The city has taken steps to ease the plight of tenants at McIntire Plaza, who say construction of the McIntire/250 exchange is hurting business.
Photo: Skip Degan
The nearly 50 small businesses that call McIntire Plaza home have made their voices heard above the din of incessant construction that stretches from their front yard at the intersection of McIntire Road and Harris Street down to the U.S. 250 Bypass.
Responding to steady complaints from commuters and customers, City Manager Maurice Jones met last month with some of the business owners to hear firsthand the financial hardships they’d been experiencing.
Days after C-VILLE published an article detailing their fiscal woes, the city took several steps to try and help businesses in the plaza.
For starters, the city’s engineers adjusted the timing of the red lights at the intersections of McIntire Road and U.S. 250, as well as at McIntire Road and Harris Street, so that cars can turn right on red, improving traffic flow for customers headed to or from the plaza, according to Jones.
The city also painted a large white box where McIntire Road intersects with Harris Street with signs declaring, “Do Not Block the Intersection.” Jones said a police officer has been stationed at the intersection during busy periods to keep the intersection traffic free.
Signs have also gone up along Preston Avenue promoting Harris Street as an alternate route to get to McIntire Plaza.
The steps seem to have helped, with Jones describing response from Plaza tenants as positive.
“We’ll continue to monitor the situation and work with the businesses to address their concerns where we can,” he said.
One gesture the city made—a promise to match a $5,000 advertising campaign for the businesses if they can raise an initial $5,000 between them—has fallen by the wayside, according to Matt Monson, owner of Great Harvest Bread Co. But, he said, it’s not the city’s fault.
“Honestly, the problem is on our end,” said Monson, who initially took on the task of rallying other McIntire Plaza businesses behind the fundraising drive. Differences of opinion on how to spend that money have gotten in the way, he said.
“There are like 70 different businesses here, and trying to make a decision on something like this is just difficult. It came back down to all of us wondering how we’d ever decide how it got distributed and who was going to do that work.”
Beate Casati, owner of La Linea Bella!, said that business has been steady in recent weeks, and she has exhausted her advertising budget for the year already. Both Casati and Monson agreed that the stress of day-to-day operations means business owners don’t have the time or energy to coordinate a new advertising campaign involving dozens of businesses.
While the city has increased its support for the business owners, several say they’ve also reached out to their landlord, Woodard Properties, with mixed results. None would divulge any type of assistance they’d been offered.
Woodard Properties’ manager of McIntire Plaza, Mike Morris, also declined to comment on any communications between Woodard and its tenants.
“We have no desire to offer proof of our intentions or validation of our actions in regards to our tenants,” he wrote in an email he sent to C’ville Coffee owner Toan Nguyen and to C-VILLE Weekly. “We consider these things private matters between those with which we do business.”
Morris also expressed support for both the City of Charlottesville and the contractors, “both diligently working to complete a project that has been in the works for years.”
Perhaps the biggest potential boon for tenants is set for the end of this summer, when the McIntire/Harris intersection will be reconfigured to improve pedestrian crossings with the addition of crosswalks, pedestrian countdowns, and walk buttons, according to Jeanette Janiczek, the city’s Urban Construction Initiative project manager.
In a follow-up phone call, Morris said he has tried to keep businesses focused on the prospect that the project will ultimately bring long term benefits by increasing and smoothing traffic to the area.
“Obviously it’s something that has to be done and it’s an unpleasant situation for everybody involved,” said Morris. “But at the same time, if you want to make omelets, you’ve got to crack a few eggs. The best situation is where they get done and we can move on. Obviously the faster they get done, the better.”
The city has taken steps to ease the plight of tenants at McIntire Plaza, who say construction of the McIntire/250 exchange is hurting business.
Bluewall Media founder Peter Agelasto sees his company’s Starchive software as a way to give artists control over their work. Photo: Billy Hunt
It took two years to get Bob Dylan organized, but a small software company nestled in Nelson County has finally done it.
Bluewall Media recently helped Dylan and his staff archive and digitalize more than 60 years worth of his iconic music, photographs, written documents, video, and film footage. In the years to come, Dylan fans may not only see an entire box set of the musician’s work released but also previously unreleased tracks or remastered and remixed versions of old favorites.
It’s all thanks to Bluewall Media’s pride and joy: a software program called Starchive, which the company spent the last 10 years developing. The program allows an artist to easily and quickly digitalize, organize, and even manipulate large caches of material in a bevy of high-quality formats.
Dylan was Bluewall Media’s first client to use Starchive, according to the company’s founder Peter Agelasto.
“They did take a risk, because we were just some bright-eyed kids from Virginia,” said Agelasto, speaking from his office in Roseland, about 30 miles southwest of Charlottesville.
Agelasto can’t reveal exactly how much material Dylan’s staff has archived because of a non-disclosure agreement, but he said it was more than 100,000 pieces of audio, print, video, and still images. “It’s a mind-blowingly unending river of material,” said Agelasto. “They could probably have a million things because Dylan was at the epicenter of American culture.”
Nicholas Meriwether knows exactly what Agelasto is dealing with. Meriwether is the head archivist for the Grateful Dead, whose collection was donated to the University of California Santa Cruz in 2008. In dealing with such a large swath of material—ranging from posters and fan correspondence to deteriorating VHS and cassette tapes—Meriwether stressed the cultural importance of preserving and organizing artists like the Grateful Dead and Dylan.
“It’s a sprawling and very complex collection,” said Meriwether of the Dead’s work. “It’s definitely much more difficult than the overwhelming majority of archival collections I have ever encountered in any context. That said, the payoff is magnificent. The end result is a well-organized and remarkably extensive collection that really is going to help scholars better understand not just the 1960s and the counter-culture but a whole host of associated questions that are just going to get increasingly important as time goes on.”
But Bluewall Media is not a large institution like UCSC. So how does a tiny software company and recording studio in rural Virginia—where broadband is still scarce in spots—convince a legend like Dylan that it’s ripe for such a beastly task?
Jim Fishel, the company’s executive vice president and veteran of the music industry, knows Dylan’s manager and made the introduction back in 2002 before the software program was even a glint in Agelasto’s eye. And as their relationship with Dylan’s camp evolved, so too did Agelasto’s technological ambitions. Pretty soon he found himself pitching Dylan’s staff on the idea of a comprehensive archive.
“They said, ‘That’d be great, but you’ll be working on it for the rest of your life because we have so much material and it’ll never possibly get organized,’” recalls Agelasto. “Dylan’s got 50-plus years of rich awesome analog material. But there wasn’t this super simple way to actually build an archive.”
And so Agelasto and his team of developers and engineers unveiled Starchive. But the software program does more than just archive and organize an artist’s work. It also opens up a world of options for musicians to distribute and tweak their work, transforming the typically complex technological process into a simple click of a button.
The program was born out of necessity, according to Agelasto, who opened the Monkeyclaus music studio in 1998. Scores of musicians would record at the studio, but getting that fine-tuned music into the hands of fans was an increasingly difficult task as CDs became outdated and the modern world moved to the Internet to get their music digitally. Technology and artists do not mix well, said Agelasto.
“I could just see that the modern technological approaches weren’t working at all for creative people,” said Agelasto. “They would create something and then get stopped in their tracks because of the technological aspect of getting their media out there. We realized we had to change how that was happening. We were making super high-quality files and then having to transcode all of those things to make these big files much smaller so people could download them onto terrible bandwidth.”
Matthew Gibson, the director of Digital Initiatives with the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, agrees with Agelasto. Gibson said it’s frustrating to see how fast technology is moving and how quickly the commonly accepted standard format of a digital file can change.
“There’s not one solid format that you can save it to or rely on for the rest of your life, especially with moving image and audio,” said Gibson. “What has been very volatile, and is still volatile, is the standard for moving image and audio formats. It’s hard to find a tried and true solid statement that this is the best practice. In general, you want to do something that’s as raw and high resolution as possible. But then you’re talking about these huge files and it’s really clunky to transmit them because they’re so big.”
While the archival of Dylan’s complete works is a mammoth accomplishment for Bluewall Media, Agelasto’s vision for the Starchive program goes much further.
The program automatically translates the format of a saved file into the highest quality for nearly any format, whether it’s posting on a social media site, publishing a professional grade album or book of photography, or manipulating the data so the artist can create brand new art, like remixes. It puts the power, Agelasto said, in the hands of the artist, which begs the question: Will this diminish the need for record companies and managers?
“Disintermediation is a scary thing for a lot of people because it makes them feel like they’re no longer a part of things,” said Agelasto. “For management, it’s the death of their industry. But that’s the wrong way to look at it. What it really means is that the artist is now in control.”
“What we’re doing is opening up the artist’s hard drive to the fan and making it so they can create faster,” said Agelasto. “Essentially the music business is moving towards the artist saving their work and then it landing in the audience’s earbuds. That’s revolutionary.”
Bluewall Media founder Peter Agelasto sees his company’s Starchive software as a way to give artists control over their work.
“Dylan’s got 50-plus years of rich awesome analog material. But there wasn’t this super simple way to actually build an archive,” said Peter Agelasto.
Thanks to a state budget stalemate, the local drug court has been without a designated judge since January, when Circuit Court Judge Edward Hogshire stepped down. Photo: Elli Williams
The General Assembly’s political dogfight over the state’s budget is threatening to neuter Charlottesville’s drug court.
The Medicaid expansion stalemate in Richmond has left Charlottesville’s 16th Circuit Court without a designated judge to oversee the city’s drug court for the first time since it was created 16 years ago.
“The longer it goes on, the more we’re going to see people falling off the rails,” said Susan Morrow, who oversees Charlottesville’s drug court program. “For the people who started in February, they’re not getting a real drug court experience without the most important player: a sitting judge. The sooner it gets fixed, the better.”
The Charlottesville/Albemarle Adult Drug Treatment Court was created in 2007 as an alternative for drug addicts facing jail time. Launched by former Charlottesville Circuit Judge Jay Swett, drug court mirrors many similar rehabilitation programs throughout the country, using testing, employment standards, community service, and counseling as a way for drug users to avoid incarceration.
The local drug court’s most recent chief, Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Edward Hogshire, stepped down on January 27 after 16 years on the bench. As is the way of things in the Commonwealth, the General Assembly was tasked with appointing his replacement. But the ongoing budget debate in Richmond has dragged the legislature into a special session, further delaying all routine business until the state’s budget is resolved.
As a result, the drug court and the city’s circuit court as a whole have functioned with a merry-go-round of substitute judges all year, according to court clerk Llezelle Dugger.
In that time, the drug court has not been able to secure a judge to preside over its weekly Thursday sessions at least five times, or nearly half of the participants’ appearances, said Morrow. Those review sessions are vital to the success of drug court participants, she said, because they check on their compliance with employment standards, drug rehabilitation meetings, and other court mandates.
“We have had occasions where we haven’t had a drug court judge and we’ve had to make do with a roll call instead of a drug court session,” said Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman, who sits on the drug court advisory board. “You don’t want the quality and consistency of the program to change for the participants because these are people who are very vulnerable to relapse.”
When a drug court participant violates the terms of the program, that violation is supposed to be dealt with immediately. But without a replacement for Hogshire, if a judge is not available, the participant’s violation can go unpunished for days, according to Morrow.
“The faster the intervention, the better,” she said. “We’ve got situations where we can’t actually act to correct the behavior or impose a sanction with much swiftness because we don’t have a judge to do it.”
Without a designated judge to take his place, Charlottesville has also lost its biggest drug court advocate. During his tenure, Hogshire developed personal relationships with drug court participants—a key ingredient in the efficacy of the program, according to Morrow and others.
“The drug court program operates a lot like a family,” said Morrow. “And the dad of the family is the drug court judge. Participants spend a lot of time pleasing the judge. And when something goes well they really look forward to telling the judge what happened. And when something goes badly, they really worry that they disappointed the judge.”
Charlottesville City Councilor Kristin Szakos agreed. Hogshire developed a relationship with those who came before him, and visiting judges can’t do that, she said.
“It’s not because they’re not perfectly qualified judges,” said Szakos. “We just really need to have a judge who sits here and is invested in our current local justice scene. So yeah, it’s a problem.”
Morrow said drug court participants have yet to voice any concern of their own over a lack of a steady judge. However, one former drug court participant who spoke on the condition of anonymity echoed the concerns that a lack of a sitting judge could lead to a decline in the program’s success.
The Charlottesville Albemarle Bar Association (CABA) has recommended to the General Assembly that David Franzen replace Hogshire. But Palma Pustilnik, the president of CABA, said she hasn’t heard anything from the state government since January.
Charlottesville Delegate and House Minority Leader David Toscano said the legislature doesn’t have much of a choice. Lawmakers have other judicial appointments to consider besides Charlottesville’s, and part of that process is deciding whether to fund new judgeships. That means it all comes back to the budget, and with Republicans and Democrats still unable to find a possibly non-existent middle ground on Medicaid, “it’s hard right now to see where the deal is,” he said.
Of the more than half-dozen rotating judges filling Hogshire’s vacancy, former Charlottesville Circuit Judge Swett and former Albemarle Circuit Court Judge Paul Peatross have dealt with drug courts before.
But they are both retired, filling the court’s docket as they can. The other judges come from as far away as Fairfax or Virginia Beach.
If the present looks bad, the future looks even bleaker for drug court. There are five upcoming sessions slated for May and June that currently have no judge scheduled, said Morrow. If that goes unresolved, the efficacy of the court program could truly buckle at the knees.
“We have no judges yet and we don’t know if we’re going to,” said Morrow. “The drug court would absolutely fall apart with no judge for that long of a period of a time.”
So Morrow has been meeting with other drug court coordinators and is planning to call on several other retired judges with drug court experience throughout the state to fill those judicial slots. The situation is dire enough that Hogshire himself is trying to get approval to return as a substitute drug court judge in the coming months, said Morrow.
To make matters murkier, there are other drug courts in Virginia with judges about to retire, further lessening the pool of qualified judges who could substitute in Charlottesville’s court.
Chapman said it’s incredibly difficult to gauge if any negative effect has occurred with the lack of judicial leadership in the drug court so far, but if the status quo continues, the worst is yet to come.
Business at McIntire Plaza is suffering from nearby road construction, said Beate Casati, owner of La Linea Bella! framing shop. Photo: Christian Hommel
Anybody who’s inched a car past the exhaust-spewing dump trucks and giant yellow backhoes lining the intersection of McIntire Road and the U.S. 250 Bypass knows what a traffic headache it can be.
But for the nearly 50 small businesses in McIntire Plaza, the enormous construction site in their front yard has worsened from headache to migraine, as customers have dwindled and the hard times threaten to continue until the project’s planned completion in the summer of 2015.
“Lunch used to be our busiest time where we’d make all of our profit,” said C’ville Coffee owner Toan Nguyen, who has reduced staff shifts and dipped into his personal savings in recent months to keep his business alive. For 15 years, C’ville Coffee has been a popular lunch and meeting spot thanks to its central location, easy access, and on-site parking. The construction has changed that, and it’s changing customer behavior.
“People only have an hour for lunch,” he said. “Are they going to chance it by coming down here? Some days you can’t even make a left to turn into the Plaza.”
Things aren’t any better for La Linea Bella! framing shop or for Great Harvest Bread Co. The owners of both businesses report sales have plummeted by 40 percent since road construction began.
“We pour our blood into these businesses every day,” said La Linea Bella! owner Beate Casati. “For me, it’s been a huge difference since last summer.”
And then there’s the nonprofit Charlottes-ville Fencing Alliance, which has had to rely on its programs in Staunton and Waynesboro to keep it afloat as it struggles to pay the $4,000 monthly rent at the Plaza while members complain they can’t even get to the club for their fencing classes.
“People will get stuck in traffic for 45 minutes and they’re only 300 yards from the building,” said Jaime Faine, the Alliance’s executive director. “They end up missing the classes that they’re paying for. It’s incredibly frustrating.”
First proposed more than 45 years ago, the construction project at the much-used intersection will connect the new Meadow Creek Parkway with McIntire Road and ultimately should reduce traffic congestion on both Rio Road and Route 29 North by providing a direct connection from Rio near Charlottesville Albemarle Technical Education Center to Downtown Charlottesville. The county finished its portion of the road in January 2012, and the city broke ground in spring 2013. The new traffic pattern at McIntire and 250 includes elimination of the traffic light on 250 and is designed to improve traffic flow and reduce accidents at the intersection. It should ultimately benefit Plaza businesses—if they can survive that long.
Nguyen and others believe the city and the Plaza landlord, Woodard Properties, could help ease tenants’ suffering, but their requests for assistance have thus far gone unanswered, and some feel they’re paying a personal price for a community project.
“The saddest part for me is I’m essentially being asked to put my life and my business on hold while the whole project goes on,” said Matt Monson, owner of Great Harvest, who notes that the construction inspector for the project’s engineering firm, Rummel, Klepper & Kahl, told him the heaviest construction—and worst traffic impact—is ahead of schedule but still won’t be done before the end of the year. In the meantime, Monson has had to increase the catering portion of his business in an effort to offset his losses.
Casati and several other business owners have secured a meeting with City Manager Maurice Jones this week to discuss possible remedies for the construction-related business woes. Nguyen, who is a founder of the micro-loan-providing Community Investment Collaborative, believes the city could offer businesses in the Plaza a series of low-interest loans to help them keep afloat during the construction process. A similar plea was made by businesses around the Jefferson Park Avenue Bridge, which was overhauled during a nearly 18-month-long construction process in 2011 and 2012 that tore deeply into the pockets of businesses like Wayside Chicken, Durty Nelly’s and JPA Fast Mart. But while the city funded a $100,000 marketing campaign for Downtown Mall businesses during the rebricking project in 2009, JPA businesses were left to their own devices after the city said it couldn’t provide assistance. Wayside—like Great Harvest Bakery and Nguyen’s C’ville Coffee—was forced to switch much of its focus to catering during construction.
In an emailed response to C-VILLE regarding the Plaza businesses, Jones said the city was aware of business owners’ concerns.
“The utility work near the McIntire/Harris intersection was causing access issues so we addressed those with the contractor,” Jones wrote, also mentioning the upcoming meeting with Plaza business owners. “I can’t offer possible solutions until I hear from them and have a chance to consider our options,” he said.
Nguyen told C-VILLE that he had also asked Woodard Properties to give him a temporary break on his store’s rent. Woodard Property management sent Plaza tenants an email explaining that there was nothing it could do to help. Instead, the company said, they should take their concerns up with the city.
“They say, ‘That’s tough. That’s your problem. What does that have to do with us?’” said Nguyen of Woodard’s response to their plight. Keith Woodard, the principal of the property management company, did not respond to a request for comment,
Some of the small-business owners at McIntire Plaza feel these problems could have been foreseen. And while the city has offered tax incentives to woo big businesses including CFA Institute and World Strides to Charlottesville, small-business owners at the Plaza don’t feel like they’re getting the same treatment.
“I really feel like the city did not take into account at all the impact on us,” said Faine. “And I feel that if we had been larger businesses with more money to throw around, they would have considered the impact much more than they have. It’s hard not to be a little bitter towards the city about all of this.”
You won’t see the quarter-sized computerized devices tucked behind their ears, but more than 100 local high school and college athletes are donning the sensors during games and practices as part of UVA’s latest push to understand what happens when a player’s brain receives a concussion.
Dr. Jason Druzgal, a neuroradiologist at the University, is leading the charge.
“Part of the problem is there’s not a great consensus about how to manage concussions after the fact,” said Druzgal. “We do know that if they’re managed inappropriately and someone is returned to play too soon, they have an increased risk for a subsequent concussion. And that’s a real problem. We need better tools to determine when people should be cleared to return to play.”
The cause for concern is evident, as a growing number of professional athletes have begun to link their brain injuries to an increased risk of dementia, Lou Gehrig’s disease, Alzheimer’s, depression, and even suicide. More than 4,500 current and former NFL players are in the midst of an ongoing $765 million lawsuit against the league, fueled by accusations that the organization withheld information and research about how concussions affect brain function in the short and long term.
Shari Benson, the head athletic trainer for St. Anne’s-Belfield (STAB), knows full well the extent of concussion concern among parents and athletes, which is why she urged about 15 football players at STAB to participate in the UVA study last fall. About 60 UVA football, soccer, and lacrosse players also volunteered for the study.
“I can’t talk to a parent in this school without concussions coming up,” said Benson. “Even after a basketball game, people will say, ‘Well, I’m glad it was a concussion-free game.’”
Science has made great strides recently in documenting concussions, but only after they occur. And over the last several years every Virginia high school and college has implemented a series of intricate post-concussion cognitive tests to ensure athletes return to normal levels of brain functioning before they are allowed to play again.
But the initial diagnosis is patently difficult, according to UVA football’s athletic trainer Kelli Pugh. It largely relies on players voluntarily coming forward with potential symptoms, which they know could land them on semi-permanent hiatus from playing the game they love as they undergo a series of treatment options that aren’t well founded either. And players like to play, not sit on a bench.
“You’re typically giving those tests to someone after they’ve reported symptoms. With this research study, one of the questions they hope to address is how to accurately diagnose concussions, so we don’t just have to rely on someone coming in with a headache or a teammate telling us to check on a guy,” said Pugh. “We’re trying to help people be safe and move the science forward on concussions, because really the only treatment we have at this point is rest.”
The UVA study aims to tread where no study has before. Researchers take a baseline MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) test of each player at the beginning of the sports season and another one at the end, so they can compare the two.
Other studies have rarely used the participants’ own baseline MRI results as a basis for comparison. Instead, they compare the subject’s post-concussion brain function to another person’s “normal” brain function, which creates a flawed scope of results, according to Druzgal.
Concussion studies in the past have also not bothered to measure or record the severity of the actual hit that causes the brain injury, relying instead on the subjective recollections from the players themselves. But every hit an athlete takes is slightly different, as is their experience of it, which makes for flawed scientific findings, said Druzgal.
And so the UVA study measures each crushing blow players receive by using a tiny computer device about the size of a quarter that attaches to the skin behind their ear with an adhesive patch. Before UVA football practices and games, the researchers “tape up” with the players, quietly affixing the sensors, which they retrieve afterwards as the players come off the field.
The device—made by X2 Biosystems and already used by several college and NFL teams around the country—senses, measures, and records rotational and linear movements, so after a sharp hit during a game or practice, the researchers plug the device into their computers and gauge the severity of the impact. They later will correlate and map those hard hits to any changes in brain function that appear on the players’ two MRI results.
It became so routine for the players to wear the devices that some of the STAB participants forgot to take them off after they finished playing, said Benson.
Both athletic trainers—Benson and Pugh —have high hopes for what the study will unveil, as does Charlottesville High School football coach Eric Sherry. All three have experienced a growing reluctance by either players, or their parents, to join the football team as the national attention on concussions has grown.
Sherry recalled one of his players who complained to a teacher of a pounding headache during class. And because he was on the football team, he was immediately sent for an evaluation to see if he had a concussion. In reality, Sherry said, the kid hadn’t eaten anything all day, causing his blood sugar to drop and a headache to set in.
“I really think they have to give it time to let the science grow with it because you can overreact,” said Sherry. “I understand you want to err on the side of caution. But you also have to be careful not to overdo it because then you dilute the whole results about what is and isn’t a concussion.”
Cass Bailey, pastor at Trinity Episcopal Church, says food literacy is a key step in combating hunger and poor nutrition—and he wants to make his church part of the fight. Photo: Elli Williams
Canned ravioli, instant cups of soup, and microwaveable chicken dinners are a fixture in the kitchens of people who can’t afford to buy food.
They’re free from food banks and charity distribution programs, because they’re easy to prepare and don’t go bad. But they’re not the most nutritious meals, and their sugar content and preservatives can often lead to a series of long-term health and dietary problems, ranging from obesity to diabetes.
On a weekly basis, food banks and social welfare organizations in town offer low-income residents a wide array of food, from canned goods to meats, and local non-profit gardens donate thousands of pounds of fresh produce. But what’s missing in Charlottesville—according to a bevy of health, aide, and food workers—is what happens with that food once it gets home.
Cass Bailey, the pastor of Charlottesville’s Trinity Episcopal Church is out to change that.
“A lot of people just don’t know what fresh food really tastes like,” said Bailey. “The other aspect to that is, O.K., you get fresh food, but then how are you going to cook it? What ways do we need to learn and re-learn how we prepare our foods in order to get the most taste and the most nutrients from them?”
Lack of education contributes to the dual struggles of hunger and obesity in many poor communities, he said. “How do you tackle the problem of people not getting the proper nutrition that they need and at the same time have a weight problem because of what they eat?”
Partnering with dozens of health care professionals, farmers, and fellow ministers, and armed with grants and donations, Bailey is heading up a new initiative aimed at revolutionizing Charlottesville’s food culture by teaching low-income residents how to cook unfamiliar foods, how to preserve fresh produce so it can be eaten when it goes out of season, and how to structure meals so they bring families together.
By next spring, Bailey plans to have renovated the church’s basement kitchen with new top-of-the-line equipment, along with an expanded work and storage space, in order to offer a wide array of free and low-cost cooking, canning, and dietary classes.
Using education to close Charlottesville’s food gap is not a new idea, but many who work with organizations trying to help the hungry say Trinity’s efforts will bring needed tools to a tough fight.
Karen Waters-Wicks runs the food drive program at New Beginnings church in Belmont, and in 2007 helped found an urban garden project near Friendship Court to grow and distribute produce, particularly to lower-income families. That project has grown into the Urban Agriculture Collective of Charlottesville (UACC), a nonprofit that grows more than 10,000 pounds of food a year on just over half an acre of city land.
Waters-Wicks said it’s not just the availability of fresh foods that makes the difference, it’s knowing what to do with it. Often the younger generation won’t know what to do with the five pounds of fresh chard or radishes they get.
“The 20- to 40-year-olds that have been cooking with microwaves all their lives, that’s the hardest [population] to really reach. And they are the least skilled,” said Waters-Wicks. “When we have our market day, people ask all the time what ‘greens’ are. And when we tell them, they say, ‘Well, I guess I’ll take them to my mama, she’ll know what to do with them.’”
Other local institutions have pitched in to help teach a new generation of eaters the kinds of kitchen skills that lead to better nutrition. Waters-Wicks remembers teaming up with culinary arts teacher Bob Bressan’s students at CATEC when the urban garden project was in its infancy. They prepared the chard harvest in three different ways and brought their finished meals, along with recipes, to the gardens. Chefs from the UVA Health System’s nutritional services department regularly partner with UACC to offer family cooking classes at the Friendship Court Community Center.
The Haven, a Downtown day center for the homeless, also has offered several classes in years past, and has a rotating slot for one person at a time in its kitchen training program, offering instruction on cooking and preparing meals in a commercial fashion.
But The Haven’s efforts are aimed more at providing a healthy fresh breakfast to the area’s homeless, who most often do not have access to a kitchen or food storage. Kitchen manager Tina Stephens said she would love to expand instruction and put a special focus on nutrition-based training, because she believes it could make a real and immediate difference in peoples’ health.
“The folks we serve are basically in crisis,” said Stephens. “We’d love to see more nutrition-based training. We have a lot of folks with diabetes and a lot of them know not to eat straight sugar, but they don’t know a lot of the other stuff that goes with it.”
Educators and advocates agree: Space and resources for food education are limited, and ground-level participation from the people being served is a key ingredient. To have a fully stocked modern kitchen that is centrally located on a high-frequency bus line would be a dream come true, said Waters-Wicks.
“A community kitchen would be a tremendous asset to the food justice mission in Charlottesville, particularly if that kitchen is accessible and if there’s leadership from the population it’s intended to serve,” she said.
Bailey and the church’s advisory committee are stepping up to fill that leadership role, but for now, they’re focused on the money. Trinity Episcopal has raised more than $60,000 on its own and received a matching donation from one person for $25,000. It also raised an additional $20,000 and got a matching grant from the national Episcopal Church, which will be used to fund the programs and workshops they offer. Bailey plans to use those dollars to hold weekly classes, partnering with different churches, chefs, and educators in town to teach meal preparation and nutrition classes.
Alas, the church is about $15,000 short of the $90,000 needed to fully renovate the kitchen. Bailey is hoping the holidays will bring more attention—and support—to the program
“There are a number of meals programs at different times of the day throughout the week,” said Bailey. “But where there really is a gap is in trying to achieve some kind of systemic change, particularly from the individual perspective with the way people relate to food.”
Kate Tamarkin conducts Ash Lawn Opera’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, a holiday opera that inspired her as a child.
At 11 years old, Kate Tamarkin sat in a dark Laguna Beach, California theater, her mouth gaping, flabbergasted at the boisterous sounds produced by the singers in a performance of Amahl and the Night Visitors.
“I had not ever heard opera before,” said Tamarkin, who 40 years later is now the director of the Charlottesville & University Symphony Orchestra (CUSO). “It was the first time I remember hearing a real live trained voice. So when the woman who plays Amahl’s mother opened her mouth and came out with her big sound I remember saying, ‘Whoa!’ No one I knew could sing like that,” she recalled.
Cut to the present where Tamarkin is walking Georgia Castleman, the 15-year-old star of Ash Lawn Opera’s upcoming performance of Amahl, through the intricate components of the role as the Covenant School student falls in love with the music, the lyrics, and the acting—just like she did as a kid.
And Castleman is pumped. Not just about missing school so she can rehearse every day for up to 10 hours before the show opens. She’s thrilled to be working alongside professionals, which Tamarkin, who is conducting this year’s performance certainly is.
“Having a whole week of just theater is kind of any theater kid’s dream,” said Castleman. “It makes it feel like it’s your job and you’re one of the professionals too, so I’m really thrilled about that.”
Castleman has come to love working with Tamarkin, but it was not a shoe-in from the start, at least not from the teen’s point of view. She could sense the clout that Tamarkin carried.
“The first time working with Kate was really intimidating because she’s just so professional,” recalled Castleman. “I walked in and was pretty scared. She’s scary at first. But then she’s so sweet and good at what she does that it’s just amazing to get to work with her and I’m so thankful to have the opportunity to get to do that.”
Gray haired, with a long elegant nose, Tamarkin is a musician in residence at the UVA Medical Center, playing the Celtic harp at the bedsides of sick and dying patients in hospitals, hospice care, and nursing homes. In short, Tamarkin looks, sounds, and acts like the aunt everyone wishes they had. As though she has an apple pie, ice cream, and a mug of hot chocolate just waiting for you.
Tamarkin is also quite a force. She took charge of the CUSO in 2006 after conducting orchestras and symphonies in more than two dozen cities throughout the world, including the nation’s capital, where she led Catholic University’s symphony and opera for three years. Since 1982, she has been the music director for symphonies and orchestras in Wisconsin, Texas, Vermont, and California. She’s even served as a cultural ambassador to Moldova for the State Department, performing with its local National Philharmonic.
But you won’t necessarily get all of that by chatting with Tamarkin. Instead, she’s more apt to tell you how excited she is to be auditioning for Fiddler on the Roof next month.
“Absolutely!” said Tamarkin with a deep chuckle. “Even if I end up being a fourth stettle grandmother, I’m going to audition for Fiddler on the Roof.”
Or she may tell you about the music program for the Hospice of the Piedmont that she runs and the deep sense of fulfillment she gets from playing her harp for people at the end of their lives.
“It just hit me over the head one day,” said Tamarkin. “I looked at the small harp and decided that maybe I could learn to play it. I just got this idea in my head, not knowing anything about it, which is the best way to proceed in life. Get a crazy idea and run with it.”
Tamarkin is extremely professional and has the credentials to back it, but she’s also light, intrigued by the more spiritual side of existence, and, if nothing else, humble. All of those qualities led her to the harp.
The former director of the Chamber Orchestra of Charlottesville, Tamarkin has her fingerprints all over the local classical music scene. She has judged numerous adult and youth music competitions in town, put on two opera galas while at CUSO, given talks on opera and fellow conductor Leonard Bernstein, and served on the search committee for Ash Lawn Opera’s new director.
It was in this latter role that Tamarkin met Michelle Krisel. Selected as a candidate by one of the finest musical headhunters in the country, Krisel quickly became friends with Tamarkin, who along with her husband hosted Krisel on several trips down to Charlottesville from Washington, D.C., where the now-director of Ash Lawn Opera had been working with the Washington National Opera.
The pair soon discovered one of those life connections that occur so often in Charlottesville. While Tamarkin was sitting as a child in a Laguna Beach theater being awed by her first exposure to opera, a 12-year-old Krisel too sat transfixed by the lead character in the very same Amahl and the Night Visitors performance.
The opera has held a special place in both of their hearts for nearly their entire lives. And they’re hoping this year—by bringing together members of the CUSO, the Wilson School of Dance, and the Virginia Consort—to share that sense of magic and community with every generation in town.
Hundreds of migrants—the majority of them Latinos here legally on work visas—work in Central Virginia’s orchards each fall. This year, a lack of funds meant their best option for low-cost medical care wasn’t available. Photo: Jack Looney
The several hundred migrant workers who flood Albemarle and surrounding counties every apple season have come and gone. But the community of nonprofit health care providers that supports them each season is already thinking about next year.
The Blue Ridge Medical Center (BRMC), which provides medical care to more than 10,000 patients each year in some of the most rural and impoverished areas surrounding Charlottesville, has been using its mobile clinic since 1999 to serve many who would otherwise go untreated, including migrant farm workers. Strapped for cash due to a lack of donations, the nonprofit wasn’t able to send its mobile health clinic into the orchards in Albemarle and Nelson counties to serve permanent and migrant orchard workers during the picking season, leaving an unknown number of people in a dangerous line of work underserved.
There are seven major migrant camps and extension camps in Albemarle County, ranging in size from about a dozen workers to about 60, with a couple of hundred more workers in the Nelson area orchards for the season, which ended last week. According to police, health care workers, immigrant rights advocates, and the workers themselves, the vast majority of the migrants travel legally from Mexico to Virginia on H2A agricultural visas requested on an individual basis by orchard owners. But upon arriving in the state, they are met with a series of obstacles. Most of the workers are unable to buy or rent a car while they are in the country because of financial constraints, so they are dependent exclusively on the orchard owners for transportation: to get groceries, go to the post office, and get health care treatment.
“Transportation is limited for guest workers who come from outside of the country,” said Christianne Queiroz, program director for the Virginia Farm Workers. “They usually have to depend on their employer, but that’s limited to one time a week for a trip to the grocery store. Farm work is one of the most dangerous professions in the country and people are really in need of medical care, whether it’s preventative or something more serious.”
Many of the orchard workers don’t speak English well, which makes communicating and interacting in the surrounding communities difficult. As a result, migrant workers often feel isolated and unable to seek out services like medical care.
And they need it. Exposure to pesticides is constant among farm workers and the harmful effects that can arise as a result often go overlooked outside of the farms and orchards themselves. Health care advocates say part of the problem is ignorance of the chemical and pesticide world within the medical field.
“One of the things I’d really like to see are doctors specializing in detecting pesticides so people could be treated and could develop claims for pesticide poisoning,” said Queiroz, at a recent Hispanic Services Summit held at the BRMC’s facility on Route 29 where legal experts, health care providers, and representatives from a local church and orchard met to discuss how the Latino and migrant farm working populations can be better served.
“We’ve had people with rashes,” said Queiroz. “And doctors are not generally trained to address that specific cause, so they feel a little reluctant to affirm that something is caused by pesticides when it can be caused by so many other things.”
Several farm workers interviewed for this story said they either personally experienced a rash from working closely with pesticides or knew of coworkers who had, but none of them would go on the record for fear of losing their jobs next year. Others in the health care community have been told by orchard owners that they are not allowed to visit their private farms during certain periods.
In an effort to break through cultural, linguistic, and geographical barriers to ensure the farm workers get the health care services they need, the Blue Ridge Medical Center has been carting around its mobile unit, which resembles a giant moving truck housing a sleek exam room and medical supplies.
But this year, according to center Executive Director Peggy Whitehead, BRMC couldn’t afford to hire the nurse practitioner who typically accompanies the mobile clinic. With only 18 percent of its budget coming from federal funds, the medical center has relied on grants and donations from area residents and farms. But they didn’t come through in the numbers necessary this year.
“Everything we do on the outreach level is funded through grants and donations,” said Whitehead. “And that’s getting a bit more difficult to come up with. We do a really good job of getting services to people now, but in the future I see more and more difficulty finding the funding to make that happen.”
The Lovingston-based center has tried to keep up with the area’s needs. But with limited funds, it had to prioritize its services to orchards closest to its home base. As a result, hundreds of local farm workers likely never saw a visit from a health care provider this fall.
One orchard worker, who has lived in the area for years and did not want to be named, said she heard the center was short staffed and wasn’t accepting new patients. Luckily, she said, the orchard reached out to the center directly, which ultimately sent a health care worker to the camp. But other area camps had received similar word about the center’s financial state and likely did not inquire further, the worker said.
The center charges the poorest of its clients—which include most migrant workers—about $30 per visit, which covers lab and diagnostic work as well. Some in the Latino community have suggested that the orchard owners themselves pony up money for the medical center as a makeshift health insurance plan for their employees. But Whitehead and the center’s head of its rural health outreach program, Vanessa Hale, stressed that these are not huge corporate farms. They are mom-and-pop operations with relatively low bottom lines.
“These growers, while they’re big for Nelson and Albemarle County, they’re still small family farms,” said Hale. “I’m not saying they couldn’t pay more for the service they receive. However, it’s not like it’s some huge multinational corporation grinding down on these workers. It’s more complicated than that.”
To bolster their ranks, Hale oversees eight health promoters at the Blue Ridge Medical Center who volunteered more than 350 hours this year to visit with migrant and permanent farm workers at the various camps, determining their needs while giving them information about various health care issues like diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity risks.
Henry Chiles, who owns the Chiles family orchards, said he and his managers try to make sure all of their workers get the health care access they need, providing them with transportation if need be.
“As far as I know, everyone’s been taken care of and is in good shape,” said Chiles.
And there’s hope that the underfunded BRMC program will be back on wheels next year. Whitehead said the group has hired a part-time bilingual nurse practitioner, and that the provider shortage shouldn’t exist next year
“By the time we get to the season again next year, we should be in great shape,” she said. “It shouldn’t be so difficult.”
As a teenager, I couldn’t wait to get out of Charlottesville. I wanted to travel, to prove my independence, and to test myself against challenges my hometown just couldn’t provide. If I didn’t leave right after high school, I reasoned, I might not ever leave. And the last thing I wanted was to be a 20-something, buying mallrats cigarettes and booze after spending the day lounging around at the Mudhouse talking about how one day my writing career would take off.
So in 1999 I packed my things and moved to Flatbush, Brooklyn. A lot of my peers did the same thing.
“I wanted to get as far away from Charlottesville as I possibly could,” recalled Kate Zuckerman, the 34-year-old founder of Common Ground and co-owner of Barefoot Bucha who fled to California after graduating from Western Albemarle.
The urge to spread your wings isn’t unique to us Generation X-ers who were born into the globalizing landscape of the post-Cold War 1980s. We inherited it from our parents, The Baby Boomers. Raised in the 1960s with an overwhelming pang to change the status quo, they set sail from their hometowns in search of greener professional and cultural pastures, largely setting up new lives in the process, far away from the worlds where they were raised. Throughout the 1960s about 20 percent of the U.S. was moving away from their hometowns, according to the Pew Research Center. But my generation is doing things differently. That number has dropped to under 12 percent over the last decade.
“When I left Charlottesville 12 years ago, I was 26 years old and there wasn’t enough going on here for me,” said Josh Hunt, 38, a Charlottesville native and co-owner of Beer Run who lived for years in Austin, Texas. “I felt like I had gone past what there was to do here.”
People have started to call us the Boomerangers, because we come back home. The story goes like this: The more often we came back to visit friends and family who had stayed put, the more we fell in love with our childhood home and began to see it, not as a small-town trap, but as a place that offers the community we once went looking for. We went in search of a scene and then realized we could actually start one. At home.
Generations change things, though. And Charlottesville has not been immune to that change. A major part of why native Gen-X-ers have been moving back to town is due to the fact that Charlottesville has become so much more than it was when we grew up. Being raised in a university town that was once home to our third president has its perks. Sure. But it can also be extremely hindering for a generation that wants to break out of the mold of tradition and dogma.
“It’s no longer simply governed by its association with Monticello and UVA,” said 29-year-old Caroline Horan, who graduated from Albemarle High School in 2002 and promptly moved to New York City. “There’s so much dynamic energy here. There’s a creative class here that I feel is being priced out of places like New York. There’s a capacity here for young entrepreneurs, whereas in New York you have to have a lot of money or funding to advance.”
29-year-old Caroline Horan graduated from Albemarle High School in 2002, attended Parsons The New School for Design, and moved to New York City, where she worked as a wine importer. After suffering a serious riding accident during a vacation in Mexico, Horan dedicated her life to Ayurvedic healing, moved home to Charlottesville, and started Ahara Thrive, a health consulting practice. Photo: Elli Williams.
Up and out
Horan left Charlottesville twice before she decided to settle down. After graduating from Parsons The New School for Design in Manhattan, she came back home, became a Pilates instructor, and got ensconced in the wine industry, working at the Market Street Wineshop. It was 2005 and while she was glad to be back, she quickly got restless.
“I felt like Charlottesville still wasn’t nourishing or stimulating me in the way I needed,” said Horan during a recent interview at C’ville Coffee. “I still had more to do and discover.”
So back to the Big Apple she went, working for several years in the “dog-eat-dog” wine importing business, until her mom called and told her she seemed exhausted, convincing her to take a vacation to Mexico. Funny how life works. The trip wasn’t restful, but it did change her life.
During a horse ride through the Mexican countryside, Horan was hit by a dump truck, fracturing and dislocating her shoulder. In the weeks and months after her emergency surgery and recuperation, Horan reevaluated her life and decided to focus on her health and well-being, with an emphasis on Ayurvedic medicine. She enrolled in a school for the ancient Indian practice during the day and ran a wine bar in the evening. In many ways, she was doing what so many of us have done—pursue our true passion in every way we can while supporting the quest with a money gig that has nothing to do with our aims. We burn the candle from both ends.
Horan eventually realized the pace of New York City didn’t mesh with her new path. So last year, she jumped ship and came back to Charlottesville. She has since launched her own Ayurvedic consulting practice called Ahara Thrive, and gives talks on topics like digestion at Rebecca’s Natural Food, where she works part-time, and at Common Ground, the wellness cooperative started by fellow boomeranger, Kate Zuckerman. The two of them are part of a much larger movement to turn Charlottesville into a center for alternative health and well-being practices.
“It’s a budding energy. It’s not as though all of these people are becoming very successful right now, but there’s this growing energy and I think we’re on the brink of something,” Horan said.
There’s a generational divide that permeates health modalities like Ayurveda and holistic healing. The boomers put these kind of practices on the map in the ’60s and ’70s, but their efforts died with a whimper in the face of the rampant advances in medical technologies and specialties during the ’80s. As the health care industry expanded, people edged away from the more “hippified” alternatives. Now it’s the X-ers who are leading the movement back with the help of dogged boomers who never let go. The trick is to figure out how to turn a cultural movement that spans two generations into life-sustaining business practices, in short, to create a new local health economy.
“There’s not enough awareness yet for Ayurveda in Charlottesville, so my goal is to spread the awareness and create an Ayurvedic destination here in Charlottesville,” said Horan.
Horan said the younger generation is excited about learning alternative medicine techniques and that our parents’ generation is showing promise of reinvigorating a movement it once created. Having exhausted the promises of traditional western medicine, many Boomers are testing the temperature of preventative healing as they deal with a host of nascent diseases and ailments brought on with age.
Zuckerman is in the same boat, trying to breath a new energy into her hometown while attempting to bridge cultural and generational gaps by founding the egalitarian-based health and wellness center run out of the Jefferson School City Center.
After going to college in California, moving back to Charlottesville, and then living in L.A. for years, Zuckerman said when she finally boomeranged back to town for good in 2008, she was struck by how much Charlottesville was “a racially, economically, socially stratified city.”
Kate Zuckerman attended college in California and moved to Los Angeles after graduating. She returned home to Charlottesville for good in 2008 and started Common Ground, an alternative health cooperative located in the Jefferson School City Center. Zuckerman and her husband, Ethan, also run Barefoot Bucha, a Nelson County-based kombucha brewing company with regional distribution and a distinctly green footprint. Photo: Elli Williams.
So she opened Common Ground, offering sliding scale fees for a wide array of health and wellness classes, with the goal of attracting the poorest and wealthiest sectors of Charlottesville and putting them in rooms, classes, and scenarios where their commonalities are more apparent than their differences.
The accolades for Charlottesville as a quality-of-life town turn into a laundry list: Top 100 places to live, America’s smartest city, the No. 1 city to live in in the country, the seventh best place in the country to raise a family, etc. But what makes Charlottesville so attractive for young natives who are returning with aspirations of sparking progressive change and building a new generation of Charlottesvillians? It’s not that they buy into the hype, it’s that they don’t want to miss out on the fun.
For many of the boomerangers I spoke with, it’s not the hype of this town that has brought them back. They could care less about that. More, the answer lies in the quality of relationships that come along with the slightly oxymoronic fact that Charlottesville is a big small town.
