Jeanette Walls will be in Charlottesville on July 8 at the Irving Theater for a reading and conversation. Publicity photo.
Jeannette Walls had an embarrassing childhood. For a storyteller, that’s gold.
She parlayed growing up with colorful, irresponsible parents—creative optimists who didn’t always provide for their children’s basic needs, like food or shelter—into The Glass Castle, her 2005 memoir that has been a New York Times bestseller for nine years.
“I had a happy childhood,” insists Walls, who now lives on a 320-acre farm in Orange. “You couldn’t pay me to go through it again.”
The Glass Castle, which sold 7 million copies in North America alone, has been translated into 35 languages and was made into a 2017 movie starring Woody Harrelson, has a devoted fan base and has become so iconic that we have to ask Walls if she ever gets tired of talking about her childhood.
“No,” says Walls. “I think it’s really not about me anymore. People are trying to figure out their own stories. People carry around so much shame or anger.”
Walls was a gossip columnist working for magazines and television in New York, and had never told anyone about living with her three siblings in a three-room house with no running water in West Virginia, about being so poor and hungry that she scrounged through trash cans for food in high school, or about her alcoholic father stealing the piggy bank that held the kids’ escape money.
One day John Taylor, a colleague at New York magazine who later became her husband, said something about Walls didn’t add up, and when he asked her about her childhood, “I always changed the subject,” she says. When she finally told him, he said, “That would make an incredible book.”
“He thought I was exaggerating,” says Walls, “until he met my mother.”
Walls describes her storytelling parents as “fabulists,” and she was thrilled when she discovered journalism and “that I could earn a salary for telling the truth.” After The Glass Castle, people started telling her their experiences, and she couldn’t go back to the snark of gossip writing. She and Taylor moved to Virginia.
While fiction initially didn’t attract Walls, she plunged into it and her latest book, Hang the Moon, tells the story of a young woman trying to manage—and expand—her father’s bootlegging operations in Prohibition-era Virginia.
“I love transitional periods,” says Walls. The 1920s, with cars, electricity, and women’s suffrage, was such a time, moving isolated rural societies into more contact with the outside world.
“I was fascinated with Prohibition,” she says, “and with a father who was a raging alcoholic, I wanted to live through this time when you couldn’t drink.” But such efforts have unintended consequences, and for moonshiners, what had been a cash crop became illegal.
“Outlaw. Rumrunner. Bootlegger. Blockader,” thinks Hang the Moon’s heroine, Sallie Kincaid. “I don’t forget for one second what we are doing is illegal, but legal and illegal and right and wrong don’t always line up. Ask a former slave. Plenty of them still around. Sometimes the so-called law is nothing but the haves telling the have-nots to stay in their place.”
Walls relied on newspapers for much of her research. “These moonshiners weren’t keeping diaries,” she notes. She learned that Franklin County, Virginia, was dubbed the “wettest county in the world,” with an estimated 99 percent of the population involved in the business, including the sheriff.
She wondered, how was this operation run? “I spent way too long researching, but I didn’t want to put anything in the book that couldn’t happen.”
Walls also wanted to explore what it was like to be a woman in a man’s business, and Elizabeth I and her oft-married father, Henry VIII, provided a template.
“My mother and father fought over Elizabeth,” recalls Walls. “My father adored her and called her a ‘tough-ass broad.’”
Walls was reading a biography of Elizabeth with ”cousins marrying each other, people killing each other,” and thought, “They’re kind of like white trash, aren’t they?”
Transporting the powerful, murderous Tudors to 1920s Virginia had Elizabethan experts thinking it was a fabulous idea—and friends with their eyes glazed over, says Walls. Ultimately she had to make the story her own, and she assures readers they don’t need to know about Elizabeth’s rise to power to read Hang the Moon.
The book is also a story about family, and “how we take on these roles that are assigned to us,” says Walls. “It’s the story of a woman underestimated because of the circumstances of her birth.”
Family continues to remain important to Walls, and she moved her artist/hoarder mother—whom she once observed dumpster diving in New York as Walls rode by in a cab—into a cottage on her farm. “I was able to love my mother more as an adult than as a child, when I expected her to take care of me,” she says.
“I still found her maddening,” says Walls, listing the 18 typewriters and 75 cameras she found cleaning out her mother’s cottage after she died in August 2021. “But she found such joy in life.”
Appraising her parents is no longer a matter of forgiveness for Walls. “It’s acceptance.” She and her siblings had their father, Rex Walls, disinterred and reburied alongside Rose Mary Walls on their daughter’s farm.
And she inherited some of her parents’ optimism. “Life is so dang good,” she says. “It’s so ridiculously beautiful.”
Seattle-based sextet The Head and the Heart conveys a spectrum of emotion on its fifth studio album, Every Shade of Blue. The record’s 16 songs showcase the band’s sonic evolution, infusing catchy pop into its signature indie-folk sound, from the highs of “Tiebreaker” to the anthemic swell of “Virginia (Wind in the Night).” The record’s popularity earned the group multiple performances on national television, including “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” and the championship banner drop for the Seattle Sounders. With Illiterate Light, Landon Elliott, and Deau Eyes.
Tuesday 7/11. $50, 7pm. Ting Pavilion, 700 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. tingpavilion.com
Freedom House Ambulance: The First Responders. Supplied photo.
The Indie Short Film Series returns with a new slate of screenings, including Annette Bank’s, Freedom House Ambulance: The First Responders. Set in 1967, the 30-minute documentary remembers America’s first EMT service, composed solely of Black men and women from Pittsburgh. Banks and other filmmakers will discuss their work during a post-screening panel discussion, then audience members can cast their ballot for the Audience Choice Award.
Saturday 7/8. $20, 7pm. Vinegar Hill Theatre 220 Market St. lighthousestudio.org
Enjoy moonlight tunes and sunset views at Starry Nights, Veritas’ outdoor concert series. Set up your tents and blankets, stock up on local wine, and head to the stage, where the Wil Gravatt Band performs high-energy country and Western honky-tonk. Pack your own picnic, or grab tickets for a seated three-course plated dinner, or choose from the full buffet, prepared by the Veritas chefs.
The sun hangs high over the horizon on a recent summer morning at McIntire Park, and Stephen Delli Priscoli is trying to defy gravity.
A slight pivot of the legs, a subtle manipulation of friction. It’s not hard to imagine Isaac Newton discussing the forces that pull a skater down to his board. Delli Priscoli jumps, twists, and lands the trick, called a tre flip because of the board’s three consecutive rotations.
He grins. “I’ve been working on that all week.”
Joined by a handful of other skateboarders at the Charlottesville Skate Park at 8 in the morning, Delli Priscoli is part of a wave of skaters who, fueled by an amalgamation of factors including the COVID-19 pandemic, construction of the $2 million skate park, and increased visibility from competitions like the Olympics and X-Games, are creating a thriving skateboarding culture in the city.
Driven stir-crazy by school and workplace closures during the pandemic, many people picked up new outdoor activities, including skateboarding. Skateboarders in the city cut across demographic groups: On any given day at the park you’re likely to see teenagers, graying adults, parents and children, and young professionals riding skateboards or BMX bikes across the park’s obstacles.
Charlottesville provides unique incentives for interested skaters, including the skate park. Opened in 2019, the park is a social and economic engine that draws skaters from across the East Coast, says Matt Moffett, manager of the city park. In addition to being a co-owner of Cville Skates, Moffett was a professional skateboarder for almost 20 years.
Construction of the skate park itself isn’t the only way the city is subsidizing the sport. Moffett reckons he is one of a few skate park managers in the country. In addition to funding his position, which falls under the Parks & Recreation Department, the city employs maintenance staff to keep the skate park meticulously clean. Graffiti at this skate park? Nope.
Longtime Charlottesville skateboarding activist Duane Brown began petitioning the city for a skate park in the 1970s. Photo by Andrew Shurtleff.
“It would be in shambles if not for that,” the manager says. “There’s damage in skate parks. That’s just the nature of them.”
The skate park’s vision, and the current skating renaissance, has been decades in the making.
Duane Brown, a Charlottesville skating activist, began petitioning the city for a skate park in the 1970s. As a child, Brown would travel to the skate park in Richmond as often as possible. Eventually, at the behest of a mentor, Brown joined a bid to petition the city for construction of a hybrid private-public skate park.
“My first experience of City Council—I was 14 or something,” Brown says. “[We] got completely shot down.”
It was the first, but not the last, of Brown’s efforts. In the late ’90s, a successful push by skating activist Daria Brezinski secured a space for skateboarders in the unused and dilapidated tennis courts nestled beside the Charlottesville-Albemarle Rescue Squad on McIntire Road.
Downsides of the new location included its proximity to a creek, which would often flood the courts, plus two-inch wide cracks that dotted the ground, Brown says. Undeterred, skateboarders found ways around the haphazard environment.
“We’d find an old handrail somewhere that wasn’t being used and, like, literally hammer it into those cracks and use that as a rail to skate on,” Brown says. “The odd thing was, every now and then I guess, the city would get a little freaked out about the things that we built, and they would come out and take it all away. But they still allowed us to skate there.”
One feature of the old skate park involved a “really big ramp” that Brown built on behalf of Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham, who came to University Hall in 1998 to host a crusade, or fundamentalist preaching event. To appeal to the young crowds at the university, Graham flew in a professional skateboarder-turned-preacher. Graham also asked Brown to build a skateboard ramp. After the event ended, he told Brown he could keep the ramp. Brown called the former Parks & Recreation director, Johnny Ellen, and said he would donate the ramp to the city if it promised not to tow it away. Ellen agreed, but wanted to take a look first.
“I’ll never forget, I saw him walking to it and his face lit up,” Brown says. “He was like really stoked about the whole thing from the very start. So that kind of legitimized the whole endeavor, once we had that big ramp there.”
The tennis court arrangement lasted about eight years before construction on the 250 bypass forced the courts to shut down. With no dedicated place to skate, Brown reinvigorated his activism, forming a volunteer skate park committee, with the goal of keeping in close contact with the city’s Parks & Rec officials. In addition to educating local government leaders about skateboarding, the committee gave input on the design of a potential new park.
Louis Handler’s Cinema Skateshop, located on the Downtown Mall, is a community center for skateboarders. Photo by Eze Amos.
The temporary skate park would move one more time, to the parking lot of the former golf course at McIntire Park, before plans for a permanent skate park moved forward. Years passed as budget and approval processes hit snags. The skating community wavered. “We are losing skaters,” a facilities manager told The Daily Progress in 2016.
With some grant funding from the Tony Hawk Foundation, a final budget was drawn up, and construction for the park moved forward. The two-acre park opened in April 2019, and features two layers of skating areas, including rails, stairs, and deep bowls built by Dreamland Skateparks.
“Those guys are, in my opinion, one of the best skate park builders out there,” Moffett says.
The skate park opening also included the reveal of a bicycle and pedestrian bridge, which had long been in development. The final product connected the skate park to a small parking lot and the Brooks Family YMCA.
But the skate park ran over budget and the city had to scrap plans to include flood lights. Eventually, the skateboarding community raised the money to install the flood lights themselves.
Now, skateboarders can enjoy the park during daylight and twilight hours. The city also promotes the sport by offering private skateboarding lessons and hosting summer skating camps for young children and teens. On a typical summer week, Alex Mikes, a camp volunteer and skate park committee member, says the camps can cater to around 20 to 30 kids on weekday mornings, and provide a relatively affordable way for young skateboarders to enter the sport. Camp participants have a “huge range of abilities,” Mikes says. For campgoers who are too young to mount a board, Mikes gives them water guns and balloons.
Together, the skate park and summer camps have generated skating enthusiasm and spawned a new generation of young Charlottesville skateboarders, many of whom frequented the park during the coronavirus pandemic, when schools pivoted to virtual learning. (The skate park was so busy during 2020 that the city threatened to shut it down to avoid transmission of the virus, but skaters successfully lobbied to keep it open.)
“Even 20 years ago, it’s crazy how much better they are,” Mikes says of the current skateboarding generation. “They’re born skating here. People just keep getting better.”
One up-and-comer, 13-year old Hunter Bougis, started skating when he was 4. On a typical afternoon, he can be spotted in the park bowls, occasionally making videos or commenting on those taken by other skaters. In one video shot, Bougis jumps on a ledge, as a Jay Love song plays in the background.
Another skateboarder, Zephyr Chatowsky, the 12-year-old daughter of Moffett, recalls heading to the park with a group of friends and occasionally tuning into online school directly from the park during the pandemic.
“I started doing it more because there wasn’t much to do,” she says.
Zephyr is among a growing group of girls who entered the sport over the last few years, says Jeneene Chatowsky, Zephyr’s mother and co-owner of Cville Skates.
The local skateboarding scene differs from Florida and Rhode Island, where Chatowsky grew up skateboarding, and where she would sometimes be one of a few female skateboarders in the area.
“Now to see these girls ripping in the Olympics, I think there was a lot of work to lead to this,” Chatowsky says.
Located in McIntire Plaza, Cville Skates grew out of a project that Chatowsky completed for her master’s degree, when she was required to create a brand. The shop originally started as an online platform before securing its first physical location inside a building co-occupied by High Tor Gear Exchange, an outdoor gear and clothing consignment store. Eventually, Cville Skates moved into a different space, behind High Tor.
Jeneene Chatowsky (left) initially opened her skate shop inside Erin James’ High Tor Gear Exchange. Cville Skates has since moved to a different space, behind High Tor in McIntire Plaza. Photo by Tristan Williams.
Chatowsky and Moffett imagine Cville Skates as a community hub for a growing group of skateboarders. Besides selling boards and merchandise, the shop hosts art shows with local high schools and has rotating music shows for underground bands in Charlottesville.
In addition to more girls, Chatowsky sees more parents interested in skating, and credits that to Charlottesville’s family-friendly culture.
“To see more moms out there skating with their kids,” Chatowsky says. “That’s pretty powerful.”
Cinema Skateshop, located on the Downtown Mall, is another community center for skateboarders. The shop’s owner, Louis Handler, has been making skating videos since he was a teenager, and a reel of videos plays on a widescreen TV inside the store. Handler grew up in town and remembers the McIntire tennis courts. He thinks the skate park’s construction was inevitable given the interest from the skateboarding community.
Handler still makes videos, showcasing some skateboarders on Cinema’s Instagram. In them, an eagle-eyed viewer can spot a few Charlottesville landmarks. Along with skateboards, the shop also sells skating apparel and caters to the community’s interest in fashion and art.
Cinema’s clients also include street skaters, who focus on grinds and flat-ground tricks on the built urban environments beyond the skate park. Even though the skate park is open, street skating still draws plenty of skateboarders. Charlottesville’s downtown layout and preference for colonial architecture make the area attractive to street skaters, Handler says.
“The brick feels cool, there are good places to skate aesthetically,” he says.
Brown himself is no stranger to street skating. Before the skate park was built, he used to skate in a drainage ditch by a parking lot near University Hall, and he sought out cement formations around town that provided a good riding surface.
As they rise and decline in popularity, features from skating’s stylistic offshoots—bowl, street, and ramp skating—appear in modern skate parks, according to Brown.
Back at the Charlottesville Skate Park, a group of skateboarders including Delli Priscoli, Mikes, and Bougis stand in a single-file line, gearing up to tackle one of those features. The sky is clear, and after a rest for Gatorade, they push off and fly.
One potential location for new affordable housing is this Wertland and 10th streets site. Stacey Hall is not included within the scope of the project. Image courtesy UVA.
It has been more than three years since the University of Virginia launched an initiative to help build between a thousand and 1,500 affordable housing units. Three sites have been selected, and the next step is to announce the nonprofit developers that will design and build new homes for households below certain income levels.
“We are really close but we’re not quite at the finish line yet,” says Colette Sheehy, UVA’s senior vice president for operations and state government relations.
The project is an outcome of President Jim Ryan’s Council on UVA-Community Partnerships, and will first see development on two sites owned by either UVA or its real estate foundation. These are at 10th and Wertland streets in the heart of Charlottesville, and the Piedmont housing site on Fontaine Avenue.
The North Fork Discovery Park has been identified as the third site, but planning there will not begin until after the UVA Foundation goes through the rezoning process in Albemarle County. That request is on hold.
The Piedmont Housing Alliance has been invited to submit proposals to develop each site. The nonprofits Community Housing Partners and Enterprise Community Partners are also in the running for Piedmont, and AHC Inc. and Preservation of Affordable Housing are hopeful to be the developers of Wertland and 10th.
UVA will only contribute land to the project, leaving financing to the selected developer.
“The partnership terms and the agreements will hold the developer accountable for creating high-quality developments that will be affordable and well maintained,” reads the initiative’s website.
Meanwhile, the university is also hoping to build more residences for second-year students, and has set aside $7 million for planning and design.
Where will the new student housing go? Exact locations haven’t been determined, but the draft of UVA’s next master plan designates six “residential mixed-use redevelopment zones,” including Ivy Gardens, Midmont, and south of Scott Stadium.
Another of these zones is south of the Buckingham Branch railroad that divides Charlottesville. UVA paid $8.73 million in August 2016 for 2.63 acres of land at the intersection of Grove Street and Roosevelt Brown Boulevard.
A matrix in the draft Grounds Framework Plan states that housing is the primary use at that location. Anything built there would not be subject to Charlottesville’s zoning code.
Stacey Hall on West Main is adjacent to the 10th and Wertland site, but is not included in the affordable housing initiative. The draft framework plan designates this as an Academic Mixed-Use Redevelopment zone, with housing listed as a potential primary use.
UVA student Abdallah Maher Aljerjawi is the recipient of a full-ride scholarship, and has advocated for immigrants’ rights and changes to the country’s educational system. Supplied photo.
The Supreme Court shook the academic world June 29 when it ruled that the use of affirmative action at Harvard College and the University of North Carolina was unconstitutional. The court was starkly split along ideological lines in both cases.
Students at the University of Virginia who support race-conscious admissions policies had long anticipated the court’s verdict, and had spoken out ahead of the decision. Abdallah Maher Aljerjawi wrote an open letter to the student body, urging his peers to unite and protect affirmative action.
“Affirmative action is a core aspect of holistic admissions as it cares about the experiences shaping students,” writes Aljerjawi, a third-year nursing student. “Yet, simultaneously, the Supreme Court contradicts it by failing to recognize that nothing could shape an individual more profoundly than their own race.”
In his letter, Aljerjawi reflects on his immigration to the U.S. from Gaza, and the hurdles he’s subsequently faced in his life, education, and career.
“Though I have only been in America for five short years since I immigrated, I can confidently assert that being a minority in America presents a web of intricate and intertwined challenges,” he writes. “Obstacles in every facet of life, including racism, economic hardships, language barriers, and the ever-present fear of racial profiling during routine traffic stops—all of which compound. How can we turn a blind eye to race’s role when it is so rooted in these experiences?”
Fellow third-year Syrell Grier says even though he was anticipating the court would reject affirmative action, it still came as a shock to him and his fellow students.
“You come to expect it with this Supreme Court now,” he says. “It’s sad and heartbreaking.”
Grier, an economics major, Jefferson and Echols Scholar, and founder of the Black Economic Empowerment Society, believes he was likely a beneficiary of affirmative action in his application to UVA.
“I came from a high school in Woodbridge, Virginia, called Gar-Field High School, and it’s majority low-income, so a lot of kids just don’t really branch out for those amazing opportunities like they should,” he says.
Grier notes that, though he did well academically at Gar-Field, having access to the support and opportunities available at UVA helped make him a better student. “If I were to go to an institution that’s not as high ranking, I might not have had those same resources and been able to sprout and develop into the person I am today. That’s the benefit of having affirmative action in place.”
The Supreme Court’s decision has also affected prospective students. Ammar Aljerjawr, a high school junior from Houston, Texas, was eyeing UVA as his top pick for college and visited Grounds in June. He’s worried that, without race-conscious admissions policies in place, the challenges he’s faced as a Palestinian immigrant may not be considered in his application.
Taking down affirmative action “will make my [acceptance] chances lower,” he says, “and will make me work twice as hard or three times as hard to just be the same level as others.”
Although UVA has not made a formal decision on how to handle a post-affirmative action admissions process, President Jim Ryan and Provost Ian Baucom delivered a joint statement in which they declared they will “of course continue to follow the law. We will also continue to do everything within our legal authority to recruit and admit a class of students who are diverse across every possible dimension and to make every student feel welcome and included here at UVA.”
Amyrose Foll is the founder of Virginia Free Farm, which primarily serves marginalized communities by distributing free food, and handing out seeds and plants to anyone who wants to grow for mutual aid. Supplied photo.
Amyrose Foll is fond of quoting the statistic that the human brain can process 1,500 words of speech per minute. And she does her best to pack in each one.
The farmer, food sovereignty activist, lecturer, and founder of Virginia Free Farm has more projects than can fit into the hours of the day—except that she does fit them in, each in its own plot like a garden patch.
The garden plots on her property are numerous, too. There are turkeys, chickens, ducklings, geese, and baby goats in her backyard. Sweet corn, beans, peas, melons, and grains grow in a plot. Some fields are for produce, others for seeds. There’s a food forest that provides pawpaws, persimmons, and maple syrup. There are pigs and goats rotating in behind collards and kale, and a patch with dozens of chickens.
“We call it poultry for the people,” Foll says. People donate the chickens and ducks they can’t keep. Mostly, it’s roosters. “So they bring them here. Everything here has been donated. [Volunteers] will come and help us process like 40, 50 birds at a time. We give away hundreds of roosters because they come every weekend. Sometimes there’ll be like 200 birds in there holding, waiting to get butchered.”
Last year, Virginia Free Farm grew 113,000 pounds of food. “For context, 13,000 pounds is the weight of an African elephant,” Foll says. All of that food was given away.
Foll was a commercial farmer for over a decade until 2017, when she started giving everything away. At the time, most of her income came from her sign and print company, and she could see the food insecurity in her area.
“[Louisa] County has twice the state average of poverty and food insecurity,” Foll says.
The only grocery store in the area didn’t have healthy food options, and the food bank was inaccessible to those who needed it most. Often, she would drive door to door delivering fresh produce, connecting with people on Facebook and Instagram.
As a farmer, Foll says, “I always had extra. If you ask any farmer that does farmers’ markets or even a local grocery store, there’s always extra, and it’s a perishable product. A lot of them will feed it to their animals or compost it. So instead of throwing anything away, I just started giving it away, to the point where my neighbors and friends were like, ‘Jesus Christ, no more eggs and zucchini.’”
Foll, who is Penobscot and Abenaki on her father’s side and grew up near the reservation, identifies with an ethic of sharing wealth rather than hoarding it.
“I feel like food should be a human right,” Foll says. “Instead, organic or local food has become a new mode of conspicuous consumption for the wealthy.”
Halfway through her first year of giving away food, her idea started attracting attention.
“I had just random people coming to me, messaging me asking to help,” she says. “I didn’t ask anybody to do anything, they all came to me and they were like, ‘I love this idea, let’s do it.’”
Farms, community gardens, and collectives in central Virginia, and some farther away, wanted to help grow or distribute free food. Foll found she had a movement on her hands.
“I’ve got an army of badass people that just want to feed people that came to me, and I didn’t even ask them to do it,” she says. “That’s really heartening.”
Virginia Free Farm’s network of farms and gardens includes plots in Rappahannock, Monacan Nation, tribal reservations, Charlottesville, Richmond, Petersburg, Newport News, and Blacksburg. Each one serves a different community. Foll’s original home farm primarily serves the undocumented community and refugee families of Richmond and Charlottesville.
“I’ll grow molokhia, a lot of Turkish eggplants, Syrian and Turkish melons, and okra because we want to be able to provide things for our families that are familiar to them,” Foll says. “You can’t get molokhia anywhere, and they get so happy when they see something that they recognize that’s like home.”
Foll worries about what the refugee women she works with are going to do when their federal assistance runs out and they are left to fend for themselves in an unfamiliar place where they may not speak the language. She remembers how hard it was when she moved to the area as a single mother with no support system and sons to feed. She would have liked to have had help when she needed it, and she knows the difference a stable meal can make to someone who is struggling.
And while Virginia Free Farm prioritizes giving food to marginalized communities that suffer the most from food insecurity, Foll’s primary motivation is that she wants to feed people. “I just like taking care of people,” she says. “It makes me really, really happy.”
Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s latest round of appointments put big donors into power at UVA, VCU, and Virginia Tech. Image courtesy State of Virginia.
Selecting seats
Gov. Glenn Youngkin has appointed four new members to the University of Virginia Board of Visitors. The new BOV appointees—Paul Harris, Paul Manning, John Nau III, and Rachel Sheridan—were announced in the governor’s most recent slate of appointments June 28.
Three of the four individuals are major contributors to the governor’s political efforts.
The largest of the contributors is Nau, who gave a combined $300,000 to Youngkin’s gubernatorial campaign and his Spirit of Virginia PAC. The UVA alum previously served on the BOV from 2011 to 2015, and is currently the chair and CEO of Texas-based Silver Eagle Beverages. Nau is a major Republican contributor who’s donated more than $900,000 to GOP candidates in Virginia since 1999, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.
Both Manning and Sheridan also contributed to Youngkin’s campaign for governor, giving $240,000 and $25,000, respectively. While not a Virginia alum himself, Manning lives in Charlottesville and has frequently worked with the university, most notably on the Paul and Diane Manning Institute of Biotechnology. Sheridan is a double-Hoo, with a bachelor’s and law degree from UVA, and is the vice president of the Virginia Athletics Foundation.
Harris—the lone appointee who has not contributed a substantial amount to Youngkin or his PAC—is the executive vice president and chief sustainability and compliance officer at Huntington Ingalls Industries. Although he now lives in Richmond, Harris was born in Charlottesville and represented Albemarle County in the Virginia House of Delegates as a Republican from 1998 to 2002.
In a statement to VPM News, Youngkin spokesperson Macaulay Porter said, “The governor has appointed experienced and dedicated professionals willing to utilize their professional expertise to deliver on our higher education priorities of affordability, academic excellence, and free speech.”
Coming full circle
After more than two years, the newly renovated Crescent Halls is reopening its doors to residents.
During construction, the 105-unit public housing project was updated extensively to better meet the needs of tenants, who are mostly elderly and people with disabilities. Some of the updates include new HVAC units, community rooms, a nursing clinic, outdoor patios, and free high-speed internet.
Residents advocated for the renovations for years prior to the project breaking ground in 2021, and were heavily involved in the planning process.
While the redevelopment was originally meant to be completed without displacement, a massive water leak forced occupants to move out temporarily. The Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority is now moving tenants back into the building floor by floor, after a longer-than-expected construction period.
Although the reopening of Crescent Halls is a step toward alleviating Charlottesville’s ongoing housing crisis, demand for affordable housing continues to significantly outpace availability.
More than 900 people are currently on the waitlist for housing at Crescent Halls.
Photo by Jack Looney.
In brief
Pipe it down
Fighting back against the fast-tracked approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline, the Southern Environmental Law Center is representing the Wilderness Society in opposition to U.S. Department of Justice and Mountain Valley Pipeline, LLC efforts to toss out a pending challenge to the pipeline. Approval of the MVP was included in the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which suspends the limit on federal debt through January 1, 2025.
Picking fights
On June 29, Charlottesville “sign guy” Mason Pickett was convicted of assault following an incident on the Corner. During the trial, Torrance Malone testified that after a heated verbal exchange with Pickett, the man grabbed her aggressively when she tried to move his sign out of her way. Pickett was sentenced to 20 days in custody, but was released on a $2,500 bond while he appeals the decision.
Airing it out
Charlottesville air quality once again took a turn for the worse last week, thanks to Canadian wildfire smoke. The diminished air quality will likely continue intermittently for the rest of the summer, due to the particularly harsh wildfire season Canada is currently experiencing. According to the CDC, individuals in areas with unhealthy air or pre-existing conditions should watch for symptoms of acute smoke exposure, including: headache, eye irritations, trouble breathing, coughing, wheezing, chest pain, palpitations, and fatigue. To monitor local air quality, visit the Air Quality Index at airnow.gov.
