Month: September 2020

Categories
News

Upcoming vacancy: Visitors bureau to depart Transit Center, citing expense and declining tourism

The Charlottesville Albemarle Convention & Visitors Bureau plans to leave the Transit Center, where it’s been housed since the center opened in 2007. Staff photo.

Since the stylish, glass-walled Transit Center first opened in spring 2007 on the east end of the Downtown Mall, the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention & Visitors Bureau has been a tenant in what was the city’s first LEED-certified building. That long-term relationship will soon end.

Even before the pandemic turned the mall into a ghost town, the number of visitors finding the tourist center was down, says Albemarle Supervisor Ann Mallek, who serves on the CACVB board. “The decision was based on the very few interactions held in a building with very expensive rent,” she says.

The bureau announced plans for two mobile visitor centers—likely Ford Sprinter vans—to replace brick-and-mortar locations downtown and in the former Crozet train depot and “to reach and interact with even more visitors, by meeting them where they are located,” according to a release.

Mallek says at events such as the Heritage Harvest Festival, “I was handing out hundreds of brochures. I’m very much in favor of mobile vans.”

Councilor Heather Hill, the city’s representative on the CACVB board, says a pilot test moving the visitors bureau to the Old Metropolitan Center in the center of the mall earlier in the year revealed a “resistance to the public going into buildings.” She favors a hybrid model that offers more flexibility and reduces costs.

“Everyone is rethinking how much office space they need,” she says, “and not expending dollars on space we don’t need.”

The visitors bureau is funded from 30 percent of the city and county’s lodging tax, and pays the city $45,000 a year to rent the Transit Center space, says CACVB Executive Director Courtney Cacatian.

Charlottesville-area lodging occupancy rates through July of this year were down 42.6 percent compared to 2019, says Cacatian, citing an industry report. The average daily rate slid 22.7 percent, and the key industry metric, revenue per available room, is down 55.6 percent for that same period.

“Two years from now, we’ll really be feeling the budget impact from the coronavirus,” she says. “We’re still crunching the numbers to see what we’ll have left over for office space.”  

The bureau has a month-to-month lease, and will depart the Transit Center at the end of October, says Cacatian. 

When it was first proposed in the early 2000s, many considered the Transit Center a boondoggle to take advantage of $6.5 million in soon-to-expire federal funds for intermodal transportation. When a location on West Main near the Amtrak station—to connect trains or Greyhound coaches to city buses—was not forthcoming, the city decided to proceed on land it owned on the mall.

At the same time, plans were in the works to revitalize the east end of the mall with a music pavilion that would be leased long-term to and run by music/real estate magnate Coran Capshaw. The city now bills the Transit Center’s intermodality as connecting city buses, bikes, and pedestrians. 

Philadelphia firm WRT won awards for the design of the 11,200-square-foot space. Besides housing a Catch the CAT hub downstairs, original plans called for a retail space, but other than a brief run for Alex George’s Just Curry in 2008, that hasn’t materialized either.

The visitor center’s departure means the city will soon have more vacant space on the mall. “Obviously it’s a loss for that rental revenue,” says Hill.

As for future occupants of the space, city spokesman Brian Wheeler says, “At this point, they haven’t given notice. We aren’t making plans in absence of notice.”

“It’s kind of an awkward space, with a lot of volume but little square footage,” says Kirby Hutto, who runs the neighboring Sprint Pavilion. Whoever next occupies the space will have to work closely with the Pavilion once concerts begin again, because the Pavilion restricts access when there’s a show, he says.

Hutto thinks it’s important to have a visitors center on the Downtown Mall. “I’d like to see a place where people can ask questions and get directions,” he says. “I think it’s kind of sad there won’t be a visitors center.”

But Cacatian says the bureau will still have some sort of presence on the Downtown Mall. She notes that Arlington’s visitors bureau went mobile in 2010 and hasn’t reopened its brick-and-mortar  center. “It’s working great. They’re able to serve 40 percent more people.”

She adds, “The good thing is we have time to figure it out.”

 

Categories
News

In brief: Richardson steps down, Johnny Reb goes down, and more

A crew removes Johnny Reb from his pedestal. PC: Eze Amos

One down

Johnny Reb, the bronze Confederate soldier who has stood, musket in hand, outside the Albemarle County Courthouse since 1909, has been replaced by a patch of hay.

After the Unite the Right rally accelerated the national debate over Confederate monuments, Charlottesville finally took down one of our own. The Albemarle Board of Supervisors voted to remove Johnny Reb, officially known as “At Ready,” earlier this summer, and on Saturday morning a truck arrived to haul off the Lost Cause relic. A small crowd gathered to watch as the crew’s yellow ropes slowly lowered Johnny Reb off his pedestal.

The removal revealed a time capsule encased in concrete below the statue’s concrete plinth. Charlottesville Tomorrow found an old Daily Progress clipping in which the monument’s erectors declared that the capsule shall remain untouched “until the angel Gabriel shall put one foot on the land and one in the sea, and proclaim that ‘time shall be no more.’” Those plans went awry sometime in the course of the last 111 years—the capsule was breached by groundwater long ago, and when the Confederate relics contained within finally saw the light of day, they were so waterlogged as to be almost unrecognizable.

The time capsule buried below the “At Ready” statue is in bad shape after more than 100 years underground. PC: Eze Amos

UVA religious studies professor Jalane Schmidt, who has spent years researching Johnny Reb and lobbying for his removal, says “it was a relief” to see the statue come down. “It’s gratifying to see public opinion shift, especially among elected leaders,” she says.

Still, Schmidt has serious concerns about the monument’s future. As per the new law, these Confederate statues must be offered to a museum rather than just melted down. A dubious list of organizations volunteered to take Johnny Reb, including the Sons of Confederate Veterans. In the end, the Albemarle Board of Supervisors voted to send him to the Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, a New Market-based public history organization with a checkered record: In February, C-VILLE wrote a story about the foundation’s (unsuccessful) attempt to secure state funding for a Black history museum, despite the all-white board neglecting to consult any Black people about it. Last year, the foundation actually installed a new Confederate monument on a Winchester battlefield.

Schmidt says we’ve “disposed of our toxic waste” elsewhere, but that plan “doesn’t bode well for the disrupting of the transmission of Lost Cause narratives.”

__________________

Quote of the week

“Our work is not done…The forces of destruction who didn’t want him to go are alive and well and in our midst.”

—UVA professor and activist Larycia Hawkins, at a ceremony held to cleanse and reclaim the former site of the Johnny Reb statue

__________________

In brief

Richardson rolls out

City Manager Tarron Richardson, the most powerful individual in Charlottesville’s municipal government, resigned Friday afternoon. The move won’t come as a surprise to those who have followed his tenure here. Richardson, City Council, and other city officials have repeatedly clashed during budget discussions and in the course of regular business. After helming the city government for 16 months, Richardson’s severance package includes a year’s salary: $205,000. City Attorney John Blair will step in as interim while a search is conducted.

Clark conquered

UVA’s Board of Visitors voted this week to remove the statue of George Rogers Clark from the Corner. The monument, which shows Clark and his men attacking Native Americans, has been the site of several protests this summer—one activist even tried to saw Clark’s head off, but couldn’t make it through the metal neck. The BOV also agreed to strip the names of slaveholders Curry and Withers from university buildings and “contextualize” the Jefferson statue outside the Rotunda.

Voting begins

Early voting in Virginia begins this Friday, September 18. Get registered online or at the registrar’s office, grab your ID, and make your way to the polls as soon as possible. This is the big one, folks.

Categories
Arts Culture

PICK: Riverdance in HD

Stepping back: It’s been 25 years since Riverdance busted Irish dancing out of a Dublin arena and hooked the world into its Vegas-style showcase of step dancing to infectious Celtic rhythms. Filmed in February 2020, Riverdance in HD brings us back to that pre-masked time when arm-in-arm high kicks were taken for granted, and sweaty spins and bends brought grins instead of nervous grimaces.

Limited seating, masks required. $11-15, Saturday 9/12, 3 and 7pm. The Paramount Theater, 215 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 979-1333.

Categories
Culture Living Uncategorized

PICK: Monticello Fall Plant and Nursery Sale

Sowing the seeds: Take your faith in mother nature to the next level in 2021 with perennials such as rattlesnake master, globe thistle, and Virginia bluebells, courtesy of the Monticello Fall Plant and Nursery Sale. The popular annual event is taking safety precautions that include pre-registration, limited occupancy, and time limits that allow each guest 45 minutes to shop. Plant availability varies.

Free registration, Saturday 9/12, 11am-1pm. Monticello.org.

Categories
Arts Culture

PICK: Save the Music with Beleza

Musical mash-up: Tired of your quarantine playlists? Then it’s time to spice things up with some samba, funk, soul, blues, bossa nova, jazz, and Spanish flamenco—the livestreamed Save the Music with Beleza embodies it all. Madeline and Berto Sales take you to a Brazilian paradise with their musical and marital harmonies: Madeline sings in Portuguese, English and Spanish, while Berto skillfully strums his guitar to blend the sounds of North and South America. Proceeds benefit The Front Porch.

Sunday 9/13. 8pm. facebook.com/frontporchcville.

Categories
Arts Culture

Lyrical departure: Local academics get creative in psychedelic-emo outfit Mouzon Bigsby

A Charlottesville trio with literary inclinations has released a catchy new LP. But none of the three band members are sons of Bill Wilson.

Mouzon Bigsby, which dropped its debut full-length album, Kino, on August 24, formed after a 2015 Christmas party when UVA English professor John Parker met JMU English professor Brooks Hefner over cocktails. Parker had been playing acoustic guitar almost exclusively solo for 20 years and wanted to plug back in. When he mentioned he was looking to form a band, Hefner said he’d come to the right place—he played bass.

“I told him after the first time we played…his chops were through the roof,” Parker says of Hefner.

The pair of profs commenced collaborating in Parker’s garage, tinkering with a lo-fi, alt-country sound highlighted by Hefner on lap steel. The duo went into the studio in 2017, and released a sparsely produced five-track record featuring Darby Wootten on drums. The three-piece played six or seven shows around Charlottesville to whip up support.

The concerts were well received, and the musicians thought they’d put together an LP in short order. They had completed several recordings in the studio session that leaned in a garage-rock, post-punk direction, and the tracks promised to lend themselves to full production.

But life served up some complicated riffs. Parker and his wife had twins. Wootten had other band commitments and a baby of his own. “We got upended,” Parker says.

By 2020, Parker had finally recorded the additional lead vocals and guitars needed to round out the record, and Mouzon Bigsby was ready to release the seven tracks that would become Kino. Life riffed again. The COVID-19 pandemic slowed the mixing process and the musicians won’t be able to gig to support it in the way they anticipated—at least in the short term.

The full-length LP, recorded and mixed at Virginia Arts by Chris Doermann and Sean Dart and available on Bandcamp.com, may very well stand for itself. Parker’s melodic, soft-spoken vocals contrast with his scratchy guitar riffs, and blend seamlessly with Hefner’s Motown-influenced basslines. Anchored by the funky final track “Elon Musk,” Kino offers a sound ranging in influences from The Cars to Joy Division, Dinosaur Jr. to Curtis Mayfield.

“I think of it as a psychedelic wash over this power pop—a sheen that comes through the fuzz and distortion and other effects that are critical to the sound,” Hefner says. “I think the melodies are quite beautiful.”

Hefner brings a softer side to the band via his love of ’70s soul, and Parker says he’s embraced that music, at least in his singing voice. Not only does the Motown sound give Hefner and Wootten a place to lock in as a rhythm section, its R&B sensibility offers Parker’s oblique, pithy lyrics a chance to play off the band’s fuzzy guitar effects.

Awash in a profession known for verbosity—Parker studies medieval and Renaissance drama, while Hefner focuses on 20th century American lit and pop culture—the lead singer says his lyrical approach is an intentional departure from his day-to-day life.

“The whole point of this is it has allowed me an outlet and relationship to language that my professional life doesn’t have,” Parker says. “It’s an opportunity to have a much lighter, carefree approach. I don’t want it to be too cerebral.”

Most of the songs on Kino find that non-cerebral niche without falling into the mundane. The tracks are about relationships and loss, society and loss, finding oneself and, well, losing oneself.

Parker and Hefner say they don’t want their work in Mouzon Bigsby to be overly commercial. Both in their mid-40s, the bibliophiles-cum-musicians aren’t looking to sign a major record contract and tour the globe.

“When you decide what you are going to do for a living and pay the bills, you’re lucky if you can do something you love, but you are instrumentalizing what you love,” Parker says. “If we wanted to try to pay the bills, that would put a lot of pressure on us, and I think it would potentially hurt the music.”

At any rate, Parker and Hefner aren’t sure what to expect when the world emerges from its COVID-induced slumber and again celebrates live sounds. “I’m just hoping the venues are there. You hope they can hold out until it’s safe,” Hefner says.

The duo—sans Wooten—has been recording material for another album remotely, going back to their alt-country roots with Hefner now on pedal steel. They’re also sitting on a number of recordings from the original session avec Wooten.

Parker and Hefner would like to see Mouzon Bigsby back in the studio as a full-strength trio at some point, but before the pandemic clears, they’re just hoping to be back in the garage. According to Parker, it’s been too humid—a problem the songwriter grapples with esoterically in “Elon Musk.”

“What if Elon Musk can’t save us,” Parker sings on Kino’s finishing track. “What if after dark we go to the park / If it gets too hot we’ll stay in the car.”

Or stay in the house, for that matter.

Categories
Culture Living

All hail the Harrison: A historic apple takes root in central Virginia

Sept. 23, 2009 - Apples line the area outside of the cold storage room at Virginia Virginia Apples. photo Ashley Twiggs

Once upon a time, the apple was king in America. There were thousands of specialized varieties, home orchards were widespread, and cider was the most commonly available beverage. These days, we’re used to a very different reality: Most Americans are familiar only with a handful of commercial apple varieties, bred for shelf life and looks instead of flavor, and cider is more of a niche product than a staple. But local cider makers are reconnecting to that lost era of the apple, and the Harrison—which came within a hair’s breadth of being lost to history—is a key link.

“Anyone interested in fine cider and heritage apples is interested in the Harrison,” says Charlotte Shelton of Albemarle CiderWorks, the orchard and cidery located in North Garden. It’s an apple that earned praises from connoisseurs as early as 1817, when William Coxe, author of an illustrated guide to American apple varieties, called it “the most celebrated of the cider apples of Newark in New Jersey.”

Newark was part of an important apple industry serving the New York and Philadelphia markets, and Coxe went on to note that the Harrison “commanded a high price in New York.” Buyers in those days would have been attuned to the Harrison’s special qualities: “the taste pleasant and sprightly, but rather dry—it produces a high coloured, rich, and sweet cider of great strength.”

Within the century that followed Coxe’s guide, though, the temperance movement and changing American demographics put a damper on what had been a robust apple and cider culture. Prohibition in 1920 was the last nail in the coffin for many of the American apple varieties, and the Harrison—being suited only for cider, not for eating—was among many that were largely forgotten.

Many varieties will never be recovered, a fate nearly suffered by the Harrison. But in 1976, a collector from Vermont went searching for it in the Newark area and, by a stroke of luck, discovered a Harrison apple tree that was less than a week from being cut down by the owner of the backyard where it grew.

Before it fell, the collector took scions (cuttings). Some of these eventually made their way into the hands of Tom Burford—a celebrated central Virginia apple grower, pomologist, and nurseryman who spent decades spreading the gospel of heirloom apples through his books and public appearances. Burford also helped and advised Charlotte Shelton and her siblings from the time they established their business in the 1990s until his death in March.

“One of the things we’re interested in doing is exploring what American apples can produce in terms of cider. The Harrison plays into that hugely,” says Shelton. “Tom was interested in promoting that, and we are his heirs in that regard.”

The Harrison is now being grown around the country and featured as a varietal by several craft cideries. Albemarle CiderWorks, for one, is growing around 150 Harrison trees and makes a single-varietal Harrison cider. According to Chuck Shelton, Charlotte’s brother and the CiderWorks’ cider maker, the Harrison is important not only for its place in history, but because it still makes great cider today.

“My opinion is it’s probably the best cider apple that’s ever been grown in the U.S.,” he says, praising the Harrison’s practical advantages: “It’s a great producer. It’s dense and hard, and stores fairly well so you don’t have to press it right away. A high-sugar apple tends to make a high amount of alcohol from fermenting. That helps preserve the cider.”

All that is a boon to the orchardist, of course, but what about the taste? There too, Shelton says the Harrison earns its keep through a balance of several characteristics. “It’s high in tannins, which give you a slight bitterness and full-bodied mouthfeel,” says Shelton. “It’s very acidic, so it has a very sour taste to go along with the astringency. All these things together make it one of the best.” As for Burford, he may have gone even further when he told Edible Jersey magazine that he was so bowled over by his first taste of the Harrison that he had to sit down.

Come early October or so, the Shelton family will be harvesting this year’s crop of Harrisons: smallish, yellow-skinned, black-spotted apples destined to be pressed, fermented, and eventually poured from tall bottles into waiting glasses. Chuck Shelton says the Harrison is finding its way into more orchards in Virginia and beyond, and that its popularity is a boon to the growing American cider business. “We’re fortunate,” he says, “that it didn’t go completely extinct.”

Categories
Arts Culture

Fresh take: Get Duked! confirms the genius of director Ninian Doff

About halfway through Get Duked!, there comes a moment when you realize this silly little comedy about a group of city-dwelling teenagers in the Scottish Highlands became a bold experiment in instinctive filmmaking. Right when it seems like things are about to fly off the rails, it’s clear that it was slowly evolving into a lawless social satire the whole time. The film hasn’t betrayed our trust by breaking its own rules, as many madcap comedies often do. It rewards our investment by proving it never needed rules in the first place.

This is British music video director Ninian Doff’s feature debut, produced from his own screenplay. Doff has a lot to say in Get Duked!, managing to fit more into 87 minutes than many filmmakers do in movies twice as long. It’s so dense that Doff needed at least four endings, Lord of the Rings style—narrative, political, emotional, and tonal—and each one of them is earned. With a film that covers so much terrain, it’s hard to imagine how he could possibly follow it up, but Get Duked! leaves little doubt that this is an artist with no shortage of fresh ideas.

The story concerns a series of disasters that befall participants in the Duke of Edinburgh Award, a fictionalized version of a real program. Three delinquents—Dean (Rian Gordon), Duncan (Lewis Gribben), and DJ Beatroot (Viraj Juneja)—are sent to the Scottish Highlands on a hiking trip as penance for blowing up a public restroom. They’re joined by Ian (Samuel Bottomley), a naive, homeschooled boy who volunteers for the program to make new friends. As they make their way to camp, they’re pursued by a possible serial killer disguised as the Duke of Edinburgh (Eddie Izzard). The local police, already ill-equipped to deal with the case of a bread thief, misconstrue events until their suspect description is little more than a string of scary adjectives, all while never actually accomplishing anything.

Get Duked! made the rounds at last year’s festival under the name Boyz in the Wood. The new, less jokey title is better suited to the final film, but the original captures its spirit and its place in the history of British satire, with the likes of the sitcom “Spaced”—created by and starring Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson, directed by Edgar Wright, and co-starring Nick Frost—about 20-something Londoners mired in American pop culture, and the juxtaposition of their mundane lives with their Hollywood obsessions. (It propelled the team to films like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, which are built on similar sensibilities.)

Setting Get Duked! in the Scottish Highlands taps into some of the same absurdity that makes “Spaced” so much fun. Nothing is supposed to happen here, yet it becomes the scene for drug-fueled underground raves with Scottish farmers, bored officers too eager to assume the role of supercops, bored hunters who pretend to be murderous aristocrats to act out a generational grudge, and commentary on how trying to help “troubled” youth has no basis in what they actually need. Along the way, the filmmaking joyously borrows from a number of genres, including action, horror, musical, even zombie. Changing the name to Get Duked! was a good decision, but Boyz in the Wood says a lot about its intentions.

Many films like this fail in treating the depth of their characters as secondary to the loudness of their antics, and it’s in getting this right that Doff truly sets himself apart as a writer-director. He knows that we’re used to thinly sketched characters being reaction machines, screaming at scary things, laughing at funny things, while the selfish one says selfish stuff, the stupid one says stupid stuff, etc. In Get Duked!, not only do all four boys see real growth throughout the film, but even the most insane action is convincing. Doff is fully invested in the characters as people, and for a minute you may find yourself genuinely anxious about their fate. They are not simply the vehicle by which an opinionated artist conveys a snarky opinion, or a skilled technician shows off. These characters are strong enough to carry a film twice as long.

Get Duked! is a wickedly clever commentary on class and the state of Britain in a deceptively funny package, anchored by stylistic boldness and propelled by memorable performances and shockingly blunt anti-aristocratic commentary for a country that still has a monarch. Some have found Doff’s lengthy flights of fancy to be frustrating. I find them invigorating, like he knew he was breaking the rules, but believed in the material too much to care.

Categories
Arts Culture

Sound Choices: New projects break through the noise

A. D. Carson

i used to love to dream

(University of
Michigan Press)

A.D. Carson has made a career out of breaking boundaries. As a Ph.D. student at Clemson University, his dissertation was an album called Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics Of Rhymes & Revolutions. Across the project’s 34 tracks, he examined identity politics, and even challenged the university to look inward on “See the Stripes,” which points to John C. Calhoun, a slave-owning 19th-century statesman whose house is memorialized on campus. After garnering thousands of viewers and listeners on platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud, Carson was offered the position of assistant professor of hip-hop and the global South in the McIntire Department of Music at the University of Virginia.

He continued his work with the “mixtap/e/ssays” series sleepwalking, turning the spotlight on his new home of Charlottesville by tackling themes like the proliferation of white supremacy in the wake of the Unite the Right rally that ravaged the community in 2017. i used to love to dream is the third installment of the series, and it marks another milestone for Carson: It’s the first peer-reviewed rap album ever published by an academic press. Tracing his roots back to his hometown of Decatur, Illinois, Carson harnesses feelings of leaving home and what constitutes the idea of success or “making it.” Elsewhere on the collection, he tackles systemic racism, police brutality, and the impact of discrimination by the criminal justice system. i used to love to dream is a multifaceted, cross-genre display of how art and activism go hand in hand—and is a must listen (released on August 6).

Kate Bollinger

A word becomes a sound

(Self-released)

After generating a lot of buzz with her 2019 EP I Don’t Wanna Lose, Charlottesville native Kate Bollinger returns with another batch of languid dream-pop compositions. A word becomes a sound finds the songwriter, who recently graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in cinematography, expanding her sonic palette. Across the EP’s five tracks, she incorporates electronic elements and a new level of production, all while maintaining the hazy lo-fi quality that has become her signature. Bollinger once again teamed up with classmate and frequent collaborator John Trainum to achieve this balance. The result is a lush, laid-back offering of R&B, jazz, and indie shoegaze. Bollinger and Trainum finished writing and production for newer tracks like “Queen to Nobody” during the pandemic. But the opener, “A Couple Things,” has been a staple of Bollinger’s live sets for years. “If I mess up a couple things or if I mess up a lot of things,” she muses on the song. “If I fuck up a couple things, well, what if I fuck up everything?” It’s Bollinger’s ability to channel sentiments that are simultaneously personal and universal that makes A word becomes a sound her strongest work to date (released on August 21).

Various Artists

A Little Bit at a
Time: Spacebomb
Family Rarities

(Spacebomb Records)

Richmond’s Spacebomb Records is more than just a record label; it’s a musical nexus. Operating in a newly renovated studio, Spacebomb also serves as a publishing, management, and production company. Spacebomb sought to showcase its many facets with a new compilation, A Little Bit at a Time: Spacebomb Family Rarities. Digging into the archives, the album highlights Richmond-based artists like Andy Jenkins, Sleepwalkers, and Spacebomb founder Matthew E. White, alongside artists like Pure Bathing Culture and Laura Veirs, who have worked with Spacebomb in various capacities. Featuring B-sides, previously unreleased tracks, and demos, A Little Bit at a Time is the perfect deep dive from one of the biggest drivers of Central Virginia’s creative community (released on July 3).

Categories
Arts Culture

C’ville chic: Bottom Drawer is hyperlocal and hyper-absurd

It’s not an exaggeration to say the graphic tee revolutionized the fashion world. Its unique pairing of text and image allowed for an unprecedented level of self-expression, and gave birth to a slew of immediately recognizable designs—from I ♥ NY to Frankie Says Relax to D.A.R.E. (the latter being as ironic as it is iconic).

The ability for individuals to make their own shirts has led to localized versions of the graphic tee trend, and Charlottesville is no exception. Who among us doesn’t recognize a WTJU rock marathon tee, or the teal heart design of the Cville love shirt? Like other small but culture-rich communities, we wear aspects of our city emblazoned across our chests.

Kate Snyder, founder of Charlottesville-based T-shirt company Bottom Drawer, just might have our next iconic logo. The Townie tee, “the very FIRST perfect T-shirt in a line of completely perfect T-shirts” (or so claims Bottom Drawer’s Instagram page) was unveiled in early August, and it’s exactly what it sounds like. TOWNIE is displayed in all caps, block letters—in your choice of black text (“PLAIN BAGEL”) or rainbow (“EVERYTHING BAGEL”)—across a white background.

Snyder says her lifelong townie status—she was born and raised in Charlottesville—combined with a love of fashion, specifically graphic tees, inspired her to make this Bottom Drawer’s debut design. “I think of graphic T-shirts as the most basic way to announce something about yourself through your clothes,” she says. “It’s an interesting way to say who you are…spelled out in black and white—or multicolored, as the case may be.”

Although Snyder has dabbled in T-shirt design before, creating and selling POACH tees (an edgy parody of COACH) a few years ago, she hadn’t planned to start an entire Charlottesville-based business. In fact, she hadn’t intended to remain in Charlottesville at all—a 2020 UVA graduate, her postgrad sights were set on New York. However, Snyder’s professional prospects were cut short by the pandemic. Like so many others, she found herself in “this weird townie space, living in my childhood bedroom.”

Hence the Townie tee. “This was my banana bread or my sourdough starter,” Snyder says. “I wanted to test out that creative side.” Her creative side, as it turns out, comes with a very unique sense of humor—one that can be seen most obviously in Bottom Drawer’s Instagram. Whether it’s a movie still of James Stewart as George Bailey, expertly Photoshopped to sport a Townie tee—It’s a Wonderful Life is, after all, the ultimate townie tale—or an interview of dubious authenticity with Karl Lagerfeld about breakfast and fashion, Snyder has established an undeniable brand for Bottom Drawer in just a month.

Under all the irreverence, though, is a real commitment to her community. Three dollars from each Townie sale goes to The Haven, an idea that Snyder says was brought on in part by the pandemic. “Obviously, the circumstances of people suffering from homelessness in Charlottesville has been exacerbated…it seemed like a no-brainer.” This charity pairs well with Snyder’s newest initiative: including a pre-stamped postcard in each Bottom Drawer package so that her customers can write a letter to someone and support the United States Postal Service.

Snyder has released three designs since Townie, each one punnier than the last. “Hautemeal,” the most recent, features an anthropomorphized and decidedly elegant bowl of oats. It is, as she is happy to admit, “openly ridiculous”—but then, she says, so is the idea of fashion itself. “Why not, when you’re getting dressed, make the thing that you’re getting dressed in as ridiculous as possible?”

Snyder, who still plans on moving to New York sometime soon, isn’t sure how much longer Bottom Drawer will continue to put out new products, but she says the venture has made her realize designing shirts is “something that I would like to do forever.” If wearing fashion is a form of self-expression, then Snyder has found that creating it is a form of self-discovery. “I’m trying to find my own language through my work for Bottom Drawer.”