Hidden Charlottesville

Riverview Park

A few hundred yards beyond Riverview’s parking lot the Rivanna curves into sight, past the playground equipment and a stretch of grass. There’s something beautiful about that murky brown snake. During the American Revolution, the City’s most prominent river provided an indispensable transportation route, and Thomas Jefferson’s moniker “River Anna” gave rise to its present name.

The original brown stone and sand trail that traverses the Park was completed in 1993, with the forsythia-bordered river loop finished the following year. Cutting through both forests and meadows and sticking close to the water, the trail is one of the City’s finest, especially for a summer walk with Fido. The park is one of few to allow dogs off leash—Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

Riverview features a few sandy spots great for fishing—one’s only option since Tropical Storm Fran pilloried the original fishing pier in 1996. Between dogs, angling and the river, this is the place for an afternoon impersonating Huck Finn.

Dome Room

The Dome Room of the Rotunda is a bit like the sunglasses you can’t find because they’re on top of your head. Like the shades, the Dome Room is hidden right there. Not only that, it’s often unoccupied: The Downtown set avoids UVA at all costs, like the proverbial elephant in the room, and students avoid the Rotunda because it’s for tourists.

Few know that the room is open to the public. Cozy niches encircle the space, each with chairs, tall windows and glassed cases stuffed with old books. Pouring through the circular skylight and over the blonde wood floors, sunlight ennobles the neo-Palladian aesthetic Jefferson so admired. Over one of two fireplaces hangs an old colored drawing of Jefferson’s “academical village,” depicting the Rotunda with its northern extension that was scrapped after the 1896 fire. Pairs of Corinthian columns feathered with acanthus reach toward the dome, which seems so vast and empty that it alters sense of scale. The Dome Room could easily serve as an airy ballroom or an intimate lecture hall—or an excellent place, as we found, to spend a quiet afternoon with a book.

Third floor

The former barbershop at the intersection of Fourth and Market streets has housed Daedalus, Sandy McAdams’ idiosyncratic bookstore, for 30 years. Like its namesake Athenian inventor, McAdams crafted the store’s maze of titles and built all the shelves by hand. “I’ve never measured,” he says, “but there must be miles of them.” A customer could hardly refute that claim, after browsing three floors where every available inch of wall space is covered with used books.

Upstairs discover a poetry-lover’s dream—a comfortable room filled with poetry volumes stacked so high a ladder is needed to reach the top rows. A window looks out onto Market Street, and sunlight filters in through a tree, leaving a fresh and open aspect. A solitary metal lamp hangs from the ceiling and casts its little circle of yellow light on a chair and stepstool. What else could there be to do but pull down a volume of Edna St. Vincent Millay and start reading?

Leander McCormick Observatory

Nestled at the crest of Observatory Hill at the southern edge of Charlottesville proper rests the 13th-largest refractor telescope ever built. Inside the circular building, smaller telescopes and several astrometric tools are dwarfed by the grand instrument. As the three slits in the top of the rotating dome open to the nighttime sky, Jupiter—one of many sights observed through the lens—becomes a world all its own: Great red spots move within the shadows of Jupiter’s four moons, and cloud bands hover in the planet’s high wind speed, scribbling loops and swirls around the planet.

Along with the breathtaking view of the sky, which later this summer will feature a closer-than-ever-before view of Mars, the Leander McCormick Observatory offers a fascinating history. McCormick, whose brother Cyrus invented the reaper, donated the observatory to UVA on Thomas Jefferson’s birthday in 1885. As the family became supremely wealthy and moved from Virginia to Chicago, McCormick sought to donate the largest telescope in the world back home, to UVA. But thanks to the Chicago fire, which reduced his fortune to cinders, he had to wait a decade to build and then donate the telescope—actually the second largest of its time.

Blue Hole

The trip to Sugar Hollow, off Garth Road, may be some of the best 30 minutes you could spend in a car. For once you’ve wended your way through the makeshift parking area and foot trails, up above the reservoir and its flowing dam, you’ll discover a luscious little swimming spot straight out of The Blue Lagoon.

The woodsy and silent Blue Hole, as it’s known to frequent visitors, is about a 15-foot climb down from the wide and rocky Sugar Hollow trail, a fire road reputed to be the onetime main route from Albemarle to Lynchburg. The azure oasis, fed by a bursting white waterfall, stems from a fork in the rich Moorman’s River.

The daring can swing from a handy Tarzan rope into the deep pool. The less daring can cannonball from the slick rock beside the falls—the middle of the hole is said to be more than 12 feet

Scoops

Certain places convey the feel of a Norman Rockwell painting, and that can be a good thing, especially when it comes to ice cream parlors. At the end of a drive down Route 20S to Scottsville, there on the main drag sits Scoops, the enterprise of David Dodge and one of our favorite hidden treasures (it’s so hidden, it’s in Scottsville!).

A canvas awning shelters the front stoop, and two wooden benches face Valley Street. Inside, the place is spotless, polished from top to bottom. Everything gleams. That white tornado aesthetic combined with the warm yellow walls and cream-white valances over the windows adds an almost surreal cherry to the nostalgia sundae. It’s like the ice cream shop remembered from a childhood summer vacation. In the freezer there’s row after row of homemade ice cream that Dodge buys from our City’s preferred parlor, Chaps. Eat a scoop of mint chocolate chip with a scoop of moose tracks in a waffle cone while sitting on a wooden bench in a small town, and suddenly it’s 1955.

The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Museum

Formerly a plantation home, the Kluge-Ruhe building is now home to more than 1,600 paintings, sculptures and artifacts from all over the comparatively unknown world of Aboriginal Australia. Crossing the threshold of the house just off Route 250E launches the visitor into another cosmos. This is no truer than with the latest exhibition, “Object Lessons.”

But new visitors are not left to navigate the new/old world on their own. Acrylic works, bark paintings and other organic pieces carefully handpicked from the museum’s permanent collection hang alongside lengthy explanations.

“We’re so close to this art,” says associate curator Julia May, “that we sometimes overlook the obvious.”

The museum itself came into being in 1997 through a gift by Albemarle billionaire John Kluge, who began collecting Aboriginal art in 1988.

Between the collection and archives of the late Aboriginal expert Ed Ruhe and Kluge’s pieces, the museum offers one of the foremost private collections of true Aboriginal art in the entire world.

Right here, in our own backyard.

Top Deck

Unexpectedly, one of the most striking views of Downtown is obtainable from a parked car or Downtown’s only glass elevator. Besides the incredible vista, different layers of the area’s history surface from the top floor of the Market Street parking garage. The site of the garage rests well within the original boundaries of early Charlottesville, a 50-acre plot defined by Jefferson Street to the north and South Street at the other end. If you’re daring enough to peer over the edge, you can catch a glimpse of Main Street, too, which became the City’s primary business district during the 1840s—about the time businesses began radiating away from Court Square (180 degrees from the view seen here).

The brickwork of Main Street lies below, as well, a testament to the 1976 facelift that spawned the Downtown Mall. Beyond the east side of Main, past another garage on Water Street, stretch the Blue Ridge foothills, certainly as important as the City’s buildings. Especially in this trumpeted Lewis and Clark bicentennial year, the historical strata on display here take on deeper meaning, from the center of the City to those manifestly destined hills in the distance.

Back Room

Down the rear hallway of the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar and beyond the restrooms, there’s a room on the right. A comfortably worn, green couch sits against one wall, and one good-sized table with four chairs occupies the middle of the room. Ornamented with plants and a wooden statue of the Hindu god Ganesh, it’s the kind of room in which you’d conduct a business meeting after yoga class. Two skylights cut through the ceiling, and two windows and a door open onto a large deck, which has a few judiciously placed tables and some bright red benches—and some ashtrays, too.

There’s something terribly urban about smoking cigarettes while drinking puerh tea in the surroundings of vaguely tropical plants, rattan, Hindu gods and satellite dishes that poke into sight from nearby roofs. Momentarily, one might even get the sense of standing on an East Village rooftop patio, before quickly realizing there’s far too much space for that to be true. It must be Charlottesville.

Courtyard

Paul Goodloe McIntire was the original philanthropist extraordinaire of the greater Charlottesville area. It might seem fitting then that the courtyard established in his memory behind the Historical Society continues to give and give—give a peaceful place to rest, that is. The cobbled bricks and serene air are themselves a trip back to the 1900s.

Within the viridescent City courtyard lies the perfect shady spot for a quick lunch (for you or the birds) or maybe a meditation on the great philanthropists of yore like McIntire.

Born in 1860, McIntire was a clerk for the C&O Railroad, until he went to New York to dabble (successfully, it must be said) in the stock market. He returned to his hometown in 1918 and dispensed more than $1 million across the town, from the land for McIntire Park to an endowment for UVA Hospital.

Twelve years ago, the Historical Society took over the building behind which sit the courtyard and bust of the great man himself. The site actually dates to 1920 when Charlottesville’s first library was opened, built by—you guessed it—Paul Goodloe McIntire.