Sounds of silence
Hiding from cars and John Ashcroft
In the middle of McIntire Park, there’s a cluster of trees where you can settle into the green grass and lose yourself in the sounds of swishing leaves and chirping birds––provided you can sneak past the watchman who insists that stretch of the green space is for golfers only.
McIntire Park is among the last places in Charlottesville to find refuge from traffic noise, the groan and whine of engines and the hum of rubber on pavement. Given that Americans, on average, spend eight hours a week behind the wheel and a good deal more time absorbing car-related noise, how valuable is a place in the City where you can turn off the automobile?
On Saturday, July 19, Mayor Maurice Cox, Councilor Kevin Lynch, and a handful of local activists met Butch Davies––the local representative on VDOT’s Commonwealth Transportation Board––for a hike along the proposed path of the Meadowcreek Parkway, a road that’s been in planning stages for more than three decades. When (if) built, the Parkway will cut through McIntire Park and link McIntire Road and Route 250 in Charlottesville with Rio Road in Albemarle County.
On that Saturday hike, the Councilors wanted to show Davies how the new thoroughfare will destroy one of the most valuable aspects of McIntire––its peace and quiet. Once the weedy lowlands around Meadowcreek are paved over, the continuous whoosh of traffic will infest all corners of the park.
The County plans to compensate for the lost City parkland by building a narrow green strip along the Parkway. However, after trekking along the presumed path of the roadway, Davies declared the County’s proposed walking trail a poor substitute for the quiet that will disappear when the Parkway is built.
“I didn’t know it was so tight through here,” he said. “It’s not park replacement land. It’s not useable.”
Cox wants to turn a 33-acre farm along Rio Road into a park he hopes would substitute for McIntire’s lost silence. The land currently has three owners, including Clarence Wetsel, and is appraised at $2.9 million. Davies says he will use his position on the CTB to search for grant money from the State and private foundations to turn the Wetsel farm into a park.
Wetsel is anything but quiet on this subject, however, saying he is “not at all” interested in turning his farm, which the County has zoned to accommodate 15 homes per acre, into a park.
Silence can be a blessing when you seek it, but a noose if forced upon you.
During its regular meeting on July 21, Council considered a resolution to oppose the Federal USA PATRIOT (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act. PATRIOT Acts I and II, passed in the wake of 9/11, give Federal agencies like the FBI and the Department of Immigration and Naturalization Service broad new powers to detain people without charging them with crimes, and to snoop through citizens’ e-mails, library records and education histories without obtaining a warrant.
The City’s resolution affirms that Federal and State agencies working in Charlottesville should comply with local police procedures and not detain people without charges; the resolution also orders public libraries to post signs warning patrons that their reading habits and Internet activity can be legally monitored by the Federal government. Further, the resolution says City schools should notify people if agents use the PATRIOT Act to pry into their records. The resolution does not order anyone to break Federal laws.
The Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice rallied a mixed bag of citizens to speak in favor of Council’s anti-PATRIOT ordinance, from aging baby boomers and religious leaders to teenagers with green-tipped dreadlocks and ragged Converse All-Stars. Carrying signs instructing others to “Speak out while you can,” the activists offered by-now standard critiques of the PATRIOT Acts: Malicious and Orwellian, the Acts blatantly conflict with the American values of free thought and speech (with tiresome hyperbole, one speaker compared the Bush regime to Nazi Germany without presenting evidence that Bush, Cheney and Ashcroft have genocide and promotion of a master race on their agenda).
Councilor Rob Schilling cast the lone vote against the resolution, which passed 4 to 1. “My vote doesn’t necessarily reflect my personal beliefs,” the Republican said. “But it appears this government body is overstepping its charter.”
Other Councilors, however, used the occasion to orate against the USA PATRIOT Act and the Bush administration generally. When the Federal government passes laws that show such obvious contempt for the American republic, the Councilors said, local government has a duty to break the fearful silence currently hanging over Richmond and Washington, D.C.
“What are we supposed to do?” asked Cox. “Are we supposed to say, ‘It’s not our job?’”
After the vote, the crowd cheered and left the building, leaving the Council to tend to the more pedestrian duties of local government––bond ratings, right-of-way debates––in quiet obscurity.––John Borgmeyer
Demolition by neglect
UVA takes a slower approach to razing Blue Ridge Hospital
Last spring, when C-VILLE reported on UVA’s plans to build a research park at the site of the Blue Ridge Hospital on Carter’s Mountain, it looked as if the bulldozers were ready to roll in. But now it seems UVA is employing a slower, but no less effective, means of demolition––time––and the wait has caused its projected construction partner, Monticello, to bail out of the project.
Since 1978, UVA has owned Blue Ridge Hospital, a former tuberculosis sanatorium comprising 45 buildings on 140 serene acres east of Route 20. In 2000, UVA transferred the property to its private development arm, the Real Estate Foundation, and in October of that year signed a “memo of understanding” that would lease a portion of the site to the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (which operates Monticello). In turn, Monticello planned a 95,000 square-foot visitors center where the sanatorium’s dairy barns now stand.
C-VILLE’s March 5, 2002 cover story [“Discharged! UVA and Monticello stamp out history”] pecked at the irony of UVA and Monticello, two self-proclaimed stewards of history, bulldozing a local landmark deemed “significant” and worthy of preservation by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources.
Since then, however, UVA has put its research park on the back burner, and Monticello has tired of waiting.
“The Foundation was anxious to move forward aggressively––comma––starting in the summer of 2000––period,” says TJMF director Dan Jordan, who includes punctuation as he dictates his quotes. “We’re looking at other sites already owned by Monticello––period.”
In exchange for a 35-year lease, Monticello had pledged to pay 50 percent of any demolition costs up to $3 million, but now that agreement is off. Monticello had planned to hire an architect to survey the extant dairy barns and figure out what portions of the structures could be incorporated into the visitor’s center. Jordan says that never happened. “We never got that far––period,” he says.
Jordan says UVA still has Monticello’s blessing to build the research park. UVA Vice President Leonard Sandridge says the Real Estate Foundation intends to “develop the entire site consistent with our original plans” and that the terms of the October 2000 memo are still valid, including UVA’s pledge to conduct a pre-construction survey of the site’s historical significance. Also, the memo says there can be no “bars, hotels, motels, free-standing restaurants, retail establishments and amusement centers” on the site for 20 years.
“Maybe that’s what they’re waiting for,” quips Daniel Bluestone, a professor of architectural history at UVA. He believes the Real Estate Foundation, as private owners of historic property, ought to stabilize the Blue Ridge buildings, which have sat vacant for more than two decades.
“It sounds like a strategy of demolition by neglect,” says Bluestone. “They don’t have to deal with the tough challenge of figuring out how to reuse the buildings.”
The State Department of Historic Resources has not surveyed the site since 1989, and Bluestone says that since then some of the hospital’s buildings have passed the 50-year mark that would make them eligible for historic designation.
“Some of the most reusable buildings have passed over that threshold, and the State hasn’t looked at them seriously,” says Bluestone.
But because the Real Estate Foundation is a private entity, the State can’t force UVA to protect the buildings, says Kathleen Kilpatrick, director of the State Department of Historic Resources. She says her agency would like to do an updated survey of the Blue Ridge site.
“We’re happy to work with them,” Kilpatrick says. “But once those buildings were transferred to the Real Estate Foundation, they were considered private property and not subject to our review.”––John Borgmeyer
Tree of life
Tracing their roots, blacks can be torn about their master-slave ancestry
Until recently, Julian Burke considered himself the third in a line of Julian Burkes going back to his grandfather. But a few years ago, in the middle of a 10-year project to write his family history, Burke stumbled onto a long-lost family secret––his light-skinned great-grandfather, also named Julian Burke, had renounced his blackness, married a white woman and lived the rest of his life as a white man.
“It was the first time anybody in my family knew there was a fourth Julian Burke. He had to shun his black family, and my grandfather held that against him the rest of his life,” says Burke. “My grandfather never spoke of his father again after that.”
Earlier this month, as the descendants of Monticello slave Sally Hemings gathered at Monticello, the contentious matter of her sexual relationship with Thomas Jefferson again took the stage. The Hemings clan has been in recent years the most visible symbol of the intimate conflict between slavery, racism and family ties. But many blacks of less famous parentage wrestle with identity questions arising from their blood relationships to men who enslaved their ancestors.
“It’s very, very common,” says Burke, who founded the Charlottesville-Albemarle African-American Genealogy Group to help blacks trace their family histories.
In Burke’s own case, for instance, after continued research, he uncovered an 1810 inventory of slaves owned by William Fitzhugh at Chatham Plantation in Stafford. It includes the values of 22-year-old Billy Burke, Julian’s great-great-great-grandfather, who was worth $400; and his 52-year-old father, Lewis, worth $200.
A white man named James Burke owned a nearby plantation, and his son, Silas, became overseer for Lewis’ family. For that reason, Julian Burke believes his family is a branch of the James Burke clan. “I don’t have proof of that, but it’s very likely,” he says.
Tracing black history is very different than tracing white history, says Burke. “Because of record keeping and literacy, white histories can go back ad infinitum. With blacks you have that wall of slavery,” says Burke. If a person’s descendants were kept by a wealthy owner, as Burke’s were, there may be records of their age and values. But since all slaves were given new names, the trail always goes cold.
“You don’t know your African or West Indian ancestors. That name is lost forever,” says Burke, who has recorded the history of both sides of his family in a pair of 400-page volumes called Lest We Forget: A Tribute to My Ancestors.
Josh Rothman, who earned his Ph.D. at UVA and now teaches history at the University of Alabama, has just written a book about interracial sexual relations in slave-era Virginia. While it was technically illegal for blacks and whites to fornicate, it was also exceedingly common, especially between masters and slaves.
“Whites knew it happened all the time,” says Rothman. “If you were genteel, you didn’t joke about it, but it made great gossip.”
Families who discover interracial ancestry react variously, says Rothman. Some blacks are outraged, some whites feel tainted. Other times, both sides are excited by the discovery.
“It changes how they see themselves, and how they see their families,” Rothman says. “It raises some deep psychological issues.”
Back in North Garden, Burke now performs genealogical research for others. He helped Lenora McQueen, who lives in San Antonio, Texas, to trace her family history back to some of Central Viringia’s largest plantations—Redlands, Carter, Hardware. McQueen says her family’s oral tradition connects them to the Hemings-Jefferson bloodline, but her research hasn’t yielded any conclusive proof.
McQueen, the daughter of a black father and German mother, says she has communicated online with some of her white relatives in Albemarle’s Lewis family. “I think I’m related to half the County,” she says. “They’ve all been very accepting…as far as I can tell.”
The master-slave origins of her family provoke mixed feelings, she says. On one hand, she says, it hurts to think of her ancestors kidnapped from their homes and shipped to America like animals. She does not know whether the relationships were consensual, but according to her research the masters sometimes left money and property to their mixed-race children.
“It’s very confusing. It’s hard to know what to think,” McQueen says. “I look at the slave masters as family. There is actual blood between us.” ––John Borgmeyer
Art from the heart
Tim Rollins on the craft of high-octane teaching
In the early 1980s, conceptual artist Tim Rollins, UVA’s Arts Board Resident Artist for 2003, took a public school teaching job in South Bronx, New York. Raised in rural Maine, the experience was one he calls “a real eye-opener”—wild dogs, broken windows, crumbling school building walls and crack use running rampant. After the first day, Rollins promised himself he’d stay only two weeks.
But that’s not how it worked out. More than 20 years later, Rollins still calls South Bronx home, continuing to spread the word with his Art and Knowledge Workshop, appropriately nicknamed K.O.S. (Kids of Survival), around the United States and the world.
With numerous works of K.O.S. art hanging in more than 50 museum collections worldwide, K.O.S. is now recognized as an artistic saving grace among kids who hate school, but long for creativity in their lives.
The rest is art history.
Kathryn E. Goodson talked with Rollins, who was recently appointed Distinguished Professor at Philadelphia’s Drexel University, on the final day of his three-day multimedia workshop for UVA Art Museum, “Summer Arts @ the Museum 2003.” An edited transcript of that interview follows.
Kathryn E. Goodson: How did you get into this notion of saving kids through art?
Tim Rollins: When you see people with those weird bumper stickers that say “Art works” or “Art saves” or whatever it might be, it’s truly no joke. For children who are academically at risk—art works.
With the K.O.S. kids in South Bronx, they needed this program, and I’m from Maine, where if you need a barn, you build a barn. So we built the program. We raised money, used my salary and got a small seed grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. I was so angry that these kids were just being tossed aside that I got them painting. I used a high-energy teaching method and mixed works of art with the classics of English literature. The kids loved it, sometimes staying until 9 at night and coming in on the weekends.
But the work is no good if I’m the only one doing it. Workshops like this must be everywhere and open to everyone, not solely the kids that can afford it. Arts need to be the core of every curriculum.
You’ve conducted multimedia arts workshops with kids from Lawrence, Kansas, to the Navajo Nation, to Tjorn, Sweden. How would you rate the job we’re doing with Charlottesville kids in relation to the arts?
It feels good to me. I love the idea that the UVA Art Museum makes such a connection with a broad range of kids in this area through the making of art. I also love Southern kids—they’re so much more polite than their Northern counterparts. But they’re also surprisingly open, enthusiastic and eager to try new things.
I have to say that the last time I was visiting in March and April, Charlottesville High School was putting on its version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was really outstanding. If that’s any indication of the level of excellence, then yes, it’s a good job.
Some of your workshops, including the Summer Arts program at UVA, focused on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. What’s the reason to interweave an art program with plays?
As far as using A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I love kids’ initial excitement about plays—they immediately detect the magic of the complex plots. I always want to recreate that through art. In this group for instance, the kids watched the play and instantly all of them related to the character of Puck. So I had them find a flower—a magical flower unlike any other—and through drawing and painting they created their flower onto the pages of the play, and all the individual pieces the kids made will be displayed as one large work here at the Museum in the fall.
Someone recently remarked to me that my classroom was like a Pentecostal tent revival. My teaching style involves a lot of drama and energy, certainly. But teaching for me is not only a gift, it’s a calling. I use teaching as a medium.