All that separates Tina Awkard’s front lawn from a chemical graveyard is a few hundred feet and a chain link fence. Yet Awkard, who moved here with her children three months ago, wasn’t aware that the “waste and lagoon treatment center” next door is a toxic dump with a file at the Environmental Protection Agency […]
What is it about this town? You can check out, but you can never leave.
These are interesting questions, but earlier today, I was copying a file to disk and the computer ate it. Now the computer will neither open the file nor read the disk. How can Charlottesville expect you to write encomiums to its greatness when your computer files are being eaten? Not that you care. No one […]
Brawl on the mall
At the height of its short career, Danielson and Rolph’s company, D&R Development, held more than $10 million in Mall property. Onlookers credit two of their projects in particular––the Charlottesville Ice Park and the Regal Cinema building––for catalyzing the Mall’s evolution from a shell of empty buildings to an urban streetscape where people live, work […]
C-Ville 20
Brad Eure Once upon a time, newspaper publishers, television producers and radio station managers actually lived in the communities they served. Now, with more media falling into the fold of corporate conglomerates, the phrase “locally owned” is practically an anachronism. Brad Eure has managed to survive the dog-eat-dog radio market by staying tuned in to […]
Tim and Vincent’s Excellent Culinary Adventure
The clock is ticking. A dishwasher furiously scours knives as the grill chef checks the fryer by his station. Amidst the loud intermittent clank of utensils and pans against stainless steel countertops, Tim Burgess, co-owner of Bang and chef for the night, swiftly dices mint in preparation for the many Thai carrot salads and peanut-sesame […]
Hidden Charlottesville
Riverview Park Chesapeake Street Woolen Mills Neighborhood A few hundred yards beyond Riverview’s parking lot the Rivanna curves into sight, past the playground equipment and a stretch of grass. There’s something beautiful about that murky brown snake. During the American Revolution, the City’s most prominent river provided an indispensable transportation route, and Thomas Jefferson’s moniker […]
War no more
“CCPJ provides a way for those in our community who care about peace and justice to join with kindred spirits,” says CCPJ steering committee chair Bill Anderson, above. “As our name suggests, we in CCPJ believe that peace and justice are inextricably intertwined. When we work for one we promote the other.” Twenty years ago, […]
Cancer sells
Last year, local hospitals treated more than 53,000 patients for cancer. From prostate and breast cancers to melanoma and pediatric lymphoma, these numbers show no signs of abating. In 2003, the American Cancer Society estimates, cancer will strike 32,800 more Virginians. The State-wide death toll this year is estimated at 13,700. It’s hard to obtain […]
Here’s the story of a man named Brady
That’s an excerpt I like from “Whitman in 1863,” a song on local folk musician Brady Earnhart’s new album, Manalapan. In a way, it’s only fitting that the enterprise contains a tribute to America’s bard. Earnhart wrote his dissertation on the man many consider the country’s first original poet, and his songs, while the product […]
Weed whackers
They say that in Charlottesville, the guy who serves your coffee probably has a PhD. Increasingly, the coffeeshop where he works likely serves another function too: art gallery. In the past several years, all over town, new art spaces have proliferated—in restaurants and boutiques, and as cooperatives and nonprofits. The town’s concentration of visual art […]
Weed whackers
In early March, the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement Task Force arrested 18 people, ages 17 to 30, following almost a year of undercover operations in Belmont. Eight men and one woman face charges of distributing marijuana. One man faces charges of distributing both marijuana and imitation cocaine. Eight suspects face cocaine charges. In JADE press […]
Best local coffee
After water, coffee is the world’s most popular beverage. For most, it’s also a way of life. “Long before the great coffee craze, I was born and raised in an era when it was totally natural for my family to serve us kids espresso after dinner,” says Tony LaBua, owner of the Java Hut and […]
UVA Inc.
They called it an incubator: the upstairs of the Charlottesville Tomorrow building on West Main Street, space leased to University faculty whose ideas no longer quite fit the contours of academia. To move into one of the six offices subsidized by UVA’s Patent Foundation signaled progress for a new biotech company. It meant that early-phase […]
Charlottesville’s new homeless
The resulting contradiction couldn’t be sharper: While developers and their supporters on Council hammer a “Wealthy Buyers Only” sign on the top of the City gates, a new breed of disenfranchised City dwellers is sprouting below. Lynn Wiber is among them. Educated and employed, she has no home of her own and few prospects of […]
Pooling Resources
There’s a truck with a trailer driving in the deep end!” says Pat Healy, looking out from a window in the clubhouse at Fry’s Spring Beach Club at the crater where a 100-meter swimming pool used to be. On this bright February day, it looks more like a giant, muddy hole, shored up with remnants […]
Take a Message
Since the first cave dwellers plunked a rock against a wall for purely expressive reasons, music has been social—even sometimes political. Like any art form, music offers an individual’s take on the surrounding world, one that is in turn absorbed and cast back into the world by an audience. Every song, no matter the subject, […]
Making Book
Books and writers certainly get their due starting at about this time of the year as the Virginia Festival of the Book ramps up. Local authors who have been holed away surface to share their year’s work in one way or another, shedding temporary (and sometimes unwanted) light on a solitary process. But there is […]
Know your enemy
Using the latest DNA technology, Charlottesville police in November linked a series of area rapes to a single perpetrator. The attacker’s modus operandi—violent sneak attacks on carefully selected victims—led police to suspect the serial rapist could be responsible for as many as seven assaults since 1997. Hoping for a tip that could lead to an […]
Faded Genes
Seeds…those sleepy little kernels tucked in their winter coats. Not one metabolic quiver until, suddenly and by the millions, they start to move. They travel by ground and by air, from state to state, from December through April. That’s the time of year when discerning growers scour seed catalogues, browsing long lists of plants with […]
Not Necessarily the News
It starts with the music , one of those brass-and-percussion fanfares that news anchors like to hum on their way to work. Then the announcer trumpets: “From Comedy Central’s World News Headquarters in New York, this is ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.’” And before you’ve had a chance to sort through the incongruity of […]
Tales from the Gift
Flashlights, GOP handbooks and dirty shirts: very, very costly. This will not be an O. Henry moment.In what follows you will find no stories of bartered hair and pocket watches. If there is sentimentality in these tales of best and worst gifts, we didn’t put it there. Deploying the sharpest investigative tools, by which […]
Hard Water
Rain…The word alone forms a complete prayer. Spoken as a plea or demand, the simple invocation has been a common mantra across the Southeast this year. The congregation of thirsty supplicants included, until recently, those of us living in the Rivanna Watershed, which in the past four years has been shy about 40 inches of […]
Village People
Two years ago, Charlottesville carpenter Louise Finger packed her tool belt and sized up a new project. She put aside her usual routine of building swanky homes for Central Virginia’s well-to-do and embarked on what she says is a more rewarding path: constructing no-frills public structures for communities in need. Ilove that kind of work, […]