Tag: north downtown

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Knock, knock: Lyndsey Brown is at your door, which may end up on Instagram

Long walks in her new neighborhood of north downtown—and seeing the many colors and styles of the front doors there—inspired Lyndsey Brown to start her Instagram feed. Photos: @cvilledoors

The door photography craze can be traced to 1970, when a New York ad exec created a colorful collage of 36 arched Georgian townhouse doorways he shot while on a project in Dublin. As the story goes, the adman showed the assemblage to the head of the Irish tourism office in Manhattan, who commissioned copies with the simple tagline “The Doors of Dublin.” The poster led to a book of the same name, and spawned a tourism boomlet of people who wanted to see the doors in real life.

Today, the list of Instagram feeds riffing on the door theme—including one with 2.8 million followers—is so long that we lost count. But @cvilledoors is near and dear to our hearts. Lyndsey Brown launched the feed in June and had gained 145 followers by summer’s end.

After moving from Preston Avenue to a place on Park Street, Brown and her fiancé, Mike, began taking long neighborhood walks with their dog, Ollie. “North Downtown has such beautiful homes, and many people have put great care into their exteriors,” Brown says. “As we walked, we’d always notice the unique doors and point them out to each other. It became a kind of game.”

The game became the Instagram account, and the rest is history. You may take the photos at face value, or read a little into them like Brown does. “Doors are interesting because they’re interactive and functional,” she says. “Choosing to have a beautiful or unique door says something about the style and character of the people inside.”

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News

Fenced out: Neighbors complain about closed shortcut

When one North Downtown resident wanted neighbors to stop crossing her property to access that of the Park Street First Baptist Church, she built a fence—about a foot in front of the church’s fence and access gate. Photo by Skyclad Aerial

In the North Downtown neighborhood, a new fence is causing a fuss.

Where some Second Street NE residents have long walked down their dead-end lane to an unlocked gate that led to the backyard of the Park Street First Baptist Church, they’ve recently been faced with an obstruction to the beaten path.

It’s a fence—a second fence—built about one foot in front of the church’s.

Residents who have used the path and the church’s property as a place to walk their pooches, ride bicycles, sled in the winter and watch summer fireworks say the neighbor who lives nearest the fence has cut them off.

“Everybody is actually very irate over it,” says Amita Sudhir, who has lived on the street since 2011. “She’s effectively cut off our access to one of the best sources of recreation in the neighborhood. I can’t think of a single valid reason for her to do that.”

But Jane Angelhart says she owns the property and consulted a legal adviser before building the wooden wall.

“I have my reasons to put up a fence and I feel justified,” she says, not sharing many details, but contending that it wasn’t a decision she took lightly.

Others who live on Angelhart’s street have taken to neighborhood website Nextdoor—where friendly conversations oft turn ugly, and in this case, have—to call for removal of the pedestrian-blocking barricade on private property.

“If neighbors want to challenge it, then they need to do it in a proper way, not through bullying me online or in the newspaper,” says Angelhart.

But Angelhart has the support of at least one neighbor, Sandy Werner, who wrote on the website, “I trust her and know that she made this decision carefully after seeking counsel. As for the impact of the fence to me as a resident, I have accessed the church grounds this way myself for 20 years, but now I simply walk a few extra blocks to access via Park Street.”

According to Angelhart, it’s about a seven-minute walk for those who’d like to circumvent the church and enter through the front instead of the back. But that seven minutes makes all the difference for some folks.

“It’s like living beside a park, and Jane’s response is to just walk around because it’s only seven blocks,” says resident Diana Filipi. “Well that’s the difference between living beside a park and seven blocks away from a park.”

Filipi says neighbors have reached out to Vice-Mayor Heather Hill, another North Downtown resident, for guidance. City spokesperson Brian Wheeler says the fence is under review by the city’s Neighborhood Development Services staff.

Says Filipi, “That has been an open pedestrian access way for over 30 years and we believe that she is not allowed to just take that away.”

Former attorney Debbie Wyatt says she can understand why someone wouldn’t want a large volume of people consistently crossing her property.

She doesn’t mince words: “If it’s her property and the fence is legal, then she can put it up.”

However, if neighbors have been crossing her property for ages, they could make an argument that it’s a prescriptive easement, which can happen when people use a property openly for 20 years.

More than a decade ago, Wyatt represented “Razor wire widow” Shirley Presley, whose Bland Circle home abutted a section of a 20-mile trail network built by the Rivanna Trails Foundation without her permission. Presley began piling brush on the trail in 2002, and a year later, she sanctioned it off with razor wire.

After the city unsuccessfully sued Presley in 2004, she countersued the city and the Rivanna Trails Foundation in a $1.5 million suit that she eventually settled for an undisclosed amount.

Adds Sudhir about the current case in her neighborhood, “Whether or not it’s legal for [Angelhart] to do that, it’s really kind of mean.”

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News

Still here: White supremacy strikes again

North Downtown residents found fliers proclaiming that "it's okay to be white" on their front lawns this morning. Photo courtesy of Gail South

“It’s okay to be white.”

The sentence that first started popping up on high school and university campuses in November is the same one that was plastered onto dozens of fliers, folded into a neat square, stuffed into a sandwich bag with a rock in it and tossed on the lawns of North Downtown residents last night.

Neighbors on Cargil Lane, Marshall and Hazel streets and Locust and Watson avenues were some of many who awoke to find such a message on April 18.

“I think it’s supposed to be intimidating,” says Gail South, whose husband found their note around 7am. “Why on earth would someone do this?”

But Reverend Phil Woodson says it came as no surprise, because there have been almost 40 overt actions or events involving white supremacists in town since August of last year.

“One of the narratives that people like to think is that on August 12, we were invaded, that people came from somewhere else,” he says. “But the reality is that there’s still a large number of white supremacists who live in and around Charlottesville.”

He points to local cars that have since been spray painted with racial slurs, white supremacists who have interrupted City Council meetings and an enormous Confederate flag recently raised on the side of Interstate 64 in Louisa.

Charlottesville has been the target of racist fliers before, and the Winchester Star reports the KKK distributed 22 similar fliers-in-a-baggie in Frederick County April 8.

Flyering is activity that only takes one person, says Carla Hill at the Center for Extremism.

On Monday morning, Reverend Woodson arrived at the First United Methodist Church to find its nearby telephone poles stapled with similar fliers, and with one caught in the netting of the church’s scaffolding.

This flier was a Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson quote that read, “The time for war has not yet come, but it will come, and that soon; and when it does come, my advice is to draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.”

Quotes on fliers stapled to nearby telephone poles were attributed to Charlottesville’s beloved Thomas Jefferson, though Monticello’s website says Plato, Felix Frankfurter and Anton Menger have been credited with the same quote: “There is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequal men.”

Though members of the First United Methodist Church have been very vocal in their opposition to white supremacy, Woodson says he doesn’t believe the messages were directed toward them.

“I really think it was due to the high traffic that would have been downtown for the Tom Tom Festival,” he says. “Any time there’s going to be a large gathering of people, it presents an opportunity for these white supremacists to spread their discord and hatred.”

He adds that local residents should be aware of what’s happening, and that white supremacy doesn’t always look like a man marching down Market Street with a swastika flag in tow.

“We can’t seem to get the vast majority of the community to understand that this is still happening and it’s going to take every single person to get involved in order to make a difference,” the reverend says.

Woodson nods to the Concert for Charlottesville, the free night of “music and unity” that drew Dave Matthews, Justin Timberlake, Ariana Grande and other stars to town in the wake of August 12.

“How many thousands of people showed up to a Dave Matthews Band concert at the UVA football stadium, and how many of those people are actually engaged in confronting white supremacy?”

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News

Noisy neighbors: Residents ask Allied Concrete to quiet down

Allied Concrete, zoned industrially, is close to a residential neighborhood. Photo by Jack Looney

North Downtowners have long complained about the noise from Allied Concrete, which was established on industrially zoned Harris Street in 1945—just on the outskirts of a residential neighborhood.

Colette Hall, who has lived in downtown Charlottesville for 16 years and served on the North Downtown Residents Association board for 12, five as president, says the noise has persisted as long as she can remember. And it’s not just during the day. With normal operating hours from Monday to Saturday, Allied also has a third shift that sometimes works overnight.

With the constant clanging and banging and noise of the utility vehicles’ backup beepers,“You cannot sleep if this is going on all night long,” Hall says.

In 2002, she, City Attorney Craig Brown and then-NDRA president Chad Freckmann approached former Allied president Gus Lorber about the noise. He allegedly agreed to have the backup beepers silenced at night, Hall says, but she awoke to the familiar noise of incessant beeping soon after. At around 3am, she got dressed, marched over to the plant and confronted a man operating a utility vehicle. He agreed to silence it and she says she thought the battle was over.

“It seems to do some good for a while, but then things go back to the way they used to be,” says Mark Kavit, another former NDRA president who still serves on the board. He says he suspects between three and five couples have moved out of the neighborhood to elude the noise.

To this day, Hall says about Allied, “They haven’t been a friendly neighbor.”

But Ted Knight, the company’s current president, says, “We are good neighbors and stewards and try to be as courteous as possible.” In his three years of presidency, he says he hasn’t received any noise complaints. But with crews currently working up to four nights a week on a Route 29 solutions project, he says neighbors are probably hearing additional noise.

About those backup beepers, though? Regulations require backup alarms on Allied’s hulking utility vehicles for safety. “Those are things we can’t disable,” says Knight.

For William Hunter, a Nelson Drive resident since 2004, the beepers aren’t the biggest issue. He has recorded several nights’ worth of what he calls a “medley of very loud machinery,” and says the noise has become louder over the past several years. In a recording taken from his front doorstep at 3am last week, Hunter plays what he says sounds like a mortar shot or a loud snare drum going off in 30-second intervals.

The city’s noise ordinance says the maximum sound level for residential areas is 65 decibels during the day and 55 at night. No limits are imposed for industrially zoned areas, and Charlottesville Police say no calls for Allied-related noise have been received over the past year.

“I wouldn’t bother the police with a complaint when I know they are well within their rights to make as much noise as they need deem necessary,” Hunter says about the company.

The ordinance declares that “the people have a right to and should be ensured an environment free from excessive sound that may jeopardize the public health, welfare, peace and safety or degrade the quality of life; and that it is the policy of the city to prevent such excessive sound.”

“The city holds all the power,” Hunter says, acknowledging that no noise limits are imposed at Allied and some neighbors have been reluctant to bring the issue before city staff in the past. As part of a “peaceful protest,” he has constructed a Scrabble-style piece of folk art in his yard that uses words such as mitigate, buffer and please.

William Hunter's "peaceful protest." Staff photo

His house is just a five-minute walk from the Downtown Mall and Hunter says the city should be just as concerned about the effect of Allied’s noise on his neighborhood as they are of concerts and other events downtown. On any street in Charlottesville, there is legal recourse for a dog barking loudly, he says, and some similar enforcement should be in place for the “industrial roar” he lives next to, such as the construction of a buffer or wall.

“Noise pollution is a real thing and this is an extreme example of it,” Hunter says.

City staff isn’t always aware of situations that could be violations of city code, says spokesperson Miriam Dickler, though they are aware of past complaints against Allied. “If folks can contact us and let us know, it allows us to investigate and work with them on a faster timetable than waiting for us to come across it on our own.”

However, Allied’s president offers another perspective: “When you move next to a railroad track, you can’t complain about the train.”

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News

A third fox joins the gang that’s terrorizing downtown

Police say test on this fox, captured March 14, did not indicate any signs of rabies. Photos by Michelle Walker (via NBC29)

Early this morning, a fox bit a Charlottesville woman on her lower leg, making her the third person in two weeks to report being attacked or bitten by a potentially rabid fox.

According to city police, animal control responded to a report of a fox acting aggressively in the 1200 block of Monticello Road around 9:33am and, at that time, learned of the woman who was bitten in the 1100 block of Leonard Street earlier that morning. The officer captured the fox on Monticello and it was euthanized at the Charlottesville Albemarle SPCA. Its remains have been sent to the Virginia Department of Health for testing.

Officers captured and put down a fox “acting suspiciously” on Watson Avenue March 14. Two days later, police said tests on the animal did not show any signs of rabies. Animal control officer Casey Breeden told C-VILLE she believed this to be a different fox than the first one that bit two people in north Downtown on March 8, evaded capture at Allied Concrete on Harris Street and reportedly crawled into a storm drain.

Small animals like foxes can only live with rabies for a matter of days, according to Breeden. She and other neighbors speculate that the first fox is already dead.

City spokesperson Miriam Dickler says if you see a fox in your neighborhood, do not approach the animal. “Don’t try to capture it yourself,” she says. “And don’t try to pet it.”

Stay inside or get inside if an animal is concerning you, she adds. Keep all garbage covered and don’t feed your pets outdoors or leave their food outside.

If a suspicious animal—like the group of potentially rabid foxes recently seen downtown—is in your line of sight, Dickler says to call 911. If you are reporting a previous fox sighting, call animal control at 434-970-3280.

“Leave it to the professionals,” Dickler says.

Bonus fox fact: A group of foxes is called a skulk or a leash.