The mysterious third-floor Dome Room will finally be open to the public on June 11.
PHOTO BY TOM DALY

Monticello was designed for the pleasure and architectural curiosity of its owner, but as a new tour and exhibit will show, it was also designed for the enslaved workers who moved about the house relatively unseen, serving food, changing linens, and emptying chamber pots.

On Tuesday, May 25, Monticello boss Leslie Greene Bowman and staff gave the press a sneak peek at rooms that have never been opened to the public. It’s all part of a new “behind the scenes” tour that will launch June 11, accompanied by a new exhibit in the cellar level called “Crossroads,” all to shed light on the intersections between Jefferson, his family and guests, and the enslaved workers.

“We’re trying to make Monticello a more lively and entertaining experience,” says Susan Stein, Monticello’s senior curator.

Indeed, during Tuesday’s tour, reporters were led through the cellar complex to the to-be-restored “office,” a sort of staging area where food was carried before being served upstairs in the dining room.

For an additional $15 over the base tour rate of $22, visitors will now be able to climb as many as 75  very steep and narrow stairs to the third floor— definitely not recommended for the frail, the obese, or those carrying small children. The expanded tour opens the second and third floors, where various guest and family rooms are on display, as well as the restored Dome Room.

On the second floor, (more)

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Betty Paine says she was the “perfect patsy.”
PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

Betty Paine has no qualms about telling people how she fell “hook, line and sinker” for a scam that cost her $4,000. What she doesn’t want is her grandson’s name used, even though he had nothing to do with his 78-year-old grandmother getting ripped off. So in this story, we’ll call the innocent grandson and the scam artist “Lyle.”

When she picked up the phone at 9:58am on April 28— Paine keeps meticulous notes— the person on the line sounded like he had a very bad cold and was in distress.

“I said, ‘Who is this?’” she recounts. “He said, ‘Your grandson.’ I said, ‘Lyle?’”

The fake Lyle said he was in Canada, something Paine didn’t find unusual because (more)

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Casteen vows to fight Cuccinelli’s inquest.
FILE PHOTOS BY LISA PROVENCE, CUCCINELLI CAMPAIGN

Lamenting that the controversial climate inquest launched last month by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has “sent a chill” through Virginia colleges and universities, UVA President John Casteen announced Thursday that the University of Virginia has filed papers in Albemarle Circuit Court to fight the inquest.

Remarking that Cuccinelli’s Civil Investigative Demands, or CIDs are sending “a chill that has reached across the country and attracted the attention of all of higher education,” Casteen, in a prepared statement, portrays his stand on the issue as a defense of academic freedom.

AG Cuccinelli, however, portrays it as a potential swindle.

“This is about rooting out possible fraud and (more)

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The rink was officially opened on May 1, 1996. It will officially close on June 30 unless a buyer steps up.
FILE PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

In spite of increasingly urgent negotiations with an unnamed “interested party,” the owners of the Charlottesville Ice Park say they’re still planning to close on June 30, leading some to fear the effect of another vacant behemoth on the Mall’s economy.

“Time is rather short now,” says Ice Park co-owner Roberta Williamson, noting that the sale of the Ice Park’s large equipment, including the ice-smoothing Zamboni, would need to happen quickly since buyers of such tools typically want to make purchases before fall.

Seven years ago, Williamson and then husband Bruce Williamson and two (more)

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The Corner was first published in 2001.
PHOTOS BY HAWES SPENCER

After several years of unavailability, Coy Barefoot’s history of the UVA Corner district is set for republication June 3.

The move comes as a rescue of sorts for the copiously illustrated volume which first appeared in 2001. Featuring hundreds of vintage photographs from the 1850s to the 1950s and all the way up to the turn of the century, the mix of history, image, and anecdote sold briskly at the UVA Bookstore and other local shops. However, the subsequent dissolution of the publishing house, the Howell Press, prevented many readers from buying a copy.

Barefoot, also author of Thomas Jefferson on Leadership, relates that he personally put in a bid to (more)

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John Casteen bestowed degrees at his last graduation as president of the University of Virginia.
PHOTO BY DAN ADDISON/UVA PUBLIC AFFAIRS

After a 20-year tenure, the final exercises May 23 couldn’t help but be poignant and bittersweet for retiring President John Casteen. But for the reporters converging on Charlottesville from Roanoke, the Washington Post, and Rolling Stone, Casteen’s work as leader of Virginia’s flagship university took a backseat to something sadder.

Although the sun broke through the overcast sky as the Class of 2010 began its walk on the Lawn, the Sunday morning event was marked by the shadow of the murder of their classmate Yeardley Love three weeks earlier.

Clearly, it weighed heavily on (more)

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With family and friends of the couple mostly circling wagons in silence, the Washington Post has managed to tie together the newspaper’s copious reports on the late Yeardley Love and the violence-prone, lacrosse-playing lover who allegedly took her life earlier this month. Appearing in its Sunday issue, the 2,246-word story recounts tales of Love, George W. Huguely V, his father, Farmington Country Club, and Boylan Heights restaurant.

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Minor just won a big one.
FILE PHOTO BY JAY KUHLMANN

After a two-week trial in a federal court in San Francisco, jurors have awarded Internet millionaire and Charlottesville hotel builder Halsey Minor over $8 million in his lawsuit against Christie’s, a rebuke to the auction house and a change of outcome for the frequent litigant.

“We have a verdict,” scrawled the foreperson on Friday, May 21, at 1:51pm as the jury found that Christie’s committed fraud and conversion against Minor and awarded him $8.57 million. The jury did, however, grant Christie’s, in its counterclaim, $1.5 million (more)

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What Washington & Lee University officials are calling a “close call” should be a wake-up one for UVA students planning to celebrate this weekend. During a W&L party in Lexington last weekend, a deck on a house with as many as 80 people on it collapsed, injuring nearly 30 students and sending 22 of them to the hospital. Luckily, no one was seriously injured in the May 14 incident.

According to the North American Deck and Railing Association, that’s not always the case. Since 2000, there have been more than 30 deck collapse fatalities, and 75 percent of the people on collapsing decks get injured or killed. What’s more, there are 40 million decks in the country more than 20 years old.

“Every weekend, somewhere in the country, a deck collapses or someone falls through a deck rail,” says Joe Loferski, a Virginia Tech professor of wood science who has been researching the causes of deck collapses since 2000.

A nearly identical disaster occurred during a weekend party at Virginia Commonwealth University in 2008, when (more)

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Artist Gerry Mitchell, one year after the crosswalk incident.
FILE PHOTO BY WILL WALKER

A hearing scheduled for Friday, May 21, in Gerry Mitchell’s $850,000 suit against the City of Charlottesville and two police officers has been indefinitely delayed after retired Augusta County Judge Thomas Wood, appointed to hear the case after Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Edward Hogshire recused himself, withdrew this week due to an undisclosed health issue.

In November 2006, Mitchell, who is confined to a wheelchair, was struck in a West Main Street crosswalk by an Albemarle County police cruiser, then ticketed in the UVA emergency room by Charlottesville police officer Steve Grissom. Mitchell filed suit against the City, Grissom, and the Albemarle County police officer who struck him, Gregory C. Davis, in June 2009, alleging negligence, malicious prosecution, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Lawyers for the City and for  Grissom had filed a motion to dismiss the case based on the legal concept (more)

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