On Friday, November 8, Architect-Mayor Maurice Cox delivered a jargon-heavy lecture on his vision for the future of Charlottesville–something about creating public spaces through the juxtaposition of built form and whatnot. On Saturday, a green cardboard dragon-car trampled picnickers and excreted pavement on the floor of Nature Gallery.
The two events had nothing to do with each other, except for one thing–each manifested the belief that the future of Charlottesville can be planned democratically. The Mayor’s lecture outlined his plan for a dense, urbanized Charlottesville. The car skit was part of an "Un-Road Show" organized by the local activist group Alternatives to Paving. Both events were short on details and long on faith in the power of ambitious design and public participation.
Cox’s slide show at UVA’s School of Architecture traced the influences of his architectural work to Italy, where he was inspired by the idea that cities "could be planned by form, not by zoning," he said.
Cox’s vision of a dense Charlottesville, where people walk for groceries and ride buses to work, is getting more real as the City Department of Neighborhood Planning and Development Services drafts major changes to the zoning ordinances. When the changes are approved by City Council next year, they will likely spawn major increases in certain City neighborhoods such as Fifth Street Extended, Fifeville, Cherry Avenue and Jefferson Park Avenue. The Mayor’s talk also alluded to City plans to develop the Mall’s east end and make West Main Street more pedestrian-friendly.
Not everyone will be happy about the changes. Just as people threatened to sue or lay down in front of bulldozers during construction of the Downtown Mall in the mid-1970s, the current proposed zoning changes are inciting discontent. "It’s an expected consequence of working in the public realm that people will not always understand the vision," Cox said.
After more than an hour, the Mayor’s will to lecture was outlasting the audience’s desire to listen, and there was almost a collective sigh of relief when Cox–an associate professor of architecture at UVA who’s obviously comfortable at a podium–finally asked for questions.
Perhaps he could have taken some cues from the Un-Road Show, sponsored by Alternatives to Paving, an activist group organized by perennial Council candidate Stratton Salidis and his many family members. The group lured people into Nature with promises of folk music from Devon and Paul Curerri, then slipped politics into the punchbowl.
ATP covered the walls of Nature with various morally charged maps of future road projects (bad) and the Rivanna Trails system (good). There were pictures of innovative public transit trams from Oregon, an explanation–captioned in cursive by Dave Norris, chairman of the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority board–about how auto-centric sprawl makes things tough for poor people. Slogans like "Roads=Sprawl=Oil=War" abounded. The topper was a skit featuring the fictional politician Joe Slick who feeds tax dollars to a cardboard dragon car that excretes roads and big-box developments.
During the festivities, City Councilor Kevin Lynch made sand art while Harrison Rue, director of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission, picked his guitar and sang his ode to smart growth, "The Unjam Song."
Cox’s lecture, and the participation of leaders like Norris, Lynch and Rue in the Un-Road Show, indicate that in Charlottesville, ambitious visions of change are not just the province of freshly politicized University students or disenfranchised youth. Both the Mayor and Salidis, however, say the real trick is getting voters to bestow a public mandate on big ideas.
"If people actually exercised their power to vote, we wouldn’t have these massive road projects," said Salidis at Nature, possibly overstating things. Cox, however, believes public support can make it easy for leaders to resist noisy critics.
"Now is the time to think long-term and not be blinded by the moment," says Cox.– John Borgmeyer
Outside interference
Supes consider if WVIR will get a 250′ tower
Come 2006, if you haven’t gone digital, you could be kissing your UVA football and "Friends" reruns goodbye. That is, if the Federal Communications Commission and Albemarle County Supervisors don’t pull the plug on your cathode ray pleasures first.
On Wednesday, November 13, Harold Wright, vice president of Virginia Broadcasting Corporation and general manager of WVIR-Channel 29, came before the Board of County Supervisors to request they approve the construction on Carter’s Mountain of a 250′ lattice tower mounted with a 50′ antenna for digital broadcast television.
The new obelisk would be the latest addition to the 11 structures known as the "tower farm," which already top the mountain property owned by Crown Orchard. But WVIR isn’t just edgy to update its toys – it has the FCC breathing down its neck to switch from the current analog system to one that is solely digital, which, says Wright, is why WVIR is "desperately under the gun."
Built in 1972, WVIR’s current tower on Carter’s Mountain had earned WVIR the phrase "Virginia’s most powerful station." The proposed new tower, with its ability to distribute 5 million watts into the airwaves, has only one problem – its purpose is to serve digital customers only. That means WVIR would need to keep its existing tower, too, until the year 2006 much to the chagrin of local environmentalists, like Jeff Werner of the Piedmont Environmental Council, who likens the existing towers to "litter."
Still, WVIR has exhausted all of its options. "The old tower with its 4,000-pound antenna simply cannot hold any more weight," says Wright, "and if we are forced to take the old tower down before building the new one, that will mean we will be off the air for two weeks." Not only will lost air time upset local viewers of the NBC affiliate, WVIR could lose its federal license, as well.
In March, 2001, the FCC gave Wright and WVIR one year to plan and build the new digital facility. Having already received one extension until December 1, 2002 for the planning and approval stages, Wright doubts he will get another one. "I encourage you to pass this today," Wright said to the Board, "because it already took me a year to deal with my landlord and others and get the motion this far." Wright furthers that if he is forced into using a temporary, low-power transmitter because no plans were presented to the FCC before his December 1 deadline, the 1,000-watt facility would serve only the City and the surrounding 10-mile radius. The rest of the County will be left to listen to the radio.
The Board moved to defer a decision until its December 4 meeting, and WVIR is running out of time – and options.
"If this new tower is not approved," says Wright, "I will cancel my lease on the old tower and move to another location. Our license depends on it. We will have no other choice." – Kathryn E. Goodson
Precinct politics
With rezoning, UVA neighborhoods could get denser
When the Planning Commission held its regular meeting at City Hall on Tuesday, November 12, they gathered an hour earlier than usual to listen as Jinni Benson, a planning consultant, conducted a question-and-answer session on the City’s new zoning ordinances.
Sixty minutes, however, was hardly enough time to discuss all 73 different sections of the inch-thick draft ordinance. There was just enough time for Benson to explain details of some of the more controversial changes, including the rezoning of some neighborhoods around UVA into higher-density "University Precincts," dodge some of the more difficult questions from the gallery, then duck quickly out of City Council chambers when the hour was up.
The University Precinct designation allows developers to build seven-storey buildings close to the road in certain neighborhoods adjacent to UVA, with a density of up to 64 units per acre. The City will also allow new developments to have retail and commercial space on the ground floors.
The prospect of such urbanization is irritating to residents like Elizabeth Kutchai, vice-president of the Jefferson Park Avenue neighborhood association. She’s also upset by the fact that the City will not require developers to provide off-street parking for the new units. The City believes if students can walk to classes and grocery stores, they won’t bring their cars to Charlottesville, or they’ll park them in garages, easing the burden of `Hoo traffic in City streets. On October 4, UVA Vice-President Leonard Sandridge revoked the right of first-year students to bring cars to school during their spring semester, saying that construction projects like the new basketball arena will reduce parking on Grounds.
"It’s a risk to reduce parking and increase density," Benson admitted.
"It’s baloney," Kutchai said later.
Kutchai, who participated in several community meetings on the proposed ordinance changes, says JPA residents have strongly opposed higher density. But neighborhood feelings, she says, have taken a back seat to City and commercial interests. The University Precinct will keep students inside the City, where they add to Census totals but don’t burden the public school system; the developers who can build the profitable high-density units also support the plan.
During the Q&A, someone in the gallery wondered why the City, and particularly neighborhood residents, had to suffer the housing crunch prompted by UVA’s swelling enrollment. "Why can’t UVA solve its own problems?" he wondered.
Benson passed the question to Jim Tolbert, director of Neighborhood Planning. "Philosophically, you’re right," Tolbert said. "But we could talk about that all night, and there’s only 20 minutes left in the public hearing."– John Borgmeyer
Vision quest
The Paramount expects A-list acts to grace its stage
In order to understand The Paramount Theater Inc.’s vision for the future of The Paramount Theater, everyone must put on their rose-colored glasses. Now we are ready to imagine the transformation of the Downtown Mall theater that has been closed since 1974 – and is currently boarded up by plywood disguised as murals – into Charlottesville’s future leading performance theater. Or is this simply too hard to imagine?
According to Chad Hershner, executive director of The Paramount Theater Inc. – the group of individuals formed in 1992 with the mission of saving The Paramount – the once-bright lights of the theater marquee will soon shine again. And it is his belief that The Paramount will be announcing performances by diva Natalie Cole, singer/songwriters Alison Krauss and Bruce Hornsby, comedians Sinbad and Jeff Foxworthy, and classic old-timers including The Drifters and The Platters (never mind the fact that four of the five original members of The Platters are dead).
The recent surge in the development of the arts and culture scene in Charlottesville is everywhere apparent, exemplified by the popularity of venues for fine and performing arts such as Piedmont Virginia Community College’s V. Earl Dickinson Building and Live Arts, which will be moving into the new City Center for Contemporary Arts on Water Street after construction is completed next fall. Still, the question remains: Is it possible for The Paramount, which has been closed for more than 25 years, to become a viable Downtown center for the arts?
Robert Chapel, chairman of the UVA Department of Drama and producing artistic director of the Heritage Repertory Theatre, is confident it can. The Paramount’s success is guaranteed because of its ability to present shows – concerts, stand-up comedy and movie presentations – that other venues cannot. "The Paramount will serve a different function than the rest of us," says Chapel. "So far in Charlottesville, each of the arts venues has its own identity. People who go to Live Arts also come to Heritage and so on. But each entity has its own personality, and I’m sure that The Paramount will have its own personality, and that’s what attracts people."
Like Hershner, Chapel doesn’t perceive competition between the venues. For one thing, The Paramount will accommodate between 1,000 and 1,100 seats, while the new Live Arts space is intended to seat 395 people in three theater spaces. Chapel believes the various-sized arts centers will complement each other. "We all feel that the more arts in Charlottesville, the better," he says.
Chapel attributes the success and quality of his Heritage productions to his own hard work, yet maintains that hard work is not a foolproof formula for a theater’s success. Chapel believes it is rather The Paramount’s uniqueness that will attract the kind of shows for which Hershner strives.
As The Paramount’s reopening is tentatively scheduled for winter 2003 or spring 2004, the Paramount Theater Inc. is currently raising funds to meet its goal of $14,400,620 and finalizing the floor plans for what it calls "the new Paramount." Having completed the pre-demolition work, Hershner is hoping to begin active construction work and full restoration and renovation by December.
Donations exceeding $300,000 each from the County and the Commonwealth, as well as $500,000 from the City, will certainly help Hershner and associates, if not to resurrect The Platters, then at least to achieve their goal: to restore "the grandeur of a Charlottesville landmark and to create a lively center offering programs to entertain and educate, enchant and enlighten."—Maura O’Brien