Tag: Mary Joy Scala

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Historic effort: Burley High on its way to landmark status

Local activist Jimmy Hollins, who attended Burley High School (now a middle school, above) when it was “colored-only,” led a campaign for the school to receive landmark status. Photo by Skyclad Aerial

Last fall, after Burley Middle School unveiled a monument wall listing the names of students who attended the segregated school from 1951 to 1967, local activist Jimmy Hollins began circulating a petition to officially designate it a historic landmark.

Burley is one of three operating Virginia schools that had once been all-black, as it was when Hollins, 71, attended from 1960 to 1965. The Burley Varsity Club, a nonprofit co-founded by Hollins, collected over 500 signatures and sent a letter to the Albemarle County superintendent.

The Albemarle County School Board approved a resolution for the designation February 14. Next, the proposal goes to the Virginia Landmarks Register, which would officially grant historic status to the school. Then, an application would be submitted to the National Register of Historic Places to designate it a national landmark.

Burley’s unique story makes it a strong candidate for historic designation.

In the late 1940s, Charlottesville and Albemarle County decided to build Burley to show proponents of integration that public schools could truly be “separate but equal,” a common strategy in Southern localities at the time. The city and county provided Burley ample funding, hired top-shelf teachers, and distributed substantial resources to its athletic programs–all in the hopes of maintaining segregation.

At first, it seemed as though the plan may have worked. Burley was built to replace Jefferson and Esmont high schools and Albemarle Training School. “I think all the black kids wanted to go to Burley,” says Hollins, who played defensive tackle on the football team. “Charlottesville had police officers and firefighters who went to Burley, and UVA nursing school worked to get black nurses for UVA hospital from Burley.”

But the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1954 unanimous Brown v. Board of Education ruling, determined that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” because segregating black children on the basis of race “generates a feeling of inferiority…in a way unlikely to ever be undone,” wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren. Regardless of quality, schools would have to integrate.

In the years between Brown and Hollins’ first year at Burley, Virginia Governor James Lindsay Almond Jr. shifted his efforts to actively resisting integration, temporarily closing Venable Elementary and Lane High schools in 1958 to avoid admitting black students. But his efforts were repeatedly quashed by mandatory desegregation orders from federal courts, and in 1959, the first black students enrolled at Lane and Venable.

Facing yearly declines in enrollment, Burley converted to a school for seventh graders from the overflowing Jack Jouett Junior High in 1967, then reopened as an integrated middle school in 1973.

Jeff Werner, historic designation and design planner with the city, decided to team up with Hollins after discovering they had a common interest: Since Burley Middle School is squarely within the Rose Hill neighborhood, designating the school could help the effort to preserve the entire historically black area, which has many homes dating from 1900 to 1930.

Werner inherited the project of designating Rose Hill a historic district from his predecessor, Mary Joy Scala.

Last summer, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources deemed Rose Hill eligible for historic status. This has granted special protections, since eligibility alone requires state agencies to take steps to mitigate potential damages when working in the district, even though its status has not yet changed.

Designating Burley a historic landmark “really changes the narrative,” Werner says. “Think about what that means to these individuals. That’s invaluable.”

Hollins concurs. “If I could go back to Burley I would do it all over again,” he says. “It was a family.” And one with a proud history, including the Burley Bears’ 1956 undefeated football season, which Hollins wants to make sure is not forgotten.

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Historic conservation at center of controversy

Though a number of residents want to preserve the historic character of their neighborhood, Woolen Mills is already home to many modern houses. Matteus Frankovich / Skyclad AP

A proposed historic conservation district in Woolen Mills has the neighborhood divided. While some residents are pushing for a neighborhood association-requested ordinance that would promise protection of their historic assets, others say the drafted rules concerning additional construction in the area—for both big and small projects—would require them to jump through too many hoops.

The neighborhood, named after the Woolen Mills factory that produced a combination of wool, cotton, flour and lumber from 1830 to 1962, is home to an array of millhouses dating back to that era. Today, about 475-500 homes exist in the neighborhood, and 82 properties owned by 68 residents are located within the proposed conservation district, according to John Frazee, chair of the Woolen Mills Neighborhood Association.

Frazee has lived in the neighborhood for 12 years and spent five years on the neighborhood association board. He lives two houses outside of the proposed conservation district that namely protects properties on Chesapeake, Riverside, Steephill, Franklin and East Market streets.

“Personally, I feel that the concept of a conservation district is a positive one for a neighborhood like ours,” he says. “I feel it affords a reasonable amount of protection for the integrity of what comprises our neighborhood, even though it is very mixed in terms of architecture and history.”

He says the largest point of contention for some residents is the proposed ordinance, which as currently written, and if interpreted strictly, would require them to receive approval from the Board of Architectural Review before building anything onto their properties. And doing so comes with a price tag.

“This has been a working-class neighborhood since its inception,” says Barry Umberger, a Woolen Mills resident of 35 years who lives in the proposed conservation district. He says building any type of addition is already costly—and if the ordinance passes, hiring an architect to draw plans and having them reviewed and approved by the BAR, a step that would cost from $125 to $375, are an added burden.

Additionally, he says the overlay of the proposed district is arbitrary—his house, and those surrounding it, are nearly identical, though both he and his neighbor are included in the proposed perimeter and the four houses behind him are not.

“I think we should have the right to opt out,” he says.

Eric Hurt, who also resides in the proposed district, agrees. “The only real compromise is for people to do what they want with their own property,” he says. “I just don’t think neighbors should be vying for rules on other neighbors. The city does that and we don’t need more of it.”

Mary Joy Scala, the city’s preservation and design planner within the Department of Neighborhood Development Services, is aware of neighborhood concerns. She is currently rewriting the ordinance to make it more specific before City Council votes on whether to adopt it.

“It was ready to go to City Council for adoption in December and then some of the residents took a closer look at it and became concerned about exactly what was required or not required,” Scala says. “One of their big concerns, which I agree with, is that the ordinance was a little bit vague about precisely what required approval and what didn’t.”

For example, neighbors raised questions about whether they’d need approval for structures like birdhouses or chicken coops, and the answer, some residents say, seemed up to interpretation.

Louis Schultz lives in the proposed perimeter and is concerned that the city may not be operating legally in other historic districts because some property owners have been permitted to build without the required approval. He says, “It’s fine, in some ways, if [the ordinance] doesn’t really affect you because someone doesn’t enforce the law, but that’s not good government at all. Ignoring the law for my benefit is really not something that’s reliable in the long run.”

The proposed historic conservation district is intended to prevent the demolition of current structures and to review proposed new buildings and structures to “make sure they fit the character of the district,” Scala says.

Historic conservation districts—two of which already exist in the Martha Jefferson and Rugby Road neighborhoods—are similar to, but less intensely regulated than, architectural design control districts, of which there are eight, including North Downtown, West Main Street and the Corner.

Within the next five months, the proposed ordinance, which requires a zoning text amendment, will go to the BAR for recommendation. It will then be sent to the planning commission for a recommendation and City Council for the final vote.

“I think historic conservation districts are really useful and important because there are a lot of historic neighborhoods in Charlottesville where you would not want to see buildings demolished without any kind of review,” Scala says. “It’s a mechanism to protect a lot of neighborhoods without getting in there too much.”

Updated January 19 at 9:15am to clarify Louis Schultz’s remarks.

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A Vinegar Hill memorial you can actually see

The plaque currently memorializing Vinegar Hill is often hard to spot, but at least it’s no longer flanked by a big black planter and a trash can bolted to the ground. Staff photo

A forthcoming addition to the Downtown Mall will commemorate Vinegar Hill, the historically African-American neighborhood that saw displacement of 158 families when city residents voted to develop the land in the 1960s. Officially called Vinegar Hill Park, this chunk of real estate between the Omni hotel and Main Street Arena will house $15,000 worth of interpretive signage, such as informational kiosks.

“The important thing about this site is its location,” says Mary Jo Scala, the city’s preservation and design planner. “It’s near where [Lawrence] Halprin envisioned this homage to Vinegar Hill, and it’s near where a lot of West Main Street’s African-American businesses were located.”

Halprin, a renowned landscape architect, began designing the Downtown Mall in the early 1970s, but he left room for a “park” that was never built to remember the lost neighborhood.

“The whole mall is a park, in a sense,” Scala says. “It’s an urban park. It doesn’t necessarily have to have trees or playground equipment or whatever you traditionally think of as a park. I think urban parks are kind of a place of respite where you can sit and enjoy yourself.”

Halprin’s drawing of the park shows trees and a water feature, Scala says. “That’s certainly possible for the future,” she adds. “That’s the beauty of this site.”

Within the next six months, Scala says you’ll be seeing wayfinding signage for Vinegar Hill Park on the mall.

Asked if this is the type of commemoration the Blue Ribbon Commission on Race, Memorials and Public Spaces has advocated for, commission chair Don Gathers says, “That and much more. We would like something specific and highly visible located at the entrance to the park or plaza—whatever they intend to call it—and also something throughout the Downtown Mall to direct people that way.”

The current marker memorializing Vinegar Hill, which will stay in place, isn’t cutting it on its own, Gathers says.

“It came to be known because it was behind one of those huge black planters and on the opposite side of it was a large city trash can bolted to the ground,” he says. “Unless you were looking for it, you never would have known it was there.”

While the city has since removed the planter and the trash can, Gathers says the marker still sits eight to 10 inches off the ground and is barely visible to the public.

Andrea Douglas, executive director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, says the park—as the Historic Resources Committee described it—will honor more than the displaced families and the black population, but also the idea that Vinegar Hill was once a center of commerce in Charlottesville.

“It wasn’t just black people who used the commerce on Vinegar Hall,” she says. “Inge’s store was the place in Charlottesville where anyone could go to buy fish. …It holds a significant history that is associated with the development of our community.”

And there’s also room for more seating at the park, but, according to Scala, the Board of Architectural Review and Parks & Recreation have squabbled about what constitutes a Halprin-approved bench on the mall. (Which, if you ask the BAR, the backless benches in front of City Hall apparently aren’t).

In the past, the city has removed benches on the mall because of an alleged “behavior problem” by those using them, which the homeless people who camp on them have taken as a personal attack.