New parkland (shown dark green) will be kept wild to buffer Meadow Creek.
CITY MAP

The County’s 1,200-acre Biscuit Run has been getting all the attention lately, after its would-be developers sold it to the state for $9.8 million plus an undisclosed number of tax credits. But Albemarle is not the only place where private land is turning public. The City of Charlottesville has announced the recent acquisition of 27 acres of parkland adjacent to Meadow Creek.

“This land is not going to be playgrounds,” says Chris Gensic, parks and trails planner for the city, explaining that the heavily-wooded tracts, much of the terrain in floodplain, will instead protect the creek and help get the city-wide trail system together.

Eighteen of the recently acquired acres lie behind the Seminole Square Shopping Center, donated by Ja-Zan LLC, the real estate corporation owned by siblings Jay Jessup and Suzanne Jessup Brooks, who also operate the Pepsi Cola Bottling Company of Central Virginia.

The remaining land is about eight acres near Holmes Avenue. The city purchased 2.3 of those acres for $10,300, and the remaining six were (more)

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No one told Maurie Sutton her street would be no parking when she bought a lot there in 2007.
PHOTO BY COURTENEY STUART

The neighborhood already reeling from getting declared a no plow zone in December just got another unhappy surprise when residents learned that they can no longer park at the end of their cul-de-sac. Now, some residents of this south-of-downtown neighborhood say they don’t know where they’ll park.

“I have a roommate, a 23-year-old nurse who works nights,” says resident Maurie Sutton. “She’s going to have to walk through a neighborhood that isn’t safe.”

And safety isn’t the only concern at Roy’s Place, (more)

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The Battle Building will transform West Main’s streetscape.
Odell & Associates

“Building, but not sprawling” was the headline of a recent UVA Magazine story on the school’s $308 million build-a-thon this year— in the face of a recession and UVA budget cutting. But next year one massive project will dramatically alter West Main’s streetscape (something UVA has long been threatening to do): the $141 million, 7-story, 200,000 square foot Barry and Bill Battle Building at UVA Children’s Hospital, which is scheduled to go up on a temporary parking lot beside the 12th Street Taphouse from 2011-2014.

The new building, which will serve as an outpatient surgery and (more)

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Front yard clutter? City zoning inspectors ordered this Cherry Avenue resident to relocate the satellite dish.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

Satellite dish in my yard
Tell me more, tell me more
Who’s the king of your satellite castle?

We may not know exactly what Dave Matthews meant in his song “Satellite,” but last month Cherry Avenue resident Susan Blake had no doubts about what a letter she received from the city had to say about the dish in her yard: relocate it within a month— or face legal action with fines up to $5,000.

After losing her job with a construction company, Blake was looking for ways to save money, and switching from cable to satellite television was one of them.

“I was paying $62 per month for Comcast, but now I’m paying $27 per month for DirecTV,” says Blake. “That savings practically pays my electric bill.” Of course, those $27 offers are only good for the first year, but with things so tight for folks like Blake, many people are switching over.

However, that small piece of mind was shaken by the letter she received from (more)

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Attorneys James Schroll, Steve Blaine, and successful bidder Bill Moses clear up a little paperwork to return ownership to Moses and his wife.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

The only bidder at the foreclosure auction of the multi-million-dollar spec house built in Patricia Kluge and Bill Moses’ Vineyard Estates was… the couple themselves, as Clover Acquisitions LLC.

Their attorney, Steve Blaine, put down a $150,000 deposit, and their bid of $3.675 million, which covers the interest and principal on the mortgage held by Sona Bank, was accepted by auctioning attorney James Schroll in front of the Albemarle Circuit Court Monday, March 1.

The 6,600-square foot house on 2.895 acres was built in 2007 and is assessed for $2.76 million. It’s on one of 24 lots that make up the 511-acre Vineyard Estates subdivision near (more)

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On the block: the first homestead in Vineyard Estates, developed by William Moses and Patricia Kluge.
ALBEMARLE COUNTY WEBSITE; LISA PROVENCE

The high-dollar development of Patricia Kluge and Willam Moses, already beset by a multi-million-dollar spec house in foreclosure, earned another unwelcome distinction Friday as a judge ruled that a realtor’s $2 million lawsuit against the project can move forward.

The attorney for the Vineyard Estates development, Dave Thomas, argued February 26 in Albemarle Circuit Court that an email that estate broker Frank Hardy sent a day after a meeting in which the two sides discussed ending Hardy’s exclusive listing agreements for the 24-lot development, amounted to a contract.

“We all agree that we would like to accept your offer of $25,000 together with the release of the existing contact list,” Hardy wrote in the email. “Would you like to prepare a document which would terminate our agreement upon receipt of funds?”

(more)

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On the block: the first homestead in Vineyard Estates, developed by William Moses and Patricia Kluge.
ALBEMARLE COUNTY WEBSITE; LISA PROVENCE

With a looming foreclosure of its only spec house and a $2 million lawsuit against it, Patricia Kluge’s Vineyard Estates subdivision seems to be pumping out sour grapes instead of sales.

“If Vineyard Estates breaches the contract, they have to pay the full commission,” says Brock Green, attorney for real estate broker Frank Hardy, who alleges in lawsuit that Vineyard Estates breached its listing contracts and now owes nearly $1.9 million in commission his firm would have reaped had it sold all the lots.

Back in 2003, wine-making philanthropists Kluge and husband William Moses envisioned the 511-acre Vineyard Estates as luxury villas in the midst of grapevines and orchards. After their bold concept of interweaving mansions with vineyards fell afoul of neighbors and Albemarle County zoning laws, the couple ended up (more)

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Firefighters secure the area around 206 West Market, at right.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

The recent snowmageddon appeared in danger of causing a roofmageddon for the owners of 206 West Market Street, but police and firefighters blocked off the street Tuesday morning so that building inspectors could examine the flat roof of the 93-year-old building.

Studio 206 owner Chris Friedman, who said she had noticed the ceiling in her dance studio beginning to bow, called officials earlier February 16. While she was eventually told her business must close until repair work gets completed, she realized that things could have been far worse.

“I’m just happy to get this taken care of before any more damage was done,” said Friedman, who owns the building with jewelry designer Lee Marraccini, whose studio is on the first floor.

City building inspector Tom Elliott said that the trusses (more)

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Instead of moving to a retirement community, Lynne and Don Gardener had their Lexington Avenue house rebuilt for their needs.
PHOTO COURTESY ABRAHAMSE & COMPANY

Like so many of the estimated 78 million Baby Boomers circling the retirement ages, Charlottesville residents Don and Lynne Gardner began to think about where and how they wanted to live as they grew older. At age 70, Don had begun battling memory loss, and he required dialysis. And Lynn, a 65-year-old registered nurse, was beginning to worry about the basement stairs her husband insisted on negotiating to get to his beloved workbench.

They had raised two sons in their 38 years in the Hazel Street house, but Lynn began asking herself hard questions: “Could he continue to navigate the basement steps or the second floor and the numerous stairs? How safe was it for us to stay?”

But they didn’t need assisted living, and they weren’t thrilled about (more)

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Former country club president Mike Comer will plead guilty.
NELSONCOUNTYLIFE.COM/ALBEMARLE POLICE

The former Glenmore Country Club president and homeowner’s association treasurer who disappeared July 1 moments before an audit was in Albemarle Circuit Court Monday to set a date to enter a guilty plea on five counts of embezzlement.

Michael D. Comer, 45, appeared dressed in a blue blazer and considerably more clean shaven than when he emerged from hiding July 27. Accused of pilfering (more)

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Wendell Wood’s house on Carter’s Mountain takes shape. Click on the image for a closer view.
AERIAL PHOTO BY SKIP DEGAN

“Why would you want to write about some house I’m building?” That was developer Wendell Wood in a Hook cover story last February, when asked about the mansion he was building. The “real story” he said was the expansion around National Ground Intelligence Center and the prospect of 1,500 new jobs. “Now that’s a story,” said Wood.

Indeed, Wood’s developments along Route 29 over the last 30 years have been an ongoing story that earned him plenty of economic kudos and conservation-minded critics, but as the size of his new house becomes apparent (even from miles away), one may recall his reluctance to talk about it.

“It’s just,” he said with a smile, “that people hate me enough as it is.”

According to County records, Wood’s new house will tip the scales at 15,554 finished square feet with another 14,269 square feet of unfinished basement, decks, and porches— putting it within range of Patricia Kluge’s 23,000 square-foot Albemarle House and making it not only one of the biggest houses ever built in Virginia but also (more)

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A Parham Construction dump truck arrives at owner Ronnie Parham’s residence on Route 20 South January 7 with a load of debris from the Avon Street sawmill demo.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

At least since Tuesday, January 5, trucks from Parham Construction, the company contracted to demolish the former Charlottesville Lumber/Better Living Mill Shop building at 310 Avon Street, were discovered hauling debris from the site to company owner Ronnie Parham’s 76-acre home in the 2500-block of Scottsville Road and dumping it on a hillside in the woods. The morning of January 7, for instance, truckloads were still arriving at Parham’s property just 10 to 15 minutes apart and passing each other as they cruised along Route 20 South.

Wait a minute. Isn’t that illegal?

According to Parham, however, he was just hauling cinder block, bricks, and dirt to his property to use as cover on his driveway, something that’s perfectly legal under County zoning code. He says they were also making room at the Avon site to build a detention pond to collect runoff as they complete the demo, which he says should take 75 to 90 days.

According to property manager Caroline Satira, the contract with Parham Construction handed all the salvage to them and provides that the company will “use its best efforts to recycle as much of the construction debris as possible.”

Parham says that copper is going to Cycle Systems, doors will be reused, plumbing fixtures are being donated to places like Habitat for Humanity, and some of the better timber (more)

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Part of a presentation to Albemarle planners.
FOREST LODGE LLC

With at least part of its $34 million loan already declared in “early stage delinquency” by the lead lender, Biscuit Run’s conversion to a state park may leave several banks with millions in losses.

In a November 6 federal filing, Bluefield-based First Community Bank notified its shareholders of the potentially massive problem but assured them that the loan was “adequately secured” by a “large tract of undeveloped land in Virginia.”

What First Community may not have counted on was Governor Tim Kaine’s eagerness to add new parkland or on the generosity of Biscuit Run owner Forest Lodge LLC, a consortium publicly headed by Hunter Craig.

Craig spent several years before County staff winning the right to eventually develop 3,100 homes on the 1,200-acre tract in southern Albemarle. On December 30, however, Craig’s group sold the land to (more)

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Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris celebrates the completion of the Mall re-bricking project, while the uncompleted Landmark looms.
FILE PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

Quite a few additions to our physical landscape in 2009 took a long time to materialize, and others could take a longer time still. Was it worth the wait? And are they worth waiting for? We’ll let you be the judge as we present some On Architecture highlights from 2009.

We’re calling this first photo the “On Architecture Photo of the Year” for the way it brings together two controversial projects in 2009. Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris, with City Councilor Satyendra Huja beside him, stood in the shadow of what has become Charlottesville’s most famous unfinished building, the $31 million Landmark Hotel, as they presided over a May 29 dedication ceremony for the $7.5 million Downtown Mall re-bricking project. The hotel’s financier, Halsey Minor, and its developer, Lee Danielson, dreamed of a luxury hotel towering over the Mall’s new Halprinian bricks, complete with a roof-top restaurant with spectacular views. But Minor and Danielson had a sudden falling out, and Minor an alleged falling short, leaving us with a very tall eyesore. Will the hotel get built in 2010? Minor has vowed to finish “that damn hotel because I started it,” but that appears to be as likely as Minor appearing, as he once put it, on the cover of the Hook with wings and a halo.

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Over 300 workers lined the floors of the new Martha Jefferson Hospital.
FILR PHOTO BY BOB DAVE MCNAIR

New Martha Jefferson Hospital

At an October 14 “topping off” ceremony, the final steel beam was secured on the new 500,000-square-foot, $275 million Martha Jefferson Hospital on Pantops Mountain. As part of the ceremony, over 300 workers stood at attention along each floor of the building while MJH president James Haden hoped for their continued safety and thanked them for their hard work. The hospital, which Haden said was 40 percent complete at the time, is scheduled to be finished in 2012. Meanwhile, MJH’s old location on a 14-acre tract  along Locust Avenue will be developed into a $170 to $200 million mixed-use development.

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Sacajawea descendant Summer Morning Baldwin performed a traditional Shoshone sign language prayer at the dedication.
FILE PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

Sacajawea gets a plaque

On June 10, close to a hundred people gathered at the foot of the Lewis and Clark statue at the intersection of streets called Ridge, Main, and McIntire to dedicate a plaque to Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman who accompanied Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on the first American expedition to the Pacific coast. It was a response to concerns that Sacajawea’s representation, crouched beneath the two men in bronze, underplayed her importance to the expedition. The City invited two of Sacajawea’s descendants to write the text and attend the ceremony.

“When I saw this statue I was very sad, but you are leading the way, Charlottesville,” Rose Ann Abrahamson, Sacajawea’s great-great-great niece, told the crowd. “I believe this expedition had divine intervention, because we are all here together.”

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The Fry’s Spring Service Station on the eve of its spring sale.
FILE PHOTO BY TOM DALY

Fry’s Spring Service Station

The city’s only historically protected gas station, the circa 1931 Fry’s Spring Service Station, ended its more than 70-year run of car care when sold in April to Fry’s Garage LLC in McLean for $800,000. Run by owner Jimmy Houchens for more than 40 years, it made the Virginia Landmarks Register in 2007 for its Spanish colonial-meets-Jefferson exterior and its Art Deco bathrooms. But a family dispute held up its inclusion in state and national historic registers.

“I’ve been here since I was a baby,” Kristy Houchens, 37, told the Hook at the time of the sale. “It’s an icon. It’s kind of the end of an era.”

Meanwhile, the old service station begins a new era as a restaurant/coffee place/sports bar, according to the folks at the nearby Fry’s Spring Exxon, who say a guy named “PK” has been busy renovating the building. By press time, attempts to reach the owner(s) had been unsuccessful, but you can be sure we’ll keep trying.

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After a summer squall, a rainbow appeared over the Gleason.
FILE PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

The Gleason

During an open house reception in August atop the downtown ACAC for the topping off of the six-story, 122,000-square-foot Gleason condo building, one of the only planned downtown towers to actually get built, a rainbow after a sudden summer squall appeared to be a good omen. Not counting the new National Ground Intelligence Center and a few behemoths at UVA, it’s the biggest building ever constructed in Charlottesville. As it nears completion, more than half of its 38 condo units have been sold at prices ranging from $339,000 to $1.2 million.

Developer J.P. Williamson admitted the credit situation was grim, but said the demand for downtown residential space remains high. The simple trick for success, he said, was abandoning the old development model that got us into this mess.

“That speculative development model for mixed use condominium buildings— which never really existed in Charlottesville— dominated markets like Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Miami,” he said. “The classic speculative model— option a property, market it, hope to close acquisition and construction financing at the same time with limited equity model– is over.”

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“I’ve always been proud of my design for the Downtown Mall,” said Lawrence Halprin in June.
PHOTO COURTESY LAWRENCE HALPRIN

Goodbye, Mr. Halprin

On Sunday, October 25, at the age of 93, Downtown Mall designer Lawrence Halprin died at his home in San Francisco. Along with Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall in 1976, Halprin designed the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC, in 1997, Sea Ranch in Sonoma County, California, in 1967, and Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco in 1968. Halprin received the Thomas Jefferson Medal in architecture from UVA, as well as the nation’s highest artistic award, the National Medal of the Arts.

If it wasn’t for Halprin, the $7.5 million Mall re-bricking project might have been a fiasco, as City planners, who had not bothered to consult Halprin, originally wanted to replace the Mall’s old bricks with smaller new ones, not to mention adding a cascading water fall on the east end and a “Sister City Plaza” in front of the skating rink, which they believed would be more stable. However, when the Hook asked Halprin how he felt about the renovation, the size of the bricks was one of his main concerns.

“I feel it’s important to maintain the original brick size and pattern as the ground level establishes the character for the Mall,” he said. “If the bricks need to be replaced, I urge the city to replace them with similar ones.”

Even after Halprin’s comment, however, city planners continued to push for the smaller bricks, claiming that the larger 4 x 12 bricks were made only in a factory in Nebraska and would be prohibitively expensive.

Eventually, after some public pressure, the city heeded Halprin’s advice, somehow locating 4 x 12 bricks  made in Virginia and relatively inexpensive. It was the last defense Halprin made for a Downtown Mall design he said remained “close to my heart.”

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