June 20 - 26, 2024
Fa lls Chur c h, V i r g i ni a • ww w. fc np. c om • Fr ee
Fou n d e d 1991 • Vol. XXXIV No. 19
The City of Falls Church’s Independent, Locally-Owned Newspaper of Record, Serving N. Virginia
New Uyghur YOU ARE ENTERING TINNER HILL! Restaurant Moving Into Orso Space Dolan Uyghur Will Be Its 3rd Location in DMV by Nicholas F. Benton
Falls Church News-Press
It was a sudden, unhappy development for Falls Church when the popular Pizzeria Orso restaurant on S. Maple announced it was shutting down almost immediately this spring. Now, that shocking news has been met with a much happier report, and this concerns a new restaurant that will be occupying the space by the end of the summer. This latest announcement came on a weekend in Falls Church when its racial and ethnic diversity were on full display, including with a day of Vietnamese-American activities open to the public in Cherry Hill Park, bringing the Eden Center, as it were, to downtown Falls Church for a day, and with the formal unveiling of a brilliant new mural on S. Washington St. marking the newly designated Tinner Hill Historic District, home to the first rural chapter of the NAACP. Juneteenth holiday events yesterday also marked the special week in the Little City. The Dolan Uyghur will not be just any restaurant. It is a third location in this region that will be opening with the same name, and that means something special for the Little City. For Hamid Kerim, the owner, it will mark another important step in his unfolding restaurant empire here that foresees more locations in the wider area where he already has restaurants on Connecticut Avenue in Northwest D.C. and in Chantilly to the west. This surely stands to be Falls Church’s gain, and in a major way. With apologies that it might sound facetious, it will represent a way for
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A COLORFUL NEW MURAL graces the S. Washington facing wall of a building there to mark the new Tinner Hill Historic District in Falls Church that was dedicated last weekend to honor the African-American community there. (photo: Gary Mester)
F.C. Police Chief Meets Business Owners by Nicholas F. Benton
Falls Church News-Press
He’s into his fifth month on the job, but Falls Church’s new police chief Shahram Fard is continuing to work hard to familiarize himself with every element of the community here because community policing is his particular passion. Chief Fard addressed the monthly luncheon of the Falls Church Chamber of Commerce at the Italian Inn Tuesday and offered a deeply personal account of fleeing with his fam-
ily from Iran in the wake of the Ayatollah revolution there in the early 1980s, and his family’s struggles once emigrated to the U.S.when he was just 12. His dad was a civil engineer in Iran, but forced to flee on horseback incognito across the border into Turkey, eventually winding up in Montgomery County, Maryland, and then Richmond, Virginia. Long story short, as an admirer of public safety work of police at a young age, once in the U.S. his aspirations led him to a career in policing, including 26
years with the Alexandria Police Department, rising to the level of deputy chief. Long-time friends with retiring Falls Church Chief Mary Gavin, Fard said that rather than retiring, he was persuaded to apply for the job as Gavin’s successor here, and was vetted by the Virginia Association of Chiefs of Police that ran the Falls Church recruitment effort. But it was his sensibility to the struggles on small business owners, in particular, that underscored his desire to serve in the area of public safety.
Stripped of his opportunity to work as a civil engineer in the U.S., Chief Fard’s dad was forced to do whatever it took to raise his family in the U.S., and that meant as a rug merchant in Montgomery County, where he faced all the ups and downs of running a small business, including the devastating effect that thefts and robberies had. With so little margin for error as a retailer, his dad fought to make ends meet for his family, and even his wife had to take
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