Author: erika-howsare

After you’ve been to Disney World, the Tilt-a-Whirl at the county fair seems a little disappointing. Similarly, after the wild ride that was local real estate in 2005, this year’s tamer market would seem to signal that housing prices and sales are seriously slowing. But in its third-quarter market report, the Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors stresses that what looks ho-hum this year is actually still a very strong market, historically speaking.
    In the third quarter of 2006, home sales were down sharply from the same period in 2005—20 percent, to be exact. Sales for the year as a whole are down too, but less dramatically at 11.5 percent. Not only are fewer homes being sold, their median price this quarter ($269,000) was just below last year’s third-quarter figure ($274,900).
    Still, median prices overall are still rising, around 9 percent so far this year. And the report points out that these numbers put 2006 on a comparable track with 2004, the market’s second best year ever. To return to the roller coaster metaphor: In 2004 we were still climbing, in 2005 we reached the apex of the track, and now we’re on the way down.
    We may not be plummeting, though—more like coasting gently downward. CAAR is at pains to call the current market “healthy.” You can tell it’s healthy, the report explains, because the inventory of homes for sale (currently 2,992) is nearly double last year’s (1,681). That’s good news for buyers, and here’s a little more: You’ll have 70 days to consider buying the average home on the market right now, and that’s 14 days more than you had in the third quarter last year.

Rock ‘n’ roll lives

The Sandridge house in Ivy is an unlikely home for rock ‘n’ roll. A yellow Labrador runs laps in the backyard of this cedar-sided ranch home with a mountain view while two girls, just home from elementary school, bounce a kickball back and forth on the patio. The SUV and a full-size pickup parked in the driveway share matching license plates: “HooMomy” and “HooDady.”

   It looks like a suburban utopia, but on a recent Friday afternoon something wicked begins to rumble in the basement. There’s the buzz and crunch of an electric guitar, wet bubbles of bass notes and crashing drum breaks. Underneath the Sandridge living room, The Wave is rolling in.

   The Wave is drummer Avery Sandridge, 13; guitarist Willie Denton-Edmundson, age 13; and bassist Marsh Mahon, who just turned 16. The band kicks off an afternoon practice with a rendition of the Jimi Hendrix tune “Fire,” with an opening hook and heavy drum fills that give Avery a chance to rattle the plates stacked in her parents’ cupboard. The band runs through a couple more songs—an original tune called “Tiger,” composed of lines from William Blake’s poetry, will appear on a record the group is recording at Charlottesville’s Music Resource Center. They also do a sing-along version of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” that’s actually a cover of Guns N’ Roses covering Bob Dylan’s 1973 hit.

   Former G’N’R guitarist Slash is one of Willie’s musical influences; after earning money playing guitar on the Downtown Mall, Willie purchased a Gibson Les Paul, Slash’s axe of choice. “The guitar is pretty old,” Willie says. “It was made in 1998.”

   After the last strains of fuzzed-out guitar fade out, Sherry Sandridge barrels down the stairs, carrying a stopwatch. In the old rock ‘n’ roll story, Mom is supposed to tell you to get a haircut, turn off that godawful noise and clean your room. Not Sherry. She’s got advice about the setlist.

   “That puts you at about 18 minutes, and that’s with all the fiddling around in between songs,” Sherry tells The Wave. The band, which formed two years ago to perform Aerosmith’s operatic anthem “Dream On” at the Henley Middle School talent show, is preparing for their biggest gig yet—a Battle of The Bands hosted by ACAC to promote a teen night at their rec center on Four Seasons Drive on Saturday, September 10. Not only will there be hundreds of teenagers assembled to hear
six teenage bands, but first prize is a check for $1,000.

   “The sound cuts off at 20 minutes,” says Sherry in a voice like a track coach, “so it looks like you can do four songs.”

   Things sure have changed since the late ’60s, when shocked parents called Mick Jagger the devil incarnate; when the Rolling Stones blew through town last week, a lot of parents probably took their kids as a history lesson. Raised by parents who lived the rock generation, The Wave and the rest of Charlottesville’s young teenage bands spend their afternoons kicking out the jams, crammed in among forgotten sports equipment and boxes of outdated wardrobes, and moms and dads don’t seem to be covering their ears or keeping an eye out for Satan. As their kids learn the joys of working together and making a huge racket, they’re also helping to keep their parents’ rock ‘n’ roll dream alive.

 

The basement tapes

Thomas Reid, 14, pulls off his socks and kicks back in the basement bedroom of his friend and bandmate, Cory Fraiman-Lott, 13. The posters wallpapering the room offer a pretty good insight into the music of their band, The Safety Scissors. The Ramones looking like street toughs in the late ’70s perfectly complement The Hives, a contemporary band playing the latest revival of a back-to-basic genre known as “garage rock.” There’s also a giant blow-up of the cover art for Nirvana’s 1991 album Nevermind, a naked infant swimming toward a dollar bill on a fishhook. On a table is a stencil pattern for a Safety Scissors t-shirt that reads, “Run with us.”

   The band members, which also include Edward Rubin, 13, and Ben Hunt, 15, are all students at Buford Middle School, except for Hunt, who attends Charlottesville High School. “When people ask what kind of music you play and you say ‘rock,’ it comes off as, like, we play heavy metal and worship Satan or something,” says Thomas. “I say that we play upbeat music….but we’re not the Osmonds.”

   Like other young teenage bands, much of the Safety Scissors’ set list reflects their parents’ record stash.

   “My dad has tons of CDs and records,” says Cory. “He was always listening to the Ramones and stuff. Yeah, he’s old. One of his favorite bands is The Who. Now, that’s one of my favorite bands.”

   Cory’s father, Eric Lott, is the prototypical cool rock dad. His unkempt blonde hair isn’t quite as long as his son’s wavy purple-dyed mop, but he does play in his own local band, Zag. He taught Cory how to play drums, and he introduced the Safety Scissors to the heavy metal thunder of Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix—on vinyl, no less.

   “They play boomer music,” says Lott, laughing at how 30 years ago any self-respecting rock band wouldn’t be caught dead jamming on tunes their parents like. Now, Eric and Cory bond over The Who and The White Stripes the way other sons and dads might share an affection for the Dallas Cowboys.

   Charlottesville’s teenage rockers aren’t like the Sex Pistols, yearning to tear down everything that came before. Instead, they approach rock like dutiful apprentices eager to study at the feet of masters like Jimmy Page and Keith Moon. “We missed the great rock by a good 20 or 30 years,” says Thomas.

   The Safety Scissors find their link to rock ‘n’ roll history in the basement practice space that adjoins Cory’s room. The basement has been rock’s hallowed ground since the mid-1960s, when bands like The Count 5 inspired the term “garage rock” to describe bands of suburban teenagers playing loud, simple music with youthful abandon. Those kids drew on The Who and the Rolling Stones to create garage rock, which spawned punk, which became independent (or indie) rock, then grunge and The Hives and The White Stripes, on and on, rock without end, amen. The death of rock has been proclaimed many times, but as long as there are teenagers and basements, rock ‘n’ roll isn’t going anywhere.

   Besides the instruments, amplifiers and earplugs stacked against packing boxes and old hockey sticks, the Safety Scissors keep a list of band rules taped to a window in the basement that keep the members in line, including “No fighting, no matter what,” and “No fake quitting. If you quit, you’re out for good.”

   In their basement, the Safety Scissors, like other fledgling bands, learn to work together and find the space to write out their own rock ‘n’ roll stories. “My life is in there,” says Thomas. “The best thing about being in a band is that you have all your random anecdotes about what happened, like the time we made Ben wear a toga.”

   Thomas’ random anecdote, by the way, is the story of how he became the first Safety Scissor to get clocked with a bra, which a classmate brought to throw onstage during a recent show at the Gravity Lounge. “This big red bra hit me right in the face,” he says. “I couldn’t stop laughing.”

 

Like a rolling stone

Once upon a time, rock ‘n’ roll was a moment. Every rock fan has one—a moment when a song pushes all your buttons in just the right way, when the fantasy of rock ‘n’ roll comes true.

   These days, of course, rock is more than just a joyful moment—rock is also a lifestyle industry. The idea that personal identity can be purchased is perhaps most forceful among teenagers, who (in case we don’t remember our own teenage years) spend lots of time and money establishing which groups they belong to, and which ones they don’t.

   On Saturday, September 10, Charlottes-ville’s hipsters-in-training showed up to the Battle of the Bands clad in the now-classic rock uniform—t-shirts and jeans—announcing allegiances to the tribes of Guns N’ Roses, Rush, Sublime, Led Zeppelin, Green Day, the Rolling Stones and Homer Simpson. ACAC also passed out glowing hoops the kids wore on their heads or around their necks.

   Only teenagers were allowed into the gymnasium, where a disco ball hung from the ceiling above a stage flanked by massive speakers. Parents were allowed to watch from a weightroom overlooking the gym. After 49-year-old Peter Doby helped his 14-year-old son, Graham, and his band, The Deltas, load their equipment into the gym, he retreated upstairs with the rest of the parents.

   Like many of the rock ‘n’ roll dads, Doby had his rock moment in the late 1970s. “Me and a buddy were living in Florida,” he says. “We quit our jobs and started jamming, playing in bars. It was a lot of fun.”

   Doby’s rock ‘n’ roll dream may be over now, but he had a great seat for his son’s own moment. Just minutes into The Delta’s set, a fuse blew, the amplifiers lost power, and everything went silent. Acting fast, Graham launched into an epic drum solo while ACAC staff fiddled with the electronics. When the juice was finally restored, the audience screamed as The Deltas launched into a medley of songs mostly written a decade before they were born: “Stairway to Heaven,” “Voodoo Child,” “Day Tripper,” “Keep On Rockin’ In The Free World” and “Back in Black.”

   “That’s what we’ve been trying to tell them,” says Doby, “that Kurt Cobain wasn’t the first guy to write the song that starts out quiet then ramps up.”

   Next up is The Wave. “Are you ready to rock?” asks Willie Denton-Edmundson. The screams confirm the kids are, indeed, ready. Willie has apparently done his homework on Slash. He has perfected
the technique of tossing his blond hair
to and fro to accompany a guitar solo, a move that prompts more high-pitched screaming during their performance of “Tiger.” After the song, the kids crowded in front of the stage all toss their glo-hoops in approval.

   Willie’s mother, Liz Denton, supports his musical talent; still, a mother must be concerned when her son takes cues from a former heroin addict named Slash. “I looked at some of the guitar magazines he reads, with an eye to the values that are in there,” Denton says. “The main value is that you have to work hard. I don’t see any negative influence.”

   The Safety Scissors worked an encore into their 20-minute set. After their performance of the “Scooby-Doo” theme song, Cory says: “Cheer if you want to hear one more.” The cheers came, and the Scissors launched into a cover of the 2002 song “United States of Whatever” by Liam Lynch.

   After the show, reviews are mixed. Alex Peterson liked The Sixth Element, a band that brought their own trailer and played fast-paced punk songs. “They didn’t do the same old songs,” Peterson said. “They had a lot of energy.”

   Graham’s drum solo led Katheryn Scott to favor The Deltas. “They had a good recovery after the power outage,” she said.

   When the judges had their say, though, the $1,000 first-place prize went to The Wave. They seem to be handling the windfall with maturity. Instead of blowing their winnings on a cupcake bender, they’re using the prize money to have their debut album, Dreamers, professionally mixed.

   “We have a song called ‘Dreamers,’” says Willie. “It’s what we want to do when we grow up. Play in a band.”

There’s a cliché in the art world: the reluctant teacher. Many artists take teaching jobs for the steady paycheck and to stay connected to art—not because teaching itself is their calling. And often these teachers are just a little resentful: students, grade books and faculty meetings come to seem like burdens that eat into studio time.

   Then there’s Chica Tenney. Since she came to Charlottesville in 1964, Tenney has been building a reputation as a serious artist, a community leader and a beloved teacher, and her holistic approach to all three roles blends and reinforces each of them. Perhaps it’s for this reason that her retirement from Piedmont Virginia Community College last December has not severed her ties to Charlottesville’s visual art community. “It’s an unusual thing to discover somebody can move so seamlessly between their life and their art,” says Rosamond Casey, president of McGuffey Art Center and a longtime friend of Tenney’s. “I think that more than anybody I know, her art is her life.”

   During the month of October, no fewer than five venues around town will be showing portions of a Tenney retrospective [see sidebar]. The show, curated by Daniel Mason, is collectively and portentously titled “Chica Tenney: Advent.” If the past is any indicator, good things are on the horizon, both for Tenney and the community that surrounds her.

 

Tenney has always been an artist. “I just grew up with that designation, because I was drawing all the time,” she says. A native of Michigan, Tenney took summer art classes as a child and went on to study art at Michigan State University before leaving college when she married her husband, Harry. The pair moved to the New York area and then to Washington, D.C., and all the while Tenney continued making art on her own. Eventually, in 1964, they landed in Charlottesville because of Harry’s business. It was here that Tenney would become a respected artist and teacher.

   As “Advent” makes clear, Tenney’s artistic output reflects a series of shifts in genre and medium. As a young artist, she made abstract prints that coolly vibrate with large areas of color. She also painted onto photographs in serial images meant to echo film. Eventually, though, she returned to the practice of drawing and painting from life that had captivated her as a child.

   These days, much of her work depicts the view from her Buckingham County studio. The vast landscape of work is usually tempered with images of domesticity: a porch railing, a table with a potted orchid, or a shadow subtly revealing a house’s hidden presence. Another series of sepia drawings, called “Messengers,” shows people with the possessions that catalog their lives: Albemarle County artist Beatrix Ost sits with a fan-patterned teapot, her drooping shawl and a carved ebony hand; Harry Tenney holds chopsticks over several pieces of sushi and piles of fruit.

   “Advent” coincides with McGuffey’s 30th anniversary—fitting, in that Tenney was one of the art center’s original founders. In some ways, Tenney, McGuffey and Charlottesville have all grown together. When Tenney came to Charlottesville, she saw it as a good place to raise her son and daughter, but not as an artistic hotbed. “There wasn’t a lot going on,” she recalls, with characteristically gentle humor. “There were three other women artists that I could find.” Tenney continued to make art, though, studying at UVA and Virginia Commonwealth University. And in 1975, when Charlottesville’s potential as an art community began to unfold in the form of McGuffey, Tenney was there.

   “Who would have imagined that it would last 30 years?” she laughs, remembering how McGuffey began as the brainchild of a contingent of artists and UVA architects who saw the City-owned school building on Second Street as a possible art center. Tenney was one of several artists who put in long hours during the center’s first years, hanging shows, designing brochures and silkscreening posters. The effort helped Charlottesville turn a corner.

   “Suddenly people saw Charlottesville as a good place to live for an artist,” Tenney says, calling the current art scene “on a par with anywhere outside of New York.”

   Casey believes McGuffey was a golden egg for the city. “Having this great big building so close to the Down-town Mall was a real invitation to expand the arts in the Downtown area,” she says. “I think Chica is one of a number of people who can be credited for that.”

   Throughout the transformation, Tenney’s role in the community deepened. When Casey moved to Charlottesville in 1981, she re-members, “The name Chica kept coming up everywhere among the people that I met. She was incredibly open, incredibly kind and sensible, and she seemed to know her way around the whole art scene in Charlottesville.”

   Former student Cri Kars-Marshall relates Tenney’s tendency to use her network for the greater good to a conviction that art is part of—not separate from—the world at large. “You have to look at the world around you and bring that into your art,” Kars-Marshall recalls Tenney teaching her and other PVCC students. “As an artist you’re not only an artist; there are other things you’re concerned with.”

 

That sense of responsibility—so different from the model of artist-as-solitary-genius—made Tenney an unusually well-loved figure at PVCC. “You would like to clone her,” Cliff Haury says of Tenney. He’s known her since they both arrived at Piedmont in 1976, and he’s been reading Tenney’s student evaluations since he became dean of humanities, fine arts and social sciences 20 years ago. “[They] simply repeated time and time again what a gifted classroom instructor she was,” he says, going on to praise her other talents in areas from running PVCC’s gallery to choosing bathroom tile for the V. Earl Dickinson Building on campus during its construction.

   Tenney says community college teaching suits her outlook. “I just seem to be drawn to the group effort as well as requiring an enormous amount of solitude and privacy. I like to see what people can do in their own brief time to be effective, what can be changed, what can be growthful for the community.”

   That community supplies a wildly varying range of students, from the fresh-out-of-high-school to the fresh-into-retirement. “The diversity of ages I really find interesting. I’ve seen them be very helpful to each other,” Tenney says.

   Anyone who knows Tenney well would add that Tenney herself made those interactions possible. Haury says that instead of letting beginners be intimidated by older, more accomplished artists, “Chica could take superior students in her class and allow them to be role models for the younger students.” Casey calls Tenney a “great encourager,” saying, “There’s something in her whole spirit that makes the arts seem delicious and accessible and exciting.”

   And serious. Virginia Thompson, who began studying with Tenney in 2002, says Tenney was committed to “the integrity of the subject. It would be so easy to turn it into a hobby course, but she never did that.” Thompson adds that Tenney often urged her students to combine art and activism—“to get involved in a larger way, not just to keep art for ourselves.”

   Tenney herself says she has an interest in “working on the fabric of the community.” To that end, in 1994, she recruited Kars-Marshall and other local artists to teach in a new program called ArtReach, which brought various art media to local at-risk youth. ArtReach was a program of Second Street Gallery, where Tenney served on the board, and operated through the Charlottesville Schools Alternative Education Program, Venable Elementary School and Teensight at FOCUS: A Women’s Resource Center.

   “I think that was a critically important thing for the individuals who took part in it,” says Casey. “It was very relaxed. It directed them into areas they were really getting pleasure from.” Tenney says art making, for these kids, was both healing and stimulating. “My feeling is that the creative process offers hope,” she says. “Externalizing your emotions is healthy, but also learning to deal with questions and come up with ideas.” Though Tenney left and the program was downsized in 2002, it continues to operate at Teensight.

   Tenney’s retirement from PVCC, she says, was mostly for the sake of painting full-time. “I wanted to be able to paint in the spring,” she says simply. Haury says Tenney’s legacy at PVCC will endure on several fronts, including donations to the college from grateful alumni of her classes. Kars-Marshall, who took several courses with Tenney and has since become a ceramic artist, is currently involved with the establishment of the Chica Tenney Fund for the Visual Arts, which will provide scholarships and prizes for PVCC art students. She says, “There is this groundswell of gratitude from students towards her.”

 

In 1982 Tenney was about to begin working on a MFA at VCU, and needed to pull back from the responsibilities of studio membership at McGuffey. At the same time, the Buckingham County farmhouse she and her husband had slowly restored was finally ready to use as a studio. She moved her art practice there, and the farm has been a crucial escape for her ever since. “Buckingham County is really flat and reminds me of Michigan,” she says. “It has the horizon line that I’m interested in in terms of immersion. It’s a place I can really think about light.”

   Much of her work began, at this time, to occur on a large scale: mural-sized paintings, four-foot-wide drawings. Tenney says her interest in immersion, nurtured during her Great Lakes childhood, drives this oversized work. “You can feel that with a horizon line of water, mountains, you can feel it in a city among throngs of people, and I needed that size to convey that feeling.”

   Now, Tenney’s looking forward to being immersed in not only the expansive space of her farm, but also uncluttered stretches of time. “I probably will just revel in being able to read and paint and think about what I’m interested in painting next,” she says. So far, though, her retirement’s been full of preparations for the retrospective, a process she likens to “a combination of being in graduate school and planning a wedding.”

   In readying the 70-plus pieces that make up the five-venue show, Tenney has enjoyed taking a long view of her career. “That was a great benefit of it, to be able to curate and locate the work and think about it and the evolution of the ideas in it.” The show started as a simple retrospective in the PVCC Gallery but quickly expanded when Daniel Mason, the gallery’s interim director, became its curator. “Her retrospective offers an opportunity to pose the question of an artist’s role in the community,” says Mason. “For Chica Tenney that meant starting an art center, serving on boards, doing art education for everyone.” The multivenue approach, he says, is a way of physically and graphically connecting the many art institutions around town on which Tenney’s put her stamp. “Perhaps an exhibition itself can unite a community,” he hopes.

   Mason says the title “Advent” is meant to counter traditional notions of a retrospective show as a swan song. “Chica is on the verge of something in her painting,” he says. Whatever that thing is, Tenney says, it will emerge intuitively. “I’ve always looked at art as a research, as a way of staying connected with what is happening right now and expressing a feeling about that,” she says. “Through making art you’re paying attention—honoring something that may seem ordinary but is extraordinary. That same ability was useful to me in teaching.”

   Like many of Tenney’s former students, Virginia Thompson has gone on to develop a serious art practice of her own. If she’s any indicator, the voice of Chica Tenney will be echoing around Charlottesville for a long time to come, retirement or no. Says Thompson, “I just trust what she said to me so much that it’s like all the time she’s talking over my shoulder. She’s someone I’ll always be able to turn to.”

Once upon a time, Virginia had clear air. From the northern end of Shenandoah National Park, people often say, you could look east and see the Washington Monument, more than 65 miles away.

Today that almost never happens. Average visibility from Shenandoah has decreased from 115 miles to just 25. Shenandoah perennially appears on lists of the 10 most threatened national parks in the country, including one published by the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA). It’s also the second most polluted park in the nation—topped only by Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee—according to Dan Holmes, an air pollution expert with the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC).

Stretching 101 miles from Front Royal to Rockfish Gap, Shenandoah is a narrow swath of woodland that curves along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Throughout the park, a section of the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail parallels Skyline Drive, the north-south parkway that defines the Shenandoah experience for most visitors. Within park borders are more documented plant and animal species—well over 2,000—than in all of Europe.

At its southern end, Shenandoah National Park just happens to share a border with Albemarle County, and while the park contributes tourist dollars to Albemarle, it may be getting something a lot less useful in return: pollution.

 

“The views here at the park are the main reason we have a national park to begin with,” says Christi Gordon, Shenandoah’s air resource program manager. “Scenery is fundamentally important to the purpose and national significance of the park.” With 90 percent of visitors experiencing the park from their cars, it’s safe to assume that long, lovely views (as opposed to wildlife sightings, or the challenge of a mountain hike) are their primary reason for coming. During the warm months and the fall foliage season, pullouts on Skyline Drive are rarely empty of cars, their occupants taking in a view as expansive as that from an airplane window.

Those occupants also spend $45 million each year in the counties that surround the park. Unfortunately for those counties, the number of visitors at Shenandoah has decreased dramatically in the last decade—down from 2 million to 1.5 million. Theories vary as to what could have caused a 25 percent drop in the number of visitors—Quinn McKew, a policy analyst at the NPCA, thinks the park suffered first in the late ’90s, when flush economic times allowed more overseas travel, and again after the September 11 attacks, when tourism decreased nationwide.

Air pollution is probably part of the cause too, McKew says. “The number of Code Red air quality days has been going up over the last couple of years,” she says. On a Code Red day, ozone levels are so high that the public is discouraged from driving unnecessarily or doing strenuous activities like hiking—exactly the wrong weather for a visit to Shenandoah. “While air quality has been improving across the nation, it’s getting worse in the park,” says McKew.

Holmes says that on hot, humid summer days, a phenomenon called climatic inversion traps pollutants (ozone, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide are some major ones) that would normally be carried northeast by the jetstream. So, when visitors stand on Skyline Drive and look east toward Albemarle County, for example, they see little more than a heavy haze, instead of a rolling carpet of trees and farmland. On the worst days, visibility is less than a mile, according to McKew.

Gordon says that the park’s ozone pollution “is still getting worse overall.” As air resource manager, she can do little more than monitor the crisis. Shenandoah’s pollution problems are hardly within her jurisdiction to change.

 

The emissions clouding Shenandoah are, in fact, amazingly well-traveled. Sulfur pollutants, says Gordon, come from industrial burning of fossil fuels, and originate in a variety of places: the Ohio River Valley, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, among others. Coal-burning power plants, constructed before the 1977 Clean Air Act and exempted from its requirements in “grandfather” amendments, are the biggest source of such emissions.

“They basically have a permit to pollute,” Holmes says. “What the grandfather sought to do was say ‘We know these things will be replaced soon. We won’t require them to do pollution control updates.’” Decades later, many of the dirty plants are still around, and still spewing thousands of tons of pollutants a year. Besides obscuring views, their emissions contribute to acid rain and stunt forest growth.

While out-of-state polluters are a big problem for Shenandoah, Virginia itself is hardly blameless. “There’s a significant amount of evidence to show that Virginia is responsible for a lot of its own pollution woes,” Holmes says. For example, according to PEC data, nearly 300,000 tons of sulfur dioxide were generated in Virginia in 2001. Large coal-burning power plants accounted for 73 percent of these emissions. (There are smaller coal-burning plants, too—in fact, one is located right here in Charlottesville, and is owned by the University of Virginia. Built in the 1950s, the plant produced 430 tons of sulfur dioxide in 2001.)

And, since energy deregulation took effect in 1998, the power industry has proposed a raft of new plants in Virginia—30 in all, with 16 approved so far. With 22,183 megawatts already in production in Virginia, and last year’s peak demand at around 19,000 megawatts, Holmes says the new plants are unnecessary. “We have a surplus right now,” he says. “At what point is all this power going to become superfluous and shipped out of state?”

Frank Burbank, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Quality (which approves new plants), says his agency is only responsible for making sure plants will comply with existing guidelines. “It’s not our decision whether or not we need them,” he says. “If someone comes to us saying ‘We want to open a plant and here’s our application,’ we review it as an individual project.”

While new, non-coal-burning plants are usually cleaner than the smoke-belchers of yore, Holmes believes the proposed plants are still a serious threat to Virginia’s air quality and to Shenandoah National Park. “Shenandoah is by far the most threatened national park when it comes to new proposed [pollution] sources near its boundaries,” he says.

Holmes and McKew are both particularly galled by a proposal by Competitive Power Venture, a power company, to build a plant just five miles from the northern entrance to the park. “When you compare it to a coal facility, it’s not bad,” Holmes says. “But it’s equivalent to 5,000 new homes with two cars apiece. It’s another step in the wrong direction.”

McKew agrees and says the NPCA supports a moratorium on new power plants until their potential effects can be better studied. Burbank refused to comment on this idea.

 

Speaking of cars, from Skyline Drive you can see thousands of them—even on a hazy day. Interstates 81 and 64 are major arteries, not to mention 29N. And several busy urban hubs—including Charlottesville—are within a quick drive of the park.

Charlottesville and Albemarle may be adversely affected by industrial pollution blowing in from other places. But they generate plenty of pollution too, mostly through auto emissions. Whereas power plants and other industrial sites are known as “point sources,” since their emissions can be traced to a single point on the map, vehicle exhaust is a “non-point source”—a nebulous haze attributable in part to each person who drives.

Jeff Werner is the PEC’s field officer in Albemarle County and specializes in land-use issues. He says sprawl not only encourages driving, thereby increasing pollution, but chips away at the beauty of the countryside—and that both these effects detract from visitors’ experience in Shenandoah. He imagines disappointed park visitors: “‘It was hazy and gray and all I did was look down on a bunch of swimming pools and houses. Let’s go to West Virginia next year.’”

Smog hanging over Albemarle not only affects the view from the park, but may also physically travel to the park, Gordon says. Scientists had long assumed that prevailing winds always carried pollution eastward, but recent data suggests the movement of air throughout the state is more complex. “Some of these more recent findings defy conventional wisdom when we consider that Eastern Virginia is important to air quality in the park,” she says.

It’s tempting to point to Skyline Drive itself as part of the problem—after all, it’s a road, and one that sees its fair share of gas-guzzling RVs. But Gordon says vehicle emissions within the park are miniscule compared with those from the eight counties surrounding the park.

If anything, emissions on Skyline Drive point out the fact that a pollution crisis is made up of many smaller problems, and that Shenandoah cannot be considered separately from its surroundings. “Pollution is incremental; it all adds up,” Holmes says. “Pollution generated in Albemarle County does affect the park.”

 

And the park, in turn, affects Albemarle County. “For us the Skyline Drive and Shenandoah are a pretty significant part of our product mix,” says Mark Shore. As the director of the Charlottesville Albemarle County Convention & Visitors Bureau, Shore promotes an industry that pours more than $300 million into local coffers annually—and that’s not counting restaurant and hotel taxes. “Scenic beauty ranks high on the list for visitors”—not just in the park, but throughout the region.

So has declining visitation in Shenandoah meant a hit to tourism here at home? Not so far, Shore says. “The great thing about this area is there are a lot of things to see and do,” he says, making Albemarle more resilient than communities banking on only one tourist attraction. “I think for us the significant issue is, is there going to be a general decline in the scenic beauty?” he says. “Scenic assets are fairly unrecoverable. We are supportive of the preservation of open space and scenic vistas.” Meanwhile, his office continues to send visitors to Shenandoah and hope for the best—even on Code Red air quality days.

John Holden is the manager of Blue Ridge Mountain Sports, in the Barracks Road Shopping Center, and a hiking guide in the West Virginia mountains. He says that his store hasn’t seen any significant drop in business because of Shenandoah’s declining visitation. “While air pollution affects visitation to the park, overall feelings about the park are positive,” he says. Still, he believes that pollution in Shenandoah may be preventing some out-of-state visitors from coming in the first place. “Certainly the negative publicity for the park has taken those people and sent them to other places,” he says.

 

In June, the NPCA released a report on Shenandoah, authored by McKew, which can only be described as gloomy. It details serious budget shortfalls that hamper park officials’ ability to manage pollution, as well as staff shortages, outdated management plans and development encroaching on park boundaries. For “stewardship capacity,” the park was given an overall score of 63 out of 100. For stewardship of air quality, the score was just 38. But McKew says park officials are doing the best they can.

“The stewardship capacity rating in the report was never designed to reflect the park’s management of itself, but how well they were given the tools to manage the resources,” she says. While costs went up 31 percent between 1980 and 2000, she says, the park budget increased only 24 percent. “The park’s done a very good job of making ends met, trimming a little thing here, a little thing there,” she says. “Now they’re seriously looking at cutting visitor services,” like ranger and visitors centers.

McKew believes the Federal government is to blame. “Ultimately the responsibility runs right back to Congress,” she says. “It’s Congress that controls the legislation and money and staffing levels in our national park system. They’re ultimately the stewards.”

McKew and others also complain that the Bush administration is trying to weaken pollution controls. Though the administration claims its proposed “Clear Skies” program will reduce emissions and make pollution regulation less convoluted, environmentalists have attacked it for not requiring industry to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The existing Clean Air Act, they say, has bigger teeth.

Notably, the power industry favors the Clear Skies plan. “The current administration seems intent on weakening preservation and protection of natural spaces for the sake of economic short-term gains,” says Holden.

 

From Congress to the State DEQ, all levels of government have some responsibility for fixing air pollution. Though he’s not making excuses for the Feds, Jeff Werner emphasizes local solutions to local problems. He says that looking down from Shenandoah is more than a momentary disappointment. “Why would people in Albemarle and Charlottesville be concerned that some elderly couple from Iowa was not impressed with the view from Skyline Drive?” he asks. “Well, because it indicates that something is happening. Air pollution is telling us something.”

The PEC recently produced a mock newspaper called the “Albemarle County Clarion” that warns of high-density development in Albemarle’s designated Rural Areas—95 percent of the County—which are zoned for up to 110,000 homes. (There were 33,000 in 2000 when the last Census was taken). “Albemarle should either revise its ordinance to be consistent with the intent of its Rural Area policy, or rename the Rural Area the ‘Suburban Area,’” he says.

The PEC’s strategy primarily focuses on frightening middle-class homeowners with visions of scenery ruined by cheap-looking sprawl. But Werner says sprawl menaces more than the view. “It’s the dispersed development that we’re concerned about,” he says. “That does create the need to drive everywhere.”

Tobin Scipione, director of the Charlottesville-based Alliance for Community Choice in Transportation, agrees and says that auto emissions, in turn, are a culprit in some health problems. “School nurses and doctors will tell you that there’s an air quality problem in most places. They’re seeing growing incidents of asthma and upper respiratory problems in children and seniors.”

Interestingly, no one knows just how bad local air pollution is in the first place. Other counties in Virginia have air-quality monitors—small machines that measure the amount of ozone at ground level—and there’s one in Shenandoah National Park. On a recommendation from the Department of Transportation, the Charlottesville-Albemarle Metropolitan Planning Organization has considered siting a monitor in Albemarle County, but so far none exists. Werner says the MPO may be afraid of what the monitor would show. “When you begin to determine you have pollution, a lot of localities are concerned about what the implications are,” he says. “Once you have the data you have to pay for it.”

Specifically, if ozone levels were high enough, Albemarle could be declared a Nonattainment Zone by the DEQ. This would make road-building projects much harder to implement. “You have to actually prove that any transportation project will not exacerbate the current situation, which is very hard to do,” says Holmes. Chances are, a monitor in Albemarle would deliver bad news. “Every single county [in Virginia] that has a monitor is classified Nonattainment,” he says. “That tells you something.” In fact, the American Lung Association has recommended that the entire state of Virginia be declared a Nonattainment Zone.

Scipione says that air pollution data, cheerful or not, is something the County needs. “There’s a very real, very human issue, which is that the people of this community need to know what the quality of the air is,” she says.

 

Ultimately, Shenandoah National Park is just a long, skinny bit of land around which humans have drawn an arbitrary line. As a national park, its pollution problems receive special attention. But as part of a greater ecosystem, it’s a bellwether for its entire region. “You can’t create small zones of ecological diversity and expect them to stay diverse without creating connections to other zones,” says Holmes.

McKew says there is a need to update the basic philosophy behind national park protection. “The truth about the national parks is they were created with an eye toward finding the interesting places and protecting them because they were seen as good tourism destinations,” she says. “There’s a movement in conservation circles to expand the thinking so these aren’t islands, they’re considered part of the larger ecology.”

For a small Southern town, Charlottesville’s looking mighty international these days. Locals can taste chicken souvlaki, examine a Panamanian carving, sip Indian tea, and watch a weaver repair a Persian rug—all within a couple of blocks of the east end of the Downtown Mall. In fact, the area is growing into an enclave of internationally themed businesses that arguably lend it a different atmosphere than the Mall’s western arm. As Scottie B. (born Scott Williams), who is a partner in Garden of Sheba, an African diaspora-themed restaurant soon to open, puts it, “Once you pass the fountain there’s a whole other culture going on.”

Take, for instance, the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, universally called “the teahouse” by devotees. Whereas on the Mall’s west end, the favored places to sit and sip are coffee-centric, the teahouse flavors the east end with rooibos tea and plates of pistachios and dried mango. Ed Luce says that when he and Matteus Frankovich opened the teahouse on the second floor of 414 E. Main St. last fall, the east end of the Mall seemed like the best fit. “It made more sense to us to put the teahouse here,” he says, “because it’s tranquil, it’s serene, and that would get lost and consumed on the west end.”

As it evolves and new businesses settle in, the feeling on the east end can escape definition. Geographically, the cultures represented there are far-flung, from the Middle East (the falafel bar at Bashir’s Taverna, for example) to the Caribbean (jerked fish at the Garden of Sheba). Trying to corral these places under labels like “Third World” or “non-Western” misses the mark. There are too many cultural and economic factors involved to fit one tag.

Yet there’s no mistaking the evidence on a busy summer night. Walk past the Second Street crossover on the Mall’s west end, and likely you’ll notice movie marquees, the smell of pizza and menus filled with Euro-continental or American cuisine. Meanwhile, up on the east end the trees seem a bit shadier, the crowds a bit mellower. Storefronts glow softly with the patterns of tribal textiles. “There is something exotic, something ethnic on this side of the mall,” says restaurateur Bashir Khelafa of the eponymous Taverna.

 

Luce likes to call the Mall’s east end “the front of the bus,” an apt description, it turns out, as the City undertakes a major development project in the area of the Amphitheater, namely, a $6.5 million bus transfer center. If Luce is right regarding the private enterprise on the east end, then that “bus” is headed for a diverse and sophisticated future, and a group of passionate businesspeople are at the wheel. Both Saul Barodofsky, owner of Sun Bow Trading Company, and Frankovich at the teahouse use the phrase “missionary work” to stress the educational aspects of their businesses.

“It’s our passion,” says Frankovich of the surprisingly large body of knowledge surrounding tea. “The depth of tea is here if you scratch the surface. If you come in a peaceful time we can talk to you about brewing techniques and so on.”

Frankovich and Luce say travel is what inspired them to open Twisted Branch. Frankovich recalls “billowing, tapestry-filled restaurants” on Egypt’s Sinai peninsula with “palm tree dividers and low cushion seating. You can spend the whole day there swimming off the back porch drinking tea.

“I wanted to share that with our people here,” he says, “because it just created such a pleasant state of being in me to while away the day in these types of atmospheres.”

Barodofsky, too, built a business out of his experiences abroad. “I set up the business based on a certain number of criteria of what I wanted from a business. Travel was right on that list,” he says. Since the 1960s he’s made nearly 100 trips to the Middle East—Turkey, Pakistan and Chinese Turkistan, among many other countries—to buy carpets, kilims and other textiles.

He sees his shop on the corner of E. Main and Fourth streets as an educational venue as much as a business. “Sun Bow is an art project to introduce tribal rugs and women’s textile art,” he declares.

Indeed, Barodofsky lectures at Washington D.C.’s Textile Museum and at rug conferences around the country. Perhaps more importantly, in the shop itself, Barodofsky and his employees offer cups of tea and the knowledge gathered during years of travel—making Sun Bow truly a place to learn (buying is, of course, welcome).

“I was having my car serviced and I heard the mechanic having this discussion with someone about the value of tribal rugs versus non-tribal rugs,” Barodofsky recalls. “I realized he had come through our world and was giving it out with a lot of enthusiasm.”

Sun Bow and Mead’s Oriental Rugs have been exposing Charlottesvillians to Middle Eastern and Asian artifacts for decades—Mead’s since 1974 and Sun Bow since 1977. As Americans generally have become more knowledgeable about world cultures and immigration has increased, Charlottesville has seen its international offerings multiply. “Our level of diversification is beginning to accelerate a little bit,” says Joe Mead, who owns Mead’s Oriental Rugs. One need only try to get a seat in the teahouse on a Friday night to recognize the widespread appeal of Eastern cultures for Western consumers.

And the growth continues. The mall’s east end is about to gain another pair of cultural missionaries when Scottie B. and Abba Watts open the Garden of Sheba later this summer. The two say their place at 609 E. Market St. will serve up entertainment and food—vegetarian and fish dishes from Africa and the African diaspora—but, just as importantly, awareness. “What we find really special about the space is that you can throw a stone to the old slave block,” says Scottie, referring to a site on the southeast corner of Court Square, which bears a small slate marker. “We’ve been chosen to help people wake up and realize there was a slave market right there.”

Scottie—who has been studying African music since 1990—and Watts want to present African and African-roots cultures in a family setting. The space will be smoke-free and the entertainment will include kid-friendly events like storytellings. “We’re just trying to promote as many positive things in the culture as possible,” says Scottie. “Africa is a very rich, wealthy, healthy continent.”

The idea for the restaurant grew from the pair’s experience in producing local music and cultural events (recently putting together a month of concerts and dances in the storefront on Water Street now occupied by make-up boutique Blush), as well as from travel in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. The first time he visited Africa, Scottie says, was a revelation: “I began to realize that Africa is bigger than what I was shown as a kid—Tarzan, people starving in the street, people living like savages. I cried for a whole day because I had been misled.”

Watts, too, says travel has changed his perspective. “It’s one thing to be poor in a rich country,” he says. “It’s something totally different to be poor in a poor country.” During his studies of Caribbean cooking in Jamaica and other Caribbean countries, he remembers, “We would have to go and harvest food before we ate it—climbing trees for breadfruit, digging up casava. We don’t take any of this for granted.”

 

The question of authenticity can’t be avoided when non-Western cultures—particularly those with poor economies—are being sold to American consumers. “I think it’s important to hear about a culture from someone from that culture,” says Watts. “Not only just living there” is vital, he adds, “but having the experience of the world looking at you as if you’re from that culture.” When cultural transactions meld with commerce, the attitudes of clients and business owners alike can cheapen or enrich the exchange.

For example, since 1997, Bashir and Katherine Khelafa, whose backgrounds are Algerian and Hungarian, respectively, have served a wide variety of cuisines—Greek, Italian, Moroccan, Tunisian, Algerian, Spanish—under the general heading “Mediterranean.” In their new location next to the post office (previously they operated from the ground floor space below what is now the tea house), they’d like to expand even further, especially into Hungarian dishes. But they say it’s important to stick with cultures into which they have genuine insight. Says Bashir, “We’ll never go beyond the ones we know.”

Across the street, Frankovich and Luce say they struggle with the responsibility of presenting cultures—Japanese, Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern—they weren’t born into. Asked if there’s any danger of exploitation in their venture, Luce says “There definitely is. It’s a fine line that we walk in here, probably.”

Frankovich agrees. “This place does turn into a cool nightclub scene at times,” he says. “I have struggles with the missionary work as opposed to just ‘Here’s your tea.’”

 

Like many business owners on the Mall’s east end, Simon Harvey has traveled extensively, if in markedly posher conditions. He says the idea for Read & Co., the shop just a few doors down from the Tea Bazaar that he and his wife Lisa run, was born of his experience captaining yachts for wealthy employers. “I would help not just on the yacht, but with their land-based houses,” he says. “I would go out and buy artifacts, arts, décor, to help them furnish their houses and their yachts. I was buying into the tens of thousands of dollars.” Having kept up his worldwide contacts in the art and antiquities markets after coming ashore, he says it was a logical move to open an import business.

The resulting shop, opened in 2001, has a definite air of colonial times gone by. Inlaid wooden furniture from India sits next to Australian aboriginal didgeridoos and British rugby balls. Harvey takes a rosy view of the multicultural pastiche he’s created. “We’ve had a lot of customers say ‘When we come in here it’s like stepping into another world,’” he says. “There are so many cultures put together in here. Everyone likes to be romantic.”

Holding a small wooden carving made by residents of the Panamanian rainforest, he says, “They’re very primitive and it’s un-commercial. A kid could probably do it. But they’ve got the soul in it.”

Harvey estimates his customer base is 70 percent tourists, but also “professional people: doctors, lawyers. They’re the people that travel, and read and watch TV about the stuff they have.”

Mead finds a similar demographic among the clientele at his Fourth Street shop: “very refined, artistic individuals who’ve already been through the first and second stages of fine object appreciation.” Business owners may be loathe to use the word “wealthy,” but the fact is that much of the merchandise offered on the Mall’s east end is not aimed at a budget-minded crowd. For example, a relatively elaborate Panamanian carving at Read & Co. is priced at $800, and textiles at Sun Bow can cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

By contrast, the restaurants are affordable outposts in a Downtown market that is steadily moving to higher tiers. Dinner at Bashir’s Taverna could come in at under $10 per person, for instance, and the teahouse experience has rapidly become a community center for young artsy types as well as families with children. “In other cultures, the teahouse is historically a meeting place,” says Frankovich. “It’s not niche-based, it’s not clique-based. It’s where everyone from grandmas to babies come to hang out.”

Garden of Sheba promises to be another democratic venue. Watts says, based on the response to cultural events he and Scottie have produced in the past, he believes there’s a need in Charlottesville for the kind of meeting space the restaurant will provide. “It’s kind of like an underground movement,” he says. “There are people out there that want to see it go on.”

 

If the Mall’s east end hosts a higher concentration of non-European, internationally themed businesses, many people see it as pure coincidence. Katherine Khelafa says the neighborhood resists umbrella categorizations like “Eastern” or “Third World,” pointing out nearby restaurants like C&O, a French-Southern standard-bearer, and The Nook, Downtown’s answer to the lunch counter. Her husband worries that “Third World” has inaccurate, negative connotations. Simon Harvey points out that Willow 88, which sells Chinese furniture and Asian and aboriginal art, is situated on the Mall’s west end. All of the business owners interviewed for this article cited practical considerations—rent, storage, wall space—as the key factors in choosing their locations, rather than larger Downtown trends.

Yet some also say that, by luck or design, the area has a more sophisticated, quieter feel then the other end of the Mall. “It seems to have a little bit more of a soul,” says Mead. “I’m next door to Sandy McAdams, the sage of Charlottesville [and owner of Daedalus Books]. I share the same building with a Chinese restaurant [Peking].”

Gregg Davis, a Charlottesville police officer who patrols Downtown on a bicycle, says the majority of situations needing his attention occur on the west end. “It’s just slow on the [the east] end,” he says. “It seems like if you want to be seen you’ll be on the west end.”

However, newer, more youthful factors are beginning to change the face of the east end. Nearby Belmont is fast becoming a hotspot of gentrification and is a quick walk away from the teahouse and other east end attractions.

Last fall, the Khelafas moved Bashir’s to a new location in a City-owned building at the mall’s extreme eastern end. Most business owners agree that when the building emerged from renovation and new shops moved in, the east end was given new vitality.

Carol Troxell, owner of New Dominion Book Shop, prefers to think of the mall as a whole, rather than comparing one half to another. Still, she agrees that the new shops have “added new interest in that block, definitely, which is good.”

And most also happily anticipate further City-fostered expansion of the area. The Khelafas are staking something on that idea. With the completion of the transfer station, Bashir says, the Mall’s center of gravity—and its heaviest traffic—may shift eastward.

“It will be much more dynamic, much more interesting,” he says. “This is the future of the Mall.”

They say that in Charlottesville, the guy who serves your coffee probably has a PhD. Increasingly, the coffeeshop where he works likely serves another function too: art gallery. In the past several years, all over town, new art spaces have proliferated—in restaurants and boutiques, and as cooperatives and nonprofits. The town’s concentration of visual art venues is earning it a national reputation, boosting tourism and attracting artists. “Charlottesville is definitely getting to be known,” says Leah Stoddard, director of Second Street Gallery. “Word of mouth travels fast.”

Examining the burgeoning local arts scene exposes some interesting issues, from the relationship between art and commerce to the quality of tourist-friendly art. But most local art experts agree that the more, the merrier: The variety of spaces benefits the art viewer, the artist and even the art collector. In truth, the wide range of venues—from commercial to non-profits to hybrids—helps showcase why each is a necessary component of a thriving arts scene. And as local artists attest, that’s what Charlottesville’s becoming.

 

Origin of a species

Ten years ago, art was mostly relegated to museums or more traditional art spaces. Now it’s hard to order a double Americano without catching a glimpse of a landscape, still-life or experimental photo work. More and more restaurants, bookstores, jewelers, churches and even office buildings decorate their walls with rotating art shows. Take, for instance, Downtown Mall coffee spot Mudhouse. Currently customers can see the works of abstract painter Delmon Brown Hall IV while sipping their java. Before the mid-‘90s, such a show would have likely been relegated to a handful of local galleries or one of the few forward-thinking bistros supporting local art.

Sarah Sargent was the director of Second Street Gallery from 1993 to 1999. “When I started at Second Street,” she remembers, “there was Second Street and McGuffey, and [now-defunct] Gallery X, and those were really the only three that were around.” She adds that the current trend of showing art in restaurants and stores was, at the time, almost unheard-of.

A symbiotic relationship between art and Downtown business has fueled the growth of each, say many observers. Whereas Sargent likens the Downtown Mall of 10 years ago to “a wasteland,” there are currently at least 20 separate places to see fine art Downtown, and more than 30 in Charlottesville overall. “It’s impossible now to get a restaurant table on a Friday when there’s an opening,” says Sargent. “I really feel like the arts were responsible for the development in the Downtown area.”

And in return, increased tourism—Downtown or otherwise—has been a contributor to the explosive growth of the gallery world. “We’re getting on the radar now as a regional art center,” says Jill Hartz, director of the UVA Art Museum, adding that Monticello-driven tourism can complement Charlottesville’s standing as an arts destination.

And certainly “in-town” tourism by locals hasn’t hurt the art scene: The popular First Fridays gallery walks have given a celebratory atmosphere to the local art world for at least one night per month. The well-marketed idea of the “Downtown arts district”—since, to be sure, that’s where most art venues are located—might turn out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I think that could only benefit [artists],” says Russell Richards, an artist and member of the McGuffey Art Center.

 

Everything in its right place

The expansion of art into the commercial realm has sparked some issues regarding culture and commerce. When Lynelle Lawrence, Mudhouse co-owner, talks about the only art show she’s ever had to remove from her Downtown coffeeshop, the story reveals a tension between high culture and the economic engines that underlie it. The show included a sizable pastel drawing of a nude man, surrounded by severed heads on platters.

It was not a hit. After the piece went up on a Monday, says Lawrence, “My phone was ringing literally nonstop. People said they wouldn’t come here, wouldn’t bring their children.” By Friday, the piece (and one other, a female nude with a breastfeeding baby) had been pulled. Lawrence says she herself didn’t mind the works, but “it was not an appropriate space to hang them.”

Lawrence maintains that art is an integral part of Mudhouse’s mission: “to create a space for free expression.” She also says that the severed-head snafu did not make her more skittish about showing provocative art. Yet, as a businessperson, she was forced to choose between art on the walls and customers at the counter.

That’s a consideration most non-commercial spaces—especially those solely devoted to art—generally don’t have to worry about. They can be bolder about what they show, and view controversy as an opportunity rather than a liability. Leah Stoddard, director of Second Street Gallery, recalls that several pieces by Todd Murphy (which dealt with Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with slave Sally Hemings) sparked strong reaction in 2000. The gallery responded by organizing discussions. “I felt like we were being responsible—not ignoring the controversy, not taking advantage of it, but encouraging the audience to have their say,” she says.

Even if a business is explicitly art-centered, it must strike a difficult balance between aesthetic and commercial considerations. Lyn Bolen Rushton, owner of Les Yeux du Monde (now sharing prime Water Street digs with E.G. Designs in Dot 2 Dot), says that her career as a Charlottesville art dealer has taught her about her market’s limitations. Back in the mid-‘90s when she was selling art out of her home, she says, “Some of the most experimental things that I thought were really interesting just didn’t click with the buying audience. People came, but it was hard for me to break even.”

Rushton is now betting on a new solution to the small-town problem of limited art markets: the “hybrid”—mixed-use art and retail space. Dot 2 Dot is now well-regarded by many observers for its mixed stable of local and nationally known artists, supplemented with prints and smaller works by contemporary masters like Jean-Michel Basquiat. Rushton describes her artists as “already-established artists who have a unique place in the art world, and that are somehow going to sell.”

Rushton then hastens to add, “I’m not going to sell out, ever,” and local art teachers and professionals tend to corroborate that statement, using words like “adventurous” and “serious” to describe the art Rushton shows. The vintage furniture and fine papers that make up the E.G. Designs part of the business, Rushton says, contribute to the cozy atmosphere rather than tarnishing the purity of the aesthetic.

There is a wider range of art to be seen in Charlottesville’s retail market than one might expect—even if you have to peer over stacks of merchandise to spot it. Willow 88, also on Water Street, deals in contemporary Chinese, Vietnamese and aboriginal Australian art, paired with antique Chinese furniture. Susan Flury, co-owner, says this is an art niche unique in Charlottesville (commercially, that is—the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection covers part of the same territory). GOvisual concentrates on photography exhibits. Some businesses, like Main Street Market and Les Yeux du Monde’s Starr Hill location, provide a platform for student work.

And, though some may fret about the dilution of the market—or about restaurants that should do their own interior decorating—it’s clear that local artists would have far fewer opportunities to show their work were it not for hybrid spaces. Lawrence says that, from 125 artists who apply yearly to show at Mudhouse, the 12 she chooses are overwhelmingly local. “We love to show first-time art, people that have been turned down elsewhere,” she says, adding that work usually sells briskly in the busy café. At Hamiltons’, City Centro, and Angelo, among others, Charlottesville artists have opportunities for exposure and, with luck, sales.

 

Feed your head

One group certainly benefiting from the explosion of art spaces is the artists themselves, many of whom delight in the increased opportunities for exposure. But some watchers lament a lack of experimentation in the majority of art shown in Charlottesville.

Rich Davis is a fifth-year studio art major at UVA who describes his own work as “not very traditional. I don’t know if a lot of people even call it art.” His dada-influenced projects include modifying electronic gear and making masks out of giant stuffed animals. Unsurprisingly, Davis finds much of the art in Charlottesville galleries “really conservative, really tried and true.”

Still, he says, “The gallery scene is definitely good for such a small town.” And he singles out the Downtown Gallery at Nature as the one venue he makes a point of visiting, since it sometimes offers video and installation pieces—much rarer in Charlottesville than painting and other traditional media. Piedmont Virginia Community College art professor Chica Tenny says her students, too, favor Nature, and that this is the natural order of things in a vibrant art scene. “It is important for fresh things to start,” she says. “There’s always someone thinking things need to change, and that’s the great thing about artists.”

The dissatisfaction younger, more experimental artists feel sometimes translates into action—a new space, or a temporary takeover of a non-art space, like the use of the Frank Ix Building on Monticello Avenue for the Fringe Festival last October. And having a critical mass of galleries—even conservative or commercial ones—may actually be a crucial factor in allowing experiments to blossom.

For one thing, art draws artists. “Artists are now making a decision to come to Charlottesville and make a home for themselves because of this environment,” says Stoddard.

Artists, in turn, are apt to band together, identify gaps, and fill them. McGuffey Art Center is a Charlottesville institution and the most venerable example of an artists’ cooperative in town, having provided studio and exhibition space since 1975. Richards, who’s had a McGuffey studio for three years, calls it “a fantastic resource” for its high visibility and tight community. Artists get 100 percent of sales from McGuffey walls, whereas commercial galleries, of course, take a cut.

Membership at McGuffey is seen as a mark of accomplishment, and many members are full-time artists. But less-established artists have outlets too. Members of BozART, a cooperative on the Downtown Mall, generally have day jobs, says member Karen Whitehill. “People who really expect to sell a lot are misled. But people who just want to feel like on Friday nights people will come out, be interested and give you some feedback,” she says, find BozART valuable.

Bullseye, meanwhile, is a newer and proudly informal entry in the co-op category. Director Kimberly Larkin says Bullseye’s studio spaces are its most important component. Though she and former partner Stacey Evans ran it as a regular gallery for a year, these days it’s a “vanity gallery” for the seven artists who share the rent.

Without a regular exhibition schedule and conventional hours, says member Monty Montgomery, the space—located under the Jefferson Theater—becomes a dynamic center for exchange and conversation. “I put the sign out at 10 at night” while working, he says. “People come down. Every night, I meet awesome people that can’t come down here during the day.” Bullseye also has a loose relationship with Nature, sometimes organizing joint exhibitions, and Larkin says Bullseye is flexible enough to accommodate possibilities like film screenings and puppet shows.

 

Tried and true

A true art scene isn’t just an art mall. Traditionally, galleries have served an equally significant purpose as places for artists (and especially students) to learn and be inspired. It is in that area—and in the ability to show more interesting, non-commercial works—that the established non-profit galleries differentiate themselves from upstart boutiques in the gallery world.

While strapped-for-cash artists might feel comfortable just standing and looking in upscale shops—Flury says that Willow 88 often plays host to artists asking about Asian and aboriginal techniques—traditional nonprofit art spaces are still better equipped to educate than their commercial counterparts. Stoddard says that at Second Street, “My whole shifting of the mission was away from the artist’s career to the audience. I’ve tried to make it more of a mini-museum.” That means more informative text to go along with exhibitions, as well as outreach efforts like partnering with local schools and universities for visiting-artist workshops. “I try to share that visitor with as many people as possible,” she says.

Ultimately, Stoddard and Hartz can show work even if they know no one will buy it. Both name installation art—which can be room-sized—as an important part of the contemporary scene that is difficult or impossible to sell, but has been exhibited at Second Street and the museum. Hartz points out too that, “Most of the galleries show contemporary art; there are not a lot that show other time periods and non-Western art. We can have the kind of shows [like the current Shunzhi porcelain show] that no other places in this community can do because of the budgets involved and the staff needed.”

Artists and art teachers agree that these older, non-commercial spaces are still the best for learning. William Bennett, a UVA studio professor, says “I think Second Street Gallery is a really good gallery. I think our students are missing out if they miss out on things that happen there.” Richards, who lived in Washington, D.C., before moving to Charlottesville, says that while he sees lots of peers’ work he respects at McGuffey, for him the UVA Museum is the only local substitute for the capital’s barrage of top-flight museum exhibits. In D.C., he says, “I’d go down to the museums practically every weekend. I really miss that.”

Small galleries at UVA and PVCC provide still more non-commercial—and therefore more adventurous—wall space. In UVA’s Fayerweather Gallery, says Bennett, “We pretty much do exactly what we want. We don’t feel constrained at all.”

 

Cultural cohabitation

Even with the growing hybrid and commercial art spaces, the three area art anchors—Second Street, the UVA Museum and McGuffey—will always have a place. But they are learning how to adapt to a much more crowded house. Second Street’s Stoddard says that publicity has become more pressing in the new climate. “I must admit that I got pretty passive about getting publicity out. I just assumed we would get coverage for exhibitions,” she says. “At first I was sort of like, ‘Hey!’ But then I adjusted my thinking and thought, ‘What am I doing? This is fabulous.’”

Hartz echoes her excitement about the growth of the art scene. “Galleries have become more professional,” she says. “It just adds a lot more vitality to this community. We’d like to be supportive.” Hartz adds that the new spaces create opportunities for city-wide themed shows like 2000’s “Hindsight/Fore-site,” which examined Charlottesville’s Jeffersonian legacy in 20 sites around town and was curated by Rushton.

That kind of synergy between educational, commercial and even government forces (the City helped finance the 1975 renovation of McGuffey School, for example) emerges as the most positive measure of Charlottesville’s arts scene. Established, experimental, academic and for-profit spaces may have different missions, but they don’t necessarily feel competitive.

The emerging “arts corridor” on Water Street (comprising Dot 2 Dot, Nature and the under-construction City Center for Contemporary Arts), says Stoddard, is a good example. “It’s a really thrilling time. There are things we haven’t even thought about that are going to happen with cross-pollination,” she says.

And, just as students need galleries to learn from, galleries need students, who represent future suppliers of their product. Chica Tenny of PVCC says that the school’s art department nurtures connections between students and the local marketplace. “I do think our faculty make an effort to connect them up with places to show,” she says. Whitehill, a former student, says this is precisely how she got involved at BozART. PVCC connects students to the Richmond art world too, since many faculty earned master’s degrees at Virginia Commonwealth University and have connections there.

UVA, says Bennett, is more insular, with students sticking close to grounds. “We’re working on that,” he says. “My colleagues and I would like our students to be a greater part of the arts community in Charlottesville.” The self-containment of UVA compared to PVCC may be unavoidable given that most UVA students grew up elsewhere and move on again after graduation. In fact, says Bennett, “I really encourage our students to leave town. They need a broader view of the world. I also encourage them to come back” after working or getting graduate degrees. Some students, he says, have indeed returned to Charlottesville to find their niches in the art community.

Ultimately, artists themselves provide an important barometer of the health of the art scene. Richards says Charlottesville has been a good environment for him since moving from D.C. three and a half years ago. He was already a full-time artist there and, he says, a big city is probably still an easier place to start an art career. But, he says, “I feel extremely fortunate to have this studio here. McGuffey is pretty unique to Charlottesville.”

Perhaps most tellingly, Richards feels that in Charlottesville he can both put food on the table and remain true to his vision, which sometimes includes explicit sexual content. “I think people are a little bit more enlightened around here than one might think,” he says. “I do have people come in here sometimes and look at my work and kind of turn pale and walk back out the door. But I’ve never felt censored.”

There’s a truck with a trailer driving in the deep end!” says Pat Healy, looking out from a window in the clubhouse at Fry’s Spring Beach Club at the crater where a 100-meter swimming pool used to be. On this bright February day, it looks more like a giant, muddy hole, shored up with remnants of blue concrete walls and crawling with hard-hatted workers and heavy machinery.

But Healy is beaming. By Memorial Day, the view from this window should be very different: a brand-new pool, and a solid future for both the club and its surrounding Jefferson Park Avenue neighborhood.

Fry’s Spring is an exception to many Charlottesville rules. In an era of development that voraciously devours green space to put up apartment buildings and parking garages, Fry’s Spring is a woodsy oasis that doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. In a town where many historical buildings now house upscale boutiques and lofts, Fry’s Spring is an uncluttered portal to the past. And, in a neighborhood suffused with an ever-shifting—and soon-to-burgeon—student population, Fry’s Spring is a family place where long-term relationships are the norm.

All this was at stake when the members of Fry’s Spring Beach Club voted last year to completely rebuild the 82-year-old swimming pool. Martin Chapman, president of the club’s board of directors, says the $765,000 project was clearly necessary. “Nobody’s ever stood up and said ‘We shouldn’t do this,’” he says. “The only question was ‘How can we do this?’”

This year marks the biggest watershed in club history since the pool was built in 1921. Yet it’s certainly not the first time these 10 acres near the intersection of JPA Extended and Old Lynchburg Road have passed through a moment of redefinition. Time after time, the property and its stewards have resisted development, even as it’s defined the evolution of the neighborhood that surrounds it.

 

Once part of a 305-acre parcel owned by Albemarle County co-founder Joshua Fry (for whom the neighborhood is named), the club’s site was largely woodland as late as 1890. In that year, Steven Price Maury bought it and set about building a grand 100-room hotel on the current site of the Jefferson Park Baptist Church. Native Americans had long used natural springs on the property for their curative powers (attributed to the water’s high iron content), and Maury hoped the waters would attract guests. A wooden Victorian confection draped with 400 feet of porches and festooned with gables and cupolas, the Albemarle Hotel (later renamed the Jefferson Park Hotel) charged $3 per room. The hotel originated the spot’s long tradition of live entertainment, with dancing in an open-air pavilion down the hill from it.

Though it was never a moneymaker, the hotel did fuel interest in the Fry’s Spring area. Its heyday coincided with that of the streetcar, which ran orange-and-blue cars along what is now Cherry Avenue, bringing City dwellers to dance and take in the waters. Charlottesville’s first movies were shown near the hotel, projected on bed sheets strung between trees, and there was even a theme park next door called Wonderland. Featuring a menagerie, roller-skating and horse shows, Wonderland was a project of the Charlottesville and Albemarle Railway Company, meant to entice riders at 5 cents per head. The hotel was the end of the line then, and some of those riders eventually built houses in what became Charlottesville’s first suburb.

The hotel was dismantled in 1914 after being badly damaged by a fire. Other changes were coming too: G. Russell Dettor, a businessman who bought the property in 1921, was about to propose a very big idea.

“To dig a 100-meter swimming pool, when most people went swimming in the creek, was quite forward-looking,” says Healy, a club board member, remarking on Dettor’s radical notion. In the early 20th century, very few people even knew how to swim. That didn’t stop Dettor from designing his pool with a 9’ deep end, or from charging money to swim in it. He also enclosed the old dance pavilion that had been part of the hotel, forming the nucleus of what is today the clubhouse.

 

Thus began nearly a half-century of jazzy, glamorous, all-American fun: Big-band entertainment, competitive swimming, and a social scene so hopping that at one point, in the late 1950s, Charlottesvillians could go out dancing at Fry’s Spring every night of the week.

“It was the place. It was the social club,” says club manager Greg Hussar. “We’re gradually building that back up again.”

The constant merriment prompted one observer to remark that “Charlottesville is divided into two parts—Charlottesville proper and Fry’s Spring improper.”

These days, the clubhouse has the feel of a comfortable, storied retreat, retro in the most unself-conscious way. Art Deco-style doors lead into a dark lobby with a large flowery pattern on the red carpet. In the ballroom, which holds 500, semicircular booths flank a sprung wooden dance floor, each with a number tiled right into the linoleum in front of it. Obviously partial to the setting, Chapman says that, compared to Fry’s Spring, other ballrooms in town feel sterile. “You have this relatively low ceiling,” he says. “If you have enough people in there, it creates a nice little party atmosphere.” The ballroom still hosts plenty of weddings and other parties.

By 1970, Dettor was ready to retire, and Fry’s Spring was at a crossroads. “There were plans on the table for a duplex community with 128 units,” says Healy. “Some of the people whose families swam here got together and said, ‘We would like to preserve this. This is an important part of this community’s social history. You can always build more houses, but where are you going to get this again?’”

The families formed a corporation, Fry’s Spring, Inc., and bought the property from Dettor. The pool had temporarily escaped the threat of development, but in 1991 the cycle repeated itself: With the children of the Fry’s Spring, Inc., members having grown up, the club’s owners were again ready to sell. This time, a broader members’ group came together. They put down $1,000 each, and formed a new, more cooperative corporation: Fry’s Spring Beach Club, Inc. Healy says this group, though it could barely keep up with maintenance on the aging pool, somehow managed to preserve the club’s venerable family feeling.

The pool, says Healy, also a longtime member, is a “monument to deferred maintenance.” He watches the ongoing construction with a mixture of rueful affection for the old and enthusiasm for the new. “That has a real post-World War II look to it, doesn’t it?” he remarks, peering into the pump room behind the pool’s deep end. Five “Space Age” sand filters lurk in the darkness—rusted, rotund tanks that have been cut open to reveal chunks of what looks like sawdust.

When these filters were new, in 1948, they brought a key change in Fry’s Spring history. Up to that time, the water source had been Moore’s Creek, which Dettor dammed up and pumped into the pool. “The sanitary system was that you got new creek water every day,” Healy says. With the addition of sand filters and water pumped from City reservoirs, “It stopped being olive-colored creek water, and it started being a sparkly blue, chlorinated, modern swimming pool.”

Revolutionary though they once were, the filters are now in desperate need of replacement. “We’re going to have high-tech, turn-that-water-over, lots-o’-gallons-a-minute kind of sand filters,” says Healy. Decks, too, were on the verge of collapse. Altogether, says Chapman, “We really didn’t know whether the pool could actually survive another year.”

The new pool will be superior in many ways. For one thing, it will perform a basic swimming-pool function the old pool couldn’t quite handle—holding water. Chapman says the old, leaky pool required untold hours of labor.

“Each year, somebody had to clean it all out with bleach, flushing out all of the drains, then getting it filled and making sure the water was getting recirculated properly,” he says. “There’s only so much time you can ask people to volunteer.” The new pool will be easier to maintain and use significantly less water.

A new design better allocates space for lap swimming and casual splashing around. Wider decks will better accommodate swim meets (the Dolphins are the Fry’s Spring swim team, part of the Jefferson Swim League) and private parties on summer evenings—which, in turn, may generate revenue for future projects, namely additional renovation of the clubhouse.

 

Club members acknowledge a certain melancholy in seeing their funky old pool demolished—even with a new one on the way. Jeanne Siler has been bringing her two daughters to Fry’s Spring since they were little. One daughter, a former swim team member and lifeguard, is now off at college. Siler recently emailed her photos of the project. “She sobbed as she opened up each new picture,” Siler says.

Siler’s daughter isn’t alone in her attachment to the place. The construction plans, Healy said, are meant to carefully preserve the club’s signature ambience, largely dependent on the century-old trees making a canopy over the pool grounds and the wooded acres separating the club from nearby houses.

“Yes, we want a state-of-the-art swimming pool,” he says, “but not at the cost of what really makes us special. We don’t have a vast chunk of concrete absorbing radiant energy all day. When you step through that gate, it is literally 10 to 15 degrees cooler than when you were out at your car.”

Miraculously, the project will sacrifice only one tree, a hickory leaning precariously over a corner of the pool.

By all accounts, the summertime scene at Fry’s Spring is one of good clean fun, where families form long-term friendships. Green and white lawn chairs are scattered around the pool; kids throw down towels on the grass and run off to play Marco Polo or water basketball. Three separate pools accommodate kids of different ages. “Typically, people join and start in the wading pool,” says Healy. “Your kid’s 2 years old. Then ‘he’s a big boy! A big girl!’ and you’re here in the middle pool. Then they want to join the swim team. Then by the time the kids are all teenagers and they’re up here playing Hearts on the patio, you’re down here at the deep end with your old buddies you’ve been sitting with every summer for years, reading the Sunday Post.”

Though as late as 1970 Fry’s Spring was a whites-only club, the only requirement now is the cost of membership, which at $650-750 per family, makes the club relatively affordable to everyone.

Funding for the new pool is coming largely from its members. Four club families, making donations or loans in $25,000 increments, formed the Friends of Fry’s Spring—altogether providing $200,000.

“Really that’s provided the impetus to make the project realistic,” Chapman says. Another chunk is coming from an increase in membership dues and other member fundraisers. The remainder is covered by a loan. Todd Bullard and Marty Rowan, both architects and board members, helped alleviate costs by donating their services to the design process.

Members hope the new facilities will help build up membership and maybe, eventually, bring back the glory days for the clubhouse. Chapman says the ballroom could help fill a year-round void in the Charlottesville social landscape. “When I was a kid in England, every Saturday night there would be a big dance,” he says. “We used to see some big rock groups in a place not dissimilar to Fry’s Spring Beach Club. That seems to be missing in Charlottesville.”

 

Healy stands over the natural spring downhill from the clubhouse, using a stick to stir leafy water. Fry’s Spring bubbles forth even on a freezing morning and paints a red streak down the rocks—a mark of its iron content. Healy says that, though the springs are no longer the focal point of activity as in the days of the Albemarle Hotel, they still symbolize the importance of preserving green space within City limits.

Ultimately, the decision to preserve Fry’s Spring Beach Club means not only more fond memories, but also a stand against the increasing population density in the surrounding neighborhood. Madeleine Watkins, Chapman’s wife, acknowledges that “It’s the kind of facility that, if it ever went up for sale, obviously it would sell very quickly and you could make lots of money for lots of people.”

Unlike in 1970, there were no specific proposals this time around to bid farewell to the pool and cash in on the property, which was assessed last year at $1.43 million. But there were a few ideas floating around that were not entirely out of the preservationist playbook.

“There were some proposals that circulated last year for building houses all the way around the club, to raise money to build the pool,” Chapman says. “But I don’t think from a community point of view that would be a good thing, because we have this really nice open space. Lots of people in the community use it for walking the dog, running, walking in the woods.”

Woods, in this neighborhood, are fast becoming scarce. Just outside City limits, three new apartment complexes—Sterling University Housing, Collegiate Hall and Jefferson Ridge—are going up on Sunset Avenue and Fifth Street Extended. Sitting on formerly undeveloped pieces of County land in what’s regarded as the urban ring, the City’s immediate outskirts, the majority of the 658 apartments will be occupied by UVA students. Closer to the beach club, a wooded area on Belleview Avenue may eventually be sacrificed for even more housing. Jim Tolbert, City planner, says developers have expressed interest in the 40 duplex lots (though construction is still a long way off).

Inevitably, traffic is the area’s biggest problem, says Mike Farruggio, president of Fry’s Spring Neighborhood Association, and it’s not going to get any better with the new housing. County-dwellers in the new apartments will be using already busy (and sidewalk-less) streets to enter the City. “We have children, mothers, joggers and bicyclists riding up and down Old Lynchburg Road, competing with cars that are going to the County,” Farruggio says. “It’s going to increase dramatically when these apartment complexes are filled.”

Further up Jefferson Park Avenue, the City has recently drawn University Precincts as part of its rezoning process, and in those density is slated to skyrocket. In the next half-decade, an additional 3,000 to 6,000 UVA students will be shoehorned into buildings as tall as seven stories, for which developers won’t be required to provide on-site parking. Though Farruggio says Fry’s Spring and JPA are two distinct neighborhoods, he is already plenty aware of UVA’s presence.

“We have people driving to our neighborhood to park to walk to school,” he says. “It’s extremely frustrating.”

The City claims that putting students close to UVA will eliminate the need for students to own cars, and Farruggio hopes they’re right (other observers are skeptical as long as UVA refuses to ban or severely limit car ownership among students). With County housing on one side and University Precincts on the other, the Fry’s Spring neighborhood is bound to feel the effects of a rapidly growing ’Hoo population.

In this pressurized climate, Fry’s Spring Beach Club is an important holdout. “As a neighborhood association, we love the beach club,” Farruggio says. “It is an anchor to the community.”