“It’s a mess up there, I’ll admit that,” said Russell Mooney, a 75-year-old man who once ran an Oldsmobile dealership with his father on the corner of W. Main Street and McIntire Road. An equipment rental company stands there now. “That’s why for 10 years I’ve been trying to find a decent tenant that would go in there and dress up the place a little bit, make it look better.”
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What he found was the Rebkee Company, which develops CVS pharmacies throughout Virginia. But the Charlottesville Board of Architectural Review didn’t think a 13,000-square-foot CVS would dress the site up—after a third hearing on the project November 28, they unanimously rejected the design.
“I apologize it’s not up to Charlottesville standards, we’ve done the best we can,” Rob Hargett of Rebkee Co. told the BAR. Frustrated by the process, he forced a vote to know: Did they have issues that he could fix or did they fundamentally dislike his big box coming to the corner near the Downtown Mall (and replacing the CVS currently on the Mall)?
Specific BAR complaints about the building ranged from the materials used to the faux windows designed for the exterior. Several board members brought up the fact that it was designed to be two storeys tall while containing only one floor. But at the core was a distaste for the big-box retail. “I think we’ve changed the wrapping of the box and not the box itself,” said board member Syd Knight.
Some members of the BAR had grown frustrated as well. “We have spent an immense amount of time on this project, and I don’t know when we’ve had an applicant who has been less responsive to some very basic elements in the guidelines that couldn’t be any clearer,” said an animated Lynne Heetderks, a board member. “I’m just concerned by a lack of sensitivity by the applicant to get what we’re trying to do here.”
In its initial draft, the project was more than a box: It had mixed-use elements and was a definite step away from your typical strip-mall CVS. But Hargett ultimately determined that adding office or residential space isn’t economically feasible, largely because of the limited parking on the site.
“It’s a serious invasion of property rights,” Hargett says of the BAR. “We’re going to take another week or so and evaluate our options. If I were the landowner, I’d be in court. If I lived there, I’d be pushing for change.” He says CVS might just give up on the site.