Six months ago, in our “2006 Development Forecast,” C-VILLE reported not on how Charlottesville and Albemarle have already changed, but on how our home was going to change. Hours spent adding up rows and rows of numbers from the City and County’s planning offices yielded startling totals: a potential for 18,725 new residential units and 6,235,451 more square feet of commercial space on the way in the next decade or so. Those numbers got us thinking about what we stand to lose—green vistas, sleepy Main Streets, convenience stores, parkland—to make way for the newer, bigger and (we’re told) better buildings ahead. This piece on Crozet kicks off an occasional series, “Places We’ll Lose.” Ten years from now, someone might look back at these accounts to find the answer to that much-asked, rarely answered question, posed by residents of rapidly developing towns everywhere: “What used to be there?”
Crozet is a one-stoplight town, and that one stoplight is always green. There are four stop signs at the intersection of Three Notch’d Road and Crozet Avenue, but even in rush-hour traffic the back-up is never more than four or five cars deep.
On a recent perfect evening, the sky is blue, and no, there’s not a cloud in the sky. The late sun shines down from the west onto the main drag, Crozet Avenue, with that certain slant of light that makes the entire town feel like a dollhouse. The occasional car drives the speed limit through downtown: past the charmingly rickety Crozet Pizza, then right at the intersection, past the hardware store and ramshackle bar on the left, and the white-washed post office, church and Mountainside Senior Living facility on the right.
Mountainside dwarfs everything. Its 25 balconies are strewn with a selection of plastic lawn furniture. A solitary elderly gentleman enjoys the sun on the second floor. He’s not reading or talking on the phone; he’s just sitting, head back, eyes closed, lazy as a cat. Merengue music wafts toward him from the speakers of a nearby restaurant.
Just beyond this cluster of commerce, life is pure country. Someone has set up a volleyball net, the middle of which sags nearly to the ground. Aside from that, it’s all tall grasses and patches of dusty red dirt. This, every sign seems to say, is the stuff of a Thornton Wilder play.
Yet this strip of romantic small-town scenery is scheduled for a facelift. As per the Crozet Master Plan that was passed by the Board of Supervisors in late 2004—a grand vision for the town’s growth that rethinks Crozet’s roads, town center, and overall scale—the County bought an acre of land in downtown Crozet last March. It is intended to provide the canvas for the town’s redesigned center: new roads, improved roads, sidewalks. In addition, a new library, park and civic center are also in the plans. Add a 2,000-home development that’s on the way, and 10 years from now Crozet will be a distant, suburban cousin of the charming country mouse it is today.
Across from Mountain-side, at the corner bar that marks the epicenter of town, the Yankees play the Red Sox on two flat-screen TVs. It’s that awkward hour between dinner and late night, so the bar is nearly deserted, giving it the aura of a lonely Wild West saloon. Crowded together at one end, however, a quartet of carpenters named Ricky, Spider, Mr. Handsome and Mr. Famous (for reasons that soon become clear) are bellied up to their beers after a 14-hour day working construction on Noah’s Ark.
The guys are covered in cedar dust from the huge beached boat they’ve been building here since January for a Hollywood movie filming just down the road. Since their first week on the job, the foursome has only missed two nights of after-work brews: the day they worked 16 hours straight, and the day they worked 20. Like a uniform, they sport 5 o’clock shadows and baseball hats.
The 5-year-old daughter of Mr. Hand-some’s Crozet girlfriend gave both Mr. Handsome and Mr. Famous their nicknames. Mr. Handsome for all of the obvious reasons; Mr. Famous because he always hides behind a pair of sports sunglasses.
Spider shrugs when asked about the provenance of his moniker. “I don’t know…” he trails off. He’s the quiet one.
“You should tell her about Danger! Or Skidmarks! Or Dangler! Or Muffin!” guffaws Rick. “We all got nicknames.” They crack up as the highlights of some gruesome (yet ultimately nonfatal) tales of construction accidents get recounted. Saws are involved in one case. Dangling precariously by a rope in another.
When asked, Mr. Famous gets serious for a moment.
“I love Crozet,” he says. “If I could put a bubble around this place, I would. But it’s too late. The money’s been spent. Plans have been passed. People are coming, man. You say Crozet? I say Nozet!”
“Yeah, that side of town,” Rick chimes in, waving his hand in the direction of the ark they’ve been building, “it’s going to blow up.” He makes an explosion sound like a little boy, pantomiming a mushroom cloud with his hands.
The men all hail from the Baltimore area, and the conversation soon turns to Rick’s Maryland hometown, which went from being a backwater pile of dirt to an endless forest of track housing in the space of three years. They shake their heads, sip their beers, puff on their menthols.
“It was just wrong,” says Rick.
Crozet (population, 3,600; area, 4.5 miles) awaits a similar fate. The town, founded as a whistle stop along the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in 1876—and named for Napoleon’s bridge builder and colonial engineer, Claudius Crozet—can already smell that mushroom cloud forming on its horizon.
Based on County estimates, sometime after 2024 Crozet’s population could, theoretically, reach 24,000. The County, however, is quick to add that the number will probably be closer to 12,000. Much of the housing needs of these future Crozetians will be filled by local developer Gaylon Beights. His Old Trail project is the looming development that will bring 2,000 new homes, 250,000 square feet of commercial space and a 250-acre golf course to the western outskirts of town, which is already packed with the track housing of the Western Ridge housing development. Despite the master plan, many worry that not enough is being done to keep the town on track for the impending rapid growth.
A train passes somewhere outside.
“Train!” yells Mr. Famous. Then he points, pleased as punch, to a chalkboard sign that says the first person who calls “train” each time one passes gets a free drink. Things are winding down, but the bartender gladly plunks down another pale ale in front of Mr. Famous. The guys have to be back at work in eight hours. Spider and Rick have gone home for the night. Mr. Handsome is nuzzling his girlfriend with a sleepy eye.
These men fit in here. They may not be locals, but something about them says they’ve been here since time began. Yet, as I walk out the door, I can’t avoid the sense that the scene behind me is fading to black. I don’t come to Crozet very often. And so I know that the next time I drive through, I won’t recognize much: not the place, nor the men at the bar.
