Yes, that’s a bra next to lead singer James Wilson.
PHOTO BY STEPHANIE GARCIA

The view from the seated balcony peering down at Jason Isbell and the sold-out crowd below.
PHOTO BY STEPHANIE GARCIA

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“It’s happening,” Starr Hill Presents promoter Danny Shea said Tuesday, November 17, nearly a week and a half before the doors to the Jefferson Theater were set to open to the public for the first time in three years. And happen it did— despite the dust and renovation on Tuesday, a flash forward to Friday, November 27’s sold-out crowd lining up for wrist bands would quiet any naysayer scoffing at the possibility of the Charlottesville venue’s completion.

Originally opened in 1912, the theater has remained true to the look and feel of the early building and reopened as one glorious space for the first time in decades. Much of the plasterwork remains untouched, while the main level has been revamped with bars and a sound system to rival (more)

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Downtown’s Victory Shoe Store, as Ethel Crowe remembers it from her childhood.
HISTORIC PHOTO

While the unceremonious demolition of the art-deco glass storefront of the old Victory Shoe Store on the Downtown Mall has angered city planners, preservationists, and fans of the classic storefront—and contributed to some spirited discussion on the function of the BAR, property rights, anonymous comment posting, and “unconsciously bourgeois pathology”—for Ethel Crowe, it’s been like losing a piece of her life.

“It has made me so sick, I can’t tell you what it has done to us,” says Crowe, whose Russian immigrant grandparents, Isaac and Freda Kobre, opened the store in 1921.

“I was born in that store,” says Crowe, “That’s all I ever knew. It has been crushing. I hope they can put it back the way it was. But it will never be the same.”

As Crowe reveals, her grandparents put a new store front on the building around 1947, modifying what was already there.

Crowe says her parents, Tillie (“Miss Tillie,” Crowe says people called her) and Bernie Miller, eventually took over the store and operated it until 1995, when Tillie passed away. Crowe says she managed to keep the store going for another year, but finally closed and gave all the shoes away to charity.

“We were there for 75 years, that’s a long time,” says Crowe, struggling for words to describe the loss.

Crowe said she’s already called the building’s owner, Joe Gieck, to ask why he demolished the store front; his explanation that the glass was cracked was not well-received by Crowe.

“I hope something is done,” she says. “Maybe a petition to have it restored.”

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Cal Otto, one of three men who founded the Virginia Festival of the Book in 1994, died November 23 in Colorado Springs at age 79.

“He and I and Tom Dowd are typically credited with starting it,” says Heartwood Books owner Paul Collinge, “but the actual ball got started when he walked into the shop and said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

Otto also developed the Virginia Arts of the Book Center dedicated to books, printing and printmaking before moving (more)

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Darrell Rice will be released December 18 after serving nine month for probation violation.
FILE PHOTO BY JAY KUHLMANN

For Darrell David Rice, there may be something of a silver lining to spending the past nine months in federal prison: he has an airtight alibi for the night of October 17, when 20-year-old Morgan Harrington disappeared after attending a Metallica concert at John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville.

After completing the prison term handed down for violating the terms of his probation on his 11-year attempting kidnapping sentence, Rice will be released December 18, and his attorney says Rice hopes his freedom won’t generate (more)

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Paul Gaston at the site of the former Buddy’s restaurant, where he was assaulted in 1963.
FILE PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

Paul Gaston isn’t just the history prof who gave MLK a tour a few months before getting pummeled while protesting segregation on Emmet Street. He’s also a former denizen of Fairhope, the once-utopian Alabama community founded by his grandfather and later led by his father. And now this celebrated author has penned a new memoir about growing up— and out of— Fairhope.

Never heard of Fairhope? How about Henry George, the journalist so troubled by rapidly-accumulating wealth that he proposed a single tax system based solely on real estate? It was George followers who set up Fairhope, and it was Fairhope that eventually let Gaston down, as it (more)

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Logan Coleman shows off a memento.
PHOTO BY ERIKA MAGUIRE

She’s traveled halfway across the world, organized her own month-long trip to Kenya, studied the modernization of African cultures, interned with the Damanga Coalition for Freedom and Democracy, speaks near fluent Swahili, and one day hopes to work alongside the African Union. Oh, and she’s only 16 years old.

Logan Coleman, a Charlottesville High School junior, says she’s long had an interest in African culture. And although she’d been exposed to African customs and lifestyles through school, she realized early last year she wanted to experience the culture first-hand.

“For me, going to Africa has always been sort of a calling,” says Coleman, who (more)

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Inktree Inc. owners Eric Braun and John Keefe were a part of the largest launch in entertainment history: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
FILE PHOTOS BY JEN FARIELLO

Since launching their Shredhed product in 2008, Charlottesville entrepreneurs Eric Braun and John Keefe have seen demand soar for their product— a multi-faceted trapper-keeper style folder printed with sheet music. But in a Hook cover story last month, Keefe hinted that the versatile folder was about to hit the big time with a non-musical product— what Keefe referred to as “one of the most anticipated video games of 2009.”

He wasn’t kidding.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 detonated launch records for any entertainment medium on release day, November 10, raking in $310 million in American and the UK alone. On one day.

Keefe and Braun’s product— also dubbed The Big Fold— is part of that history, thanks to its inclusion in the expanded “prestige edition” of the game, which includes a strategy guide as well as the duo’s three sided folder offering laminated maps used in the multi-player game.

Keefe hopes to see the Big Fold appearing in future video game launches, calling it a “perfect fit.” But in the meantime he and Braun are enjoying the Call of Duty success.

“It’s very exciting,” he says.

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“At first, I hated Cabell Hall,” said UVA architectual history professor Richard Guy Wilson, “But the purpose of the big building, I finally realized, was to keep students on the Lawn.”
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

When visiting dignitaries tour The Lawn at UVA, says Richard Guy Wilson, Chair of the University’s Architectural History Department, they are often struck by how “wrong” everything looks. Indeed, as Wilson points out, the Lawn’s Pavilions are a clash of architectural styles that are perhaps more noticeable to those unfamiliar with Thomas Jefferson’s brand of genius.

“Sorry, I have to say. This is the way it is,” says Wilson. “Jefferson knew the rules of architecture, but he broke the rules.”

And he broke them, Wilson explains, to create an architectural experience for students that would teach them as much as their professors did.

“The experience of the buildings around them was as important as what was being said in the classes,” Wilson says. “It is a matter of how the space it used. It is a public communal space.”

Recently, Wilson and University Architect David Neuman discussed the (more)

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BY DON BERARD

Two of three recent arrestees charged with selling drugs within 1,000 feet of a school— a controversial drug war tactic— have now seen their charges dropped.

In October, three alleged cocaine dealers snared by the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement task force picked up an extra felony charge for allegedly hawking their wares within one-fifth of a mile of a school, as Virginia state law makes it illegal to sell drugs within 1,000 feet of a school— even if the dealer isn’t targeting children as clientele and even if the dealer has no idea the school is there.

Jose Cano, 26, from Woodridge and Jorge Rosales-Garcia, 26, from Fredericksburg were arrested October 20 behind Kohr Brothers Frozen Custard in the Woodbrook Shopping Center, (more)

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