Stacy Pethia, hired as the city’s housing program coordinator in August, says she thinks the money—$2.3 million—in the Charlottesville Affordable Housing Fund could be “used more effectively.” The developer of The Uncommon paid $331,450 into the fund. Photo by Martyn Kyle
Sharonda Poindexter-Rose is a 24-year-old single mother who works as a server at a local restaurant. She lives in a one-bedroom home, and as she’s looked for a two-bedroom place over the last several months, she’s discovered a harsh reality. “It is so expensive out here, it’s ridiculous,” says Poindexter-Rose.
In the last six years, 1,530 new housing units have been created in the city, but only 73 of these—fewer than 5 percent—are priced to be affordable. “Affordable” means that a two-person family making $52,650 a year or less could afford to rent it. In Charlottesville, 1,800 families—25 percent—make less than $35,000 a year, according to the Orange Dot report released last year.
The city has set a goal to have 15 percent of its housing be affordable by 2025. Overall, the percentage of affordable units in Charlottesville has declined from 10.5 percent six years ago to 10.06 percent.
In large part that’s because so many new high-priced units have entered the market. More than half of these are coming from three apartment buildings on West Main Street. Between The Flats at West Village, The Uncommon and The Standard, which is currently under construction, a total of 861 units will have been created. None of them has been priced as affordable for lower-income families. Instead, with rents ranging from $1,500-$3,200, the target tenant has been students.
“Everywhere you go in Charlottesville, it’s always about UVA students,” says Poindexter-Rose. “Look at all the people who work at UVA, look at all the people who work at hotels. Where do you want us to live? It comes across as if they don’t care about us. That’s what the message comes across as.”
Instead of lowering rental rates, each of these out-of-state developers has paid into the Charlottesville Affordable Housing Fund. If a developer seeks a special use permit to increase the number of allowable units in a development, a local ordinance lets companies pay the city a lump sum rather than designate “affordable” rents for a small percentage of units in the building.
But since the CAHF’s creation in 2007, every developer required by the ordinance to contribute to affordable housing has paid into the fund instead of providing affordable units. The Flats paid $487,491; The Uncommon paid $331,450; and, most recently, The Standard paid $664,777. None of those developers responded to a request for comment.
“Obviously we would have preferred to have the units,” says Stacy Pethia, the city’s housing program coordinator. “But we’ll take the money. We will find a way to spend it.” Coming from Pittsburgh’s housing authority, Pethia was hired by the city in August to oversee the CAHF. “I think it can be used more effectively, we just need to find a way to do that,” says Pethia. The fund currently has a $2.3 million balance.
Pethia says it does a great job of preserving and rehabilitating existing affordable housing—by funding projects with nonprofits such as Habitat for Humanity, Piedmont Housing Alliance and Albemarle Housing Improvement Program—but she thinks the fund needs to do more to add affordable housing to the marketplace.
Acreage in the 10.2-square-mile city is scarce and expensive, which is why Dan Rosensweig, president and CEO of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville, says the city should use the CAHF to strategically buy land for affordable housing. Habitat for Humanity has used CAHF money for nearly all of the more than 160 homes it’s helped families build.
Rosensweig says the current affordable housing system is “broken.” For starters, he argues that the city should ease its density restrictions.
“There’s no substitute for an increase in inventory,” says Rosensweig, adding that since the West Main Street developments, he’s heard that rents elsewhere in the city are falling “ever so slightly”for the first time in years.
Pethia is also making a push for increasing residential density levels in some areas of the city. If a developer is permitted to build two additional stories on a building in exchange for making 15 percent of the units affordable to lower-income families, that would go a long way, she says.
But increasing density is not always popular. The local Great Eastern Management Company is vying to be the first to include affordable units—at least four—in its proposed 126-unit apartment building on East Jefferson Street, but has received pushback from some area residents who say it’s too large.
In November, increased density was one of 35 recommendations Pethia and the Housing Advisory Committee delivered to City Council. They also recommended doubling the amount of money developers pay into the CAHF if they opt not to build affordable units, while calling on the city to increase its own funding of the CAHF, about $1.3 million annually.
“That’s simply not enough,” says Brandon Collins, an organizer with the Public Housing Association of Residents. Providing more affordable housing, Collins says, is key to preserving the fabric of neighborhoods by helping ensure existing residents don’t get priced out.
Pethia is hopeful the city will reach its affordable housing goal in eight years. “If we look at different ways to use the housing fund and to approach affordable housing development and preservation in the city, we’ll get there. The affordable housing fund has done a lot of good and has grown, but I think it’s now time to really grow.”
Relay Foods, the Charlottesville-based online grocer, merged with Door to Door Organics six months ago and announced January 2 that it will begin operating solely under the Door to Door brand come January 15. Zach Buckner founded Relay in 2009, and a release noted, “We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge this bittersweet moment in Relay Foods history.”
Porn menace
Delegate Bob Marshall offers the upcoming General Assembly a resolution to declare pornography a public health hazard that leads to adultery, hypersexualization of teens, deviant sexual arousal and normalizes violence and abuse of women and children, the Washington Post reports.
Year-end shooting and stabbing
A 29-year-old male was stabbed twice around 2:14am December 30 at Holly’s Deli on East Market Street. Glover Lloyd Jackson, 40, is charged with malicious wounding. Later that day, a 16-year-old was shot twice on Sixth Street SE. His injuries are non-life threatening.
Reported rape
A student reported to UVA Police January 1 that she was raped between 7pm the previous night and 6am at a residence on Chancellor Street. City police are investigating and looking for a white, college-aged male who was described as 6′ tall with a thin build and brown hair.
Photo: Tom McGovern
Donuts go, donuts come
With a line out the door, Charlottesville institution Spudnuts fried up its last sinker December 30. That same day, 5th Street Station’s leasing company announced Krispy Kreme will give the city another shot. The hot and fresh purveyor closed its former Emmet Street location in 2004.
Growth chart
Remember dropping off your compost each week at City Market last year between April and October? The GreenBlue-sponsored program in its second year saw a 17 percent increase in drop-off compostable material over 2015. And take it from the local nonprofit: All of that decayed organic stuff really added up.
Not bad!
Total number of pounds collected: 7,583
Average weight of drop-off:6.3 pounds
Average number of weekly participants: 38
Number of compostable bags distributed:2,292
Number of volunteers: 92
Hours of staff time:248
Pounds of CO2 emissions avoided:269
WhERE DOES IT ALL GO?
The compost GreenBlue volunteers collected at City Market was transported by Natural Organic Process Enterprises to the Black Bear Composting facility in Crimora, though the latter company closed at the end of 2016. NOPE has indicated it will continue to serve the Charlottesville area during City Market season by transporting compostable items to a facility in Waverly.
Residents can also drop off their compostables at the McIntire Recycling Center through June 30—waste must be brought in compostable bags, which can be picked up for free on-site.
Quote of the week
“The first thing I said to our team when we walked into the locker room was ‘Welcome to the ACC.’ I said, ‘If you are not right, and you are not executing all of the way through, you will not be successful.’”—UVA Coach Tony Bennett after his team’s nail-biter 60-58 loss to Florida State December 31.
The new owner of The Shops at Stonefield, O’Connor Capital Partners, has developed shopping centers throughout the country, but Stonefield, its 19th retail property, is its first in Virginia. Staff photo
It was difficult to snag a parking space on a recent middle-of-the-day trip to The Shops at Stonefield—the upscale shopping center that houses Trader Joe’s and Regal Cinema and was recently acquired by a national development firm. Though the place was crowded with shoppers before New Year’s Eve, the new owners say filling the center’s vacancies will be an immediate challenge.
Currently, nine spaces—a total of 28,000 square feet—are vacant, according to O’Connor Capital Partners, which is based in Manhattan and has developed many retail centers, residential and office buildings, but never in Virginia. It purchased the shopping center from EDENS, a development firm headquartered in several major cities across the country.
“The plan is to bring in more key tenants that aren’t already represented in the market and that have made The Shops at Stonefield the preeminent retail destination in the region,” O’Connor Capital spokesperson Mitch Breindel said in a press release.
Keith Rosenfeld co-owns HotCakes, a full-service catering business with an eatery in the Barracks Road Shopping Center since 1992. In the age of the Internet and online stores such as Amazon that can deliver goods to your front door, he says it’s becoming increasingly difficult for retail storefronts to be profitable while competition increases.
“The pieces of the pie just keep getting sliced thinner and thinner for each individual store because there are so many new ones, yet rent and other expenses keep going up,” Rosenfeld says.
Though the new owners have expressed some concern about the number of vacancies at The Shops at Stonefield, he says shopping centers are built today in anticipation of making sales over the next 20 to 30 years, and “Charlottesville may well grow into it.”
And development itself is competitive. “If a developer does not ‘buy the dirt today,’ he risks losing it forever,” Rosenfeld says. “A competing firm may swoop in, buy and develop the site, and box that developer out of the market. It’s the landrush aspect of development.”
Is there room for more retail in Charlottesville? “Nobody knows, but everybody’s got an opinion,” he says. “There’s no question in my mind that we are over-restauranted. I would also argue that we’re over-supermarketed.”
High-end retailers, such as the Jared jewelry store opening at Stonefield, might be in the best position for the future, he says, because people generally don’t order wedding rings and other expensive jewelry online.
Developers will likely also continue renting to restaurants because they draw customers into shopping centers and provide a lifestyle element. Rosenfeld notes the number of eateries currently open at Stonefield—14 out of the 41 spaces listed on the shopping center’s website—make up about one-third of its total retail. The question he asks, though, is how many of those restaurants will survive the intense hyperlocal competition for diners.
The owner of Whimsies, a children’s clothing and toy store that recently relocated from Barracks Road to Stonefield, says she was wary of moving at first and had heard about insufficient parking and low customer turnouts at the latter shopping center. But now, patrons who are waiting to eat dinner or for a movie to start often enter her store to kill time.
“We recognize a lot of traffic from those things,” owner Jessie Wright says. “We’re very excited to be at Stonefield. It was a scary thing to do after 30 years of being in one spot. …We are happy with the decision and it has really helped us.”
J.R. Hadley, co-owner of Cho’s Nachos and Beer, says the restaurant employs a special distribution method to ensure each chip is covered with toppings—not a naked chip in sight. Photo by John Robinson
J.R. Hadley has eaten a lot of nachos. When traveling around the country to Pittsburgh Steelers games, Hadley and his friends often ordered nachos to go along with their cold beers at various bars and restaurants. They would rank the nachos according to chip integrity, dispersion of ingredients (nobody likes a naked chip), quality of the cheese and other toppings and, of course, overall taste.
“I’m a nacho snob,” the Boylan Heights owner admits. And at his new spot, Cho’s Nachos and Beer, set to open later this month in the former McGrady’s Irish Pub space on Grady Avenue, the nacho is king.
It’ll have share-size and individual portions of cheesy nachos with Cabot sharp white cheddar; TexMex nachos; short rib nachos; buffalo blue cheese nachos; tuna nachos with sushi-grade tuna, avocado, jalapeño peppers, wasabi aioli and pickled radish piled on top of wonton chips; dessert nachos such as s’mores nachos; plus sandwiches and salads for any nacho-haters.
Lindsey Daniels, who co-owns Cho’s with Hadley and Kristin Roth (who, along with her husband, Scott Roth, founded McGrady’s), says that Cho’s, which is slated to open by Super Bowl Sunday, will have a full bar with 15 beers on tap—“mostly craft, mostly local, from Virginia, Maryland and North Carolina,” she says—plus bottled beer, wine and cocktails.
As far as Hadley knows, this is the first nacho-concept restaurant in the country. “Most bar kitchens have nachos just because,” Hadley says. “But nachos is what we’ll do here.”
Champion expands
Champion Brewing Co. keeps on growing. In addition to its current brewing and taproom operation in Charlottesville and the planned opening of Brasserie Saison in February, Champion is set to open a brewpub by January 31 in downtown Richmond.
Champion president and head brewer Hunter Smith says the spot, located in an old bank building at 401 E. Grace St., differs quite a bit from Champion’s basic-but-comfortable Charlottesville taproom. Champion Richmond has vaulted ceilings and a mezzanine, and while it’s more than twice the size of the Charlottesville taproom, the Richmond location lacks an outdoor patio space.
Another difference? Champion Richmond will have food onsite: a tacos and tortas menu created by chef Jason Alley of Richmond’s Pasture and Comfort restaurants.
Smith says the Richmond taproom will offer the same walk-up bar style that Charlottesville patrons have come to enjoy, plus a growler station, to-go beers and TVs for sports-watching.
Cary Carpenter, formerly of Parallel 38, The Whiskey Jar and Champion in Charlottesville, will manage the Richmond taproom.
Ken Rayher, former lead brewer at Richmond’s Hardywood Park Craft Brewery, will guide Champion’s Richmond brewing operation. Rayher, who’s really into lagers and has been brewing at Hardywood since 2013, plans to offer several new beers exclusive to the Richmond brewpub. “I tend to gravitate towards continental lagers and somewhat obscure historical styles, so look for some of the former that haven’t been done in Richmond before, and some new twists on the latter,” Rayher says. “I’ve been having a lot of fun playing around with refermentation on fruit and mixed fermentations lately.”
Halo Salt Spa offers visitors the chance to do yoga in a room lined with bricks of pink Himalayan salt, which emit negative ions into the air. Photo by Martyn Kyle
Winter is here, which means daylight is scarce and cold temperatures make most people want to spend a majority of their time indoors. This lack of exposure to sunlight can cause what is classically called “the winter blues,” a mild depression that is clinically referred to as Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD. Many people treat SAD with light therapy but others, including researchers from Wesleyan University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, believe that salt crystals may be a natural way to ward off SAD while also minimizing the symptoms of respiratory issues such as asthma, cystic fibrosis, sinus infections, a stuffy nose as a result of cold, flu or allergies. Why salt? Put simply, the positive power of negative ions.
When heated, salt generates negative ions. Negative ions are invisible, odorless, tasteless atoms that have experienced some action, such as evaporation or being vigorously tossed around in water, that causes them to gain a negative electron rendering them negatively charged. You can easily find them in nature near waterfalls or the seashore. The magnetic charge of negative ions helps to purify the air because it attracts great numbers of positively charged floating particles. Once sucked into the negative ion tractor beam, the particles become heavy and fall to the ground, away from your nose. Salt is also an antiseptic and antibacterial, and when inhaled, it clears mucus from cilia in the respiratory system, making it easier to breathe. Cleaner air and cilia means less junk going into your body, allowing more room for oxygen to go in.
Inhaling negative ions also has mood-enhancing benefits. It is believed that as the body processes those inhaled negative ions, a biochemical reaction transpires that increases serotonin (a good mood chemical) levels, which helps manage depression and, in some ion-sensitive people, triggers euphoria. I am one of those ion-sensitive people. I know this because I feel really awesome when I am at the beach. But I am also a skeptic—I needed to try it for myself.
Andi Senatro, manager of the Halo Salt Spa located off the Downtown Mall, says that clients have reported positive effects from time spent in a salt room. These rooms expose clients to negative ions through exposure to salt rocks and microscopic salt crystals pumped into the air by a machine called a halogenerator. “One client had severe sinus issues and had to give herself a facial massage before bed every night to facilitate drainage,” says Senatro. “She did one session here and could feel her sinuses draining without the aid of massage.”
On a recent visit to Halo, I was led into a quiet room lined with 8-inch-thick bricks of pink Himalayan salt—I immediately felt the kind of settled calm that one feels when entering a sacred space. I snuggled up with two blankets in a lounge chair in the corner of the room nearest a pipe opening that intermittently ejected the salted mist from the halogenerator.
Breathing deeply, I started to feel a little sleepy after about 10 minutes, which is a normal reaction, Senatro says. By the end of the session, I was about as relaxed as I would be after a deep meditation. My nose, which had been only a tinge of stuffy when I arrived, did feel clearer. The verdict: Yes, I was more relaxed and could breathe a little better, but I cannot say definitively that those results happened because I was sitting in the salt room—I might gain the same results from sitting in a quiet space anywhere and meditating.
In defense of salt therapy: Some proponents recommend sitting in the salt room for several days a week over the course of a few months to reap the positive effects and battle depression.
Good news for those of us who can’t make it to the Bahamas for the winter.
Gopal Metro and his wife, Angel, recently launched a weekly Goth Night in the basement of the Jefferson Theater/Cinema Taco. The couple’s band, Gild the Mourn, will play a show there once a month. Photo by Ron Paris
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the rest of the world saw Charlottesville as the home of Dave Matthews. But to insiders, the beating heart of the local music scene could hardly have been more different from the frat-friendly hits of DMB. It was called The Dawning. A weekly goth night held in the dark, red-painted basement of a sushi restaurant called Tokyo Rose (now under different management and no longer doubling as a night club). While it was created as a home for Charlottesville’s gothic rock scene, The Dawning became the glue that unofficially held together every local branch of countercultural music that was happening at the time.
“There was no real cohesive scene before The Dawning,” says Mike Johnson, a drummer who has played in notable local bands for the last 25 years, ranging from Fire Sermon in the early 1990s, to In Tenebris of the early 2000s, to today’s Ego Likeness, and three other bands that he is currently playing with. “The really cool thing about it was while it was ostensibly a goth scene, you had the goths, the punks, the squatters, all the outsiders. Everybody showed up for this night. It was just where we all went.”
Gopal and Angel Metro resurrected a weekly Goth Night in the basement of the Jefferson Theater/Cinema Taco. Photo by Ron Paris
The story of The Dawning and the deliberate assembly of arguably the coolest music scene in the history of Charlottesville began in the summer of 1995 when two kids met each other in person for the first time on the Downtown Mall—Gopal Metro and Andy Deane, musicians who would later form the band Bella Morte.
Metro was raised in Yogaville, the interfaith ashram in Buckingham County, which “was a very odd place to grow up,” he says. “On one hand I was completely isolated from American culture but on the other hand I was completely exposed to rural culture. There would be government dignitaries, religious dignitaries. I was trained to be a world ambassador of peace when I was a little kid. I was trained to be a monk, a swami, when I was a little kid. I regularly did hours of meditation. It was just an unusual upbringing.”
Through his older sister, Radha, Metro was introduced as an elementary-schooler to post-punk bands such as The Cure, Pixies and The Smiths. As he got older, he started hearing about industrial music. Radha gave him an early issue of Propaganda, a gothic and industrial subculture magazine she’d picked up in New York.
“In the back of Propaganda magazine I found ads for all these other zines and I hand-wrote letters to all of these people and I said, ‘Tell me more about what you’re doing, tell me what’s going on,’ and essentially developed gothic pen pals,” Metro says. “And I got demos from bands and got clothing catalogs and started knowing all of the people in the L.A. scene on a first-name basis through pen pal correspondence.”
Meanwhile, Deane “had gotten into goth but I didn’t know anybody else into it so I was doing this thing on my own,” he says. “A mutual friend said, ‘Hey, there’s this dude named Gopal out in Yogaville who’s into the same stuff as you,’ so I just cold-called him. Just called him out of nowhere. I remember one of his sisters answered and said, ‘Metros!’ I thought this must be a restaurant. It just sounded like a business name, you know? And then we talked and he was like, ‘I got a drum machine and a bass.’ I was like, ‘Cool, I got a voice and a guitar!’”
The duo formed Bella Morte, a gothic rock band that would later record videos for MTV and tour all over North America and Europe. Like most bands fitting the gothic label, they incorporated elements of punk, metal and electronic music with an overall dark tone, not unlike the so-happy-to-be-sad premise of American blues music. Starting out in Charlottesville, they had a band but no gothic rock scene. No radio show that would play their music, no store that would sell gothic apparel, no nightclub that would book them to play live. So they made it all from scratch.
Andy Deane (middle) and Gopal Metro (right) were founding members of Bella Morte, a local gothic rock band that would later record videos for MTV and tour all over North America and Europe and that got its start playing shows at the Tokyo Rose. Courtesy photo
Metro began working at Cosmic Coyote, a now-defunct store on the Corner that sold hippie-oriented counterculture accoutrements. He soon convinced the owner to start catering to fans of grunge, punk and gothic music.
“There was no goth at Coyote before I got there,” Metro says. “Linda Friend [the owner] was awesome and was hugely influential in my life. She saw that I cared about what I was doing and she said, ‘Here’s a budget.’ She trained me all about the retail process. …So I bought everything in the Manic Panic line, literally everything. And that created demand, too. I started training people and we started carrying body jewelry. Built out a whole place to go to get kitted up if you were interested in the scene.”
At around the same time, Deane began hosting “Subculture Shock,” a goth-oriented radio show on WNRN. Now there was a voice on the air for the counterculture as well as a physical location where people could check in to find out what was happening. Kids started tuning in and buying gothic apparel. But they still didn’t have a home for live music.
At the time, most of today’s music venues did not exist in Charlottesville. The Jefferson Theater was still showing movies. The Pavilion was just a temporary stage for Fridays After Five, where bands had to stash their gear under the Belmont Bridge if it looked like rain. The Ante Room, the Southern and Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar did not exist.
Tokyo Rose, a Japanese restaurant near Foods of All Nations, offered the final piece of Deane and Metro’s countercultural empire. Upstairs it was a sushi restaurant. The owner, Atsushi Miura, had turned the basement into a makeshift nightclub that appeared to largely indulge his personal, eclectic taste in music (he did not respond to interview requests for the article).
The Rose was already an important musical outpost: Indie bands like Sleater-Kinney and Cat Power played there. Not knowing what to expect, Metro and Deane held their first goth night there as a one-off event for Halloween, in 1995.
Upstairs, Tokyo Rose was an elegant, upscale sushi restaurant with a long bar that served cocktails, Japanese beer and sake. Downstairs, the dimly lit room had walls painted a uniform red. The ceiling was low enough that performers would occasionally swing from the exposed metal framing. There was a small second bar with a few cheap beers on tap. This was before indoor smoking bans, and as the room filled up, the air would turn warm, thick and smoky, tinged with the sweet aroma of the imported clove cigarettes favored by many patrons. An ancient beer-stained couch beside the DJ booth in the back was where many couples got to know each other very intimately at an astonishingly rapid pace. The space was just the right size. Fifty people felt like a real party. Two hundred was like a riot.
“There weren’t that many goths around seemingly,” Metro says. “But they just came out of the woodwork [for the Halloween show]. We did like 150 heads or something. We were blown away, every one of us was just floored. And Atsushi loved it. He wouldn’t leave! The kitchen was going upstairs and he was just…standing there loving it. After that he said, ‘Anytime you want you can come back.’”
Angel Metro. Photo by Ron Paris
After the Halloween experiment, “Atsushi…approached Metro and I and was like, ‘I want a goth night,’” Deane recalled. “…And Atsushi, he loved the crowd. He loved these kids. And he said, ‘I want you to do Saturday night! And we’re like, really? And he’s like, yeah. So we did Saturday night and it took the hell off. It took off and it was crazy.”
Like goths to a flame, The Dawning instantly began to draw people who didn’t quite fit in anywhere else. Musicians, programmers and artists like Amelia Little, who lived in Appomattox County at the time.
“I lived in a very rural area and I was a strange, gothy child that felt isolated from everyone and I happened to get Charlottesville radio stations,” Little says. “And I got WNRN. At the time [‘Subculture Shock’] was hosted by Andy Deane and I learned about Bella Morte that way. …So I started sending fan art to their e-mails. And it was actually Gopal that invited me to come up to see them play along with The Cruxshadows at Tokyo Rose. And that’s where I started meeting some of my first friends in Charlottesville and eventually ended up moving up here because of that. Because I had made the friends and joined the group in this area that shared our dark little fun subculture.”
Shawn Decker, an HIV activist and speaker who also performs electronic music with his band, Synthetic Division, credits Metro and The Dawning in part for his current music career.
“I first became aware of The Dawning when I moved to Charlottesville and C-VILLE Weekly wanted to interview me about living with HIV,” Decker says. “The writer for that article found out I loved Depeche Mode and was a songwriter and he said, ‘You gotta meet Gopal Metro.’ …I met Gopal at Cosmic Coyote…he listened to my music and was like, ‘When do you want to play?’ At the time I was very sick and was just getting ready to start HIV meds. The first time I went to The Dawning I went in my pajama pants. …I came back and was bright-eyed and full of life in spite of being so sick and rundown.”
Decker played his first full-length concert at Tokyo Rose for The Dawning, opening for Bella Morte in 1999. Like other local bands, Synthetic Division had regular gigs there every few months for years. The consistent playing in front of the same audience helped Decker to hone his material.
“Having a venue, having a crowd, having a reason to write new songs, it just helped me so much as a songwriter,” Decker says. “It helped make music a priority in my life.”
Charlottesville native Rebecca Davidsson, who moved from Orange County to Charlottesville at the age of 14, showed up on the scene early on and quickly found herself involved as more than just a spectator.
“Andy and I started seeing each other and he would go out of town a lot,” Davidsson says. “So I started having to cover for him. I’m like 17 years old organizing these crazy kids.”
Her story was typical of many people drawn to The Dawning. Like most of the people interviewed for this article, she made visits to Plan 9 Music on the Corner a normal part of her week (Plan 9 is still in business in Seminole Square and in Richmond).
“I was one of those kids, we had skirt rules for length and they would measure our skirts and I would roll it up immediately every day to make it shorter and wear fishnet stockings to private school,” Davidsson says. “I was obsessed with Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain at the time. …I’d see fliers for Tokyo Rose in Plan 9. I’d go there and blow every paycheck. They sold me my first Buzzcocks record and my first Joy Division album.”
Transient gutterpunks would sometimes arrive at Tokyo Rose by way of the train tracks that ran behind the restaurant. They would hop on freight trains and jump off as the coal cars and containers passed by. Being broke didn’t keep them out of The Dawning.
“The great thing about it was we were very careful to create a community that was not goth exclusive or that was making anyone feel like an outsider,” Deane says. “We even had an unwritten rule, because the cover charge was five bucks every week, no matter what, people were allowed in. If you came and you didn’t have any money, you were not excluded. That’s just how we ran it the entire time. The punk kids, some of them who were spanging on the Downtown Mall all day, would come in and drop like a dollar and 80 cents in dirty change into the thing and it was just sweet.”
Even with the addition of the destitute gutterpunks, the crowd was notorious for tipping well.
“When I was bartending upstairs, people would tip me like two dollars a drink,” says Patrick Critzer, a local chef and DJ who worked at Tokyo Rose during the years of The Dawning. He recalled the large contingent of well-paid programmers who worked for Kesmai Corporation, a Charlottesville company that made computer games, who often attended The Dawning.
“The gamers and the geeks were on top” during the dot-com bubble, he says. “They really held it down. They were all, a lot of the folks, were really smart. Educated. Creative. …When I went to bartend at The Dawning I knew that I was going to have good conversation, it was gonna be interesting people wearing weird clothes and nothing stupid was going to happen. Whereas the other nights, no one knew. It was either gonna be boring or fun or would be a mess. The Dawning, it was going to be civil, organized; it was a known quantity. It was their own scene and they brought it and it was nice.”
Marshall Camden arrived from Virginia Beach to play a gig with his small gothic-oriented electronic band and remembers “the turnout being really great, all the people that were there being really into it,” Camden says. “And at one point playing one of our slower songs that I figured was just going to lose people because of having so many punks and deathrock kids there. And this [punk] dude with a giant mohawk had one boot up on the stage, just doing this really slow headbang along with the song and getting into it! I wasn’t used to that. …That sort of dedication to the scene was a big factor of why I moved here.”
Years later, Camden became Bella Morte’s bass player. And whether you were goth or country, The Dawning would make room for you.
“Johnny Fritz would come out to The Dawning and say, ‘I’m Corndawg!’” says Metro. “And shake everyone’s hand. He would come in a bright white T-shirt and ripped blue jeans. He would walk through the door, pay his cover and come out into the middle of the dance floor. It didn’t matter what was playing, and he wouldn’t stop dancing until the end of the night…and he was awesome! A goth girl came up to me and said, ‘Do you think you could ask him to leave, please?’ And we said, ‘Hell no! Are you kidding? He’s having fun! You need to go do what he’s doing!’”
While better-funded venues in Charlottesville booked national and international acts, The Dawning was consistently able to punch above its weight class and draw acts that a little basement under a sushi restaurant shouldn’t have been able to book. The coalition of different subcultures made the place too much fun for famous bands to pass up. And friendships struck up between Bella Morte members and other bands they met on the road helped bring those acts to Charlottesville.
Bands like The Cruxshadows, Voltaire and The Last Dance have never been household names in the U.S., but they were huge in Europe and the United Kingdom at the time. Metro and Deane brought them to Tokyo Rose. But their biggest coup was bringing in S.P.O.C.K., a Swedish band that performed science-fiction-themed synthpop and that was filling large European stadiums.
The manager of S.P.O.C.K. got in touch with Deane and began to explain their standard contract. “We don’t do contracts,” Deane told him. So the manager asked to discuss the sound system and the lights. “I’m like, ‘They’re both horrible! It sounds terrible down there and the lighting setup is a bunch of old cans and they’ll work most of the time. We’ll flash em for you!’” The flustered manager asked for a financial guarantee. Deane said, “‘We don’t do that either.’” But he offered the band everything paid in cover fees at the door, after paying the DJ and the people working the door.
“The reason they got in touch with us is they were flying out of D.C.,” Deane says. ”And they were like, ‘You know what, we’ll do it.’ And after the show I remember them saying it was the best show on the tour.”
“At The Dawning, one of the key parts of the culture was no cliques,” says Metro (who was, if you remember, trained as a child to be a global ambassador of peace). “If Andy or I saw you forming a clique and talking about somebody, we would literally move you from your clique over to that person and we’d say, ‘You guys have to sort this out. Talk to each other. Hang out and have fun.’ If groups of people started hanging out together too much, we would mix the pot and get everyone talking. It didn’t matter whether you were goth or punk or Johnny Corndawg.”
In 2004, Atsushi sold Tokyo Rose. There was no question of continuing The Dawning under the terms in which it had been allowed to exist. Atsushi made money from the bar and restaurant, but let the promoters keep everything earned at the door. Few venue owners are willing to allow such terms.Aside from $25 each to the doorman, DJ and lighting tech, all of the door money went to the bands that played. Metro, Deane and Chris Knight (who took over management of The Dawning after a few years) never made a dime from The Dawning. The weekly event moved to the Outback Lodge for a few years, but never had the same feel as it did at The Rose. When the Outback Lodge closed, The Dawning died.
The crowd at a recent Goth Night in the basement of the Jefferson Theater/Cinema Taco. Photo by Ron Paris
Now, 20 years after The Dawning was born, Metro has launched a new goth night on Tuesday nights with the help of his wife, Angel. It is called simply, Goth Night. Like The Dawning, it takes place each week in a basement, this time under the Jefferson Theater and Cinema Taco. Metro and Angel have a new band, Gild the Mourn, that will play once a month.
On the third week of Goth Night, Deane played with drummer Mike Johnson under the heading of his synthpop band, The Rain Within (Deane continues as Bella Morte’s lead vocalist, though Metro is no longer a member of the band). The air was noticeably cleaner than the thick, smoky funk of the old Tokyo Rose and the lighting was far better. The audience was filled with a collection of old Dawning alumni as well as younger additions who may have been in kindergarten the last time Deane sang onstage at the Rose. By hosting an all-ages show every week, Metro and Angel hope to draw a new generation of counterculture devotees as well as the old faithful. And Metro hopes that the reborn Goth Night can help misfits find a place to belong, just like The Dawning did.
“The European goth stuff was what I was into the most, the British goth scene from the ’80s,” says Davidsson, who now works at a restaurant in Crozet. “We’re always trying to copy what was done 20 years before us. …There’s a younger guy who comes into my bar and he does a lot of music now and he had heard all about [the old days at Tokyo Rose] and he said, ‘You guys were so cool!’ And I was like, ‘Life goal, done!’”
After a legal battle with Barefoot wine-maker Gallo, Barefoot Bucha has rebranded to Blue Ridge Bucha. Photo by John Robinson
In April, Gallo—the $4 billion corporation responsible for making Barefoot Wine—sued local mom-and-pop Barefoot Bucha purveyors Kate and Ethan Zuckerman for infringing on its name and logo’s trademark. The kombucha makers settled the suit in August by agreeing to change their name, and now, they are announcing the new moniker customers will see on their labels when reaching for a bottle of Elderflower Sunrise.
And the winner is: Blue Ridge Bucha.
To choose a new name, the Zuckermans created a crowd-sourced contest that received more than 500 entries.
“When we started looking at all the entries coming in, we noticed a distinct pattern: One in five contest entrants suggested Blue Ridge Bucha,” Ethan Zuckerman said in a press release. An Internet search for Blue Ridge Bucha already turns up hits for Barefoot Bucha because there’s a close association with their drink and the mountains where it’s brewed, he adds.
Because so many contestants suggested the winning name, the Zuckermans “literally drew a name out of a hat” to select a grand prize winner. Now Edward Warwick, of Charlottesville, will receive a year’s supply of kombucha.
“We love that our community picked the name,” Kate Zuckerman says. “It just feels right given our deep roots here. There were a lot of creative names submitted, but the beverage space is going through a bit of a crisis with trademark litigation right now. That’s definitely not something we want to go through twice, and picking a place name gives us certain protections from that.”
She says her team is thankful for the pro bono support of the University of San Francisco’s law clinic, because they were able to keep legal fees under $10,000, which is a low-end amount for this type of case. It will cost approximately $20,000 to rebrand their company, she says, “not counting the hundreds of hours of time it has taken us and our team to manage the trademark dispute and the rebranding project.”
The team is doing a soft launch of the new brand; once a store runs through its Barefoot Bucha inventory it will receive Blue Ridge Bucha-branded products.
With a company founded on environmental consciousness, the bucha brewers take pride in the fact that they’ve saved half a million bottles through their refillable bottle program, in which customers bring reusable bottles to filling stations rather than purchase a new one each time.
Whole Foods Charlottesville will host an official launch of the new brand from 3-5pm on January 15. Attendees will receive a free 32-ounce mini growler from Blue Ridge Bucha and no RSVP is required.
