Potter's seventh annual Wassail features live music, crafts, and, of course, cider. Photo: Tom Daily
Spirits chasing spirits: Enjoy hot mulled cider, fire pits, and sing-alongs at Potter’s Craft Cider’s seventh annual Wassail, a British drinking tradition to bless the orchards and scare away evil spirits, ensuring a bountiful harvest in the year to come. The lively day-long celebration includes face painting, wreath crown crafting, live music by the Blue Ridge Irish Music School and Ragged Mountain String Band, and food from Carbon Catering and Mama Crockett’s Cider Donuts. The evening culminates with the crowning of Wassail royals.
Nona’s Italian Cucina founder Yvonne Cunningham learned her sauce skills from a true Nona while living in Italy. Photo: Chris Martin
By Chris Martin
As they hurry to set up their stalls on a frosty November morning, breathy clouds billow from the mouths of market vendors while they exchange coffee and hand warmers, and gab about the items they’ve brought to the market to sell. Excitement typically revolves around what’s new from the gardens and kitchens, but this late in the season, farmers and makers are sustaining the year’s harvest through methods of pickling, drying, and preserves.
UVA alum Matt Bressan’s Fresh Crunch Food is a family-owned business out of Falls Church. One of eight siblings, Bressan began catering in 2008, developed some pickle recipes, and, in 2013, joined forces with his brother Luke, who is now the pickle chef.
The pair experimented with selling at farmers’ markets as an additional revenue stream. “Right before COVID we were doing lots of catering,” says Bressan. “All that got canceled and the only way to get a true income was to find more markets.” Starting with three markets in 2020, the brothers ramped up to 12 in 2021, with pickle production shifting from 20 percent to 80 percent of the business.
A third brother, Colin, is the face of the Fresh Crunch Food stand at the Charlottesville City Market. FCF offers 30 varieties of pickles, and most of the vegetables it pickles are sourced through farms in Virginia, largely Garner’s Produce in Warsaw. Have a pickle lover in your heart for the holidays? Sign them up for the monthly pickle club with home delivery (freshcrunchfood.com).
Herb Angel owner Angel Shockley started making shrubs in 2013 as a natural extension of her love for herbs, gardening, and cooking. The concentrated syrups of herbs, fruits, sugars, and vinegars can be found on many a bartender’s shelf, and they mix easily into still or sparkling water. After a nine-month herbalism course in 2012 at Sacred Plant Traditions in Charlottesville, Shockley says Herb Angel allows her to experiment in this new way.
For the holidays, Shockley is offering natural and herbal creations, including an assortment of shrubs and naturally dyed silk scarves, plus Eat Your Medicine gift boxes and a skin care collection that incorporates herbal wisdom and passion for locality that will nourish from the inside out (herb-angel.com).
Yvonne Cunningham started Nona’s Italian Cucina as an adventure in independence from traditional employment structures in 2018. Cunningham learned Italian cooking when her family moved to Italy while her husband was in the Navy. “We didn’t speak any Italian,” she says. But they “chose to live off base—we figured if we’re living in Italy, live amongst the Italians.” Her next-door neighbor, a bonafide Italian Nona, took her shopping for the freshest produce. “Nona taught me that the best tomato sauce comes from San Marzano tomatoes that are grown in volcanic and mineral-rich soil in Naples,” says Cunningham. She learned to make traditional tomato sauce, and has been making it for about 30 years, tapping into local farms for herbs and other ingredients. Cunningham’s holiday boxes come with tomato sauce, local Valente pasta, hand-embroidered Williams Sonoma kitchen towels, market totes, and other Nona’s Italian Cucina goodies. Find Nona’s Italian Cucina on alternating weekends at the City Market or IX Art Park farmers’ market, or order online (nonascucina.com).
Wife-and-husband duo Rachel and Daniel Perry run two local microbusinesses: JAM according to Daniel and Fairweather Farm, a tea and spice producer. Longtime City Market vendors, the pair used their knowledge of local produce and herb cultivation to expand in 2020 by adding a mail-order business model.
“Rachel has herbs and spices that are grabbed out of the peak of the season, dried, and mixed by her,” says Daniel. He offers small-production releases of seasonal preserves and occasional rare jams with fruit sourced from local farms within a 60-mile radius of his Charlottesville kitchen.
Each gift box has a combination of tea and jam in sustainable packaging, the perfect pairing to bring Virginia home for the holidays. Order online for pickup, delivery, and shipping (accordingtodaniel.com).
Buy local
Charlottesville City Market 100 E. Water St. Saturdays through December 18
Key’s Corner Indoor Market 800 E. Market St. Saturdays, January-March
Local Food Hub Drive-Through Market Seminole Square Fridays
IX Art Park Farmers’ Market 522 Second St., S.E. Saturdays
The Trans-Siberian Orchestra performs at John Paul Jones Arena on December 16, 2021. Supplied photo
Merry Rockmas: Rock the silent night away with the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, a progressive rock band that takes holiday tunes to the next level. The group is celebrating 25 years since the release of its debut rock opera, Christmas Eve and Other Stories, with a live show featuring wailing strings, lasers, lights, and effects synchronized to the music. The band performs holiday favorites, including the best-selling single “Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24,” which tells the tale of a lone cello player as he performs a long-lost Christmas carol.
Thursday 12/16. $47.50-87.50, 7:30pm. John Paul Jones Arena, 295 Massie Rd. johnpauljonesarena.com
COVID-19 is once again on the rise, and in light of the new omicron variant, the CDC is encouraging all vaccinated adults to get a booster shot. Photo: Blue Ridge Health District
Since South Africa reported the omicron variant to the World Health Organization on November 24, this new form of coronavirus has been detected in at least 38 countries. At press time, omicron had not yet been identified in Virginia, but several dozen cases have been reported in at least 17 states, including Maryland, New Jersey, and New York.
According to Blue Ridge Health District Director Dr. Denise Bonds, it is still too early to tell if the omicron variant is more transmissible or deadlier than the original strain of the virus, or other known variants like the delta and alpha. The delta variant currently accounts for 99.9 percent of new cases in the U.S.
“There are several mutations that cause structural changes in the virus that may make it easier to be infected,” explains Bonds. “That may mean that our defense systems—that is our vaccines and the antibodies that you develop—may not work quite as well.”
While it is unknown if the omicron variant causes more severe symptoms of the virus, everyone who has tested positive for the new variant in the U.S. so far has experienced mild symptoms, and most have been fully vaccinated, Bonds says.
“We don’t know if it’s mild symptoms because that’s what the variant causes, or if the individuals’ symptoms were mild because they were vaccinated,” says Bonds. “There are so many things we’re still trying to figure out.”
During a UVA Health press conference last week, Dr. Costi Sifri, director of hospital epidemiology, explained that it’s possible the omicron variant may begin to overtake the delta variant in some places, but not others.
“They may become coexisting and both be circulating at the same time,” he said. “It may be dependent on local factors, like what the level of vaccination or immunity is in a particular location.”
Since the start of the pandemic, the coronavirus has mutated as it’s spread across the world, leading to the emergence of multiple variants, explains Bonds.
“Viruses are really good at shuffling their instructions,” she says. “Every time that virus moves from person to person, or even is replicated within an individual, it’s an opportunity for those instructions to get just a little bit shuffled up.”
“Sometimes that change in the instructions doesn’t have any significance. But sometimes they get lucky, and the changes can result in something that’s quite infectious, like the delta variant,” she adds.
Especially in light of the new variant, the CDC is now encouraging all vaccinated adults to get COVID-19 booster shots. While those who received the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine should get their booster six months after their second dose, those who received the single-dose Johnson & Johnson should get their booster two months after their initial shot.
“Getting that booster shot will essentially remind your immune system, and ramp it up just a little bit so that you’ll have plenty of antibodies and other immune cells to protect yourself,” says Bonds.
Since late September, the arrival of booster shots has helped to bring COVID cases down significantly in the Blue Ridge Health District, says Bonds. Around 22 percent of residents in Charlottesville and 26 percent of residents in Albemarle County have received a third dose of the vaccine. Appointments and walk-ins are available Monday through Saturday at the Community Vaccination Center at Seminole Square.
Bonds also urges everyone to wear masks and social distance in public spaces, spend time outdoors, and wash their hands on a regular basis.
“If someone hasn’t gotten vaccinated, this really should be a call for them to come and get their vaccine,” she says.
Art historian Lyn Bolen Warren founded Les Yeux du Monde gallery and made immeasurable contributions to Charlottesville’s contemporary art scene. Supplied photo
The Charlottesville arts community lost one of its greatest champions and brightest stars in Carolyn “Lyn” Bolen Warren, who died on Sunday, November 21, at the age of 60 after a valiant battle with cancer.
Warren’s art gallery, Les Yeux du Monde, has been a cherished Charlottesville institution for more than two decades, featuring beautifully curated and thought-provoking shows with work by both established and emerging artists.
Warren opened the gallery in 1995, after receiving her Ph.D. in art history from UVA. In those days, Charlottesville’s arts scene looked very different than it does now—Second Street Gallery, McGuffey and UVA were the only public venues to view art. At first, Warren operated out of her stylish contemporary home just north of town on Wolf Trap Road. Though she moved the gallery into Charlottesville, first to West Main Street and then to The Terraces, just off the Downtown Mall, LYdM eventually returned to its original Wolf Trap setting in 2009, this time situated in a striking building designed by esteemed architect WG Clark. Like all of Warren’s choices, the building is both structure and sculpture, reflecting her imagination and vision.
Whether you were an important client, an artist, or a casual visitor, Warren was equally welcoming. Her passion was art, and her life’s work was sharing that passion. She reveled in the world of ideas and devoted enormous amounts of energy to community outreach, with artists’ talks and trips to studios and museums. She was also generous with her time and resources, supporting artists and collaborating with other organizations like UVA and Second Street Gallery.
“She was a beloved member of the arts community, who is now a kind of icon,” says artist and UVA studio art professor Dean Dass. “What she accomplished here is almost unbelievable.”
Among her many accomplishments, “Hindsight/Fore-site: Art for the New Millennium,” was perhaps the most ambitious. Warren conceived and curated the NEA- funded show and the accompanying publication, “Siting Jefferson,” for the UVA museum in 2000. The exhibition featured over 20 artists including luminaries such as Ann Hamilton, Michael Mercil, Dennis Oppenheim, and Agnes Denes, whose site-specific work was presented around Charlottesville.
Always gracious and accommodating, Warren moved through the world with an innate elegance. She was full of good cheer and enthusiasm, and was exceedingly kind. She was also uncompromising in terms of the high standards and strong convictions she held, and she helped make contemporary art an active public discourse in Charlottesville.
“We came up in the department together,” says Dass, who joined the UVA faculty at about the same time as Warren began working on her degree. “My wife Patsy put it so well—‘Lyn was not an art historian, she was an art history maker. She affected the careers of many artists and brought Charlottesville to a better place in understanding how to make art a part of life.’”
Warren and Victoria Beck Newman co-directed the Lydia Csato Gasman Archives for Picasso and Modernist Studies. “Lyn and I wrote our dissertations under the legendary Picasso scholar, Lydia Gasman, who maintained that modern art should often be viewed as a quest for a new sacred that was relevant to contemporary existence,” says Newman. “As a brilliant art historian and gallerist, Lyn endorsed that idea by exhibiting and writing about art that had a transformational impact on both viewers and culture. Her deep understanding of art history underlay the authoritative and serious choices she made as a curator.”
Deftly balancing her career with family life, Warren raised two children, Hagan and Ray, by her first husband, Eugene Ray Rushton, who died in 2004. She wed artist Russ Warren in 2005; theirs was a true marriage of the minds. Warren’s warmth and passion brought dozens of others into her fold.
UVA art professor David Summers, who likens Warren to a daughter, sums up her beautiful, enduring spirit. “Lyn completed her art-historical studies with the conviction that art is an unmixed good, not just a reminder of the woes of life, and not just an illusion that makes life bearable,” he says, “but something more like love, spring, and sunshine, all the joys of life, to which we might reasonably think we have a right, and by which she seemed herself to be carried along and sustained.”
Julian Lage performs at the Southern on Thursday in support of Squint, his first release on the historic Blue Note label. A masterclass with the guitarist will be offered before the show. Photo: Alysse Gafkjen
By Dave Cantor
The opening track of Julian Lage’s first Blue Note album is titled “Etude”—a nod, perhaps, to the lifetime he’s spent studying his instrument.
The guitarist, who came to national attention in a short 1996 documentary focused on his prodigious talents called Jules at Eight, has been recording as a bandleader for just over a decade. And while he’s covered a lot of territory—moving from larger ensembles to trios and working alongside jazz luminaries like Gary Burton and Nels Cline—Squint marks Lage’s ascent to a legendary imprint. It’s a label aiming to find a new generation of players to help forge a path ahead for jazz, recently releasing albums by drummer/producer Makaya McCraven and vibraphonist Joel Ross, among others.
“My obsession with Blue Note, its artistic integrity, releasing progressive music rooted in African-American traditions, improvisational traditions—[it’s] just a label that does amazing stuff and supports artists as they evolve,” Lage says over the phone from New York, while packing to embark on a handful of European dates before Thursday’s gig at the Southern in Charlottesville. “There’s one way of looking at it for me, which is that I’m being included on a train that’s been moving forward for 80 years.”
Squint continues a compositional refinement that began following the guitarist’s first release, 2009’s Sounding Point, and narrowed in focus as Lage grew interested in improvisation and writing more for himself, as opposed to his ensemble. With the trio here—bassist Jorge Roeder and Bad Plus drummer Dave King—the guitarist enjoys the drive of a power trio with the adaptability of a small jazz combo.
“I definitely like that it’s a precarious orchestration,” Lage says about his current ensemble. “There’s a lot that’s not in there. A lot of it’s implied—by the listener, by us. There’s a lineage of the guitar trio, in jazz at least, being a metric for a player’s creative output. Same with piano trios and saxophone trios.”
If Squint is intended as proof of Lage’s expanding compositional acumen, there are more than a few moments that spotlight his unique voice. “Boo’s Blues,” the album’s second track, comes off like a cowboy-indebted jazz tune. There’s the swing of Sonny Rollins’ “Way Out West” (a 1957 trio effort), but an overwhelming affinity for blues propels the track, King sitting back in the pocket. The following title track functions much the same way, though Lage takes a more aggressive approach.
“There’s a comfort in the way the guitar sits on the record that I’ve been pursuing,” the bandleader says. “And I think we kind of found a nice balance, largely because Squint is such a jazz record—from my perception—a jazz record, a swing record, a Blue Note record.”
A few noisier tunes crop up, though. The finer moments of “Familiar Flower” spring from the overdrive Lage bathes his guitar in, and the soloing on “Day and Age” might find a suitable home on a rock album. But nothing here places Squint outside of Blue Note’s purview, especially considering the release of 2018’s rock-indebted Currents, Constellations, helmed by Cline, with contributions from Lage.
Some of Lage’s more radical inclinations—at least when examined through the historic lens of the jazz genre—were ratified by working with Cline in a variety of contexts. The older guitarist’s own discography spans membership in Wilco and detours through jazz, rock, and experimental worlds.
“Nels was at the intersection of the avant-garde and songs—and so much more. Absolutely, my friendship with him has encouraged me and made me feel that I don’t have to pick sides. You can do what you like—and that’s hugely helpful,” Lage says. “The number of records Nels has made—his trio and the Nels Cline Singers. Talk about guitar trios? He has such a broad and brilliant catalog. And we play very differently, but I think we played in a complementary way.”
Even with that expansive vision as a guide, a handful of songs on Squint seem to accidentally hone in on Lage’s past: “Saint Rose,” “Twilight Surfer” and an interpretation of “Call of the Canyon” appear tied more to Lage’s childhood on the West Coast than New York clubs.
“‘Saint Rose’ is a deliberate tribute to Santa Rosa and the region—the fires,” Lage says, while disavowing any concerted effort to focus other tunes on remembrances of his California youth. “But there is a spirit of—what would you call it? Early electric guitar, surf guitar, Hawaiian slide guitar…things that have grown out of California—they’ve always been important to me. They might be so embedded in me that it just comes out in the music.”
Enthused about the path he’s forging in the jazz world, Lage recognizes that a wealth of possibilities await—especially after the pandemic. He admirably expresses that disposition across the 11 tunes on Squint.
“You don’t have to look far with music to feel hopeful,” the band leader says. “I was in a privileged position to make music that was almost like a prayer, rather than an exhibition of what I can do.”
PVCC's Let There Be Light is back for two nights of fun illumination. Supplied photo
Twinkle, twinkle: Let There Be Light returns for two evenings of whimsical illumination ahead of the longest night of the year. The outdoor exhibition includes a variety of light-centered art installations and performances. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’ Artmobile traveling gallery will be set up on opening night, and hot cider will be available to sip on as you navigate the outdoor exhibition (don’t forget to bring your flashlight). Hit the town for night two, which will feature a slow dance promenade on the Downtown Mall, interactive electronic music, and a special collaborative work by event creators James Yates and the late Beryl Solla, to whom this year’s celebration is dedicated.
Friday 12/10 & Saturday 12/11. Free, 6pm. Friday at Piedmont Virginia Community College, 501 College Dr., and Saturday at various locations around downtown Charlottesville. pvcc.edu/performingarts.com
Other places that will brighten your night
Charlottesville neighborhoods
Johnson Village, Belvedere, and Agnese Street are all known for their sparkling displays.
Oatmeal the holiday tree
Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall
Candlelight Tours at The Paramount Theater
215 E. Main St., Charlottesville
Winter Wander at Boar’s Head Resort
200 Ednam Dr., Charlottesville
Santa on Mountainview
(formerly of Charlottesville) 608 N. Commerce Ave., Waynesboro
Former Charlottesville police chief RaShall Brackney is preparing to take her case against the city to federal court. Photo: Amy Smith
“Typically, everyone just goes away. They make these agreements and people go away,” says former Charlottesville police chief RaShall Brackney. But she’s not going away.
Two months after her controversial termination, Brackney—the city’s first Black woman police chief—filed a string of formal complaints against the city, accusing government leaders of directly retaliating against her efforts to dismantle white supremacy within the police department.
In complaints submitted to CPD’s human resources department, the local Office of Human Rights, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the NAACP on November 9, Brackney claimed that city leadership defamed, harassed, and discriminated against her based on her race and sex after then-city manager Chip Boyles wrongfully terminated her on September 1. She demanded $3 million and a public apology.
Brackney gave the city until November 26 to reach a settlement with her. But since filing her complaints, she says she has only received a brief letter from the city’s attorney, David Corrigan of Harman Claytor Corrigan & Wellman. According to the civil litigation firm’s website, Corrigan specializes in representing state and local governments, and has handled numerous cases of employment discrimination.
“It literally was just a letter notifying us who their attorneys were—not anything substantive,” says Brackney. According to Brackney’s attorney Charles Tucker, the city government has yet to alert Brackney when, or if, it plans to formally respond to her complaints.
“Even when the entire world was watching, and it’s been on display what they’ve done, they just are so comfortable in the way in which they go about their work,” Brackney says. “They don’t think that they have to respond because they’ve not had anyone challenge them to this degree.”
Since her departure, “most of everything” has fallen apart at CPD, claims Brackney. Some officers have stopped coming into work, and several have completely left the department.
“They just show up when they want to show up,” says the former chief. “They’ve found officers sleeping on duty and instead of discipline, they’ve sent them home and said, ‘You know what, we’ll let them do work from home.’”
In September and October, CPD did not post information about investigative detentions and encounters on its website—a practice Brackney implemented during her tenure in an effort to improve the department’s transparency. The statistics were not updated until after Brackney sent an email to City Council last month about the department’s rollback on her reforms, she says. And though the former chief dismantled the department’s SWAT team after uncovering severe misconduct in August, she claims the team has been secretly reassembling since her termination, and will be fully funded in the FY23 CPD budget.
Brackney emphasizes that officer pushback against systemic reforms is not unique to Charlottesville.
“I am now hearing people say that this is a system that is so failed, it can’t be reformed, it can’t be reimagined. It needs to be demolished—start all over,” says Brackney. “There are really good individuals who work in these systems, but they’ve also been indoctrinated and socialized into [them].”
The former chief says Charlottesville has been “complicit” in the deteriorating situation in the department. She claims the community did not support her efforts to reform the department until after she was terminated.
“I’ve been screaming from the rooftops this is the work I’ve been doing, but no one cared,” she says. “[Local media] oftentimes were very comfortable attacking me because they could.”
Though Tucker declines to detail the exact steps Brackney’s legal team will take next, he says they have the right to file a “host of claims” in federal court.
“There’s a defamation claim that we could make…to go along with her constitutional claims that allege the city not only disparately treated her but also retaliated against her,” says Tucker. “We are putting forth our efforts to get her case ready to go.”
Due to the conflict of interest, the city’s Office of Human Rights must delegate a separate authority to investigate Brackney’s complaints on behalf of the EEOC, explains Tucker. The office has about two months left to complete its investigation.
“From their findings or lack thereof, chief Brackney would be entitled to receive a right-to-sue letter, which would give her the opportunity to then file her claims in federal court,” says Tucker.
Brackney also plans to file a complaint with the Virginia attorney general’s office requesting an investigation into the city’s pattern of discrimination.
“If you look across the board of qualified Black candidates who’ve been brought into Charlottesville…they have been forced out,” she says. One high-profile example is former city manager Tarron Richardson, who is also suing the city regarding the way his departure was handled last September.
Still, Brackney and Tucker urge the city to respond to the former chief’s claims, and save taxpayers the hefty costs of litigation and attorney fees.
“I don’t think it’s in anybody’s best interest if we get into a fight,” says Tucker. “But we’re certainly prepared to litigate the fight to the fullest extent that the law allows.”
“The city knows what we have,” adds Brackney. “If they don’t know the full extent of what we have, shame on them.”
WinterSong has all fixings you need for s'mores. File photo
S’mores-gasbord: It’s time to celebrate, and WinterSong has everything you need to get the revelry started. The festive gathering features holiday caroling, gourmet food trucks, shopping, and more. Stay warm—and make s’mores—at one of the crackling fires and enjoy your choice of beverage at this family-friendly event. Artisan gifts from local and regional vendors will be available for purchase, and live music will be provided by The Front Porch from 5-7pm.
Sunday 12/12. Free, 4pm. Rivanna River Company, 1518 E. High St. frontporchcville.org.
The building’s amenities include various co-working spaces, rooftop terraces, and a 200-seat theater. Photo: Stephen Barling
From the seventh-floor balcony of the CODE Building, downtown Charlottesville stretches out in front of you, misty blue mountains visible in the distance. Up here, North Downtown’s brick buildings, with their shingled roofs and quaint steeples, look like Monopoly pieces. And the seventh floor isn’t even the top of the office tower—two more floors of shimmering windows and black concrete rise above.
After years of construction, the place is just about open for business. Tenants are arranging their desk chairs, and the lobby’s coffee shop—Millisecond, an offshoot of Milli Coffee Roasters—is pouring joe as of this week. The caramel-hued foyer looks like the lobby of a high-end boutique hotel, with Bauhaus-style lamps hanging over leather couches. Before long, anywhere from 400 to 600 finance and tech workers will move in.
“The idea is that you have food, and sources of good energy, in the courtyard and also interior to the space,” says Rob Archer, who’s in charge of the co-working area on the building’s two bottom floors. The building itself—the Center of Developing Entrepreneurs, CODE for short—is the brainchild of mega-rich hedge fund manager and UVA alum Jaffray Woodriff. (The building’s general manager, Bill Chapman, is a co-owner of this paper.) The complex aims to “become the nexus of commercial and social enterprise activity in central Virginia,” according to the building’s website.
CODE sits at the end of the Downtown Mall, where the ice rink and Ante Room music venue used to be. The building’s floor plan is an irregular A-shape, drawn so that the tall office tower would be situated on Water Street. A triangular courtyard opens on to the mall. The architects went to great lengths to keep the original brick facade of the Carytown Tobacco building in place at the courtyard’s corner, though they painted the old bricks white with black trim, a sleek scheme to match the rest of the complex.
Photos: Stephen Barling
The new tech hub has aesthetic pedigree. Thomasin Foshay, who coordinated the building’s interior design, points out the courtyard fountain, designed by a member of the team that built the memorial at Ground Zero in New York; the rooftop garden terraces were installed with consultation from someone who designed the High Line in Manhattan. A dangling 21-foot interior sculpture, designed by an apprentice of Frank Gehry, lights up at night, offering passersby a glimpse of luminous floating polyhedrons through the window.
In the building’s red-carpeted, 200-seat theater, more bells and whistles become apparent. The chairs are “slim profile jump seats,” says Foshay. At first glance, each seat looks impossibly thin, but unfolds to create a two-part chair. When it’s time to divide the theater from the entryway, a partition appears from behind a hidden panel in the wooden-slatted wall.
“This is an amenity for tenants, co-working members, and also the community,” Archer says of the theater. The next event on the calendar is a holiday party for CAV Angels, a UVA alumni group of angel investors.
The building’s first two levels are dedicated to Codebase, the open-concept office space that allows members to buy access at a variety of tiers. At midday on a Monday, three or four people with computers sit here and there, plugging away. “What we’ve seen so far is that people are here, and they’re being extremely productive,” says Archer, a tech entrepreneur, UVA lecturer, and owner of Arch’s Frozen Yogurt. “That’s the whole point.”
Photos: Stephen Barling
A single individual can fork over $250 a month for 9 to 5 access to the office space, plus amenities like a kitchen, showers and a podcast studio. A four-person private office—with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out towards the Omni—goes for around $2,500. Twenty of the 38 offices are leased so far, and the co-working space could ultimately support as many as 200 people.
“In this space in particular, the pandemic has actually been an accelerator,” says Archer, citing companies’ desire for flexibility. The minimum membership period is two months.
Meeting spaces of various sizes are accessible from the co-working floor. “We call this a huddle room,” Archer says, opening the door to a green-walled space with a table and chairs. “But it’s really a conference room.”
Besides the lingo, other little hints of the entrepreneurial spirit are everywhere. In one conference room, ornate black and gold wallpaper shows vines curling around coffee cups and cell phones. One early tenant has hung a portrait of HGTV’s Property Brothers on their glass-walled office. Even the mailboxes have a touchscreen—you’ll need a QR code emailed to you to get your packages.
The building was designed to facilitate “collision,” says Andrew Boninti, a lead developer on the project. Central to that mission is the retail on the ground floor. Two restaurant spaces open into the courtyard: Ooey Gooey Crispy, which bills itself as a “grown-up grilled cheese” shop, is on the way, as is a storefront for organic Mexican fusion food truck Farmacy.
Will the restaurants be enough to draw passersby into the orbit of the looming building? “We like the concept that people understand that it is private property,” Boninti says, “that people are here on invitation. But that’s what we’re all about—collision of ideas. People running in to each other.”
The higher floors, four through nine, are designed as more standard office space for large companies. So far, three of the six floors are leased, with Woodriff’s firm, Quantitative Investment Management, taking floor four. Investure, a local financial planning and investment company, is fully moved in to floor five. Floors six through eight remain unclaimed, though Boninti says at least one more deal is imminent.
The pandemic has made large tenants a little hesitant to jump in. “They don’t know what they’re coming back to,” he says. “‘Are we gonna do three days a week at home?’ and all of that. I would think before the pandemic we would have had all of the spaces taken.”
Down at the bottom of the building, in the underground parking lot, 10 glowing green electric car chargers hang in front of the rows of spaces. (None of the 15 or so cars parked at the moment are plugged in.) Other environmentally conscious features include a rainwater collection system that catches water and pumps it back to the plants on the terraces. An elaborate air filtration network ensures that fresh air is always being blown in to every space—an expensive feature, but one Woodriff insisted on, citing research that fresh air boosts cognitive function.
Initially, Woodriff didn’t want to install a parking lot at all, says Boninti—“He thinks the future is going to be less cars, public transportation, and Ubers and everything else”—but the building has room for 74 cars, enough for the tenants’ bigwigs. “We have secured a lot of off-site parking,” says Boninti. “We have 100 spots at the Water Street garage, we have spots at the Omni, we have spots across the street at Staples.”
Most people, however, will encounter the building on foot, as they stroll down the mall. Amid two-story, red-brick storefronts filled with boutiques, restaurants, and used bookstores, the shiny, black, angular CODE building sticks out.
When Archer learns that C-VILLE asked about the building in its question of the week (p. 33), and one of the respondents said it reminded them of the Death Star, he says: “How do you respond to that? You don’t. You just say ‘hey, you’re entitled to your opinion. We love you, come check us out if you get a chance, the coffee’s good.’”
