There is some special place in my heart reserved for cities and towns well past their prime, an affection that comes, I suppose, from having lived in places like New Haven, Connecticut, and rural eastern North Carolina. So I was delighted when I had the opportunity recently to check out Danville—for few Virginia cities are as far past their prime.
| Destination: Danville Location: Down Route 29 near North Carolina border Distance from Charlottesville: 137 miles Danville tourism: visitdanville.com/ |
Danville, a city of 45,000 estimated to have lost more than 6 percent of its population since 2000, is a town twice jilted—once, by tobacco, and later, by textiles. Over a hundred years, Dan River Inc. built up a fabric empire on the banks of the Dan in the center of town—and, after being bought by a company in India, pulled the plug on the city in 2006. Unemployment now stands at 7.3 percent.
Sad stuff, I know, but it makes for a great place to escape the hubris, hipness and expense of Charlottesville.
My first stop, Danville’s Tank Museum, was unfortunately far more expensive than I had anticipated. General admission? Ten bucks—a price not even Madame Kluge back in Albemarle would charge to sample her wines. But I swallowed my disappointment and shelled out—only to find the tank museum less an informative display than a psychological profile of an obsessive.
I saw dozens of tanks, each with a typo-riddled caption that detailed make and model, but I didn’t come away with any sense of, say, when tanks started appearing in wars or which countries really led the industry or any other bit of information that would be useful at a cocktail party. But I can tell you that the curator, Bill Gasser, is really into showing off the gory details of war—his bizarrely detailed soldier-mannequin exhibits include fake horse dung and the bloody innards of a wounded man in a display about…well, I forgot to check the caption when I saw the fake spleen.
I’d assumed that the tank museum was quintessential Danville, a relic from the patriotic ’50s perhaps. Turns out, the museum didn’t come to Danville until 2001, relocated from Long Island. Yet it does tell a story of Danville: The city was able to reel in the tank museum by promising the expansive former factory of the Disston Tool Company, one of a long line of manufacturers that split town. When the museum opened, Gasser promised busloads of visitors drawn to Danville just for his tanks. Seven years later, the bus parking lot was occupied only by grass.
For lunch, I stopped at Mary’s Diner and Cafeteria, a heavily trafficked roadside eatery with friendly staff and copious servings of chicken fried chicken, mashed potatoes and dinner rolls. Since I was spending the night in Danville, I asked a couple of Mary’s patrons, both men in their 30s, what there was to do in the evenings.
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“What about the Braves?” I asked, pleased with my knowledge of the name of the local minor league team. “They any good?”
“If you don’t mind sweating your balls off,” said one of the men, a local contractor. It was rather hot outside.
“Any places to go out?”
“Well, there’s Back to Bogies.” He described its location before adding, “There won’t be anybody there. Not on a Monday night.” He grunted, which I took either as a rueful condemnation of Danville’s paltry nightlife or as a comment on what an odd duck I was to go out on a weeknight.
Oh well. I headed past Anywhere, USA—Target has just opened up a store, near Lowe’s and the shopping mall—and down into the heart of Danville.
Danville’s downtown is kind of like Charlottesville’s downtown, if you took away the pedestrian mall, the restaurants, the art galleries and the boutique shops. Most downtown Danville storefronts were vacant, which was a shame—I liked the compactness of the area, which stretched uphill from a bend in the river where the empty castle-like factory of Dan River Inc. dominated the vista.
Yet the downtown wasn’t a totally barren wasteland. I stopped into Bronx Boy Bagels, a sandwich shop that serves more than one flavor of coffee. My cup cost a couple of quarters less than it would in Charlottesville. While the bagel shop wasn’t very full, its presence at least signaled that Danville could be reborn. I looked out the window and imagined a revitalized downtown and an artsy edge, with a few Goths and a couple of buskers to liven up the midsummer humidity.
Further down Main Street on Millionaires’ Row, I saw several ostentatious relics of former wealth undergoing renovations. One of those old homes, the Sutherlin mansion, has been converted into a Museum of Fine Arts and History. Some of the art wasn’t bad, though the museum, like much of the town, has a bit too much of an obsession with its antebellum heritage. Danville embraces its status as the “last capitol of the Confederacy”—it just happened to be where Jefferson Davis, on the run from Richmond, spent a week before learning of Robert E. Lee’s Appomattox surrender.
Yet down the street from the Confederate-battle-flag-flying museum is Yené’s Fusion Café and Sushi Bar. Sushi: almost as promising a sign of gentrification as young women with yoga mats.
Looking downhill toward the river, I quickly imagined a new life in Danville—starting an alt weekly, every morning yakking over coffee and bagels down at Bronx Boy, learning to like minor league baseball, strolling along the riverwalk, boozing it up at Back to Bogies with other businessmen and ragging on those snobs up in Charlottesville.
Fellow businessman: “God, I hate those latté liberals up in Charlottesville.”
Me: “Don’t I know it. If only those elitists would build a damn bypass, this town could really be something.”
But I was brought back to reality by Back to Bogie’s beer list, which didn’t include the boutique, high-gravity IPAs that I love to drink. And a life of choosing between Miller Light and Bud Light is just too grim.