Unchecked, the rapacious kudzu vine creates a
landscape of green mounds called “kudzu sculptures,” which smother the trees and plants underneath.
What do you do when “the vine that ate the South” takes up residence in your neighborhood—and your neighbor doesn’t get rid of it?
One concerned Crozet resident pulled up some vines in a nascent kudzu infestation last year on property owned by the Rockbridge homeowners association—and was reprimanded by the HOA president for her trouble.
“No matter what your intentions were, it’s trespassing and not appreciated,” wrote Rockbridge president Sheilah Michaels on Nextdoor.
Michaels, who did not respond to emails from C-VILLE,suggested the HOA had a plan to deal with the vine, which can grow a foot a day. This year, the kudzu has spread and engulfed the 1.75 acres the HOA owns.
That’s what kudzu does. Originally from China and Japan, the woody perennial vine was introduced in the South as a forage crop and planted to control erosion in the early 20th century, according to a fact sheet from the Blue Ridge Partnership for Regional Invasive Species Management. It’s now eaten at least 7 million acres in the Southeast, and it’s heading north.
“It’s capable of taking down any tree,” says Rod Walker, an invasive plant expert with Blue Ridge PRISM. “The big fear is with no action over time, we’ll find ourselves covered with green mounds. It overtakes everything.”
Kudzu can completely overwhelm native species—or buildings—that get in its path. There are no animals, insects, or diseases to keep it in check, says Walker, who notes that it’s not invasive in China and Japan, where it has a natural predator.
Notoriously difficult to get rid of, the vine can take several years to completely eradicate. Its growth is fueled by a tuber that can get up to 12 feet long and when mature, weigh 200 to 300 pounds. “Cooperation among neighbors is essential where this beastly vine crosses property lines, because it grows rampantly and respects no borders,” says the PRISM fact sheet.
Goats are voracious eaters who are often brought in to tackle kudzu, but their grazing doesn’t destroy the plant’s vine-producing crowns, according to PRISM. Herbicides are one of the few options for large infestations, and in smaller infestations, cutting the crown from the tuber can kill the plant, according to Walker.
Some states consider plants like kudzu noxious weeds and require the landowner to get rid of it—but that’s not the case in Virginia, says Walker.
“The HOA has to understand there’s a problem and has to take action,” he says.
That can be expensive, says a resident in Rockbridge’s bordering neighborhood, Village at Highlands, where they’re already finding the vine.
Through Nextdoor, residents in Rockbridge and the surrounding subdivisions decided to take matters into their own hands and launch an assault on the infestation last week. Within hours, Rockbridge’s property manager emailed association members to warn that the HOA could be liable if non-residents were injured.
A half dozen neighbors still gathered to tackle the infestation last Saturday. Two volunteers report that a woman told them if they didn’t live in Rockbridge, they were trespassing and should leave—and that the HOA had contacted someone about removal.
Gloria Hill lives across the street from Rockbridge. “They should deal with it because if it takes over other people’s property, then they’re responsible,” she says. “I wouldn’t want that mess in my yard.”
Tom Oakley, pictured, says he doesn't want anyone else to get hustled by Charles Almy. Photo: Lisa Provence
Broker Charles Almy’s wife Katharine was involved in one of Albemarle’s longest—and most bizarre—lawsuits. She sued author John Grisham, St. Anne’s-Belfield development director Alan Swanson, and his wife Donna for emotional distress from accusing her of writing anonymous letters and for going through confidential school files to obtain a sample of her handwriting.
Now Almy finds himself in the defendant seat, accused by a client who alleges Almy pillaged the retirement funds he trusted him to invest.
Afton resident Tom Oakley, 73, admits he knows nothing about investing. He ran a sod business for years, which is how he met Almy. “Charles said he was a stockbroker,” says Oakley. “I had some money coming to me and he said he could help.”
More important to Oakley, both men were veterans of the Vietnam War. “There was this bond,” says Oakley. “I trusted him.”
Around November 2011, Oakley gave $32,000 to Almy to invest, according to the complaint filed in Albemarle Circuit Court.
He gave Almy $26,000 to buy Costco stock in April 2017, but Almy never made the purchase, says Oakley, who has watched the price of the stock increase since.
At a veterans event in October 2017, Oakley says Almy told him he was going to receive a check for $38,000. Unbeknownst to Oakley, that money came from shares in his brokerage account that Almy had sold, says the lawsuit. Oakley says he gave the funds to Almy to invest, but that didn’t happen.
By January 2018 when they met for breakfast, Almy said he was down on his luck and asked to borrow $1,500, says Oakley. Oakley began to lend money to his veteran pal, even taking out a line of credit, he says.
When he lent Almy $15,000, Oakley says he asked Almy to sign a promissory note. “He kept losing the agreement,” says Oakley.
Finally, on a 2019 trip to Mexico, Oakley says he had time to reflect and surmised, “I think I’m getting screwed.”
When he returned, he gathered his paperwork and went to Almy’s employer, Rede Wealth, which is also named in the lawsuit. “They said they’d make everything right,” but ultimately balked at a settlement, says Oakley.
According to the complaint, Rede co-founders Matt Dawson and Steve McNaughton had worked with Almy at other firms and should have known he had four earlier investment violations that involved senior citizens and which are a matter of public record.
Richmond attorney Todd Ratner says, “Rede Wealth vigorously denies the allegations and will continue to defend itself and the firm’s reputation against these false allegations.”
The company filed a lawsuit against Almy in January.
Almy told C-VILLE he wanted to consult his attorney before speaking. When asked who the lawyer is, Almy said he blanked. “I’ve forgotten his name.”
“What hurts the most is he broke the bond,” says Oakley, who compares the experience to being in combat. “I felt Charles abandoned me. He took advantage of me and used me.”
Oakley wants $5.25 million plus the nearly $100,000 he says he lent Almy. A trial is scheduled for February 16, 2021.
Charlottesville's Confederate statues continue to attract nighttime activity.
Confederate monuments have toppled across the South since the slaying of George Floyd at the hands of police. In Charlottesville, statues of generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson still stand, and continue to attract nighttime patrols from both statue defenders and opponents.
In the wee hours of June 28—three days before a law went into effect allowing Virginia localities to determine the destinies of their own Confederate war memorials—Lee was once again splattered with red paint, and later that night, police responded to a call about a man with a gun at Court Square Park, where Jackson resides.
Statue defenders have been on alert for weeks: In Richmond, after the United Daughters of the Confederacy headquarters was set on fire May 31 and several Confederate monuments were graffitied, local statue supporters organized sign-up sheets to defend the generals.
Brian Lambert, a member of the Gordonsville Grays chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, called for monument guards on social media. “Here in Charlottesville, we were able to stop an assault on our local Memorials by Antifa, with the cooperation of CPD,” he wrote.
It’s the alleged cooperation with the Charlottesville Police Department that troubles anti-racist activists.
Activist Molly Conger tweeted on June 19 that when she went to check on the “confederate vigilantes,” one of them called 911, and seven police cars responded.
UVA prof Jalane Schmidt regularly leads tours of Confederate markers in the Court Square area. After a June 11 tour, “I was stopped by police because of suspicious behavior,” says Schmidt. “They called in about 30 officers,” and had paddy wagons and squad cars circling the parks while officers questioned tour participants. She says she pointed to the armed statue defenders as those who were suspicious.
A Facebook page called Save the Robert E. Lee Statue, which lists a link to the Monument Fund (one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against the city for its vote to remove the Confederate generals), thanks the volunteer statue guards.
“Nightly, there are cars and people on foot casing the monuments, hoping for an opportunity to strike,” says the post. “Social media trolls have threatened to ‘dox’ the monument guards; and those standing guard have been verbally assaulted and had the Police called on them with fabricated stories of threats of harm.”
Attorney Buddy Weber, a plaintiff in the lawsuit and the group’s spokesperson, did not respond to phone calls from C-VILLE.
Lambert declined to comment when contacted by C-VILLE, and we didn’t get to ask whether he was the man with a gun reported to police June 28.
Schmidt says her neighbors are “so unnerved seeing these guys with guns that they stopped walking in the parks.”
Robert Klonoski lives across from Market Street Park and has observed the statue protectors almost every night. “I don’t like having people hanging around my neighborhood with guns,” he says.
Charlottesville Police spokesperson Tyler Hawn declined to comment on how many calls police have gotten about gun-toting statue defenders or about would-be vandals, and refused to provide any information on the June 28 call about an armed man at Court Square Park.
“The vandalism incidents in front of the police department and at Market Street Park are under investigation,” Hawn says.
According to the Emergency Communications Center, 30 calls were made in June about suspicious behavior in the two parks.
By June 29, Lee had been scrubbed clean, although a Black Lives Matter T-shirt hung from Traveller’s bridle. Jock Yellott, a plaintiff in the statue lawsuit against the city, sat on a bench in Market Street Park reading Aristotle in the early evening.
A stream of out-of-towners came through to inspect the statues. Rhode Islander Marlene Yang had already seen the graffitied Lee statue in Richmond. “It really opens a lot of discussion on what people think is important,” she says.
A visitor from New York, who declined to give his name, says, “For the record, we love the statues.” He had just been to Gettysburg. “We wanted to see them while they’re still here,” says his wife.
Even the Monument Fund, which won an injunction prohibiting removal, acknowledges the statues’ days in city parks are numbered. The plaintiffs, who are still seeking attorneys’ fees, filed a motion June 5 with Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Rick Moore to partially dissolve the injunction.
The city has appealed to the Virginia Supreme Court to entirely dissolve the injunction so it can proceed under the new state law.
A statue supporter, who spoke only on the condition he not be named, is concerned about the safety of the Confederate monuments, which have been repeatedly vandalized. “People of goodwill are looking for a place to put them,” he says. “We can’t do that if they’re destroyed. Whether you like them or not, vandalism isn’t a good idea.”
While Richmond hoisted Stonewall Jackson off his pedestal July 1, Charlottesville continues to wait for the legal process to unwind.
“The nice thing about here is there’s a clear exit ramp with the motion to the Virginia Supreme Court,” says Schmidt. “It’s slower, but at least I’m seeing steady progress.”
Jeff Lenert's progressive talk radio station WPVC has been forced off the air by communications giant Saga. Photo: Eze Amos
WPVC has been a reliable progressive talk radio voice on Charlottesville’s airwaves since 2015. But on June 17, the low-frequency station went off the air. Michigan-based corporation Saga Communications has reshaped the Charlottesville radio landscape in recent months—Saga has laid off staff from the local stations they own, and filed legal petitions to shut down competition.
When Jeff Lenert started WPVC, “the whole idea in developing the radio station was to turn it on and pass the mic to people to let them tell their stories,” he says.
WPVC had Black Lives Matter organizers on in April 2017, one of the first local outlets to do so, says Lenert. The station also offered the area’s only Spanish-language programming.
“So many people are asking why,” says Mindy Acosta, who hosted a show in Spanish. “It’s very sad. We tried to give information to the people.”
Last year, Saga petitioned the FCC to shut down WPVC and four other low-frequency radio stations in Charlottesville. The petition alleged the five small stations’ underwriting amounted to commercials, which is forbidden for non-commercial broadcasters.
Lenert says his lawyer assured him the petition wouldn’t stick. But legal bills—combined with threats from “neo-Confederates” to Lenert’s underwriters—spelled doom for the small station.
“We generated $1,048 last month in underwriting revenue,” says Lenert. “How [does Saga] know I exist? Am I taking away their money?”
Saga announced June 18 that it was temporarily suspending its quarterly cash dividend, a sign that it’s eyeing further acquisitions. “By preserving the company’s cash position, the company believes market conditions may present attractive acquisition opportunities,” says a Saga statement.
Lenert predicts that during the next FCC filing window for frequencies, Saga will try to take over 94.7.
Meanwhile, over at the Saga-owned Charlottesville Radio Group, six people were unceremoniously shown the door, including some of the stations’ best-known personalities.
The Corner’s Jeff Sweatman was given the ax March 20 while his morning show was still on the air, although he says “no comment” when asked about the manner of his ouster.
Adam Rondeau, co-host of country WCVL’s “Brondeau Show,” was given his pink slip April 15. His co-host, Bryan Shine, decided to depart as well. “The decision to leave was because they weren’t investing in the station and they weren’t investing in the community,” says Shine.
“They make money hand over fist,” he adds.
“Big Greasy Breakfast” host Max Hoecker had been with the Rose Hill Drive stations since 1989, when they were locally owned by Eure Communications, and on 3WV since 1992. He got pulled into the general manager’s office June 5, told the “Big Greasy Breakfast” was no more—it’s been replaced with a syndicated show—and sent on his way.
And Rob Schilling’s local WINA talk radio show has been sliced in half to one hour.
Last fall (pre-pandemic), the company canned operations manager and WINA morning host Rick Daniels, who worked there for more than 30 years. And longtime WINA morning co-host Jane Foy learned she was out of a job the night before she returned from vacation.
Charlottesville Radio Group GM Mike Chiumento did not respond to requests from C-VILLE Weekly.
“We got a lot of lip service that we were a local station,” says Shine, who is now hosting a podcast with Rondeau.
Lenert thinks Charlottesville Radio Group and Saga could afford to have the “Big Greasy Breakfast,” and coexist with stations like WPVC, which generate $1,000 a month. “But they choose not to in an effort to dominate the local radio market,” he says, “which appears to me every month less and less local and more syndicated.”
Playwright and LGBTQ rights activist Larry Kramer appeared at the Virginia Film Festival in 2015 to discuss his life’s work. Photo: Courtesy of Virginia Film Festival
Reposted from 2015. Larry Kramer died from pneumonia on May 27, 2020.
Larry Kramer has had his finger on the pulse of what it is to be a gay man for the past 50 years. His 1978 novel, Faggots, and its depiction of the partying, promiscuous ’70s made him a pariah on Fire Island. His play, The Normal Heart, captured the fear, anger and heartbreak as a mysterious fatal disease decimated the gay community in the 1980s.
However, it’s his work as a gay rights activist that may be the first thing that pops into people’s mind. Kramer is the founder of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. He also founded the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power—ACT UP—a group that used civil disobedience to protest the lack of funding, research and treatment for people with AIDS in the ’80s. Its first demonstration blocked rush hour traffic in New York in front of the Food and Drug Administration, the agency Kramer believed was dragging its feet in coming up with treatment for the HIV positive.
“I have no idea how many times I’ve been in jail,” Kramer told C-VILLE via e-mail because of difficulties hearing on the phone. “Less time than I’ve been in hospitals, I’m afraid.”
In 1988, Kramer discovered that he had hepatitis B, was HIV positive and in dire need of a new liver. Mount Sinai Hospital refused to put him on its organ transplant list because people who were HIV positive were considered poor candidates for transplants due to their projected short life spans. Kramer became the poster boy for AIDS/homosexual discrimination, and after news reports that he was dying, he received a new liver in 2001.
It’s “still in good shape, I’m told,” he says.
He says his writing and his activism feed each other. “AIDS gave me my subject matter that set my creativity on fire,” says Kramer.
Growing up Jewish in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Kramer has been an atheist since he was a teen. “But being Jewish has made me fascinated in how we have been eliminated during so much of history, just as gays have,” he says. “I write about this to a huge degree in my new book.”
That book, The American People: Volume I, isn’t the first time he’s observed parallels between Jews and gays. During the AIDS epidemic, he wrote 1989’s Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist.
It’s been more than 30 years since acquired immune deficiency syndrome was first observed, and a diagnosis of human immunodeficiency virus infection is no longer a death knell—Kramer has been HIV positive for 27 years. Last year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled states cannot discriminate against gays who want to marry, but assessing the changes he’s seen in his lifetime is not a question Kramer likes to answer.
“We still are not a unified united population, so I don’t think that enough has changed to congratulate ourselves,” he writes. “There is still much work to do. That AIDS is still a plague after 35 years proves how powerless we are.”
The 80-year-old makes his first trip to Charlottesville for the Virginia Film Festival screening of the documentary, Larry Kramer in Love and Anger, and for An Evening with Larry Kramer, both November 8.
Kramer says his husband, David Webster, was “heartbroken” he was turned down to study at the University of Virginia, and went to Columbia instead. Webster, an architect, has been here often and is very knowledgeable about the area’s history, says Kramer. “He knows all about Charlottesville and Jefferson, etc.,” he says.
During the inevitable Q&As with Kramer, here’s a tip about a question he hates: How would you like to be remembered? (C-VILLE asked anyway so you won’t have to.)
“I would like my writing to be recognized for its excellence, rather than its controversy,” he says. “I am usually reviewed as a loud-mouthed activist, not as a good writer.”
Fans of his 1969 Oscar-nominated screenplay for D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love would disagree.
Entrepreneur Oliver Kuttner says he has the infrastructure to quarantine COVID-19 infected people in an RV village, but needs help to make that happen. Photo: Elli Williams
Entrepreneur and inventor Oliver Kuttner has been known to step up in a crisis. In 2005, he loaded the Starlight Express, a Charlottesville-New York luxury bus service he co-founded, and headed south with supplies to aid victims of Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi.
Now Kuttner has a plan to house those who are infected with COVID-19 and need a place to quarantine: a 157-acre industrial site he owns near Lynchburg and the James River. Initially he wanted to build small bungalows, but then he decided RVs with their own ventilation systems could house 7,000 people more safely than hotels or dormitories.
“I have the infrastructure ready,” he says. “I’m halfway there.” But it’s the second half of his $80-million vision that’s more challenging.
“It’s bigger than what I can do,” Kuttner says. “I’m not a health care provider.”
He wants a larger organization like FEMA, the Red Cross, or state government to partner with him for what he says is a very cost-effective way to isolate infected people. “I need someone to put their arms around me,” he says. “I have a plan to flatten the curve in central Virginia.”
And Kuttner, who lives part time in Germany, believes the U.S. is where Germany was seven weeks ago. He’s convinced that if he can’t get the RV park off the ground by April 10, it will be too late to make it happen before health care capacity in the Thomas Jefferson Health District is overwhelmed.
One person interested in a similar plan and who has met with Kuttner is Lockn organizer Dave Frey, who envisions putting campers at NASCAR racetracks. “I know where to get RVs,” says Frey.
“David has experience setting up a facility for thousands of people,” says Kuttner.
But so far, Kuttner says he’s gotten no response from FEMA or elected officials. FEMA referred C-VILLE to its how to help webpage, but did not answer whether the agency would get involved in a project like Kuttner’s.
And as the pandemic continues its exponential growth, Kuttner says, “I would not be surprised if [this plan] never flies.”
The RV retreat isn’t Kuttner’s only COVID-19 effort. On Friday, he said he’d just procured 49 ventilators from his connections in China and plans to offer them to New York, where Governor Andrew Cuomo has put out a plea for the respiratory equipment.
Kuttner, who won the $5-million 2010 International X Prize for his design of a 102-miles-per-gallon car, also has finished a prototype for a patient transport vehicle that has separate ventilation for the driver. “I may build 10 next week,” he says. “I’m not sitting at home playing Netflix,” he says of his 18-hour days.
“I think we have a huge disaster coming,” says Kuttner. “I hope I have egg on my face in the end, but from what I’ve read, I think we’re underestimating it.”
As mayor of Charlottesville during the violent white supremacist invasion in 2017 that killed Heather Heyer and injured dozens, Mike Signer earned a place in the city’s history, and in the national spotlight.
Now, Signer has turned his leadership during the Summer of Hate into a book—one that, like the Charlottesville book written by former governor Terry McAuliffe, will not be launched in Charlottesville. (According to his publisher’s website, a book launch was planned for Richmond on March 10. The ensuing book tour does not include Charlottesville, though Signer says an event is tentatively planned at UVA law school.)
Signer’s arc in the mayorship—from a triumphant declaration of the city as the “capital of the resistance” in January 2017, to decamping from the infamous “Blood on your hands” council meeting post-Unite the Right and being called to task by his fellow city councilors that August—provided a trajectory previously unseen on City Council, one worthy of a flawed hero in a Greek tragedy.
Indeed, the title of his first-person account, Cry Havoc, comes from Marc Antony’s battle cry of “havoc” in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The reference to classical tragedy continues in the book’s preface, which lists a cast of major characters from the Summer of Hate.
Signer, who faced a barrage of invective at almost every council meeting during his term from 2016 to 2019 and a parody Twitter account that describes him as “Founder, Capital of the Resistance & really important guy,” has his share of local detractors, some of whom will see his account as self-serving.
His response: “I think they should read the book. I try to be extremely honest and self-reflecting about my mistakes. I talk about the dangers of scapegoating. I talk about how I was tempted to scapegoat others. That certainly wasn’t the aim of the book.”
His intention, he says, was to provide “a useful first-person account from my perspective of this event, which it seems clear is going to be among modern American history’s touchstone events,” like Selma or Hurricane Katrina or Kent State.
He says, “I had a really unique perspective on this.”
And Signer was in the unique position of feeling the hate from both sides. He received enough anti-Semitic trolling from white nationalists that the Anti-Defamation League contacted him and reported it had compiled a file with 800 attacks. From critics on the left, he was dubbed “neo-fascist” and “Hitler’s best friend.”
What happened in Charlottesville, he says, is a microcosm of “democracy under siege” during the Trump era. “I have really deep feelings about Trumpism across the country,” adds Signer, who also authored 2009’s Demagogue: The Fight to Save Democracy from Its Worst Enemies.
In Cry Havoc, he explains some of the “more risky” actions he took as mayor, such as declaring the city the capital of the resistance during a giant press conference that drew hundreds, but also put the city in an awkward position because he didn’t obtain a permit, which made it difficult to cite Richard Spencer for his unpermitted tiki-torch rally later in Lee Park, according to the Heaphy Report.
Among the things he’d do differently now is explain more frequently the limitations of the mayor in Charlottesville’s city-manager-as-CEO form of government, he says.
He doesn’t deny pushing the bounds of the weak-mayor system, and when he blamed then-city manager Maurice Jones and former police chief Al Thomas in a Facebook post for the failures of August 12, he faced censure by his colleagues on council.
In the book, Signer calls most of their complaints “petty or plain false.” He chose to apologize rather than put the city through further turmoil by fighting the disciplinary action, he writes, and he agreed to conditions, such as not meeting with staff alone or making pronouncements as mayor without another councilor with him. However, in the footnotes, he points out that he ended up ignoring most of the restrictions placed on him.
He reconsiders the city’s attempts to discourage counterprotesters from showing up when the KKK came to town July 8, 2017, and the suggestion that locals should “not take the bait.” That could have been cast differently to acknowledge the people who wanted to bear witness to hate, says Signer.
His leap in front of the LOVE sign on the Downtown Mall August 17 is another wince-inducing incident. “It was totally tone deaf,” he concedes.
The book reveals previously unknown details—although not without contradiction. Signer alleges that Bellamy called him after the August 12 debacle to say both Jones and Thomas should be fired. Bellamy denies that he ever said that.
According to Signer, the Virginia Municipal League threatened to cancel the city’s liability insurance after he took aim at Jones and Thomas on Facebook. It also demanded the independent review that became known as the Heaphy Report not be released to the public.
“Thus I was put in a virtual straitjacket,” writes Signer. “I was told in no uncertain terms not to say anything further about the failures that had occurred, lest I expose myself personally to the cost of defending claims.”
One of the biggest struggles from the three white supremacist events of 2017—Spencer’s tiki-torch march around the Lee statue in May, the KKK in July, and Unite the Right in August—was “wrestling with the First Amendment,” says Signer.
He was repeatedly confronted with “First Amendment absolutism,” an interpretation by federal courts that he says made it almost impossible for state and local governments to limit potentially violent events. In his book, he introduces little-known 20th-century Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who argued for more practical restrictions in the face of “planned imminent incitement.”
Signer, who’s currently vice president and general counsel at local digital product developer WillowTree, defends council’s attempts to move the rally to McIntire Park because of public safety concerns. “I worked with City Council to override the city manager, police chief, and city attorney,” he says, hiring an outside law firm to inform Jason Kessler his permit would be granted for McIntire Park.
Not surprisingly, Kessler sued, and on the night of August 11, just before Kessler’s neo-Nazi cohorts marched through UVA grounds with torches chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” a federal judge ruled the rally would stay in then-called Emancipation Park.
After the attack on UVA students standing in counterprotest around the Thomas Jefferson statue in front of the Rotunda, Signer says he got a text from then-UVA president Teresa Sullivan, asking the city to file a “motion for reconsideration based on new evidence”—the violence that had just occurred. But it was too late.
In his penultimate chapter, “Overcoming Extremism,” Signer details some of the lessons learned from Charlottesville’s experience. One of those is to separate antagonistic groups, which didn’t happen here and which “we wanted to do at McIntire Park,” says Signer.
When Governor Ralph Northam banned weapons from the Capitol grounds at the January 20 Second Amendment rally, Signer believes it was because of lessons learned from Charlottesville.
History and conflict are complicated and rarely play out in black and white. The best learning comes from the gray areas, he says, not from Hallmark or Hollywood treatments that neatly tie up events. “There’s a tradition that you see the truth and the learning in the honest account of the messy parts,” he says.
And one of the most valuable lessons of 2017 was it “showed the country how violent the alt-right is.”
At the first City Council meeting after the violence of Unite the Right, on August 21, 2017, furious protesters took over the dais and called for Signer’s resignation. Photo: Eze Amos
‘What is Mike Signer saying?’
“The Hon. Michael Signer” (as he’s identified on his book jacket) says he has tried to be “extremely honest and self-reflecting” in his new book. But it may take more than that to rehab our former mayor’s reputation here in Charlottesville.
In the fallout from the white nationalist rallies in the summer of 2017, complaints weren’t limited to the fellow city councilors who officially censured him or to the residents calling for him to resign. As newly unearthed public records indicate, local Democratic mega-donor Sonjia Smith, whose daughter was assaulted at the rally, also criticized his performance after Unite the Right.
“I’ll add my voice to the voices of many saying, ‘Why did the police stand by and do nothing?’ and, ‘What is Mike Signer saying?’” Smith wrote in an email to public relations specialist Susan Payne.
“Mike is not doing himself any favors in his discussion of the police response,” she added. “I listen to him, and I realize that I will do everything in my power to stop him from being in a position of authority over me and the people I love.”
Payne forwarded the response to Signer, who replied, “This is a problem.”
Rents are rising at Barracks Road Shopping Center.
Barracks Road Shopping Center’s go-to location for bird feeders, peacock wind spinners, and outdoor furniture is nearly empty now. Plow & Hearth will end its 30-year-plus run at Barracks Road March 1, and increased rent was a factor in the decision to shutter the store.
“Our lease was coming to term and it had some economics that didn’t work for us,” says Paul Abugattas, Plow & Hearth director of retail operations. “Our online business is healthy while retail continues to decline.” The company has closed five of its 23 stores in the past year, and plans to invest more in its Madison properties, including a flagship store there, he says.
Ten or so employees at the Barracks Road location will soon be out of jobs.
The area’s oldest shopping center once boasted a zero percent vacancy rate, but about 6 percent of Barracks Road’s square footage currently is unoccupied, according to its website. That includes the still-empty, 16,000-square-foot former CVS store and Brixx Pizza.
The Brixx space is available for an eye-popping $25,000 a month, according to Jerry Miller, CEO of VMV Brands and I Love CVille Real Estate. “Two different restaurateurs told me that,” he says. Asked to confirm, Federal Realty, which owns the shopping center, says it does “not share details pertaining to leases.”
“Because the rents are getting to be so high,” says Miller, “the local mom-and-pop and brick-and-mortar stores are priced out.” Those establishments, he says, will filter to midtown (West Main) and downtown, where former Barracks Road tenants Shenanigans and Lynne Goldman Elements, respectively, have migrated. He predicts Barracks Road will become a “bastion of national brands that have very little ties to this community.”
Many retailers across the country are struggling and closing stores, despite the strong economy. The New York Times reports 9,000 shuttered in 2019, with another 1,200 closings announced so far this year. Fashion Square Mall has seen a steady stream of vacancies, losing anchor Sears and most recently Gap.
At Barracks Road, “Our business is down from a year ago,” says HotCakes co-owner Keith Rosenfeld. The gourmet café and bakery has been in the shopping center since 1992, and he doesn’t remember seeing so many open spaces.
He says Barracks Road is “still the best, most established shopping center in town,” with Stonefield in that same high-end niche. But if local specialty shops can’t afford to be there, “you get more schlock, more national chains.”
And restaurant chains make it tougher for establishments like HotCakes, which makes everything in-house and employs around 50 people earning double-digit hourly wages.
With the rise of e-commerce, the trend in the shopping center industry is more “lifestyle experiences,” says Rosenfeld, because “visitation and spending in malls is going down.” Some, like Stonefield, have a movie theater to draw people, and there are more restaurants.
“Unless the industry can figure out how to get people to eat two to three lunches, it’s very hard to grow sales,” says Rosenfeld.
Many locals have wondered about the viability of Stonefield, which is losing Pier 1, and saw the closure of Travinia and Rocksalt last year.
But others say business is just fine. “Stonefield has worked out great for us,” says third-generation retailer Mark Mincer, who opened a Mincer’s there in 2013. “We’re reaching a lot of area people who don’t necessarily come to the Corner.” And his business has gotten better since L.L. Bean opened next door, he says.
Mincer notes that his rent goes up 3 percent every year at both the Corner and Stonefield. “I don’t love it,” he says. “If we want to go to Ruckersville, we could find something cheaper.”
The Times attributes the decline of retail not so much to e-commerce, but to factors like big box stores and income inequality, which mean retailers catering to high- and low-income customers are seeing growth, but those targeting the middle class, which has seen an unrelenting decline in income, are suffering.
HotCakes’ Rosenfeld agrees, noting Charlottesville’s “extremely high rents and cost of living.” Would-be shoppers paying $1,200 a month in rent for an apartment don’t have as much disposable income, he says. He also thinks the number of centers that have opened in the past few years have impacted existing stores.
The upcoming opening of Chick-fil-A in Barracks Road Shopping Center is expected to generate traffic to the mall—although that isn’t likely to help establishments like HotCakes.
Federal’s VP of asset management, Deirdre Johnson, says the center has recently added Zoom and Club Pilates “in response to the demand for boutique fitness.” Spring Street Boutique and a Mahana Fresh franchise will be opening soon.
“Most of the new stores are locally owned, providing Barracks Road a healthy mix of local, regional, and national merchants to best serve our community,” she says.
Spring Street owner Cynthia Schroeder is bucking the trend of area retailers exiting Barracks Road. “I think it’s the first place people think of to go shopping,” she says. “It’s one of the best malls in the country. It’s where people go to go clothes shopping.”
She declines to say what her rent is, but acknowledges: “It’s not inexpensive.”
Schroeder will close her Downtown Mall store and expects to open the new one in the spring. She isn’t worried about the empty storefronts at Barracks Road. “I think they’re going to fill those.”
Monumental Justice demonstrators rallied at the state capitol in Richmond on Wednesday. Photo: Eze Amos
Two busloads of activists from Charlottesville, plus several dozen from Richmond and Norfolk, brought their campaign for local control over Confederate monuments to Richmond this week, rallying in front of the state Capitol Wednesday.
Six legislators were scheduled to speak, but the first day of the session interfered, and only Delegate Sally Hudson managed to dash out of the House to talk to members of the statewide Monumental Justice coalition.
The issue of Confederate monuments has roiled Charlottesville for years, culminating in 2017’s deadly Unite the Right rally, ostensibly to protest City Council’s vote to remove generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson from downtown parks. In 2012, then councilor Kristin Szakos, who helped organize Wednesday’s rally, was widely castigated for daring to suggest the monuments should go.
Last year, around a dozen Charlottesvillians showed up for a 7:30am subcommittee meeting, where then-delegate David Toscano’s bill for local control was killed in a 6-2 vote, with one Democrat joining the Republican majority.
This year, organizers see a change in the wind, with a Democratic majority in both houses of the General Assembly, and Governor Ralph Northam saying he’d sign a bill into law.
The city of Norfolk filed a federal lawsuit against the state in August, alleging the law that prohibits removal of war memorials throttles the city’s free expression. And two days before the rally, Richmond’s City Council passed a resolution asking legislators to let the city determine the destiny of its Confederate statues.
Rally organizer Lisa Draine, whose daughter was injured August 12, 2017, when a neo-Nazi ploughed into a crowd of counterprotesters on Fourth Street, is with the local affiliate, Take ‘Em Down Cville. “We’re mobilizing earlier with more force,” she says, and with more legislators committed. She cautions, “it’s not a slam dunk,” and Draine plans to return to Richmond to lobby legislators.
That was Hudson’s advice to the ralliers—to tell their stories to the 140 legislators in the General Assembly. “You have to be here again and tell my colleagues why you need monumental justice now.”
She’s carrying a bill co-sponsored by Norfolk Delegate Jay Jones, who received a standing ovation in February when he described the effects of racism in the wake of Virginia’s blackface scandals. In the Senate, Senator Creigh Deeds is co-sponsoring a bill with Senator Mamie Locke, chair of the Democratic caucus.
UVA professor Jalane Schmidt acknowledges learning from showing up last year on the day of the subcommittee vote, when she believes the decision had already been made. “The energy feels different,” she says. “It’s more organized this year statewide.” That broader response, she says, shows local control of statues “is not just a boutique issue of the city of Charlottesville.”
Said Schmidt, “Today we’re here to call for a new dominion.”
In keeping with that theme, the two buses from Charlottesville swung by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to see artist Kehinde Wiley’s recently installed statue. “Rumors of War” repositions a contemporary African American in classic equestrian statuary, and it sits facing a facility of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the organization responsible for many of the Confederate monuments that dot the Southern landscape. With paper cups of bubby beverages, the activists toasted the new monument.
Bystanders at Jalane Schmidt's monuments tour on Monday night, December 9. Photo: Andy Orban.
Nearly four years after a student’s petition called for their ouster, three years after a City Council vote to remove them, two years after a deadly white supremacist rally in support of them, and months after a judge ruled generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson must stay, Confederate statues continue to roil Charlottesville.
In the latest skirmishes, vandalizations of the statues have prompted Confederate monument supporters to mount their own security measures, including the installation of a trail camera and a tripwire at the Jackson statue, and hiring private security.
Those who want the statues removed say they’ve been accosted while traveling through Market Street and Court Square parks by people impersonating police and city employees, creating a confusing and dangerous situation.
UVA prof and activist Jalane Schmidt says she was questioned December 8 by a man in civilian attire with a badge purporting to be a Charlottesville cop, who asked what she was doing in the public park, which is open until 11pm.
Schmidt, who regularly conducts tours of Confederate markers around Court Square, says the private security efforts intimidate the public in what historically was a whites-only park and “are making the police an extension of their neo-Confederate organizations.”
Following her encounter with the alleged undercover cop, Schmidt led an impromptu 9pm tour December 9 that was attended by around three dozen people—including a few monument supporters. A member of the National Lawyers Guild offered a brief tutorial on citizen rights during encounters with police in public spaces.
Activist Molly Conger says she was told to leave the park December 7 by a man wearing a green vest who claimed he worked for the city. The man identified himself as Mr. Green and said he was securing the statue. When pressed on which department he worked for, the man replied, “The statue,” says Conger.
She’s also spotted convicted tarp-ripper Brian Lambert, who was banned from the parks, wearing a city-logoed sweatshirt in hope of looking like a city employee, according to a video he posted. Lambert also was on the periphery of the tour. He did not return a phone call from C-VILLE.
A group called the Gordonsville Grays, a newly chartered Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter to which Lambert belongs, says on social media that its members have worked to protect the statues and patrol the parks. Virginia Flaggers, known for hoisting giant Confederate battle flags along interstates, will be “contracting private security to give the folks on the ground a hand,” according to its blog. Neither the Grays nor the Flaggers responded to requests for comment.
After a couple of teens were spotted in one of the parks, there was talk on neo-Confederate sites of shooting them, according to Schmidt and Conger. The Grays also have posted that Conger is on their “watch list.”
“It’s a continuance of state-sanctioned white supremacy,” says Conger. “They’re openly organizing to shoot people.”
Grays commander William Shifflett is also associated with a neo-Confederate group called Identity Dixie, according to Conger. That group, says The Southern Poverty Law Center, helped organize the Unite the Right rally. Shifflett did not respond to a Facebook message from C-VILLE.
“The Charlottesville Police Department recently received information that private citizens are walking through the parks during hours when the park is open to everyone,” says spokesman Tyler Hawn in an email. “These citizens have been seen wearing reflective safety vests, and are believed to be concerned over the recent vandalisms at both parks. The police department has not received a report of any of these citizens acting inappropriately.”
Nor, he says, have police received any reports of citizens being “accosted” in the parks. He notes that officers are either in uniform, or, if in plain clothes, “carry appropriate identification and will present it to a citizen should there be a concern as to their identity or authority.”
Anyone with information about the vandalizations is encouraged to call police, he adds, and a citizen has donated a $1,285 reward for information leading to an arrest.
Local Cynthia Neff was at the park as a legal observer for the National Lawyers Guild, and says she witnessed the private security guards. “I worry it will have a chilling effect on people wanting to assemble or access this public resource, especially if it is patrolled by people that are perceived as a direct threat to anti-racist residents and visitors.”
John Heyden, 66, a Charlottesville native who says he has been “guarding” the parks, attended Schmidt’s December 9 monument tour. He confirms he photographed Conger and says he’s given license plate numbers of people coming in and out of the parks to police. “They’ve basically ignored them,” he says.
Heyden says he’s not a neo-Confederate, nor is he a Gordonsville Gray, “I don’t know what that is.”
He’s not worried about the potential for violence in the parks—at least not from anyone he knows. “Wouldn’t you consider the damage they’re doing [to the statues] violence in the first place?” he asks.
Both statues have been repeatedly spray painted with messages like “1619,” referring to the year the first enslaved Africans were brought to Virginia, and “this is racist.” The base of the Jackson statue has suffered noticeable chisel damage, including the figures of Valor and Faith losing their noses.
Resolution may end up coming from Richmond, where a Democratic majority takes hold of both houses of the General Assembly in January. Several bills have been filed to strike the Virginia law that prohibits localities from ditching Confederate statuary.
