Daily Progress readers recently received an uplifting, tear-jerking story of the UVA student who suffered what might have been a fatal, face-crushing injury while bicycling the Blue Ridge Parkway. Were it not for some doctors, including Martha Jefferson’s well-placed Mark Harris and UVA’s Stephen Park, there might have been a vastly different ending to this three-part story.
The Rotunda stands as the centerpiece of a Jefferson masterpiece, one of only four structures in the United States to be named a World Heritage Site, but there’s one problem: 95 percent of it is not the work of Jefferson.As UVA prepares to restore the Lawn, just how much Jefferson to put back into it appears to be a matter of intense discussion. In the Spring issue of UVA’s alumni magazine, an article on the restoration plans, “This Old Academical Village: Preserving a national treasure,” elicited a number of angry letters-to-the-editor in the magazine’s Summer issue, questioning the wisdom of some of the proposed projects. In particular, alumni criticized plans to attach a “parapet” to Pavilion X and change the colors of the Lawn’s white columns and dark green shutters, arguing that just because Thomas Jefferson may have wanted them (more)
Will Charlottesville’s Hardy Drive go the way of St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe, the 33 buildings on 57 acres that St. Louis used to ghettoize its poor in the 1950s.Charlottesville wants to redevelop its public housing projects. That means that everything from adding new foliage around the front doors to pulling a “Pruitt-Igoe,” i.e. demolishing all the stuff, is on the table.
As usual for Charlottesville facelifts, Philadelphia-based Wallace Roberts Todd, or WRT, is running the show, and the first community meeting is Monday, June 29 at 6:30pm.
Other meetings will follow Tuesday, and interested citizens can follow the situation on a special redevelopment website.
Why is demolition an option? Because, according to the minutes of a May 11 consultants’ meeting, maintaining the existing building inventory “will not be viable” for Housing Authority over the long-term.
In addition to finding that even wait-listed would-be residents won’t move into the Westhaven complex on Hardy Drive, the apartments owned by the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority are “not comparable to what is available in the private marketplace, and that gap will continue to widen if the Housing Authority does not pursue rehab and/or redevelopment strategies.”
Rapture gets ahead of the smoke-free curve.Even before the General Assembly banned smoking in restaurants and bars effective December 1, longtime smokers’ paradise Rapture decided to pull the plug on puffing.
“We had made the decision before we heard about the legislation,” says co-owner Mike Rodi.
Last August, the restaurant went smoke-free at lunch. “We were losing business,” says Rodi. “We’d have maybe one smoking table, and people waiting for non-smoking. And we had a lot of smoke drift.”
In January, smoking in the bar and Club R2 was limited to between 11pm and 2am, and on June 15, smoking was fini at Rapture.
The restaurant has a new chef, new items on the menu, and the owners are ready to freshen up the decor, paint and upholstery. It seemed pointless to do that in a smoky environment, says Rodi.
He points out (more)
Police are looking for a man who went on an $8,000 Nikon-camera-buying spree June 12 using stolen credit cards lifted earlier at Farmington Country Club.
The cards were used at Wal-Mart, Sears, Ritz Camera, Finish Line, and at Best Buy, where police retrieved security video. Police describe the person in the two released images as a white male between 5′4″ and 5′6″, about 150 pounds, and between 40 and 50 years old.
“Within a couple of hours of the theft,” says Farmington GM Phil Keister, “$8,000 was charged before the victim even realized the theft.”
After a call to the credit card company, the camera equipment spree was halted.
“The credit card company shut them down,” says Keister of the cards, noting that they were presented at a couple of additional locations.
The country club had hosted a golf tournament that day for members and guests. Is it possible the thief is a member?
“It’s entirely possible,” says Kiester. “The only people we can eliminate are women.”
It appears to Keister, however, to be at least a two-man job because no one who has seen the pictures recalls seeing that individual at Farmington.
“We looked at security photos from Best Buy,” says Kiester. “I would guess the person who stole the cards is not the person in the video.”
Keister says he thinks the thief is someone who would feel comfortable walking around the Farmington locker room and notes theft at the club is “pretty unusual.”
In 2002, Farmington locker rooms made the news when a naked man allegedly strolled into the women’s locker room and pretended it was an accident, the same M.O. that allegedly was used across the street at Boar’s Head Sports Club.
–last updated 11:31am June 29
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Congressman Tom Perriello (D-Ivy, left) declined a request for federal funds for Larry Sabato’s Youth Leadership Initiative. Now Senator Mark Warner (D-VA, right) is lobbying his colleagues to save it.Few political scientists are as tapped into the ways of Washington as the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato. For his encyclopedic knowledge and predictive acumen, he has be come the go-to-guy for the national media seeking political analysis. Now, after decades spent watching Capitol Hill, Sabato needs an act of Congress to keep his brainchild alive.
“If we do not receive federal funds,” says Ken Stroupe, chief of staff of Sabato’s UVA Center for Politics, “we do not have a sufficient endowment to continue to operate this program.”
The program is the Youth Leadership Initiative, a national civics education program founded by Sabato in 1998, providing free teaching tools to 50,000 social studies teachers of all grade levels nationwide. Every two years, the program runs mock elections with students voting on the same candidates their parents will on Election Day, making for what the Center for Politics says is the nation’s largest mock election.
Since its inception, the Youth Initiative received most of its funding from a federal earmark introduced annually into the House of Representatives by Congressman Virgil Goode (R-Rocky Mount). After (more)
The outrage that put City Councilor Holly Edwards (left) and County Supervisor Sally Thomas (right) onto the Rivanna board last month didn’t stop the planned highway-hugging mega-dam pushed by chair Michael Gaffney (center).Three hours before the June 25 vote to replace the embattled engineering firm guiding the local water supply, Kevin Lynch was blasting the leadership of the waterworks. “How much longer,” asked Lynch, a former City Councilor, “will Rivanna throw good money after bad?”
The question came the same day that the Daily Progress revealed that the waterworks, the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority, was paying a lawyer $515 an hour— sometimes over $20,000 a month— to review documents.
The Progress also reported that the Authority– which has come under fire for (more)
The splashing has begun at Onesty Family Aquatic Center, and neighbors say parking’s not a problem.After weeks of worrying about parking problems at Onesty Family Aquatic Center, pool neighbors say a smooth opening weekend has slowed the ripples of anxiety.
“I was shocked that cars weren’t in my yard,” says Eleanor Wilson, who lives three houses away from the $3.8 million complex on Chesapeake Street and had feared her street would be lined with the cars of poolgoers.
According to Wilson, who doesn’t have a driveway and thus relies on street parking, her fears weren’t realized. In fact, she says cars never parked farther than her next door neighbor’s house.
Bob Manners, the City’s supervisor of aquatics, says the opening weekend was “a huge success.”
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