The South shall rise
Downtown goes modern with newest building projects
During contemplative moments, John Gibson looks up from his desk on the fourth floor of the City Center for Contemporary Art on the corner of Water and Second streets, and gazes out the window at the bricks of the Jefferson Theater’s fly loft. During the vaudeville days of the early 1900s, scenery backdrops arrived there by train, and workers loaded them into the pulley system via that strange door high in the back of the Jefferson.
“It’s meaningful for me,” says Gibson. “Two theaters, side by side. The first ‘theater alley’ in the history of this community.”
The two buildings couldn’t be more different. Built in 1901, the Jefferson Theater’s Ionic columns and rusticated brickwork reflect the Greek Revival architecture dominating much of Downtown Charlottesville. The City Center for Contemporary Art opened last year to a buzz of controversy over its unabashedly modern design and periwinkle/orange/ metallic color scheme. Some have clucked that the building doesn’t “fit in,” but Gibson loves the contrast.
“It shows that Charlottesville is not a monolithic uniculture,” he says. “Thomas Jefferson is an important influence, but not the only identity for this community.”
Gibson also sees meaning in the fact that the Jefferson Theater faces north, while the C3A, as the building is dubbed, faces south—toward the Friendship Court public housing block (formerly known as Garrett Square) and the warehouses lining the CSX tracks. “It’s like we’re opening up to the community,” Gibson says.
Indeed, the stylistic divide between North and South Downtown is ultimately a reflection of the social, economic and racial divides. “The cultural divide on Water Street is at least as strong as the stylistic,” says Jeff Bushman, who designed the C3A building. Gentrification, Bushman says, is intertwined with the stylistic changes afoot south of Water Street.
The C3A building represents a radical change for Downtown architecture, and its appearance heralds the increasing importance of Downtown’s south side. The area roughly bordered by E. Main, Avon and Ridge streets and Elliott Avenue is poised to become Charlottesville’s hip new district, where a modern, playful style of architecture will offer a contemporary counterpoint to the staid historicism in North Downtown. Along the way, the Mall’s “Jeffersonian” tradition will be redefined.
When Shannon Iaculli first walked into the Glass Building on Second Street S.E., she knew it would be the perfect home for the funky clothing store she hoped to open. The open ceiling in the refurbished warehouse reveals steel I-beams and shiny heating ducts, complemented by the cinderblock walls that Iaculli painted silver when she opened her store, Bittersweet, in the Glass Building more than two years ago.
“For what I wanted to sell, it made sense to be in a funkier, lofty industrial space,” Iaculli says. Her store sells retro clothes, cheeky t-shirts, trucker caps and other apparel with a vintage look and modern price tag. “I couldn’t get that on the Mall. Everything there had that ‘office’ look. Yuck.”
When Iaculli moved in, Charlottesville’s South Downtown was “like tumbleweeds,” she says. But since then, the area’s transformation into Charlottesville’s SoHo has picked up speed.
“I can’t think of a time when Downtown has been more exciting,” says developer Bill Dittmar. Naturally, he’s stoked—in January he and partner Hunter Craig began leasing apartments in Norcross Station at Fourth and Water streets. Dittmar and Craig renovated the 1924 grocery warehouse into 32 apartments, adding sleek steel kitchen appliances while retaining the building’s original old-growth pine beams and the maple floors that still bear scratches from handcarts. Next door to Norcross, Dittmar is putting up another 32-unit warehouse-style apartment building.
Norcross Station is one of several “adaptive reuse” projects coming to South Downtown, including Phil Wendell’s plan to move his ACAC fitness club into the Ivy Industries building on Monticello Avenue, and Gabe Silverman’s reoutfitting of the former Frank Ix & Sons textile factory (Silverman has three partners in that massive venture—Dittmar, Ludwig Kuttner and Allan Cadgene). On these sites, abandoned relics of Charlottesville’s bygone industrial age will be reintegrated into the urban fabric as homes, businesses and stores. Frank Stoner’s Belmont Lofts condo project on Graves Street is a brand-new construction, but the design reflects the hip warehouse look.
“We’re capturing feels from other urban areas, that Tribeca loft feeling,” Dittmar says. “We’re getting away from staid Jeffersonianism. That had it’s place. Where we have it, lets protect it then let’s make an urban statement.”
The epicenter for Jeffersonianism is North Downtown’s Court Square district. The 1781 Albemarle Courthouse, where future presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe each began his legal career, is a textbook example of the North Downtown style—the brick-and-column architectural motif that Monticello and the Rotunda popularized, to which Charlottesville seemed forever wedded.
Many of the buildings and homes in North Downtown display the brick facades and standing seam metal roofs that mark the Federal period. But the most relevant aspect of North Downtown architecture is its small scale, says Chad Freckmann, who has lived on Northwood Circle for five years with his wife Jacky Taylor and their three children.
“It’s very pedestrian friendly,” says Freckmann. “It allows residents to walk through the streets, to spend time in their yards and meet their neighbors. We’re able to access the Mall very easily on foot. It provides a great sense of community.”
Although many architectural styles have come and gone since the 19th century, Charlottesville has never lost its love for Jeffersonian architecture, writes UVA professor K. Edward Lay in his 2000 book Architecture of Jefferson Country. North Downtown is thus full of 20th-century buildings designed to look older.
The Palladian windows in the high-rise still known to some as the Monticello Hotel and located on the south side of Court Square, for example, are indeed very Monticello-esque. Built in the 1920s, that project demolished historic buildings and was greeted with great fanfare, Lay says.
“I think everyone was happy about it. Now attitudes have changed about history,” says Lay. “Some people still have the old attitude that progress is worth anything, but most people don’t anymore.”
Indeed, in the late ’80s and into the ’90s the City’s Board of Architectural Review (BAR) seemed so fiercely devoted to tradition that many developers complained the body wouldn’t approve a new building unless it was built with bricks and Palladian windows—consider, for example, the Queen Charlotte Square Apartments on High Street. More recently, developer Lee Danielson wrangled with the BAR over his company’s designs for the Charlottesville Ice Park and the Regal Cinema, complaining to C-VILLE at the time that if City planners didn’t “get out of his way,” he’d “never build in Charlottesville again.”
When the BAR approved the Bushman Dreyfus design for the C3A building in September 2001 by a margin of 6 to 2, it signaled that a change was underway—but it wasn’t painless. Some BAR members weren’t going gently into the realms of terne-coated stainless steel and purple-hued, ground-face concrete block.
“These decisions shouldn’t be seen as noncontroversial,” says Lynn Heetderks, vice-chair of the BAR, who describes herself as “probably the most traditional member” of the board.
“I favor buildings that use more traditional materials, and I’m sensitive to things that are more human in scale,” says Heetderks. “Some huge modernist buildings seem more evocative of machinery than people.”
Still, Heetderks says, the BAR’s membership increasingly favors modern designs. That change led to an unexpectedly warm reception recently for Danielson, the BAR’s onetime nemesis, when he returned to Charlottesville from California this fall announcing plans for a nine-storey boutique hotel on the Mall’s former Boxer Learning site. When he appeared before the BAR on December 16, chair Joan Fenton actually encouraged Danielson’s architects to experiment with the hotel’s design.
“We want you to be creative,” Fenton told Danielson. “Don’t design it a certain way because you’re afraid we won’t approve it otherwise.”
Mary Joy Scala, a City planner, says there’s a new theory abounding as to how modern buildings can fit into traditional surroundings. “New buildings take their cues from historic images,” Scala says. “They reinterpret designs of traditional decorative elements.”
For example, an important feature of historic design is articulation—tiny details that make a building more inviting. Plans for Danielson’s new hotel call for it to be built with a limestone base and bricks laid in an alternating “Flemish bond” style; the yoga studio in the old Grand Piano building incorporates transoms and sidelights to spruce up its orange façade. Even the C3A building borrows from traditional forms, Scala says. The modernist metal façade, in her interpretation, recalls the standing seam roofs of many North Downtown structures—sort of. “Maybe that’s a stretch,” she concedes.
“I think it’s delightful that someone would make those kinds of connections,” says Bushman.
In South Downtown, the City wants architects to play with the sleek warehouse forms, Scala says, and developers are willing to bet they can profit from a new generation of suburban refugees who demand stylish urban housing.
“We’ve got a lot of talented architects here, and the BAR wants them to use their talents,” says Scala.
“I think the reason those spaces are so popular is that they’re stark, streamlined, no-nonsense,” she says. “Young people are attracted to that type of architecture because it’s open and flexible, and it’s right Downtown where people want to be.”—John Borgmeyer
The write stuff
Can write-in votes resurrect Meredith Richards?
City Dems may not have seen the last of Meredith Richards. The two-term incumbent bowed out of the City Council race after her party dumped her from the Democratic ticket on February 7, and in her concession speech Richards said she would not run as an independent.
Days after the convention, flyers started to appear on local bulletin boards urging voters to “write in Meredith Richards.” Some flyers were stapled to an editorial photocopied from the February 10 edition of The Daily Progress, which lamented her ouster and floated the idea of a spontaneous “grass-roots write-in campaign.”
Richards says she hadn’t seen the flyers until C-VILLE asked her about them. “I’m not planning to mount an active campaign,” she says. “That would be hard for me to contemplate, because I’m a Democrat. Certainly I encourage people to support the Democratic ticket.”
Even so, Richards is not exactly discouraging people from writing her in on election day, May 4. The petitions, she says, are coming from “people who are angry at the party, who just can’t understand how the party could do this.
“I’m not taking a position on it one way or the other,” she says.
Dem chair Lloyd Snook says party rules forbid Richards—who serves on the Democratic finance committee—from approving a write-in campaign. Richards signed the party’s pre-convention pledge promising not to support any candidates opposing Democrats. But she points out that the pledge has been violated “repeatedly,” most recently in 2000, when some Democrats formed a group to support Republican John Pfaltz for Council that year. Besides, says Richards, the pledge only “refers to an intention you have when you come to the [nominating] convention.
“I tried to run as a Democrat, and they turned their backs on me,” she says.
City registrar Sheri Iachetta says there hasn’t been a successful write-in campaign in recent Charlottesville history. But that doesn’t mean it’s without local precedent. In 1993 Sally Thomas staged a last-minute write-in campaign and upset Carter Myers for the Samuel Miller district seat on the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors. Incumbent Ed Bain dropped out of the race seven weeks before the election, leaving too little time to add new names to the ballot. Thomas says she was “the only one foolhardy enough” to run as a write-in.
Thomas’ campaign was handicapped because write-in candidates can’t buy voter registration lists as other candidates can, making it difficult to send out direct mailings (still, write-in candidates must follow the same fundraising reporting rules as other candidates).
Many saw Thomas’ victory as a referendum on the Western Bypass, which she opposed. Could Richards’ support for the Meadowcreek Parkway, which cost her the nomination, similarly energize write-in voters? Richards predicts the write-in buzz will dwindle with the anger over her loss at the party convention.
Iachetta isn’t so sure. “In the past 10 days, we’ve received numerous phone calls on how to write in names. More than normal,” she says. “I’m not making any interpretations. I’m just saying it’s been interesting.”
Criminal past passed?
The Daily Progress on Monday, February 23, reported Republican candidate Kenneth Jackson’s admission that he had been convicted of assault and battery four times, and that three of those incidents involved him wielding a knife.
According to the story, the first incident happened in 1985, when Jackson was 18. Then, in 1990, he was convicted for misdemeanor assault on a police officer.
Records in Charlottesville District Court show Jackson was arrested for felony assault in 1993 after a fight in a restaurant kitchen with Charles Sands—who was arrested for misdemeanor assault in that incident.
The Progress reports that Jackson’s last arrest occurred when he stabbed a man in Richmond—also a felony—in 1994. According to Richmond General District Court records, however, the incident happened in 1995, when Jackson was 28.
“I’m not very good with dates,” says Jackson. The 1993 charge was dropped and in 1995 Jackson pled guilty to a misdemeanor.
Republican party chair Bob Hodous tells C-VILLE Jackson acknowledged “some run-ins with the law” when the two first met. When Jackson came forward as a candidate, Hodous says he didn’t ask for details about his past.
“That stuff was in the early part of his life. He’s turned himself around,” says Hodous, although he could not give specifics about the turnaround.
Jackson, who stresses public safety in his campaign, says he’s “learned” from the experiences. “It helped me see I was too intelligent to be getting in this kind of trouble. Situations still arise that could become violent, but I’ve learned to walk away from them.”
As for the other Council candidates, C-VILLE finds that Democratic incumbent and cycling advocate Kevin Lynch has two driving convictions—one for improper driving and one for failure to obey a highway sign. Democrat Kendra Hamilton also had a bit of driving trouble—two parking tickets and a speeding ticket. David Brown has three speeding tickets. Ann Reinicke has a spotless record, according to Charlottesville and Albemarle general district courts.—John Borgmeyer
Company man
UVA professor wrote the script for indie drama troupe Offstage
If you’re an aspiring playwright living in Central Virginia, you probably know Doug Grissom. If not, you should. Having written dozens of plays and worked with countless would-be Mamets and Wassersteins as a professor in UVA’s Drama Department, head of the Southeastern Theater Conference’s playwriting division and co-founder of Offstage Theatre, he knows a good script when he reads one.
“I kind of backed into it,” Grissom says of his career in theater. He had planned to study journalism, but got bitten by the stage bug instead. After earning degrees at the University of Tennessee and Brandeis University, he joined the UVA faculty in 1986.
In 1989 he attended a theater conference in Richmond with two playwright friends, Tom Coash and Mark Serrill. While the three waited in a bar for a producer who never showed, an idea took hold among them. After a healthy amount of drinking, they decided to start their own theater company using “found spaces” around town. Voila! Offstage Theatre was born, and a few months later, Chug, its first production, took the “stage” at Miller’s.
Since then Offstage has found homes in bars like Orbit and Rapture for the popular Barhoppers series (plays about bars set in bars) and more abstract locations like studio apartments or in front of the Paramount Theater. Last week Offstage concluded a run of Pvt. Wars at R2, the disco at the rear of Rapture.
Grissom, who remains an Offstage board member, is proud—if a little surprised—at the group’s success. “We’ve been able to go out and take audiences into non-theater locations and open their ideas of where theater can happen,” he says.
More than that, however, he’s proud of Offstage’s success in producing new works by local authors.
“We have to have produced more original works than anybody else in Virginia,” he says. “Most of them, granted, are small 15-minute plays. But still, if we do a list of new plays we’ve premiered, there are few other theaters that have done as much as we have.”
The opportunity to stage work, and Grissom’s mentorship specifically, have been a boon for countless local playwrights. One is C-VILLE theater critic Joel Jones, who, at the urging of several of Offstage’s members, began writing with no professional training. Since then, several of his works have been produced by Offstage locally and in New York.
“My favorite thing Doug ever said to me was after my third play,” Jones says. “Like most beginners I was addicted to blackouts. So Doug was criticizing me for using blackouts at the end of every play, and I was whiningand Doug said, dryly, ‘End the fucking play, Joel. Just end the fucking play.’”
Grissom keeps busy with his own work, singling out as highlights his collaborations with the Sexual Assault Resource Agency, Because I Said No and I Never Saw it Coming. Both plays toured widely, and “I know they had such a profound impact for the people I wrote them for,” he says. Next up, look for a piece tentatively titled Elvis People, which he workshopped last fall with Offstage.—Eric Rezsnyak