Beauty is in the eye of the beholder — and in the eye of the SFDC Board of Directors.
Once again, the winners of the Mary Thonen Beautification Award have been announced. This annual award recognizes local businesses and property owners for their outstanding contributions to Richmond Highway beautification. This annual award was created to honor long-serving SFDC board member Mary Thonen.
This year’s winners are: Belle Haven Towers, Cherry Arms Apartments, Cooper Center, Huntington Gateway, Montebello, Mount Vernon Square, Sacramento Center and Virginia Commerce Bank.
Businesses receiving honorable mentions are: Beacon Mall, Brown’s Mazda, Engleside Plaza, Green Olive, The Gables, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Lukens Plaza, McDonald’s-Hybla Valley, McDonald’s-Penn Daw, McDonald’s-Woodlawn, Meadow Woods Apartments, Mobil Station at Russell Road, Mr. Kleen Car Wash, Rorer’s Produce, Shoney’s, Skyview, South Meadows Condominiums, Taco Bell, Traveler’s Motel and Village at Gum Springs.
Winners are selected because of the landscape improvements that they’ve made to their businesses. Individual business owners use the landscape in front of their businesses and along the service drive medians to make their businesses more appealing to the eye.
SFDC believes that attractive landscaping brings more consumers not only to the individual businesses that landscape but also more consumer traffic to the highway as a whole. There are no specific minimum qualifications for nominees, but board members look for businesses that have landscaped both their storefront area and their service drive medians with a mixture of trees, shrubs and colorful annual plantings.