While Landmark Hotel owner Halsey Minor recently won $6.4 million in an arbitration hearing between him and former developer Lee Danielson a couple of weeks ago, and says additional legal battles between the pair are far from over, the fate of the existing structure on the Downtown Mall remains uncertain.
“It will either be completed or torn down,” said Minor in an interview after the arbitration ruling. “It’s one or the other.”
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From Landmark Hotel to plain old landmark? Following the end of arbitration between Halsey Minor and Lee Danielson, the Downtown Mall’s halted, 101-room hotel could stay or go—but paperwork for demolition might take a while. |
Tearing it down, however, isn’t as easy as simply swinging a wrecking ball. The city’s half-finished hotel is a contributing structure to an Architectural Design Control (ADC) district, namely, the Downtown Mall, which means demolition of the structure would require formal city approval.
According to the city’s website, the purpose of the ADC district is to preserve structures and buildings, and ensure that any additions and landscape changes complement their character.
All to say, the demolition of a building like the Landmark Hotel is no easy feat. Mary Joy Scala, preservation and design planner for the City of Charlottesville, says that a demolition request requires approval from the Board of Architectural Review (BAR), a nine-member body appointed by City Council that includes historians, licensed architects, landscape architects and owners of a business in an ADC district, among others.
“All structures in the Downtown ADC District are considered contributing, and therefore require approval of a Certificate of Appropriateness (COA) from the BAR prior to demolition,” says Scala in an e-mail.
After that, a demo building permit is also required, which could take a few days in order to make sure that utilities are disconnected from the structure. Applications to the board must be filed three weeks prior to the BAR meeting, so the process could be lengthy—as much as a month or more for paperwork alone.
The site of the current Landmark Hotel received a demo permit once before. In October 2008, the BAR approved the demolition of the black granite facade of the former Boxer Learning Center on Main Street, should the hotel project require it. The permit was granted on the condition that developers of the Landmark Hotel reconstruct the facade if they decided to take the granite front down—a decision similar to the one made for 219 W. Main Street, the old Victory Shoe Store whose storefront was demolished without BAR approval.
However, the original Boxer Learning Center facade remains, like the hotel skeleton, intact. “I would love to finish it, but there are so many questions that are up in the air,” said Minor following arbitration.
Meanwhile, the Downtown Business Association of Charlottesville (DBAC) remains a fan of the hotel. The DBAC “has been very supportive of the Hotel from its beginning and firmly believes that a completed hotel project would greatly benefit all the businesses on and around the Mall,” says Robert Stroh, DBAC co-chair, in an e-mail. “We optimistically look forward to attending the opening ceremonies in the near future.”
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