Anyone walking the Downtown Mall on March 16 might scratch their heads and wonder what’s going on when they see more than 350 teams scouring the area, decoding clues, cross-referencing coordinates, and vying for a chance at small-town glory: victory in the annual Cville Puzzle Hunt.
Part scavenger hunt, walking tour, and decryption exercise, the hunt is the third citywide event organized by Emily Patterson and Greg Ochsenschlager. Participants, armed with a map, puzzle decoders, water bottles, and walking shoes, will be on the lookout for clues hidden outside downtown businesses and landmarks (and maybe in a local publication or two). Unlike previous iterations, this year’s puzzle hunt has a theme: pirates.
“We wanted to give it a different look this year because the last few times it’s just been a general theme,” Patterson says. “So we were thinking, ‘What theme has a map?’ And we came up with the pirate map.”
It was a bit of reverse-engineering.
“This is pretty loose because we came up with the theme after we had designed a lot of the puzzle,” Ochsenschlager says.
During the event, downtown Charlottesville will be transformed into a pirate island. Teams will get their own map of the new landscape, designed by artist Emily Reifenstein, to solve clues.
The puzzle hunt is modeled after similar events like The Washington Post-sponsored Post Hunt, and Tropic Hunt in Miami, Florida. Charlottesville is a “perfect” city for a Post-like hunt, according to Patterson.
“It’s such a brainy and creative place. There’s bar trivia basically every night of the week here,” she says. “Also, it has a walkable downtown and a lot of opportunities to partner with local businesses, artists, and musicians.”
Patterson and Ochsenschlager, who participated in the Post Hunt before the event concluded in 2017, tested their idea at a holiday party in 2021. The game-themed gathering was akin to the U.K.-based game show “Taskmaster,” and served not only to showcase their puzzle aspirations, but also introduce them to WTJU General Manager Nathan Moore.
“I was super impressed, and not just because my team won,” Moore says. “So when Greg told me his dream was to do a citywide puzzle hunt, I told him that I know a guy.”
That guy was Moore himself.
“The puzzle hunt takes us out of our usual experience of downtown. And our usual experience of not really talking to strangers,” says Moore, whose radio station sponsors the hunt. “Because when you’re all trying to figure out puzzle answers, there’s a real and engaged sense of camaraderie.”
The first two puzzle hunts were held in the summer, and incorporated businesses like Chaps, Sidetracks Music, and Violet Crown. Patterson and Ochsenschlager enlisted help from their friends, including local singer-songwriter Devon Sproule, who wrote a song that required puzzle hunters to listen closely for clues in the lyrics. Another event staple is Patterson and Ochsenschlager’s 4-year-old wheaten terrier, Maisie.
In past years, puzzle hunters have deciphered a variety of clues, such as a spoof movie poster encased alongside legitimate cinema advertisements outside Violet Crown. In another search, participants had to flip through Best of C-VILLE magazine to spot a fake ghost-hunting advertisement and phone number.
This year’s puzzle hunt also incorporates the larger city puzzle community. One clue was designed by Bill Gardner, who runs Charlottesville’s Puzzled Pint, a global monthly social puzzle-solving event that’s held at breweries. For their part, Patterson and Ochsenschlager hope to keep making puzzle hunts for the community. The husband-and-wife team recently created a band-themed puzzle pub crawl for Preston Avenue breweries, including Rockfish Brewing Co., Superfly Brewing Co.., Random Row Brewing Co., and Starr Hill Downtown.
The pair hopes the 2024 hunt will improve on its predecessors. After the first hunt ended in an all-out sprint to the finish, the duo made their final puzzle in the second hunt more difficult, to avoid a race.
“I think we went overboard,” admits Ochsenschlager. The puzzle was so hard, he and Patterson had to give additional hints after teams failed to solve it.
This year, the couple is “focusing more on cool aha moments than actually making it more difficult,” Ochsenschlager says.
“We’re trying to make it so that out of the five additional puzzles, everybody should be able to solve at least two of them,” adds Patterson. “But the end game should be harder.”
The sun hangs high over the horizon on a recent summer morning at McIntire Park, and Stephen Delli Priscoli is trying to defy gravity.
A slight pivot of the legs, a subtle manipulation of friction. It’s not hard to imagine Isaac Newton discussing the forces that pull a skater down to his board. Delli Priscoli jumps, twists, and lands the trick, called a tre flip because of the board’s three consecutive rotations.
He grins. “I’ve been working on that all week.”
Joined by a handful of other skateboarders at the Charlottesville Skate Park at 8 in the morning, Delli Priscoli is part of a wave of skaters who, fueled by an amalgamation of factors including the COVID-19 pandemic, construction of the $2 million skate park, and increased visibility from competitions like the Olympics and X-Games, are creating a thriving skateboarding culture in the city.
Driven stir-crazy by school and workplace closures during the pandemic, many people picked up new outdoor activities, including skateboarding. Skateboarders in the city cut across demographic groups: On any given day at the park you’re likely to see teenagers, graying adults, parents and children, and young professionals riding skateboards or BMX bikes across the park’s obstacles.
Charlottesville provides unique incentives for interested skaters, including the skate park. Opened in 2019, the park is a social and economic engine that draws skaters from across the East Coast, says Matt Moffett, manager of the city park. In addition to being a co-owner of Cville Skates, Moffett was a professional skateboarder for almost 20 years.
Construction of the skate park itself isn’t the only way the city is subsidizing the sport. Moffett reckons he is one of a few skate park managers in the country. In addition to funding his position, which falls under the Parks & Recreation Department, the city employs maintenance staff to keep the skate park meticulously clean. Graffiti at this skate park? Nope.
Longtime Charlottesville skateboarding activist Duane Brown began petitioning the city for a skate park in the 1970s. Photo by Andrew Shurtleff.
“It would be in shambles if not for that,” the manager says. “There’s damage in skate parks. That’s just the nature of them.”
The skate park’s vision, and the current skating renaissance, has been decades in the making.
Duane Brown, a Charlottesville skating activist, began petitioning the city for a skate park in the 1970s. As a child, Brown would travel to the skate park in Richmond as often as possible. Eventually, at the behest of a mentor, Brown joined a bid to petition the city for construction of a hybrid private-public skate park.
“My first experience of City Council—I was 14 or something,” Brown says. “[We] got completely shot down.”
It was the first, but not the last, of Brown’s efforts. In the late ’90s, a successful push by skating activist Daria Brezinski secured a space for skateboarders in the unused and dilapidated tennis courts nestled beside the Charlottesville-Albemarle Rescue Squad on McIntire Road.
Downsides of the new location included its proximity to a creek, which would often flood the courts, plus two-inch wide cracks that dotted the ground, Brown says. Undeterred, skateboarders found ways around the haphazard environment.
“We’d find an old handrail somewhere that wasn’t being used and, like, literally hammer it into those cracks and use that as a rail to skate on,” Brown says. “The odd thing was, every now and then I guess, the city would get a little freaked out about the things that we built, and they would come out and take it all away. But they still allowed us to skate there.”
One feature of the old skate park involved a “really big ramp” that Brown built on behalf of Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham, who came to University Hall in 1998 to host a crusade, or fundamentalist preaching event. To appeal to the young crowds at the university, Graham flew in a professional skateboarder-turned-preacher. Graham also asked Brown to build a skateboard ramp. After the event ended, he told Brown he could keep the ramp. Brown called the former Parks & Recreation director, Johnny Ellen, and said he would donate the ramp to the city if it promised not to tow it away. Ellen agreed, but wanted to take a look first.
“I’ll never forget, I saw him walking to it and his face lit up,” Brown says. “He was like really stoked about the whole thing from the very start. So that kind of legitimized the whole endeavor, once we had that big ramp there.”
The tennis court arrangement lasted about eight years before construction on the 250 bypass forced the courts to shut down. With no dedicated place to skate, Brown reinvigorated his activism, forming a volunteer skate park committee, with the goal of keeping in close contact with the city’s Parks & Rec officials. In addition to educating local government leaders about skateboarding, the committee gave input on the design of a potential new park.
Louis Handler’s Cinema Skateshop, located on the Downtown Mall, is a community center for skateboarders. Photo by Eze Amos.
The temporary skate park would move one more time, to the parking lot of the former golf course at McIntire Park, before plans for a permanent skate park moved forward. Years passed as budget and approval processes hit snags. The skating community wavered. “We are losing skaters,” a facilities manager told The Daily Progress in 2016.
With some grant funding from the Tony Hawk Foundation, a final budget was drawn up, and construction for the park moved forward. The two-acre park opened in April 2019, and features two layers of skating areas, including rails, stairs, and deep bowls built by Dreamland Skateparks.
“Those guys are, in my opinion, one of the best skate park builders out there,” Moffett says.
The skate park opening also included the reveal of a bicycle and pedestrian bridge, which had long been in development. The final product connected the skate park to a small parking lot and the Brooks Family YMCA.
But the skate park ran over budget and the city had to scrap plans to include flood lights. Eventually, the skateboarding community raised the money to install the flood lights themselves.
Now, skateboarders can enjoy the park during daylight and twilight hours. The city also promotes the sport by offering private skateboarding lessons and hosting summer skating camps for young children and teens. On a typical summer week, Alex Mikes, a camp volunteer and skate park committee member, says the camps can cater to around 20 to 30 kids on weekday mornings, and provide a relatively affordable way for young skateboarders to enter the sport. Camp participants have a “huge range of abilities,” Mikes says. For campgoers who are too young to mount a board, Mikes gives them water guns and balloons.
Together, the skate park and summer camps have generated skating enthusiasm and spawned a new generation of young Charlottesville skateboarders, many of whom frequented the park during the coronavirus pandemic, when schools pivoted to virtual learning. (The skate park was so busy during 2020 that the city threatened to shut it down to avoid transmission of the virus, but skaters successfully lobbied to keep it open.)
“Even 20 years ago, it’s crazy how much better they are,” Mikes says of the current skateboarding generation. “They’re born skating here. People just keep getting better.”
One up-and-comer, 13-year old Hunter Bougis, started skating when he was 4. On a typical afternoon, he can be spotted in the park bowls, occasionally making videos or commenting on those taken by other skaters. In one video shot, Bougis jumps on a ledge, as a Jay Love song plays in the background.
Another skateboarder, Zephyr Chatowsky, the 12-year-old daughter of Moffett, recalls heading to the park with a group of friends and occasionally tuning into online school directly from the park during the pandemic.
“I started doing it more because there wasn’t much to do,” she says.
Zephyr is among a growing group of girls who entered the sport over the last few years, says Jeneene Chatowsky, Zephyr’s mother and co-owner of Cville Skates.
The local skateboarding scene differs from Florida and Rhode Island, where Chatowsky grew up skateboarding, and where she would sometimes be one of a few female skateboarders in the area.
“Now to see these girls ripping in the Olympics, I think there was a lot of work to lead to this,” Chatowsky says.
Located in McIntire Plaza, Cville Skates grew out of a project that Chatowsky completed for her master’s degree, when she was required to create a brand. The shop originally started as an online platform before securing its first physical location inside a building co-occupied by High Tor Gear Exchange, an outdoor gear and clothing consignment store. Eventually, Cville Skates moved into a different space, behind High Tor.
Jeneene Chatowsky (left) initially opened her skate shop inside Erin James’ High Tor Gear Exchange. Cville Skates has since moved to a different space, behind High Tor in McIntire Plaza. Photo by Tristan Williams.
Chatowsky and Moffett imagine Cville Skates as a community hub for a growing group of skateboarders. Besides selling boards and merchandise, the shop hosts art shows with local high schools and has rotating music shows for underground bands in Charlottesville.
In addition to more girls, Chatowsky sees more parents interested in skating, and credits that to Charlottesville’s family-friendly culture.
“To see more moms out there skating with their kids,” Chatowsky says. “That’s pretty powerful.”
Cinema Skateshop, located on the Downtown Mall, is another community center for skateboarders. The shop’s owner, Louis Handler, has been making skating videos since he was a teenager, and a reel of videos plays on a widescreen TV inside the store. Handler grew up in town and remembers the McIntire tennis courts. He thinks the skate park’s construction was inevitable given the interest from the skateboarding community.
Handler still makes videos, showcasing some skateboarders on Cinema’s Instagram. In them, an eagle-eyed viewer can spot a few Charlottesville landmarks. Along with skateboards, the shop also sells skating apparel and caters to the community’s interest in fashion and art.
Cinema’s clients also include street skaters, who focus on grinds and flat-ground tricks on the built urban environments beyond the skate park. Even though the skate park is open, street skating still draws plenty of skateboarders. Charlottesville’s downtown layout and preference for colonial architecture make the area attractive to street skaters, Handler says.
“The brick feels cool, there are good places to skate aesthetically,” he says.
Brown himself is no stranger to street skating. Before the skate park was built, he used to skate in a drainage ditch by a parking lot near University Hall, and he sought out cement formations around town that provided a good riding surface.
As they rise and decline in popularity, features from skating’s stylistic offshoots—bowl, street, and ramp skating—appear in modern skate parks, according to Brown.
Back at the Charlottesville Skate Park, a group of skateboarders including Delli Priscoli, Mikes, and Bougis stand in a single-file line, gearing up to tackle one of those features. The sky is clear, and after a rest for Gatorade, they push off and fly.
The Class of 2020 sits in Scott Stadium during Sunday’s ceremony. Photo: Sanjay Suchak
My redo graduation got off to a less-than-graceful start.
The day before walking, I found my black gown not in my closet, but crumpled in the trunk of my car, where I dumped it a year ago after declaring my 2020 graduation a total loss. My cap was nowhere to be found, and I ran to the bookstore 10 minutes before the ceremony began. My student identity, like the gown, didn’t fit quite as well as it had a year ago.
I never left Charlottesville, even after “officially” graduating as part of the Class of 2020. In March of last year, after UVA moved all classes online, my friends left their apartments for hometowns across the country. It was a slow trickle of loss, a kind of bizarre un-reality that would come to characterize the entire pandemic. The brain, being the amazing adaptive muscle that it is, weaved different stories for me. My friends weren’t gone, they were just leaving for a few weeks. Classes weren’t stalled, it was just a nice spring break extension.
This surreal feeling persisted through my class’ virtual graduation last May, when Yo-Yo Ma played the cello and Jim Ryan congratulated some 4,000 of us undergraduates for finishing college. The feeling lasted through the winter, when the U.S. announced 500,000 deaths from COVID-19. This new world, steeped in a pervading feeling of existential loss and crushing anxiety, could not have been the same world where I was once a carefree college undergraduate.
This spring, UVA announced it would hold a distanced graduation for us in May, a year after I had officially graduated from college. (The Class of 2021 will have its regularly scheduled ceremony this weekend.)
I wasn’t sure about returning. I felt too old now to walk the Lawn, too jaded to buy balloons. I had, after all, started a full-time reporting job, survived a round of harrowing job cuts, watched rioters besiege the U.S. Capitol, and saw a virus rip through the world. My entire graduating class had witnessed these things too, while also being expected to put on its new adult shoes, abandon the naiveté of young adulthood, and face the grim facts. What would we say to each other when we finally came face to face?
The year in near-isolation left me unprepared for the shock of friendship and love that I felt when I saw old friends emerge from the crowd of students in Mad Bowl last Sunday morning. The shared grief and responsibility that I feared would divide us, instead brought us nearer to each other. We joked about virtual work, the pressures of graduate school, this bizarre late graduation.
The empty Lawn, which in a normal year would have been packed full on all sides, was funnier with my friends there. Had we ever really aspired to that suffocating old graduation ritual? Instead of desperately looking over the lines to spot familiar faces, we turned to each other and laughed at the ridiculousness of it all. When it started to rain, we noted that the rotten weather was appropriate for our class’ luck, and we smiled.
If friends made the more-lonely walk from the Lawn to Scott Stadium fun, the parents and loved ones waiting in the stadium made our day. Each student was allowed two guests. Parents waved from around the stadium, desperate to get a look at their children. Students surreptitiously nudged socially distanced chairs closer to their friends. My friend Tori spotted her dad, whose grin threatened to split his face as he raised his camera to get a picture of her. Though everyone sat far apart, the quiet of the sparsely populated space gave the ceremony a certain intimacy. Families didn’t scream. There was no need. They leaned over banister railings, and waved from their seats.
“I’m so proud of you,” I overheard one parent say to a passing graduate. I spotted my own parents on the upper level. They jumped up and down.
The collected speakers were reluctant to address the full seriousness of the pandemic and what it had done to us. We were sitting here, after all, because of an unprecedented worldwide tragedy, and I couldn’t help thinking of patients dying alone on ventilators in hospital rooms, and dead bodies piled in refrigerator trucks in New York as Jim Ryan joked about apocalyptic cicadas and gas shortages. Some of the usual graduation clichés predictably rang hollow.
Unexpectedly, the most resonant speech came from Rector James Murray Jr., who graduated from college in 1968 during the peak of the Vietnam War and the aftermath of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. “Life throws many curves,” he said. “Time goes quick, quicker than ever.”
When the ceremony ended and we streamed out of the stadium, it felt like a chapter had finally been closed. Not because I got to put on my gown, or because I walked down the Rotunda steps, but because I had a chance to say goodbye to my friends on my terms—and because we cared enough to come back together, and try again.
Residents of Emerson Commons have stayed connected through the pandemic. Photo: Eze Amos
Imagine, for a moment, that the forced sense of isolation, loneliness, and stir-craziness of the past year didn’t happen. That, although you may still have to wear a mask to the grocery store, be careful around the elderly, and work from home, you could pop outside and share lunch with others. A playdate for the kids, in this idyllic world, is only a few feet away. Your friends are only one or two homes from you and, with a text, they could join you outside for a chat in five minutes. No need for perpetual Zoom hangouts and Thanksgiving alone in front of the TV.
The secret has been under our noses this whole time: co-housing. And at Emerson Commons, that’s exactly what the past year has looked like.
Emerson Commons, composed of 26 colorful, solar-paneled homes on a grassy plot in Crozet, is one of a handful of intentional living communities in the Charlottesville area. Residents of such communities share decision-making duties, common spaces, and meals. Although many people still refer to them as communes, most modern co-housing communities don’t reflect the free-loving, basket-weaving hippie stereotypes that defined the commune movement during the 1970s.
“A lot of times people hear co-housing and think ‘commune,’” says James Gammon, a resident of Emerson Commons. “I like to tell people that it’s legally a condo association.”
As the COVID-19 pandemic has driven people around the world indoors—increasing isolation and preventing family and friends from gathering together—interest in intentional living communities has increased. Weary of social distancing, it seems, many are longing for a deeper sense of connection with their neighbors.
Reflecting on the pandemic, Gammon tries to empathize with those, this author included, who are suffering from varying levels of cabin fever. “I’m trying to imagine what that would be like, if we lived in our old house,” he says. “I think it would have been a crazy lonely year.”
Common purpose
Co-housing has existed in the United States since at least the 1700s—think of the Christian Shakers, famous for their pacifism, celibacy, and artisanal furniture. Modern co-housing began in the 1940s with the establishment of the Inter-Community Exchange in Ohio, and co-housing and communes gained popularity, and sometimes notoriety, in the counterculture heyday of the 1960s—the modern organizations inherited the Shakers’ anti-war zeal, but passed on the celibacy part. Locally, Twin Oaks in Louisa County was established in 1967 and still follows the almost tribal shared labor model of those early days. (Twin Oaks declined to participate in this story, citing concerns surrounding coronavirus.)
But intentional living communities saw another, different sort of boom in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. According to the Foundation for Intentional Community, listings in the group’s directory doubled between 2010 and 2016. Some of Charlottesville’s more recent intentional communities were founded in that time, including Emerson Commons. Emerson Commons residents aren’t living in ’60s-style yurts or bead-spangled tents—families at Emerson rent or buy a house, sometimes for as much as $400,000, when they join.
Gammon joined Emerson in 2015 and moved into the community in 2019. Gammon and his wife, Rebecca, were drawn to the idea after experiencing a sense of alienation and a lack of community following the birth of their son.
“We were the first couple in our group of friends to have a kid,” Gammon says. “Oh gosh, that was an isolating year. You don’t go out or do things that your friends do anymore.”
Gammon’s wife stumbled across co-housing through a Facebook moms’ group. The young couple decided “that day,” they say, to visit Shadowlake Village, another co-housing community near Blacksburg. They were hooked.
“All the kids were having a Fourth of July parade for the adults and then our son crawled for the first time,” he says. “It seemed like a good omen or something. …It just instantly sounded like, ‘Why didn’t I know this was a thing for my whole life?’”
Five years later, they’re surrounded by friends and support, while many others have experienced a year of unprecedented isolation.
Emerson Commons residents have stayed closer than most of us. Children have playdates outside, and regular online game sessions occur—Among Us is a favorite. A few people have recently started a weekly Dungeons & Dragons campaign. When one community member contracted COVID-19, neighbors pitched in to bring chicken soup and walk the neighbor’s dog. They’ve had to adapt to social distancing inside their community, especially because some work in health care, but Emerson has been an almost alternate pandemic world where complete isolation from friends and family isn’t necessary. And others are taking notice. The community has seen an uptick in inquiries from potential new members during the pandemic.
“It’s so easy to take for granted, once you live here,” Gammon says. “It’s hard to talk about the things that aren’t problems anymore.”
Communingwith nature
Dave Redding, one of the founders of EcoVillage, was struck for the first time by the intentional-living philosophy while he and his wife were Peace Corps volunteers in Korea. Like Gammon, conventional housing didn’t appeal to Redding. Social interaction in your average neighborhood, he says, mostly involves watching people from your window.
“In traditional communities, you’re isolated. You may or may not know your neighbors,” Redding says. “We have to build community or else we’re just sitting in our houses.”
Redding, a former electrician, contractor, and world traveler, founded EcoVillage, an intentional community, in 2013—but the neighborhood as fully envisioned doesn’t exist yet. The current building plan has room for up to 38 houses and a common house on six-and-a-half acres in Albemarle County.
One of EcoVillage’s core aims is to lessen its environmental impact. Redding is working with UVA to design houses that produce net-zero waste and energy use. The property is designed to accommodate an ample amount of garden space, electric car charging, solar power, and sustainable stormwater management. Residents will share a small fleet of vehicles, but mostly get around on bicycles and an ELF, a head-turning hybrid of a tricycle and a car complete with solar panels, a covered cab, and a rechargeable battery (if you’re lucky, you might see Redding riding an ELF around town). And, although the community isn’t complete yet, residents have already been advocating for sustainability issues in the greater Charlottesville area. In October, EcoVillage co-created a petition advocating for more decisive language in the city’s Climate Action Plan.
Redding riding his ELF. Photo courtesy subject.
Seven people, including Redding, currently live in EcoVillage, in the two houses on the property. But, even with a small number of people, he can feel the benefits of the co-housing community during the otherwise isolating experience of the pandemic. Members do Tai Chi classes and regularly eat lunch and dinner together outside.
Not everything is sunshine and roses, however. Financial donors, something EcoVillage needs to become a reality, have been few and far between during COVID-19. Final approval for building plans have been pushed back, and a set date has yet to be determined.
“I’m definitely looking forward to the end of COVID,” Redding says. Like Gammon, he expects interest in co-housing to increase even more after the pandemic subsides.
“We’re all feeling the strong effects of [the pandemic],” Redding says. “This is not the way that it was meant to be.”
Reaching out
Though all of these co-housers are building on their visions of a brighter future, J. Elliott Cisneros’ vision might be the most ambitious. Since 2018, he’s been working to get Araminta Village up and running. Araminta was Harriet Tubman’s given first name, which she changed as an adult for reasons that remain uncertain. Cisneros chose it to reflect his dream—a multiracial, queer-friendly, multifaith community in Charlottesville.
Cisneros and his two daughters briefly lived in an intentional living community in Colorado, but he was disconcerted by the lack of racial diversity—like many communes, the neighborhood was overwhelmingly white. While he was living there, Cisneros says, one Black family arrived and left after only a month.
Cisneros moved to Charlottesville in a camper van after the Unite the Right rally in 2017. Since 2006, he’s run a nonprofit called The Sum, which offers to “assess one’s unconscious orientation to power and race, religion, dis/ability, sexual orientation, gender, socioeconomic class, and ethnicity” through a written test and one-hour phone call, for $150. The Sum then offers a 45-hour Power of Difference Certification program to schools and businesses that might be concerned about their results. Cisneros has set up a Sum Study Center downtown, and also started planning Araminta Village.
J. Elliot Cisneros. Photo courtesy subject.
The problem with attracting people of color to co-housing, says Crystal Byrd Farmer, a board member of The Sum and a member of the BIPOC council for the Foundation for Intentional Community, stems from co-housing’s beginning. Founded in the U.S. primarily by white people, co-housing has been exclusionary since its beginning. And it’s a hard problem to solve for already-established intentional communities. Farmer recognizes that people of color often try these communities and then leave.
“Some communities think, “Why don’t people of color come? We’re so nice!” Farmer says. “But it’s so much deeper than that.”
Crystal Byrd Farmer. Photo courtesy subject.
Models of ownership, the steep cost to enter into modern co-housing arrangements, formations for conflict resolution and consensus, and even language in these communities are founded and based on values that often disregard people of color. Farmer has consulted with intentional communities on how to welcome people of color, but says that those institutions are often unwilling to change the structure of their values. She says Twin Oaks, for example, attempted to create a cap on the number of white people that could be community members.
“I thought that was a bad idea, because they were only looking at admission and not at the deeper structure,” Farmer says. “When I talk to communities I often say, ‘If you started majority white you probably will stay that way.’”
The FIC’s BIPOC counsel works to form inclusive communities for people of color. Araminta has events like the weekly Community Circles that ask individuals to examine their underlying attitudes about difference and society.
Nevertheless, Farmer, like the folks at Emerson Commons and EcoVillage, is hopeful about the future of intentional communities. The FIC has definitely seen an increase in interest, she says, and they’ve started online events for those curious about intentional living.
“It totally makes sense to me, why people would be drawn to this,” Cisneros says. Araminta Village has a long road ahead and needs things like development planning, which has stalled during the pandemic. But Cisneros keeps asking questions, keeps imagining. “It all goes back to that question,” he says: “‘What is community?’”
UVA detected 1,300 cases of COVID among students, faculty, staff, and contract workers this semester. Photo: Skyclad Aerial
It’s 11am on Thursday, November 19. The U.S. has reached an all-time high for COVID-19 infections in a single day. Colleges have reported record-high numbers as well, contributing to around 2 percent of national infections, according to the New York Times.
And UVA President Jim Ryan has declared victory.
In a video posted to the school’s website, Ryan said the university had accomplished “what many said couldn’t be done,” and showed the world “what being a great and good university looks like.”
It’s true that UVA has largely avoided the uncontrolled spread that worried community members in the summer, when the university first announced its plan to welcome students back to Grounds. At the time, Virginia was experiencing a Memorial Day spike in COVID-19 cases and inching out of its initial Phase 1 restrictions. After college students gathered en masse for the traditional Midsummer’s party weekend, some community leaders sounded the alarm.
“I, for one, don’t understand why the students are coming back into the community, from all over the globe, and why we’re taking that chance,” Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker said at a virtual press conference over the summer.
Some at the university also pushed back against in-person classes. The United Campus Workers union and Student Council both petitioned for an all-virtual semester. In early September, student and community activists held a die-in demonstration where 50 people protested by feigning dead on the Rotunda steps and the Lawn.
Three months later, the semester is in the books. (Students left Grounds before Thanksgiving, a little earlier than usual.) Since August, the university has identified just under 1,300 COVID-19 infections among students, faculty, and staff, a number the administration has deemed a success. Those cases resulted in zero deaths and zero hospitalizations, reports university spokesman Brian Coy.
This graph from UVA’s COVID dashboard shows cases detected at the school over the course of the semester.
“There were a lot of people who were skeptical that students, or the rest of our community, would follow those behaviors closely enough to avoid a major outbreak,” says J.J. Davis, UVA’s chief operating officer. “However, as a whole, this community showed that we were capable of coming together and doing the right things to protect each other and keep the semester on track.”
Provost Liz Magill says the university faced “impossible odds” when the coronavirus pandemic halted operations in March. She cited measures such as the high amount of isolation and quarantine beds, increased testing, and restrictions on gatherings when cases spiked. The measures “weren’t easy” but ultimately the university “overcame historic obstacles,” Magill says.
Final exams
An aggressive testing operation lies at the center of the school’s COVID prevention plan. As the semester wore on, UVA instituted a mandatory testing policy, periodically calling all students living in the area to report to the Central Grounds Parking Garage for a spit test. From November 15-21, as the semester wrapped up, the school conducted 9,453 tests. Virginia has 25,000 undergraduate and graduate students living on Grounds this fall; for comparison, Virginia Tech, a school of 34,000 students, conducted 4,910 tests during that same week in November. This semester, Tech has detected around 1,600 cases.
At the beginning of the semester, UVA created 1,500 quarantine beds for students who had been exposed to the virus. The ability to shift students into this quarantine housing proved pivotal in the early fall. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill had to send students back home during the first week of in-person classes, when cases shot up and quarantine rooms dwindled to the single digits. UVA experienced a similar spike in cases during its first week of in-person classes (UNC had 130, UVA 199) but the school’s supply of quarantine beds was large enough to weather the storm.
Additionally, testing allowed UVA to monitor residence halls and identify clusters in places like the Balz-Dobie and Hancock residence halls. Regular dorm wastewater testing combined with mandatory dorm resident testing kept infections from exploding on Grounds.
Dr. Taison Bell, a pulmonary and critical care physician and graduate student who also works in the UVA hospital’s COVID-19 ICU, thinks the university learned its lesson from other colleges across the country.
“A lot of peer institutions were having issues with large-scale COVID outbreaks,” Bell says. “So maybe it was a combination of learning lessons from those institutions and effective messaging at the university.”
Laying down the law
Even with that containment structure in place, videos periodically surfaced during the semester that showed troubling scenes for those who had hoped to see social distancing.
In October, an anonymous student sent a video to CBS19 of students packing, mask-less, into the first floor of Trinity Irish Pub on the Corner. Weeks before, Ryan signaled out bars specifically in a video message sent to the UVA community, saying “If you can’t stay six feet apart, don’t go in.”
“It seems hypocritical to me that the administration tries to pretend like they’re enforcing these rules when in reality there are these events that are happening,” an anonymous student told CBS19 at the time.
Days later, students were seen waiting in long lines to enter bars on Halloween weekend.
Davis concedes there were “some issues of noncompliance,” but the school responded by laying down the law, tightening restrictions after the potential super-spreader weekend.
“There were a couple times where more strict messaging had to go out to the university community,” Bell says. “But it seems like, after that happened, the prevalence [of the virus] overall went down and the system wasn’t strained…I think overall they did a really good job.”
The Balz-Dobie and Hancock clusters prompted new gathering restrictions early in the semester, barring students from gathering in groups of more than five people. The university’s ambassadors, a school-run safety force that patrols areas on and off Grounds, enforced the rules strictly, and violations could result in academic punishments.
In a September video, Ryan alluded to several interim suspensions of students failing to adhere to social distancing policies. The university’s policy directory states that students cannot hold an event, indoors or out, that includes multiple groups from different households. The policy also outlines the face mask and social distancing requirements.
Fourth-year Hallie Griffiths says the stricter penalties had a real effect. “I know friends that would have gathered in bigger groups regardless of safety because they felt that if they got sick, they would be fine,” but they didn’t want to get expelled, she says.
The looming terror of the virus made it a strange time to be a student, Griffiths adds. In addition to the interruption of extracurricular activities, classes, and Greek life, students had to cope with ever-changing rules, the complexities of online classes, and fears of infection.
Constant safety adjustments were a whirlwind as well. The university has updated and added information to its Return to Grounds plan at least 24 times since August 4, an experience Griffiths says was “confusing and frustrating.”
“Every week there was a new email and a lot of people’s lives were turned to chaos,” she says. “And then we would adjust and then there’d be a new email.”
“It was scary in the sense that all of us came into it not really knowing what to expect and then it very quickly became very real,” Griffiths says. “All the traditions are gone. Time is stopped in one place but also going very fast. …Especially with classes ending this week, I’ve realized that time is gone and I’ll never get it back.”
Community containment
A central concern for observers in town was the possibility of community spread, especially for vulnerable communities surrounding the university. Although cases spiked at UVA in September and October, the numbers don’t suggest that on-Grounds cases resulted in large numbers of city and county residents getting sick.
But while UVA was cracking down on restrictions, the city was as well.
“Coronavirus ordinances in Albemarle and Charlottesville that were passed were aimed at being in conjunction with UVA returning,” says City Councilor Michael Payne.
In the summer, Charlottesville imposed more severe gathering restrictions than the rest of the state, in part to mitigate the effect of students returning. In Charlottesville, restaurants were unable to operate at more than 50 percent capacity and people weren’t allowed to gather in groups of more than 50.
“I think UVA was taking a huge risk in terms of having all these students come back,” Payne says.
“They have been able to prevent a massive community spread in a worst-case scenario. So in that sense it’s definitely been successful,” the city councilor continues. “But there’s no way around it: When you have that many people coming into the community, you’re going to see a big spike in cases, and that’s what we did see.”
And of course, the story is far from over. Students will return for the spring semester in February. As cold weather drives groups inside and students travel back to Charlottesville from COVID hot spots, the university could once again become dicey terrain. Referencing the cold weather and spring semester, Magill said that “vigilance will be more important than ever.”
“I’m never going to say that I feel comfortable with where things are, because there’s always the possibility that things can break loose,” says Bell. “But what I will say is that, in general, our area has done fairly well with controlling the pandemic compared to a lot of areas of the country…I think this means that, going forward, we have to keep that same diligence up.”
