Neighborhood Investments purchased this half acre lot in Fifeville for $2.24 million, the latest high-profile purchase in the Cherry Avenue area. Photo by Sean Tubbs.
As planning and negotiations continue over a grocery story at 501 Cherry Ave., major transactions continue to take place in the Fifeville neighborhood.
On September 9, the firm Neighborhood Investments paid $2.24 million for an undeveloped property between Roosevelt Brown Boulevard and Ninth Street SW. There have been several development projects associated with the land, owned by the Piedmont Housing Alliance, on two occasions.
The Piedmont Housing Alliance sold the 0.56-acre property in March 2016 for $1.19 million. The previous owner filed a site plan amendment in 2020 for 24 residential units and about 11,000 square feet of commercial space, which was never approved. Since then, Charlottesville City Council has adopted a small area plan for Cherry Avenue that discouraged tall buildings in order to preserve the character of surrounding neighborhoods.
As a result, the city’s new zoning code classified the undeveloped Ninth Street lot as Commercial Mixed Use 3, which sets a base height limit of three stories but an additional two stories are allowed if the project has affordable units that qualify it for bonus space. That is different from other corridors in Charlottesville, such as Barracks Road and Fifth Street Extended, which allow up to 10 stories to encourage shopping centers to redevelop at maximum density.
Richard Spurzem of Neighborhood Properties said in an email he was not sure if he would proceed with the existing site plan or start fresh.
This past March, Ronald McDonald House of Charlottesville bought a former auto repair business at 316 Ninth St. SW for $700,000. The nonprofit owns two nearby lots and has not yet decided how it will use its new property.
The city’s public housing agency is planning to purchase two properties several blocks away on Fifth Street SW to preserve them for affordable housing. There are multiple buildings at both locations, and the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority wants to buy them for $2.2 million.
“The acquisition of this portfolio will allow CRHA to preserve the naturally occurring affordable housing units while giving CRHA the ability to redevelop the property to provide additional housing units soon,” reads a resolution adopted by the CRHA Board of Commissioners on September 23.
The acquisition continues a trend of CRHA purchasing property, including several Fifeville properties that were part of a $10 million purchase from Woodard Properties in August 2023, to expand its portfolio.
Meanwhile, single-family homes still sell at a premium in Fifeville. On September 4, 2024, a two-bedroom house at 223 Fourth St. SW sold for $585,000, well above the 2024 assessment of $376,000. There’s also an accessory dwelling on the property.
On September 18, a single-family attached home in the Orangedale subdivision at 705 Prospect Ave. sold for $296,500. That’s over 39 percent above the 2024 assessment of $212,900.
No matter the development, the leadership of the Fifeville Neighborhood Association want all projects to align with the values enshrined in the Cherry Avenue Small Area Plan.
“We encourage developers to come talk with residents directly at our monthly meetings so that we can work together on upcoming projects and make sure residents are informed,” read a statement sent in response to a question from C-VILLE.
A dearth of fresh food in Fifeville means all eyes are on 501 Cherry Ave. Photo by Eze Amos.
There are no places on Cherry Avenue or West Main Street where residents of the Fifeville neighborhood can walk to buy fresh ingredients to prepare nutritious meals, but Aleen Carey doesn’t want you to call the area a food desert.
“A desert is a naturally occurring state,” said Carey, the co-executive director of Cultivate Charlottesville. “Not having any grocery stores or Black-owned businesses or the food access that the community wants, that is not naturally occurring. That is man-made. So instead of a food desert, we call it a food apartheid.”
That term was coined by New York food justice activist Karen Washington to draw attention to the interconnections between access to food and other socioeconomic and health inequities.
Cultivate Charlottesville formed in 2020 when local organizations Food Justice Network, the Urban Agriculture Collective of Charlottesville, and the City Schoolyard Garden merged to put a more intentional focus on those interconnections at the local level.
Borrowing a phrase from food justice activist Karen Washington, Cultivate Charlottesville’s Aleen Carey says the lack of access to fresh produce in Fifeville has caused a “food apartheid.” Photo by Eze Amos.
The nonprofit is active on many fronts including administering the city’s Food Equity Initiative, trying to secure new garden space in Washington Park—and assisting with a broader effort to bring a community grocery store to Fifeville. Woodard Properties, the new owner of 501 Cherry Ave., agreed in September 2023 to provide space for one as part of a rezoning.
But to make the idea a reality, the community will have to organize.
Buy back the block?
Carey was one member of an August 24 panel discussion at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, an event the Fifeville Neighborhood Association organized for the public to learn more about the opportunities on Cherry Avenue.
Deanna McDonald of RN Heartwork is partnering with the Fifeville Neighborhood Association on the effort to increase awareness of the space.
“I come to this project as it relates [to] health equity, food equity, and food security,” McDonald told the crowd of about a hundred people.
For decades, Estes Market at 501 Cherry Ave. served as a place to buy fresh food, but people who lived in the area in the late 20th century said the market played a much larger role.
“Estes was more than just a grocery store,” said Sarad Davenport, a longtime resident of Fifeville who served as moderator of August’s Buy Back the Block event. “It was a community center. In fact, I learned how to play chess in Estes’ parking lot.”
Once a booming grocery store, Estes Foodliner stands now as a shell of its former self. Photo by Eze Amos.
Davenport is the host of “Can I Talk To You, C-Ville?,” a series of programs put on by Vinegar Hill Magazine including one held September 23 that illuminated more details on the status of negotiations for how the space might be operated as a grocery.
Dorenda Johnson has lived in the neighborhood for 55 years and remembers more than just Estes Market.
“I can remember on Fifth Street there was Bell’s Store and Allen’s Store and down the street on Cherry Avenue was Estes [IGA],” she said. “All of those neighborhoods around those stores were predominantly Black neighborhoods and it was bustling and busy.”
Andrea Douglas, the Heritage Center’s executive director, said there was a time when ownership of commercial businesses was more diverse in central Charlottesville.
“There were seven grocery stores run by Black people in this community,” Douglas said.
One of those, at 333 W. Main St., was run by George Inge, whose establishment was a pillar of the community from 1891 to 1979 (and stands today as Tavern & Grocery restaurant). The structure built in 1820 survived the razing of Vinegar Hill and Garrett Street while many others, like Allen’s Store, did not.
According to research conducted by journalist Jordy Yager, Allen’s Store opened on Sixth Street SE in 1944 and closed when the property was taken by eminent domain as part of the Garrett Street urban renewal project in the 1970s, leading to the creation of what would become known as Friendship Court. Its owners, Kenneth Walker Allen and Dorothy Mae Murray Allen, would later relocate their business to the Rose Hill neighborhood in the space that is now home to MarieBette Café and Bakery.
Douglas said efforts to bring a new grocery store to serve the neighborhood is part of a long movement to restore what was lost during urban renewal.
When she was a child, Johnson said she would spend her days in Tonsler Park walking to and from what is now Prospect Avenue. Her parents worked hard to buy their own house, as did so many others.
“Now when I go through those neighborhoods it’s very discouraging and I see it’s no longer the predominantly Black neighborhoods,” Johnson said. “We have $700,000 homes that were bought for barely half of that. What would our parents say?”
After Emancipation, many people enslaved in Albemarle County and on plantations, such as the Oak Lawn estate on Cherry Avenue, would settle in a Charlottesville that was growing in the late 19th century.
“After the [Civil] war, a number of folks who were enslaved there moved into what is the Fifeville neighborhood,” said Jalane Schmidt, an associate professor of religious studies at UVA.
This included figures such as Benjamin Tonsler, who had been born into servitude in Earlysville in 1854. After receiving an education in Hampton, Tonsler returned to Charlottesville and became a leader in the community along with Inge. Another group, called the Piedmont Industrial and Land Improvement Company, was formed in the last decade of the 19th century to promote Black ownership of real property. They did so through the Four Hundreds Club, an informal group of Black families belonging to the middle class, who purchased lots of land priced at $400.
“There is a direct connection between emancipation, personal economy, land ownership, entrepreneurship, and food security,” Schmidt said. “How to put those pieces together that have been shattered is the question that we’re dealing with now.”
Redeveloping the Estes Market
Woodard Properties bought 501 Cherry Ave. in August 2022 for $3.5 million, the latest in a series of purchases the company has made in the area in recent years. Woodard is partnering with the Piedmont Housing Alliance to build 71 apartment units that will be rented to households with incomes below 60 percent of the area’s median income.
One condition of a rezoning granted by City Council in September 2023 is that a portion of the property be set aside for the Music Resource Center as well as an area that would be reserved for a very specific reason.
“Owner agrees to reserve a minimum of 5,000 square feet of commercial space at the Property for lease to a small grocery store or neighborhood grocery store that sells fresh produce,” reads binding language in the rezoning agreement. “The space will be reserved exclusively for a grocery store use until the issuance of any certificate of occupancy for the Project.”
Anthony Woodard, CEO of Woodard Properties, says that means the space will be held for someone to either buy or lease it from the company. Anyone who wants to operate a grocery would need to come up with the funding to get the space ready.
“We are building a commercial shell for a grocery market, which would not include interior construction, furnishings, or equipment specific to the grocery’s operation, because a grocery operator has specific needs that they know best,” Woodard said in an email.
Woodard said the total cost is estimated at around $50 million to construct the two buildings that make up the project.
The City of Charlottesville continues to review the preliminary site plan for the project, an iterative process designed to make sure that the building will be up to code.
The grocery store at 501 Cherry Ave. was once a bustling centerpiece of the Fifeville community. “In fact, I learned how to play chess in Estes’ parking lot,” says resident Sarad Davenport. Photo by Eze Amos.
City Council has signaled a willingness to provide $3.15 million in direct funding for the housing portion of the project over the next two years. The Piedmont Housing Alliance applied this year for $1.285 million in low-income housing tax credits but did not make the cut in a crowded field of applicants.
Sunshine Mathon, executive director of PHA, said there are alternative funding options that might allow construction to get underway within the next 15 months.
“We have other funding pathways we are pursuing that I am optimistic about, and would allow us to still start construction in 2025,” Mathon said in an email. “Everyone on the team is working diligently to make this happen.”
Woodard said that to cover the full costs, rent will likely need to be higher than market rate unless an operating subsidy can be identified.
Davenport cautioned against rushing ahead too fast with the project without doing true community engagement.
“Sometimes you can think you are doing the right thing but you haven’t really listened to people, and then you end up doing something that’s catastrophic and you look 40 years later and it’s like, that was a tragedy,” she said. “It did more harm than good.”
Elsewhere on Cherry Avenue
Woodard Properties owns a good portion of Cherry Avenue, having slowly acquired real estate along the roadway over the years. That includes the Cherry Avenue Shopping Center, which the company purchased for $1.9 million in April 2021, and the undeveloped parking lot across the street, bought in July of that year for $1.55 million. The Black-owned Royalty Eats catering company operates out of the shopping center and served food at the August 24 event. Woodard said there are no plans to do anything with these locations beyond what’s already been done; the company refurbished the shopping center soon after purchasing it.
The Salvation Army owns two properties on Cherry Avenue, including its storefront and a lot where a fast food restaurant used to stand. There are three stand-alone convenience stores in addition to a fourth inside the Cherry Avenue Shopping Center. Each store is owned by a different entity and none offer fresh produce.
The fog over the future of 21st-century Fifeville cleared a little in October 2023 when the University of Virginia purchased the 5.2-acre Oak Lawn estate belonging to the Fife family, whose name has been appended to the whole neighborhood. The UVA Health system will soon begin a community engagement effort for the future of that property as well as land to the north, which it purchased in August 2016.
As part of the Memory Project initiative, Schmidt and her students have researched the Oak Lawn estate and found that James Fife enslaved at least 22 men, women, and children by the time of emancipation. More than 100 years later, expansion of the UVA Medical Center displaced people who had settled in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Gospel Hill, a neighborhood that no longer exists, reducing the number of people who could walk to places like Estes Market and other Black-owned businesses.
“Land use and food security are tied to one another and that means listening to the community and folks in the community who remember what things were like when there were these hubs,” Schmidt said.
Carey said one purpose of both Cultivate Charlottesville and the Food Justice Network is to ask people what it would take to achieve food equity. She said that will take Black ownership.
“As we’re talking about 501 Cherry Ave. right now, and who might own that building or who might own the business there, one of the key pieces is, will that be a person of color?” Carey said. “Will that be somebody Black who can restore some of that community wealth building to the area?”
The Fifeville Neighborhood Association is seeking to educate the public on three potential models for ownership of the store. One would be a traditional model where the business owners take on all of the risks of the enterprise.
Another would be a nonprofit model, and a third would be a cooperative-ownership model where members of the store would govern its operations. To that end, a group called the Charlottesville Community Food Co-Op is being formed.
Mathon is hopeful the grocery space can become part of the residential development, a value-add that could attract additional funds for the overall project.
“I am working actively to pursue resources for the grocery as I see a direct positive benefit to have the grocery onsite for our future residents,” he said.
Neighborhood skepticism
Many in the Fifeville neighborhood are dubious about why a new apartment building is planned for 501 Cherry Ave. They’re also wary of the name attached to the project.
“Just the name Woodard … It is not a name that a lot of people think much of, me being one if I’m being honest,” Johnson said. “You just constantly see take. They just seem to take. They’ve infiltrated all of those neighborhoods.”
Johnson said nearby residents already suffer the impacts of traffic congestion and a new apartment building will make things worse.
“Cherry Avenue from anywhere between 3pm and 6pm. is a total nightmare,” Johnson said, adding that many continue to have fears Tonsler Park will be taken for private use.
At the moment, the city’s Parks & Recreation Department is soliciting feedback for future amenities for the park, which is owned by the City of Charlottesville. The current year budget for the Commonwealth of Virginia granted $250,000 to the city to assist with the Tonsler Basketball League, now run by former city councilor Wes Bellamy.
Schmidt said part of the conversation needs to be about returning to the spirit of the Four Hundreds Club and making sure there’s an effort to keep Black property owners in place and stop the turnover that has been occurring for decades.
“We also need to have a conversation about who’s selling these,” Schmidt said. “We have folks in the neighborhood that you remember that were pillars of the community but their children don’t live here any more. And when mom and dad die, they come back to settle the estate.”
According to Schmidt, one solution would be to establish incentives for sales to community organizations like PHA. The Piedmont Community Land Trust, a local nonprofit that works to secure affordable housing options in the area, has been purchasing properties in the Orangedale section of the neighborhood to offer homeownership opportunities.
Carey said she is not an expert on housing, but said these conversations are crucial to finding solutions.
“There are three different things going on Cherry Avenue right now: if you’re looking at the park, if you’re looking at 501 Cherry, and if you’re looking at Oak Lawn,” Carey said. “How do you have a conversation that pulls those together so things aren’t done individually?”
Carey said that should include conversations with other neighborhoods affected by the same pressures such as Rose Hill, Ridge Street, and 10th and Page.
City Council adopted a small area plan for Cherry Avenue in March 2021, the same meeting at which they adopted a new affordable housing plan. The small area plan called for an analysis of renovations and teardowns of existing stock, but it’s not clear if the city has conducted that work. The new zoning code designates the road as Commercial Mixed Use 3 in part because of the advocacy of the Fifeville Neighborhood Association.
Following publication, Woodard Properties sent a comment: “We are excited to be working with the Fifeville Neighborhood Association, Piedmont Housing Alliance, and Music Resource Center on this special project that will provide not only healthy food, but also youth programming and affordable housing to Fifeville. This project builds on our commitment to be one of the problem solvers in Charlottesville and the Fifeville neighborhood.”
A property at 902 Forest St. in Rose Hill (above) was put up for auction in 2003, and eventually demolished. It’s now one of 18 vacant lots in the neighborhood. PC: Staff Photo
Back in 2013, Julie (who asked that we not use her last name) bought a house in Rose Hill, a small, historically African American neighborhood roughly bordered by Preston Avenue, Madison Avenue, and Harris Street. The house had gone into foreclosure during the housing market crash, and had been neglected for a while.
After determining that bringing the house up to code would be too expensive, Julie considered demolishing it and turning it into a small brewery. But the property was zoned B-3, a type of intensive commercial zoning that would require her to provide more parking than seemed feasible for the mostly residential neighborhood, along with other requirements like making retail sales and staying open till 1am.
While a majority of Rose Hill is zoned for single-family residences, and parcels along Preston Avenue are zoned for mixed-use, others are still zoned B-3 for major commercial uses—what planning commissioner Lyle Solla-Yates calls “our worst zoning.”
Business zoning “is the least efficient…and least useful for the city,” says Solla-Yates. “It’s been thought for a long time that mixed-use is the better way to do cities. If you have housing above and businesses below, that’s more pedestrian-friendly, welcoming, [and] prettier. And it gives you housing in areas where you need housing.”
That was the intention of another owner in the neighborhood, Julie says, who originally submitted a site plan for an office space below, and residential above. “But his site was not zoned for that,” she says, “so he went back to [Neighborhood Development Services] with an office space.”
Julie ultimately decided to submit a site plan for a small warehouse, but after learning from a neighbor that the site planning process could take months to complete, she called it quits.
Lately, she’s noticed more and more houses like hers being demolished in Rose Hill—“and the lot just sits there.” There are currently 18 vacant lots in the neighborhood, six of which are zoned B3.
“I’ve attended a couple of [site plan reviews],” she says, “and it just seems like they don’t go forward.”
Some projects run into issues with sewer and property lines, Julie says, but others, like hers, have faced restrictions with zoning.
Since the ’90s, the city has gotten rid of “almost all of its B zoning,” Solla-Yates says. He guesses that it kept B zoning in Rose Hill because “it was small.”
He adds that the city “hasn’t given a lot of love and attention to Rose Hill.” Like 10th and Page and Fifeville, two other historically African American neighborhoods, “there’s some pretty serious social justice issues with [Rose Hill] not getting infrastructure and services at the same level as the rest of the city for decades,” Solla-Yates says. “Which is also part of why we’re a little bit slow to think about [its zoning] seriously.”
The city’s upcoming zoning overhaul will get rid of business zoning, as well as other out-of-date zoning practices, Solla-Yates says, and will have an “integrated look at zoning and housing.” While consultants are still in the process of reviewing the zoning, he predicts that business zoning will be replaced with mixed-use.
“Business-only zoning doesn’t have a future in Charlottesville,” Solla-Yates says. “We are not fine-tuning the existing zoning. We are replacing the zoning. We want something better, and we’ve waited long enough.”
Read Brodhead, a zoning administrator with Neighborhood Development Services, agrees that mixed-use zoning is generally more practical, but doesn’t think the city should get rid of business zoning entirely, as “there’s traditionally been a lot of commercial uses of it.” He points out, for example, that MarieBette Café & Bakery, on Rose Hill Drive, is zoned B-3, and that the four vacant parcels across the street from it (also zoned B-3) could also be used for a business “that’s significant for the neighborhood.”
But until any type of new zoning is approved, Julie remains concerned about the future of Rose Hill. Every week, she receives phone calls and postcards from developers wanting to buy her property, and is ultimately concerned that a large developer will come in and buy up all of the vacant lots and create a large commercial business, since a developer would have “the time and resources to go through the whole approval process.”
“That would just be out of scale with the neighborhood,” she says.
And as for the other property owners with deteriorating houses or vacant lots, “they are sitting there and wondering what other people are going to do,” she says.
A fig tree sprawls to the edge of the sidewalk on Sixth Street in Fifeville. Photo: Eze Amos
My first intoxicating taste of a freshly picked fig took place in the formal garden at Villa Vignamaggio, in Tuscany. Frozen in Renaissance times, the setting had a surreal beauty to it, the kind you see in period pieces—like 1993’s Much Ado About Nothing, which was filmed at Vignamaggio. The villa’s owner, a lawyer from Rome, reached up into the tree, plucked a ripe fruit, and asked, “Would you like a fig?”
Following his example, I held the stem with my fingertips and bit into the flesh of the green-skinned bulb. I had grown up on Fig Newtons, with their chalky pastry wrapped around a too-sweet gummy filling, and I had sampled figs in fancy New York restaurants, usually with a bit of goat cheese and a balsamic-vinegar reduction. But the musk-and-honey flavor that filled my mouth at Vignamaggio made my eyes roll back in my head. I knew the experience could never be replicated. I feared no fig would ever taste as good.
Then I came to Charlottesville. And on a typically steamy summer day, I sat with my sister on the back porch of her house in Fifeville, drinking cold white wine in the hot air.
“Wanna go pick some figs?” she asked.
“Where, in Italy?” I replied.
“Nope,” she said. “Right up the street.”
I took the last swig from my glass, my sister grabbed a little wire basket, and within minutes we were gently pulling soft little orbs from the branches of a sprawling tree near the corner of Fifth and West Main streets. I looked around furtively, afraid that we’d be arrested. Even though the tree stood on the property of a shuttered restaurant, the angel on my shoulder told me we were trespassing and stealing.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Just pick.”
As I have discovered since then, fig trees thrive in Fifeville. The one near Fifth and Main became a popular community resource, but the owners of Little Star removed it last year because it was crowding their outdoor dining space (bummer). Walk along Fifth, Dice, Sixth, Sixth-and-a-Half, and Seventh streets, and you will see at least a dozen fig trees, tucked up against houses, looming by sidewalks, peeking over fence tops. Out of public view, in residents’ yards, even more figs grow. In mid-July most of the fruit is green, hard, and no bigger than your thumb. But as July stretches into August, the figs swell and ripen—the green skin showing a little purple—and the Fifeville fig harvest commences.
Devin Floyd, founder and director of Charlottesville’s Center for Urban Habitats, confirms that the fruit trees thrive in certain pockets of the city, including Fifeville and Belmont, where “marginally Mediterranean” growing conditions exist. This may be because of the sparse shade and sloping terrain, which drains well. “[Fig trees] need a dry and hot microclimate to do best,” Floyd wrote in an email. “I planted one in a south-facing lawn in Belmont. Ten years later, it is still kicking.”
Floyd is quick to point out that figs are a non-native species. Many sources cite California as the birthplace of the fig industry in America, but the fruit’s history there is rocky. In 1881, thousands of cuttings of the Smyrna variety were imported to the Golden State from Turkey. However, the trees bore no fruit until 1899, when the fig wasp, shipped in from the Middle East, performed the pollination that the Smyrna requires in order to produce.
Meanwhile, in Charlottesville, figs were already growing, thanks to—you guessed it—Thomas Jefferson. Touring the south of France in 1787, he wrote, “The most delicate figs known in Europe are those growing about this place.” Two years later, he received and planted 44 cuttings from France—including the Marseilles variety, which is the most common in Fifeville and does not require pollination by a wasp to bear fruit. Through sharing with local and out-of-state friends, Jefferson became the Johnny Apple Seed of figs.
Having collected about five pounds of fruit from the Fifth Street tree, my sister and I scurried home. She pulled a disc of Pillsbury pie dough from the refrigerator and set it on a cookie sheet. She smeared the dough with several tablespoons of apricot preserves (she said she sometimes uses lemon curd, instead), cut the figs into quarters, and arranged them in concentric circles atop the jam. After crimping the edges of the dough, she baked the galette (oh, so French!), and mouth-watering aromas wafted out of the kitchen.
The experience was unexpectedly moving. My body was in Fifeville, but my mind traveled to a villa in Tuscany.
Fig trees thrive in certain pockets of the city, including Fifeville and Belmont, where “marginally Mediterranean” growing conditions exist.
Through sharing with local and out-of-state friends, Jefferson became the Johnny Apple Seed of figs.
The sound of gunfire and the arrival of SWAT teams are unnervingly frequent within a few Fifeville blocks. Photo by Skyclad Aerial
In the early morning hours of February 10, Julie Bargmann woke up to the sound of gunshots. She laid still.
“Unfortunately, I’ve gotten kind of used to it,” says the Fifeville resident who’s lived on Sixth Street Southwest for four years. Over the last two, there have been multiple shootings and other incidents that drew a massive police response.
Every time it happens, she says, “I hunker down low and I stay in my bed.”
Police presence in the immediate area of Sixth, 6 ½, and Dice streets, in the neighborhood across Cherry Avenue from Tonsler Park, seems to be all or nothing. While community members say they don’t usually see any cops patrolling, when law enforcement does respond to the area, it’s quite a show—multiple squad cars line the narrow, one-way roads and driveways, and at times that’s been accompanied by a heavily militarized SWAT team that has terrified residents.
Bargmann and other neighbors say they’re aware that the Charlottesville Police Department is currently understaffed, and they’re sympathetic to its officers, who are currently down 18 co-workers, according to police spokesperson Tyler Hawn. But residents say a regular patrol is necessary in a neighborhood that has seen drug dealing and gunfire—and that a steadier police presence would make those SWAT raids unnecessary.
On this particular February morning, Bargmann waited until she saw the red and blue lights reflected onto her bedroom walls, then watched as the apparently naked victim of the shooting was hauled off in an ambulance.
Back in 2017, she’d witnessed a SWAT raid at the same house. An officer in military-style gear popped out of the top of a BearCat, a tank-like armored vehicle. He scanned the area with his gun drawn as other cops climbed a ladder leading to a window above the front door, bashed it in, and hurled a flash grenade through it, she recalls.
“And then I saw Sam, my neighbor, being taken away in handcuffs,” she says. Court records show that Sam Henderson, who owns the house, was arrested November 16, 2017, for possession of a controlled substance and found guilty seven months later.
But she and other neighbors still see him come and go, and they’re wondering why police don’t shut down this known “drug abode”—or the other known drug operation in the immediate area. “You’d think it would be a pretty high priority,” she says.
At Henderson’s house on a recent Thursday morning, the front door is cracked open and there appears to be a bullet hole in a window next to the door. No one answers when this reporter knocks multiple times, nor did Henderson respond to a note left by the ashtray on his porch.
Police spokesperson Hawn didn’t respond to an inquiry about Henderson or the house, but says the department “actively patrols and engages the members of the Fifeville neighborhood on a continual basis.”
Edward Thomas, a longtime Fifeville resident with properties on Sixth and 6 ½ streets, says many residents are wary of talking to police, but he and Bargmann met with an officer in December to air their concerns after their houses were paintballed. He was left “flabbergasted” when the cop suggested they start a community watch.
“Community watch programs can be a resource multiplier and a system of support for the community and the CPD,” says Hawn.
Says Thomas, “I remember saying, half joking, ‘This week it’s paintballs, next week it’s going to be real bullets.’ Well, sure enough.”
About a week later, on December 29, Thomas woke up to the sound of gunshots on 6 ½ Street. Six days after that, around 6am, neighbor Stephanie Bottoms says Charlottesville police deployed another SWAT team to arrest the culprit.
As she watched from a window, she counted 30 officers, approximately 20 of whom carried what appeared to be automatic weapons. They broke down the front door of the house in the 300 block of 6 ½ Street. With two BearCats surrounding the home, they also busted through second-floor windows on its front and back sides, she says.
That day, Ernest Anderson was arrested and charged with shooting in a public place, a misdemeanor, and felony possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
“Thank God they got the guy that shot up the neighborhood,” says Thomas, because that isn’t always the case. After the February 10 shooting, police say a gunman in a black ski mask got away.
Matt Simon, who lives on Dice Street where it intersects Sixth, recalls hearing “a ton of gunshots” back in December 2016, when two people were injured by gunfire. Two weeks later, he pulled a record out of the bin he keeps in his living room and found it broken. He realized one of the bullets had barreled through six of his discs.
“I think we warrant a patrol car coming through every now and again,” says Simon, who says things haven’t improved.
“Nothing happens until it gets really bad, and then all of a sudden, it’s like a war zone here,” says Thomas. “It’s the scariest it’s ever been.”
He says he saw a kid shot to death several years ago, which was undoubtedly frightening, but now with the somewhat regular militarized SWAT response, “it’s like we’re scared of the police.”
This type of showing from the cops “makes the neighborhood even less desirable and scares people away from buying and potentially leasing the vacant property,” Thomas adds. Three people interviewed for this story mention neighbors who have moved or started renting their properties because they don’t feel safe.
“There is definitely an overuse of SWAT teams and military vehicles [in town],” says local attorney Jeff Fogel, who’s been known to criticize the cops. “They are incredibly intimidating, not only to the occupants of the house being attacked, but the neighborhood as well. I suspect they are used for that very purpose.”
Says Hawn, “The Charlottesville Police Department takes concerns about safety in the Fifeville neighborhood and throughout the city seriously. While we understand the presence of a SWAT or tactical team may feel overwhelming, we are committed to providing a safe response to incidents for our officers, the public, and any persons involved.”
The city’s general upkeep of the neighborhood also leaves much to be desired, Thomas notes. On any given day, neighboring lots are overgrown, and beer bottles and other trash can be found strewn across the lawn of the historic Benjamin Tonsler House, which was built in 1879 for Tonsler, a prominent African American teacher and principal in town. His friend Booker T. Washington once stayed there, according to the city’s website.
There have also been cables lying on the ground since a storm last spring, complemented by a nearly-collapsed telephone poll in front of Thomas’ house. He says some crime in his area could be attributed to the broken windows theory, which suggests visible signs of disorder and crime can lead to more of it.
“I used to worry about the gentrification destroying the character of the neighborhood,” Thomas says. “Now, I kind of want the gentrification to happen, because I’d rather have gentrification than bullets and trash everywhere.”
Updated February 28 at 3:54pm with an addition comment from CPD spokesperson Tyler Hawn.
Dawn Woodford says Fifeville parking suffers because of UVA employees. Staff photo
By Mary Jane Gore
Fifeville is a neighborhood of new avenues and narrow side streets. Some curbs are permit parking only; others are open. The well-positioned neighborhood, near West Main Street and adjacent to the UVA Health System and other university buildings, is now fighting to preserve its streets for resident parking.
“It’s getting worse and worse,” laments Dawn Woodford, who’s lived in Fifeville for 20 years. “Someone visiting a resident can’t find parking space. Sometimes someone parks so you can’t even get in the driveway.”
Empty spaces fill up quickly, mainly in the morning between 7 and 8am as people leave their cars and head to work. There is “no place to park,” says Woodford, and in her view, the expansion of the UVA Emergency Department area will lead to worse congestion.
“The issue of parking in our neighborhoods that surround the university and the university hospital is certainly one that is of concern given the impact it has on the quality of life of our residents,” says City Councilor Heather Hill, who recently became one of two councilors representing the city on the Planning and Coordination Council.
UVA Health System does provide parking options, though employees must pay more for nearby garage slots. “All health system team members have options to park in university-owned parking lots or garages,” says Eric Swensen, public information officer for UVA Health System. “Some of those parking areas are within walking distance of the UVA Medical Center.”
Employees also may park at satellite locations, such as U-Hall/John Paul Jones Arena and Scott Stadium, and then ride a bus. The contractor for the hospital expansion project has rented parking spaces for construction workers, Swensen notes.
Related problems also are evident. “As I observed while visiting a neighborhood off of Cherry Avenue, beyond parking is the issue of individuals walking through private property, crossing the railroad line, and then climbing over the fence to get to their place of work,” Hill says of an early April visit.
One solution would be more UVA employee parking in the area. “There are no park-and-ride locations near the hospital, and no new parking areas are planned at this time,” Swensen says.
UVA Health System is making plans that could help to alleviate the crowding. By realigning and relocating its ambulatory care sector by 2024, the footprint of care near the hospital would shrink from a current 413,000 visits to about 200,000 visits annually. The Fontaine Research Center could double its visits—from 182,000 per year now to about 400,000 in the future.
Permit parking is another idea that could keep nonresidents off the Fifeville streets.
“I would encourage those streets that have not implemented zone permit parking to evaluate it with their neighbors and communicate back to the city what hurdles may be preventing alignment,” Hill suggests. “Is it cost, which we can likely work through some options to address? Is it convenience, as permits make it difficult for guests to visit residents depending on the time of day? Other reasons?”
Woodford says the police don’t always come. Hill agrees that “enforcement can be a challenge given the relatively limited resources.”
Woodford’s bottom line is clear: “Why should we pay to fix UVA’s broken parking situation” as rents rise in Fifeville?
Residents of the Fifeville, Belmont and Ridge Street neighborhoods selected four BeCville creative community projects, including planting cherry trees along Cherry Avenue, which are aimed at improving their surroundings. Courtesy of BeCville
BeCville, a community arts project centered on the city’s Strategic Investment Area (the intersection of Ridge Street, Belmont and Fifeville), has been more than a year in the making, led by Matt Slaats, executive director of PauseLab. Slaat’s premise for BeCville, funded by an NEA Our Town Grant called Play the City, is to use art to address community needs in thoughtful ways and put the whole process in the hands of residents.
“I’ve been inspired by this thing called participatory budgeting,” says Slaats. “The idea is that a chunk of public funding is set aside from a public budget and then residents decide how that funding is spent in their neighborhood.”
The process began with a survey. “We were looking at three things,” he says. “What’s important to people about this neighborhood? How are people engaging in this neighborhood? And the final thing was creativity. So, how are you creative?” What they found was a love for the community, and a fear of gentrification and rising taxes. When it came to engagement, people responded that they were too busy or uncomfortable but also, Slaats says, “people felt like their voices weren’t going to be heard.” And he says, “The top thing that people thought was their creative outlet in the neighborhood was gardening.”
Next, the BeCville group went door-to-door with one question: How would you improve your neighborhood? The team gathered the answers and distributed them as a newspaper to the neighborhood. “We wanted to make sure they knew we heard them,” Slaats says. Finally, BeCville asked artists to submit proposals based on the community’s ideas. They received 24 proposals, narrowed it to 16 that were feasible, and then opened a two-week voting period to residents. After tallying up the votes, four winners were announced on June 10 at the Cville People’s Summit.
Janet Mitchel says when her proposed South First Garden project won she was ecstatic: “I even put my tiara on when they gave me the award.”
The next winner was the Cherry Avenue project proposed by Cathy Cassety, Gregg Early and Daniel Katz. Cassety explains, “The idea is to plant cherry trees along Cherry Avenue and Elliott to link these two neighborhoods of Fifeville and Belmont. Then when the trees bloom, to have a street festival each year to celebrate the community.”
To answer the call for better lighting, Kate Tabony and Amber Ovitt proposed Luminarea, a light installation project along Sixth Street that will incorporate words chosen by the community to illuminate the dark and slow down traffic.
And finally, the fourth winner was the Memorial to the Unknown, proposed by Edwina St. Rose of The Preservers of the Daughters of Zion Cemetery, which will honor those in the historic African-American cemetery with missing or displaced headstones. St. Rose writes in an email, “We are over the moon. We hope that when the memorial is completed, we can have a community celebration!”
And just because the winners have been announced doesn’t mean community engagement ends. “Our big hope for the projects is that as they move forward,” Slaats says, “people have ownership in the process.”
