On a Tuesday afternoon at the end of June, Bill Daly posted a video explaining why Crooked Beat Records was not leaving Del Ray after all. A customer of nearly three decades had bought a building at 2101B Mount Vernon Avenue and closed on it that same day. Crooked Beat would rent from her. "She just wanted Crooked Beat to keep going," Daly said. Hours earlier, on the same Tuesday, Neighborhood Restaurant Group had announced it was opening a record store of its own at 2016 Mount Vernon Avenue, roughly 128 feet away on the other side of the street.
Two record stores, one minute apart on foot, announced within hours of each other. If you read that as a market signal, you will read it wrong. Del Ray did not get two record stores because the numbers said the block could carry two. It got two because the people who run this street called each other before they signed anything. That is the pattern worth understanding, and it is the reason this particular fall on Mount Vernon Avenue sounds different from last fall.
What Lands Between the 2000 and 2100 Blocks
The NRG shop now has a name. It is Mobius Records, a second location of the independent store Dempsey Hamilton has run on Fairfax City's Main Street since 2014. Hamilton announced the expansion on August 9 and is targeting mid-September at 2016 Mount Vernon Avenue, partnering with NRG founder Michael Babin, Evening Star Café chef Nathan Anda and NRG beverage director Greg Engert. The partnership is not new. Mobius and NRG have collaborated for more than a decade, including an annual Record Store Day beer and pop-up appearances at NRG's Snallygaster festival.
Babin has been direct about the arithmetic of two shops on one block. He said he contacted Daly as soon as Crooked Beat announced its new address.
Babin recounted the response he got: "He said the more the merrier, and it'll only make it more of a destination."
That is the whole thesis in one exchange. Babin and Anda have a combined collection of about 5,000 records between them, and the shop will sell new and used. The trio behind it has opened vinyl bars before, including the B-Side in Merrifield and Junebug in New Orleans. The opening is timed to coincide with Evening Star Café's 29th anniversary at 2000 Mount Vernon Avenue, which now trades as Hi/Fi Tex-Mex BBQ with the beer garden attached.
Crooked Beat comes into this from a harder place. A January rainstorm flooded its basement space at 2417 Mount Vernon Avenue and damaged hundreds of records. The shop closed there on May 3. The new address is a two-story townhouse of roughly 950 square feet at street level, which neighbors say had sat vacant for more than a decade. Daly founded the store in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1997, and this is the second time a neighbor has found it a home in Alexandria. A tip from another local business owner brought it to Del Ray in 2023 after redevelopment pushed it out of Old Town.
The third piece of that stretch is already trading. Crooked Run Fermentation posted an August 28 opening date in the window at 2003 Mount Vernon Avenue, the address Dolce & Bean kept warm, and that Friday has now passed. Co-founders Jake Endres and Lee Rogan started the brewery in Leesburg in 2013 and also operate taprooms in Leesburg, Sterling and D.C.'s Union Market District. The Del Ray room runs a 12-tap draught system with an in-house bar menu prepped at the Sterling facility. Rogan handled the build-out himself, which included constructing a walk-in refrigerator and correcting a significant floor sag with self-leveling concrete. Small detail, large implication: someone spent real money leveling a floor on this block before either record store opened its doors.
The Free Layer Nobody Puts on a Flyer
The paid shows get the attention. The recurring free ones are what actually change a Tuesday.
The Hi/Fi beer garden at 2000 Mount Vernon Avenue has been running songwriter sessions with free sets from local players. Upstairs at the same address, the No. 9 Lounge at Evening Star Café hosts an open mic. St. Elmo's Coffee Pub at 2300 has kept an open mic and a standing Thursday jazz night going for years. The Garden at 1503 books patio music through the warm months alongside its weekly trivia night, and Del Ray Public House runs trivia on Mondays.
None of this is new in isolation. What is new is that these rooms now sit inside a walk that includes two record stores and a taproom. Cadences shift, so check a venue's own calendar before you plan an evening around any single night.
The Anchor at 3701 Has a Loud Fall
The Birchmere has been at the north end of the same street since long before the middle of it filled in, and its fall calendar is dense. From the venue's calendar, the run ahead includes:
- September 5 — John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band
- September 11 — Herman's Hermits starring Peter Noone
- September 30 — Shinyribs
- October 1 — Yachtley Crew
- October 2 — Martin Sexton
- October 6 and 7 — John Hiatt
- October 8 and 9 — Lalah Hathaway
- October 23 — David Cross
- October 29 — Boney James
- December 4 and 5 — Chris Botti
Practical notes for a room of roughly 500 seats: the box office opens at 5 p.m. only on performance days, seating starts at 6, showtime is 7:30, parking on site is free, and everyone needs a ticket regardless of age. Lineups move. One October date on the calendar has already been canceled and refunded, so confirm before you drive up the Avenue.
The Two Saturdays That Bracket It
Art on the Avenue holds the first Saturday in October every year, which puts it on October 3 this year, running 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Mount Vernon Avenue between Hume and Bellefonte. It is free, volunteer-run, sponsored by the Del Ray Business Association, and it brings multiple music stages along with more than 300 juried artists, international food, kids' activities and the youth pie-baking contest. The 30th anniversary edition last October ran four stages, with the Irish Breakfast Band in its usual place as a neighborhood favorite. Founder Pat Miller has been consistent that the festival stays locally produced, with more than 250 volunteers behind it.
The Del Ray Vintage & Flea Market takes the second Saturday of each month from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m., with more than 50 vendors across three locations on the Avenue. That is September 12 and October 10 this fall. The Halloween Parade closes the season in late October, stepping off from Mount Vernon Avenue at East Bellefonte and running down to the Mount Vernon Recreation Center fields with awards for best pet costume, best decorated business, home and stroller. Last year's edition was the 29th and ran on a Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. The 2026 date had not been posted at the time of writing, so watch the DRBA calendar for it.
Before You Walk Over
Three status checks worth making, because the Avenue is in motion and a wasted trip is annoying.
Mobius is targeting mid-September and Crooked Beat is listing its new address as coming soon. As of the most recent local reporting, neither had opened. Both are worth a look at their own sites or social accounts before you head out with cash in your pocket.
Hypergoat Coffee Roasters is building out a cafe and roastery at 2423 Mount Vernon Avenue in the former First Agape Baptist Community of Faith building, a 3,051-square-foot space. City permits describe a barista counter, a coffee lab and roasters area and a small commercial kitchen. Co-owner and head roaster Rodrigo Ramos, who lives here with his wife and business partner Deborah Joos, told ALXnow in August that the project is in early buildout with no opening date yet. Their Old Town cafe at 215 N. Payne Street just turned two.
The Colasanto Interactive Fountain behind Del Ray Artisans at 2700 Mount Vernon Avenue is still not open. The city had targeted late April, then posted in May that completion had slipped beyond the anticipated date, with Béatrice Coron's artwork set into the perimeter. The project page is the place to check rather than walking the kids down.
What the Block Is Telling You
Read the fall as a calendar and it is a nice season. Read it as a sequence of decisions and it says something sturdier about this neighborhood. A landlord bought a building specifically to keep a record store. A hospitality group invited a competing shop's owner to share a block and meant it. A brewery leveled a sagging floor for a room that seats a fraction of what its other locations do. The Del Ray Business Association handed the Scholarship Fund of Alexandria a check for $10,511 in late August, proceeds from the sixth Bands & Brews crawl across more than 20 restaurants, and then went back to planning its next Coffee & Conversation on September 16 at Piece Out.
Junction, at 1508, closed its Chevy Chase location in August and said plainly that the Del Ray original is not affected. It has been on the Avenue since spring 2016, in the space where Mancini's Cafe + Bakery ran for two decades, with a tin ceiling uncovered during demolition still overhead and a name borrowed from the neighborhood's Potomac Yard railroad history. That is the shape of the place. People stay, and when they cannot, someone here usually figures out how to keep them.
If you have been walking these blocks for years and want to talk about what all of this means for your own address, or you have friends asking why Del Ray keeps coming up, Christine Garner is a phone call away. Call Christine, talk with an Old Town neighborhood expert, and get a straight read on your street from someone who has watched this Avenue change for decades.
