be in closer proximity to major urban areas,” Rigney said in early July.
He noted there is an adjacent site that could accommodate 450,000 square feet of development. “If that was to come in,” he added, “it would represent another significant capital investment, real estate taxes and jobs, as well.”
Not quite there yet
Not all area projects are moving forward smoothly. In March, Norfolk Mayor Kenneth Alexander announced a redevelopment idea for the long-ailing MacArthur Center that would include a 400-room hotel, more than 500,000 square feet of high-rise apartments and a 2.5-acre pedestrian promenade with more than 172,000 square feet of retail space. But that vision is still more wish than reality.
Sean Washington, Norfolk’s economic development director, says no developer has been identified for the project, nor is there a financing plan. The city is investigating whether it makes economic sense.
“This is going to be a very large public-private partnership,” Washington says. “And so, with all the other major projects we have going on at the municipality, we really want to get a better understanding of what would we be able to properly invest back in the site, which we know is obviously high priority.”
The city, Washington adds, wants a better understanding of how to maximize tax generation and examine what economic development and financial tools it can use. A developer would not have a proposal until sometime in 2025, he says, and the project would be completed in phases, with the first construction phase lasting two to three years.
The overarching goal is to create an attraction, much like MacArthur was when it opened in 1999. “We really want this to be this premier mixed-use destination, not just for our city but also for the region,” Washington says.
Another Norfolk project that experienced false starts also faces an uncertain future. The former Military Circle Mall was purchased by the Norfolk Economic Development Authority for $13.4 million in 2020. Following decades in decline, the 97-acre shopping center closed completely in 2023 after 53 years in operation.
In 2021, the city issued a request for proposals to redevelop the mall site and received three proposals that officials gave further consideration — including some big names like Pharrell Williams, Virginia Beach hotel developer Bruce Thompson and NFL Hall of Famer and developer Emmitt Smith. Among the plans were new arenas, hotels, office space, residential buildings and retail.
Going back to 2016, when the city adopted its long-term Vision 2100 master plan, Military Circle was a preferable location for redevelopment because it is among the highest elevation properties available in Norfolk — a significant advantage with so much land threatened by storm-surge flooding and sea-level rise.
Although the city began informal talks with Williams and Venture Realty Group about their “Wellness Loop” proposal in 2022, no formal announcement or contract materialized, and in late 2023, the plans to build an arena-anchored development at Military Circle were dead.
Nonetheless, the city has demolished some of the property’s buildings, although clearing the rest of the mall is in limbo, Washington says, because a Ross Dress
for Less store remains on-site and has lease options that run through 2036. Demolition cannot proceed without their consent, but the city is in discussions with Ross, he says.
“There have been some conversations that we potentially look for a new home for Ross that’s kind of relatively close [to Military Circle],” Washington says. “They absolutely love it there.”
Also, the city launched a market analysis and feasibility study this year to examine the possibility of a mixed-use family sports complex at Military Circle, along with housing, retail and lodging space. Sentara Health’s insurance office is already in the former JCPenney space.
Fort Monroe, the former military installation in Hampton, has seen a pause in redevelopment because of cost inflation, officials say. Photo by stock.adobe.com
On the move
Two other major downtown Norfolk projects are moving into design phases. The much-discussed renovation of Chrysler Hall has $1.5 million allocated for design costs during the next year, according to City Manager Pat Roberts, while the city’s capital improvements plan lists as high priorities a proposed $82 million allocation in 2027-28 for project construction.
Nearby, $4.5 million is earmarked each year in 2025 and 2026 to pay for the design of a “significant” renovation of Scope Arena. The capital budget allocates $54 million beginning in 2027 for renovations, labeling that project a “medium” priority.
Another major regional project facing marketplace uncertainty is the redevelopment of Fort Monroe 13 years after the Army closed the 565-acre property and turned it over to a state authority. A master plan completed in 2013 called for preserving the site’s history and envisioned a phased development with residential, retail, restaurants, a hotel and enhanced public spaces.
Smithfield-based Pack Brothers Hospitality had plans to invest $45 million to build a marina, renovate two historic buildings into conference space and a restaurant and hotel over the water, but those plans were shelved in January due to rising costs, the developers said.
“One of the biggest challenges for developers coming to Fort Monroe is there are a lot of historic preservation requirements that developers have to meet,” says John Hutcheson, the Fort Monroe Authority’s deputy executive director in charge of real estate. “Sometimes that increases cost, [and] sometimes it adds time to the permitting process. Specifically, to the Pack Brothers marina development, they got caught up in a combination of the cost inflation post-pandemic and the increase in interest rates for construction financing. Those two things combined to make the project not viable in the current market.”
Hutcheson says the project could become viable at some point and that the authority might make another request for proposals. For now, the authority is pursuing utility upgrades necessary because the Army’s old water and electrical systems do not fit with current utilities.
Those include two sites where Richmond’s Echelon Resources has options to transform historic buildings into apartments. Echelon has begun the design and permitting phases for two other sites that do not require utility upgrades and will house 75 to 80 apartments, says Hutcheson.
Developing the property is complicated, he notes. Its history goes back to Indigenous people, making it a part of American history, not just military history. The Old Point Comfort site also has historic significance as the place where enslaved Africans first landed in America in 1619. The authority planned to take bids in September to construct the African Landing Memorial plaza.
“I think that will be the thing that carries Fort Monroe to achieve its rightful place among the most historic sites in our country,” Hutcheson says. “That’s what we’re all working for. That’s what all keeps us focused. It’s a big real estate project, but it’s equally as big a historic project.”
Jeremy Alessi was a gamer and software developer in Norfolk about a decade ago when he first heard of Bitcoin, the mysterious and complicated cryptocurrency. “I thought it was a dumb idea,” he says.
Four years later, after his father-in-law mentioned hearing a National Public Radio story about the currency, Alessi decided to take a second look. He read a white paper about Bitcoin and immersed himself in its details well into the night. He was a convert. His timing was good.
In 2012, Alessi would help launch Virginia Beach-based Bcause LLC, a speculative bitcoin mining business. Bcause would receive more than $12 million from investors, attract a $500,000 Virginia Beach economic development grant and employ 36 people at its height, before it was ordered by a federal judge to liquidate its assets in October, following the company’s voluntary bankruptcy filing earlier this year.
For Bcause and other Virginia companies that have entered the cryptocurrency space, this volatile new financial sector has been a roller coaster journey of high hopes, altered plans and sobering realizations.
Despite the fact that cryptocurrency remains largely bewildering to the general public, it has emerged further into the mainstream this year amid reports of Facebook’s controversial plans to launch its own cryptocurrency, libra. Already facing scrutiny from U.S. and European officials, the project hit a serious snag in October, after it lost support from seven high-profile financial partners, including PayPal, Visa and Mastercard.
Down the rabbit hole
“It’s a new industry, it’s a new business model. Not a lot of people understand how this works,” which has made it difficult for some startups to attract venture capital investments, says Richmond attorney Alex Mejias. He has specialized in representing startups focused on cryptocurrency and blockchain-based models.
Mejias fell down the cryptocurrency rabbit hole in 2017. Soon, he began helping startups through the regulatory maze. One client, Louise W. Reed, a Richmond-based certified public accountant, runs Afloat, a blockchain-based marketplace for tax-credit transfers. Another out-of-state client developed a cryptocurrency-based social network similar to Instagram that rewards users for posting photos.
Some of his clients haven’t been able to stay in business. While Mejias is a believer in the technology, he’s not a cryptocurrency market player. “I tell people, ‘Do not trade Bitcoin.’ I don’t,” he says. “It’s such a volatile market that you have to really know what you’re doing and have a high tolerance for risk.”
Mejias saw his cryptocurrency practice fall off this year, he says, after the Securities and Exchange Commission issued regulations that made it a lot more difficult for companies to issue initial coin offerings (ICOs) on which many startups had depended for capital.
In late September, the SEC ordered one of the largest blockchain technology companies, Block.one, to pay $24 million in penalties for conducting an unregistered ICO of digital tokens that raised a record $4.1 billion in 2017 and 2018.
Block.one, which was co-founded by Virginia native and Virginia Tech graduate Dan Larimer, recently announced plans to locate its $10 million U.S. headquarters in Arlington County, creating 170 jobs. Registered in the Cayman Islands with offices in Hong Kong and Los Angeles, Block.one has an operation center in Blacksburg that employs more than 80 engineering and research and development workers.
Larimer will be one of the featured speakers at Blocksburg Summit 2019, a blockchain conference hosted by the Virginia Tech College of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science on Nov. 10-12 at The Inn at Virginia Tech and Skelton Conference Center in Blacksburg.
If Block.one is the big kid in town, RoundlyX is the new kid looking to latch onto the buzz. Will Trible, a web designer with a degree from James Madison University, invested in Bitcoin early on. He reconnected in Richmond with a boyhood friend, Andrew Elliott, who served as an intelligence officer in the Marine Corps in Afghanistan and earned an MBA from Georgetown University, and they started looking for a gap in the startup landscape. Cryptocurrency seemed like a worthwhile opening.
In 2017, they founded Coin Savage as a cryptocurrency news and analysis website with a leaderboard that tracks its analysts’ investments, much like Morningstar, the investment research firm. After two years, they’re changing focus, folding that into a new venture, RoundlyX, which they launched in April. RoundlyX allows users to buy cryptocurrency by rounding up their credit card purchases automatically.
Elliott says it’s a low-risk way to enter the cryptocurrency market, which has fluctuated wildly. “We had so much volatility, it scares mainstream folks away sometimes,” Elliott says. “You’re making it so people can’t really overextend. … It’s a great way to get people in.”
Coin Savage’s content and leaderboard will be integrated into RoundlyX. So far, the company has more than 700 users in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. Elliott and Trible make their money with site subscriptions and affiliated products.
Still, despite promising startups like RoundlyX and success stories like Block.one, the cryptocurrency world “is very much unproven ground,” Mejias cautions. People seeking a way to get rich quick should “be very, very careful.”
The race is on
So how does cryptocurrency work?
Bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency today, is “a really elegant system. It’s a combination of math, game system and economics — the whole setup of Bitcoin is really cool,” Mejias says.
Unlike traditional currency, you can’t hold a Bitcoin or any of the hundreds of other cryptocurrencies in your hand. They exist only on the internet and most cryptocurrencies run on blockchain technology, which was invented in 2008. What’s blockchain? Put simply, it is a digital ledger that stores transactions in virtual blocks. Every block contains a record of thousands of transactions and a blockchain is a cumulative ledger, composed of a continually growing number of blocks. Blockchain technology is expected to have applications for a number of industries, ranging from accounting to real estate.
Cryptocurrency proponents say the system is superior to and more secure than the traditional monetary system. For one thing, the traditional banking system can sometimes take as long as a few days to transfer money to a retailer following a debit transaction, but cryptocurrency financial transactions are virtually instantaneous. Additionally, larger blockchains are practically hacker-proof, and peer-to-peer financial transactions cost much less because there are no middlemen such as bankers or brokers involved.
Transactions on Bitcoin’s blockchain are verified by miners who earn bitcoins for the service. Bitcoin miners use high-powered computers stacked in warehouses requiring vast amounts of electricity to solve — some descriptions say it’s by guessing — complex math problems to update a blockchain ledger of transactions. Think of it as a high-tech version of a guy wearing a green visor making an entry into a dusty ledger, except everyone — including you — can see the ledger instantly. The theory is, this makes the transactions more secure.
Bitcoin mining is a race — the first miner to finish verifying a block of transactions earns about 12.5 bitcoins, which are now worth around $8,200 U.S. apiece. New blocks are created roughly every 10 minutes.
When Bitcoin was founded a decade ago, a miner could run the software on their home computer. Now, in order to compete, it takes powerful — and expensive — computers solely dedicated to mining.
A work in progress
Bcause opted to enter the cryptocurrency market through mining, and it provides a cautionary tale about the industry’s volatility.
In 2009, the payout for mining a block was 50 bitcoins, but that has dropped over time to 12.5 bitcoins. The real-world value has also fluctuated wildly, with the currency reaching a high of nearly $20,000 in December 2017, then crashing to about $3,330 in December 2018.
For Bcause, mining was up and down. There were some early dry holes due to problems with the companies supplying computers to Bcause. But the company also earned returns on some investments within weeks. “We learned, OK, this mining thing is sort of risky, but you can make money if you’re partnered with the right [hardware] manufacturer,” says Bcause co-founder and former acting CEO Tom Flake.
A round of financing raised $5 million. BMG, a mining company, advanced Bcause nearly $7.8 million in November 2017 as part of a hosting agreement to mine cryptocurrency.
Following the mining market’s late 2018 crash, Bcause filed for bankruptcy in April 2019 in federal court in Illinois, declaring debts of more than $14 million, including $4 million in arrears. The bad news continued, though. In June a power surge at the Virginia Beach facility destroyed or damaged 325 mining computers owned by BMG, according to a settlement agreement filed with the bankruptcy court. As a result, BMG says it’s owed nearly $7.8 million and it terminated its hosting agreement in October, pulling its computers.
Flake was still optimistic that the company could work through reorganization, but in early October a federal bankruptcy court judge ordered the company to liquidate its assets and Bcause ceased operations.
As for Alessi, although he did some programming for Bcause in the early days and is listed as a co-founder, he hasn’t been in touch with executives there for months. He has a decidedly more reserved view of cryptocurrency these days and no longer invests in it.
Alessi has hopes for the blockchain/cryptocurrency industry, though. “It’s still a work in progress,” he adds. “I think people are developing cool things with it that at one point you’ll be like, ‘I can’t live without it.’ Once that happens — maybe once you can pay your taxes with it, stuff like that — it’ll change commerce.
“I went from this point of being very skeptical to being very onboard with it. And now I take a little bit more of a balanced view. Some people will say that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is a Ponzi scheme. And some people will say that it’s the future, [that] this is how we will transact. I just think it’s both.”
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