Is there anything that won’t thrive in Charlottesville? In 24 weeks of looking back through our 20-year archives, the answer seems to be no. Whether it’s local rock or a rock-hard will to reconfigure local buildings and public spaces, people in Charlottesville get things done. Take Jessica Nagle, for instance. Her drive to remake Downtown Charlottesville has been on full display all month as the Festival of the Photograph, of which she is a co-founder, transforms trees and facades into screens and frames for outstanding pictures. But for more than 10 years, she has demonstrated her commitment to rethinking tired locales. Fresh ideas and free access? Sounds like a winning combo made for the pages of C-VILLE. Check back next week for more historical tidbits from this still free and still free-thinking newspaper.
Paging through the archives
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“On December 14, a ribbon-cutting was scheduled…at what had been something of a black-hole on the Downtown Mall, the former operations center for Jefferson National Bank.
“One of the biggest buildings downtown, the 52,000 square-foot beast will soon be home to the explosively growing SNL Securities…for this special renovation, the person calling the shots is…Jessica Nagle.
“‘She’s bringing life,’ says well-known developer Gabe Silverman, ‘to a building that was closed to the street.’”
—Hawes Spencer, December 15, 1998
“Even if their financial database company, SNL Financial, didn’t pump 275 gainfully employed people into the Downtown economy, Jessica and Reid Nagle would deserve commendation simply for the makeover they accomplished a couple of years ago. They took the hulking monolith formerly known as the Spy Building (and officially dubbed the National Ground Intelligence Center) and transformed it into something approximating a sleek, city-centric pillar of white-collar industry.
“It wasn’t an impulse born of aesthetics that prompted them to relocate to 90,000 square feet on Seventh Street from their chunky brick building on Fourth Street. No doubt the deal they brokered with the City of Charlottesville to rent the Spy Building at rates far below market sweetened their interest in remaining Downtown. But what was the bottom line? Their company had outgrown its home. Again.”
—Cathy Harding, June 21, 2005
Getting covered
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October 11, 2005 |
