Month: June 2009

Is there anything that won’t thrive in Charlottesville? In 24 weeks of looking back through our 20-year archives, the answer seems to be no. Whether it’s local rock or a rock-hard will to reconfigure local buildings and public spaces, people in Charlottesville get things done. Take Jessica Nagle, for instance. Her drive to remake Downtown Charlottesville has been on full display all month as the Festival of the Photograph, of which she is a co-founder, transforms trees and facades into screens and frames for outstanding pictures. But for more than 10 years, she has demonstrated her commitment to rethinking tired locales. Fresh ideas and free access? Sounds like a winning combo made for the pages of C-VILLE. Check back next week for more historical tidbits from this still free and still free-thinking newspaper.   

Paging through the archives

“On December 14, a ribbon-cutting was scheduled…at what had been something of a black-hole on the Downtown Mall, the former operations center for Jefferson National Bank.

“One of the biggest buildings downtown, the 52,000 square-foot beast will soon be home to the explosively growing SNL Securities…for this special renovation, the person calling the shots is…Jessica Nagle.

“‘She’s bringing life,’ says well-known developer Gabe Silverman, ‘to a building that was closed to the street.’”

—Hawes Spencer, December 15, 1998

“Even if their financial database company, SNL Financial, didn’t pump 275 gainfully employed people into the Downtown economy, Jessica and Reid Nagle would deserve commendation simply for the makeover they accomplished a couple of years ago. They took the hulking monolith formerly known as the Spy Building (and officially dubbed the National Ground Intelligence Center) and transformed it into something approximating a sleek, city-centric pillar of white-collar industry.

“It wasn’t an impulse born of aesthetics that prompted them to relocate to 90,000 square feet on Seventh Street from their chunky brick building on Fourth Street. No doubt the deal they brokered with the City of Charlottesville to rent the Spy Building at rates far below market sweetened their interest in remaining Downtown. But what was the bottom line? Their company had outgrown its home. Again.”

—Cathy Harding, June 21, 2005
 

Getting covered

Who: Paul Long, 59

Where: Born and raised in Philadelphia. Moved to Charlottesville 11 years ago.

What do you do: “I have two jobs at UVA. Both of them are not professional jobs. During the day I work as a transport, I am one of the people who take patients down for X-rays, EKGs, MRIs, and I have a part-time job as a patient companion/sitter.”

Why: Two issues concern him the most. First, drug use should be decriminalized in the state of Virginia. Second, the Charlottesville Transit Service is good, but could be better. “I would have all the bus routes operating on Sundays, as well as legal holidays. Life goes on and there are still things to do on Sundays and legal holidays.”

Why now: “Why not make the effort and bring my opinions and viewpoints out to the public to consider?”

Why Independent: “I have been a life-long Democrat. I have a problem with the caucus system. I would like to see an open primary for local candidates as well. I think the caucus system discourages people from participating.”

Charlottesville’s number one challenge: “Mayor Dave Norris and others have called for a discussion about race, which I think is important, but I also think that there is the need for a discussion about class differences in this city. I do think they exist.”

What do you bring to the table: “Charlottesville prides itself on being a world-class city, and Charlottesville is a good town, but I think that Charlottesville has to outgrow just being a college town. I think Charlottesville should be actively enticing new businesses to come in the city.”

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

At the corner of Grove, Ninth and King streets, following the winding Roosevelt Brown Boulevard, sits a vacant piece of land that is seldom walked on by Fifeville residents. Yet, its proximity to the UVA Medical Center makes the lot a prime piece of real estate.

Around 1999, Plaza South Main, LLC, a profit-making subsidiary of Piedmont Housing Alliance (PHA), a regional nonprofit organization that creates housing and economic opportunities for local low-income residents, purchased four city parcels that make up the lot. In 2000, the few buildings and a house that populated the site were demolished.

“[The site] has gone through several iterations through the years with different designers coming up with proposals,” says Mark Watson, PHA’s Project Development Manager. “We finally reached a point where we are ready to do the development.”

PHA’s pending project will be the first one in the city to be built in the transition zoning, approved in 2003 for the Cherry Avenue Corridor to increase economic development in the area.

On June 17, the City of Charlottesville staff and engineers and a architect for the project will hold a meeting to discuss the preliminary site plan that was submitted in late May.

“We really want to call it SoHo, like in ‘South of the Hospital,’” says local architect Bill Atwood, whose firm, Atwood Architects, was chosen to design the project. Like many of Atwood’s current projects in the city—Waterhouse on Water Street and Sycamore Ten Point Five on West Main—this one, too, will have his signature feature. “It obviously has got a water catchment in it,” he says. “I think it’s a one-of-a-kind project for Charlottesville, because it will feature affordable housing, workforce housing, but also market housing all in one building.”

In its current state, the site plan calls for a four-story, mixed-used building with three commercial units for a total of 4,800 square feet, and 30 dwelling units—10 one-bedroom units, 11 two-bedrooms and nine three-bedroom units. “The idea behind the initial purchase of the building was that we would replace the number of units that had been on that block initially,” says Watson. The present site plan includes about nine affordable units. “We are increasing it so it will generally be about a third affordable to be able to be subsidized by PHA funding and other sources.” In the end, he says, there will be a three-tiered pricing structure.

The affordable units will be priced according to a criteria set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. According to Watson, the price will be connected to PHA’s clients whose income is no higher than 80 percent of the area’s median income.

“It will be a front street design,” says Atwood. “The building will be centered on a big street, and we are excited about the look.”

In addition to the water element, Watson says the building will follow the strictest rule for an environmentally conscious structure. “That has been first and foremost in my mind,” he says. “We want to try to make every unit we build better than the last one and so we are committed to doing as much green building, energy efficiency, durability, healthy construction as possible on the site.”

And a green building is not cheap. Preliminary estimates put the project in the $7 or $8 million range.

Watson expects the ground breaking sometime in 2010.

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

When the Board of Visitors first approved the Arts Gateway to the University of Virginia in 2007, the project—an estimated $118 million plan that would include, among other buildings, a new art museum at the current site of the Cavalier Inn—was slated to begin construction during the spring of 2009. Now, with renovations underway for the UVA Art Museum on Rugby Road, Vice Provost for the Arts Elizabeth Hutton Turner says that plans for the Arts Gateway are on “indefinite hold.”

“We’ve pressed the ‘restart button’ for the museum and are proceeding with the expansion of the old Bayly [Art Museum] building to match the expansion of our ambitions,” said Turner in an interview.

However, save for a few components of the Arts Gateway—for instance, that name-making location on Emmet Street—both Turner and new museum director Bruce Boucher feel convinced that the renovations there will fulfill many of the same goals, as well as components of the Arts Grounds project included in the University’s Virginia 2020 plan, first announced by President John Casteen in 1998.

“The thing to remember is that the Arts Gateway was going to be an interdisciplinary center, and we would have been part of a large number of other features and facilities there,” said Boucher of the museum. When asked about the possibility of decreased visibility given its non-“gateway” location, Boucher added that the museum renovation plan is a “win-win situation, because we stay in the center of Grounds.”

“There was some discussion as to whether students and faculty would migrate across Emmet Street,” he said. “I think it’s better in the foreseeable future for us to be on Rugby Road and to utilize as much as possible both the existing buildings and the possibility of expansion behind the Bayly.”

Turner specified that the expansion of the art museum was a project separate from the building’s renovation. “We’ve written the program for the new building,” she said—including a 17,000-square-foot addition that would increase the museum’s programming space by roughly 88 percent. “But we do not have a design yet. We look forward to a moment in the very near future where we’ll be able to put out a request for proposals.” The museum’s renovations will include print and object galleries, greater on-site storage of the museum’s permanent collection, and expansion of the entrance of the Bayly, as well as allowance for climate control of each room.

Both Boucher and Turner cited the economy as a deterrent from the Arts Gateway project. By renovating rather than relocating, the museum will remain close to a large number of arts buildings at UVA, including the Culbreth Theatre and the new studio art and exhibition space, Ruffin Hall.

Whether other components of the Gateway will find a new life is another question. During Friday’s Board of Visitors meeting, Board members and President Casteen expressed concerns over the design and location, respectively, of the plans for a new rehearsal hall for McIntire Department of Music. University Architect David Neuman will consider the design and revisit donors for the project—possibly including Hunter Smith, an early Gateway donor whose $22 million gift to create an arts center went unused when construction failed to start in 2005.

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.