The owners of the Amtrak parking lot have graded and filled potholes, but have never paved the lot.
FILE PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

Although there have been many big plans for the revitalization of West Main Street, including a streetcar, a multi-story mixed use building, and several ambitious UVA expansion projects, a new business group deplores the current state of West Main— particularly the dust that rises daily from the pot-holed parking lot surrounding the Amtrak station.

Calling the lot a “blight on the Midtown landscape” as well as a “health hazard,” and “an environmental travesty,” the newly formed Midtown Association calls on the private owners of the Amtrak parking lot to pave it.

“The history of this situation between the City and the property owners borders on municipal negligence and professional irresponsibility,” reads an Association statement. “Something has to be done.”

In the 1990s, the City pushed Norfolk Southern Corporation to sell the parcel to Gabe Silverman and Allan Cadgene in hopes of fostering a public-private partnership whose (more)

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Abby Larner helps create a new logo for CvilleRail at the second annual Design Marathon.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

“The mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create 11 design projects in 12 hours and hand them off completed to clients. This RFP will destruct in 30 seconds…”

At 10:30 this morning, 35 volunteer design professionals, working in teams of three or four, went to work on 11 pro-bono design projects for area nonprofits. It’s all part of the second annual Design Marathon at the Charlottesville Community Design Center on the Downtown Mall, which wraps up at 10pm tonight.

The event is the brainchild of Serena Gruia, creative director for Alloy Workshop, who floated the idea to CCDC’s director Jane Fisher last year. You may not have heard of Alloy, a construction/architecture/graphics design company, but we’d be surprised (more)

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Haunted singer-songwriter Elvis Perkins‘ father died of AIDS after portraying serial killer Norman Bates in Psycho, and his mother was on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11th. It’s no wonder, then, that his folk-rock tunes sometimes dip into dark and reflective Leonard Cohen territory — his new release is The Doomsday EP, based around two versions of the track which originally appeared on the self-titled album he released this past spring.

Elvis Perkins In Dearland - Slow Doomsday
Elvis Perkins In Dearland - Shampoo

90’s-rocker-gone-acoustic A.A. Bondy opens.

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The apartment building was half gone at 1:59pm.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

The first new fraternity house to be built at UVA in over 50 years got a big pre-groundbreaking ceremony of sorts Tuesday, September 22— as heavy machinery minced a 1950’s era apartment building near UVA’s famed Mad Bowl grassy field.

“It’s coming down good,” says Ralph Law, the site superintendent for Parham Construction, as the crew took a short afternoon break after a hydraulic hose burst while razing the 12-unit apartment building at 135 Madison Lane.

Delta Upsilon, now located next to Beta Bridge on Rugby Road, will build a new building on the site of demolished apartments: a red-brick, neoclassical structure of 6,825 square feet— complete with a two-story classical portico featuring large white doric columns.

Inside, over three floors including an English basement, the architectural firm of Daggett & Grigg has designed 15 single bedrooms (including two handicap-accessible) and several large common areas for the men of DU. The building will feature central air-conditioning as well as wiring for cable and Internet, and it will also be safety equipped with sprinklers.

DU, now celebrating its 175th anniversary, is the nation’s sixth oldest fraternity; and the new house in Charlottesville serves as a fresh place for a chapter founded in 1922, the first chapter south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Since at least the 1970s, there’s been a tradition that anyone painting Beta Bridge would paint “THX DU,” for “thanks, Delta Upsilon” to ensure that the men of DU wouldn’t paint over the main message.

“I don’t know if there was ever any truth to that,” says unofficial UVA historian Coy Barefoot. “That’s just a paint-the-bridge tradition.”

Appropriately enough, as part of a complex house swap-and-purchase, the fraternity that gave its name to the Bridge is coming back home.

Beta Theta Pi— best known simply as “Beta”– is the fraternity that sold its historic location at 180 Rugby to DU in the early 1970s and later spent many years at what was originally called the Compton House on Maury Avenue (a building later razed to great community upset by the Jefferson Scholars Foundation) before decolonizing.

Now recolonizing, Beta will have a rebirth in its old digs which next to the famous paint-covered bridge. We’ll have to see if “THX BETA” becomes the new mantra.

“By tomorrow,” says Parham’s Law, “we should have the majority of it out of here.”

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Crews were busy this morning laying the foundation for Forest Hills Park’s new “sprayground.”
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

After years of discussions and planning, major improvements to Forest Hills Park, located off Cherry Avenue, are finally becoming a reality. The $1.2 million project was put on hold by City Council last fall, due to budget concerns, but according to Parks & Rec director Brian Daly they were able to piece together funding earlier this year to update the 7.35-acre neighborhood park, the first such improvements in over half a century.

Indeed, Daly says the park’s existing wading pool, which will be replaced with a fancy new “sprayground,” is over 50 years old. The last major renovation of a city park was McGuffey Park, the little 1.1-acre park and playground next door to the McGuffey Art Center on Second Street NW. That park improvement cost the city $400,000 (the total cost of the project, thanks to $300,000 in private donations, was (more)

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Construction on UVA’s new $12.7 million music rehearsal hall will begin in January 2010.
Rendering by William Rawn Associates

Artists may starve for their art, but UVA’s Arts Grounds project doesn’t appear to be starving for cash.

Another piece of the ambitious project took shape last week, as UVA’s Board of Visitors gathered in the Board Room of the Rotunda to approve the design and $12.7 million budget for a new music building across from Ruffin Hall, the $25.9 million, 42,000-square-foot “village of workshops” for the studio arts that was completed last year, along with a new $12 million, 540-space parking garage.

As if that weren’t enough, a $2 million renovation of the UVA Art Museum was just completed, $8.4 million was spent renovating Fayerweather Hall, home to the art history program, and there are plans for a new (more)

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The old Mall clock was a familiar, if innaccurate, timepiece on a kiosk, which the City discarded.
FILE PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

“Hey, meet you at the clock,” could be a phrase on the lips of Downtown Mall visitors next year, as the city recently announced plans to sponsor a design contest for a $25,000 urban timepiece that would honor Charlottesville’s relationship with its three sister cities.

“The idea for a clock came from research and visits to great urban spaces around the country and world,” says Neighborhood Development chief Jim Tolbert. “Many have a clock as a key feature, and usually there is some theme to the clock.”

It’s not the first time the city has sponsored a design contest for something that may or may not get built. Last time, it was a $150,000 design contest to generate ideas for the development of the Water Street parking lots, a contest that attracted firms from as far away as Spain, but has so far convinced no developers to take the plunge.

This time the contest is open to (more)

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Trashed since construction on the Landmark Hotel began, Second Street SE will now be getting a $800K make-over.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

While our colleague Allan Smithee is certainly a talented writer, he sometime plays a little fast and loose with the facts. [See "The Rutabaga--editor.]

Second Street SE on the Downtown Mall may look like a trash site right now, but Neighborhood Development chief Jim Tolbert assures us that an $808,000 streetscaping project is scheduled to begin in September. The project was originally planned to be completed in coordination with the construction of the Landmark Hotel, but as that project appears to be stalled indefinitely, the city has decided not to wait.

According to city engineer Tony Edwards, the project should take about four months. And the eye-popping price tag? That appears to be the result of (more)

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The former Elks Lodge turned courthouse gets a facial and a beefy new security system.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

It took five years and cost $20 million, but the newly renovated Juvenile & Domestic Relations Court building on High Street is finally open for business. Indeed, when the Hook visited last week, there was a full house in the lobby, buffered now by a shiny new metal detector and three bailiffs, while men in suits stood under the new portico having a smoke, and folks with a court date cursed and strategized with (more)

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Hydraulic Wash’s struggle to install a rainwater collection system has made its way to Gov. Tim Kaine’s desk.
FILE PHOTO BY WILL WALKER

As the Hook recently reported, a county laundromat owner stepped into a bureaucratic quagmire when he tried to install a rainwater harvesting system last year. Now a slew of environmental groups, political leaders, and business owners have stepped into the fray, firing off a letter to Gov. Tim Kaine this week asking that guidelines for the practice be “expeditiously developed.”

Hydraulic Wash owner Charlie Smith says he was “run through the wringer” by the county plumbing inspection process, which thwarted his plans with outdated codes and regulations. Indeed, county building officials have admitted that one inspector was “uncomfortable with the concept” of rainwater harvesting.

Smith was eventually forced to seek approval for his plan from the local health department, but local health officials say it’s the first time they have had to review such a request, and that they (more)

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After 80 years, the old Shadwell Store falls Wednesday, July 8.
PHOTO BY JEANNE BRUCE-PHILLIPS

Sometimes the loss of an old building, even an unremarkable one, can feel like loosing an old friend. So it goes with the old Shadwell Store, the small, white-bricked building that stood on a one-acre spike of land at the intersection of Louisa Road and Route 250 for nearly 80 years, which was finally demolished earlier this month.

Until last year, the store was being run by the owners of Foods of All Nations, but they decided not to renew their lease, says owner Lloyd “L.F.” Wood, whose (more)

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Bundoran Farm in North Garden hopes to be the State’s premiere “preservation development.”
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

On Virginia Governor Tim Kaine’s recent visit to dedicate the Albemarle CiderWorks, his helicopter touched down at a development site just down the road off Route 29 South.  While Bundoran Farm, a so-called “preservation development,” provided a convenient nearby helipad, it also gave Kaine a chance to see the first community in the state to receive a “Certified Gold Signature Sanctuary” designation from Audubon International.

Kaine was talking about the CiderWorks when he said (more)

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Rain barrels are all the rage these days, but harvesting rainwater for commercial use, as the owner of Hydraulic Wash wants to do, has been stalled by outdated codes and guidelines.
PHOTO BY WILL WALKER

In a town where rebates are being handed out to folks who buy rain barrels, one might think a local laundromat owner’s plan to harvest rainwater off his roof would be welcomed with open arms. But according to Hydraulic Wash owner Charlie Smith, the County greeted his green plan with their arms folded.

“We wanted to put in the rainwater system up front when we renovated last year, but we got so much resistance from the plumbing inspector,” says Smith.

Smith says the inspector “ran him through the ringer” by making him “follow every little inch of the law” during the renovation process. Eventually, Smith says he had to put construction plans for the collection system on hold.

According to Smith, his laundromat– or “mat” as he shorthands it— uses a whopping (more)

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Rebecca Kinney was among the last to attend St. John.
PHOTO BY GORDON BLOCK

The architectural restoration isn’t quite complete, but an upcoming alumni reunion for a long-closed school is already evoking memories as well as opening a window on Albemarle’s segregated past.

“There’s a lot of history here, and it’s important to know where you come from,” says 63-year old Rebecca Kinney, one of the last students to attend tiny St. John Elementary, located in the eastern Albemarle village of Cobham.

Kinney recalls (more)

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The Rotunda stands as the centerpiece of a Jefferson masterpiece, one of only four structures in the United States to be named a World Heritage Site, but there’s one problem: 95 percent of it is not the work of Jefferson.
FILE PHOTO BY JEN FARIELLO

As UVA prepares to restore the Lawn, just how much Jefferson to put back into it appears to be a matter of intense discussion. In the Spring issue of UVA’s alumni magazine, an article on the restoration plans, “This Old Academical Village: Preserving a national treasure,” elicited a number of angry letters-to-the-editor in the magazine’s Summer issue, questioning the wisdom of some of the proposed projects. In particular, alumni criticized plans to attach a “parapet” to Pavilion X and change the colors of the Lawn’s white columns and dark green shutters, arguing that just because Thomas Jefferson may have wanted them (more)

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The old stone Albemarle County Jail stands behind an 18-foot brick wall that surrounds the structure.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

Now that the $20 million renovation of the old Juvenile & Domestic Relations Court is almost finished, another historic building in need of repair stands in sharp contrast to the new construction, boxed in as it is by a brand new parking garage: the old Albemarle County Jail. Although the J&DR court project was a joint venture between the County and the City, the price tag did not include any work on the old jail, and now it’s up to the County to figure out what to do with it.

According to Marc Wagner at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the deteriorating jail is of far more historical significance than the nearby J&DR court house.

“The courthouse is interesting,” he says, ” but the jail is really unusual.” Indeed, with its huge block stone walls and thin barred windows, it looks like something out of the Middle Ages. But believe it or not, the City was still using it to hold prisoners in the 1970s.

“I used the wall as a backstop for hitting tennis balls when I was taking YMCA lessons at the McIntire Tennis Courts, since reborn as a skateboard park,” says Antoinette Roades, a local preservationist and historian, whose family lived right next to the jail in the 1960s. “If I hit a wild shot over the wall, a prisoner would throw it back.”

The Albemarle County Jail No. 5, as it was originally called, was built by George Wallace Spooner in 1876. Spooner, who also happened to be city manager, also built the Mount Zion Baptist Church on Ridge Street and was tapped to rebuild the Rotunda after it burned in 1895, a job he would eventually lose to architect Stanford White. In 1886, Spooner added the brick jailer’s house that stands today.

Clearly, Spooner wanted his jail to send a message. In addition to three-foot thick stone walls, reinforced steel doors, and an 18-foot brick wall surrounding the prison yard, the jail also featured an iron “cage” on the ground floor (more)

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New columns adorn the Juvenile & Domestic Relations Court on High Street. The brick columns shown here have since been covered with white stucco.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

In 2004, the City and County approved the renovation of the old Juvenile & Domestic Relations Court on High Street. The projected $12 million project also included a new 3-level, 91-space parking deck.

Today, the project is finally nearing completion, but at a cost that has rocketed to $19.9 million. That’s nearly three Downtown Mall renovation projects.

Built in 1902, the Colonial Revival building that housed the jail was originally Elks Lodge No. 389 and featured a library, a card room, a billiard parlor, and even a bowling alley. Early photographs of the lodge show the building with a big four-column portico on the front with a giant elk or deer head attached to its pediment.

A major fire in the late 1940s destroyed much of the building, and when it was later renovated, local architect Floyd Johnson chose not to rebuild the portico. Other distinguishing features include double fan arches over the front door and the window above, two pilasters corresponding with Doric columns, and a rusticated façade on which every fifth brick is indented.

What the Juvenile & Domestic Relations Court building looked like in 2002 .
PHOTO FROM CITY WEBSITE

Part of the reason the renovation has taken so long, and cost so much, is the fact that a section of the building collapsed during construction in March 2006. Construction was delayed not only by the costly mishap, but also by the costly litigation that followed.

“It’s the City’s position that it was the fault of the contractor and/or subcontractors,” said City attorney Craig Brown in May 2007. “But we’re hoping to have this whole thing resolved this week.”

Try two more years.

The City would eventually file a lawsuit accusing Kenbridge Construction and excavation company J.A. Walder of “cutting corners” to maximize profits on the City’s dollar, and claiming that the city had to hire a structural engineer to fix the building while Kenbridge refused to go back to work. Of course, Kenbridge fired back with its own lawsuit, accusing the city of supplying  “inaccurate or inadequate” plans, and then for good measure went after subcontractor Walder, accusing it of negligence. (more)

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