William Moses and his wife Paticia Kluge, who donated $1.2 million to the project, cut the ribbon in the building that bears their names.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

Students already taking classes at Piedmont Virginia Community College’s new Kluge-Moses Science Building, which opened in the spring, had to pass through a throng of more than hundred people who’d gathered in the building’s atrium for the official opening ceremony on September 16, attended by Patricia Kluge and her husband William Moses, the couple whose $1.2 million gift for the project was the largest in school history.

As PVCC president Frank Friedman pointed out, the Kluge-Moses gift, while only a small part of the $11.5 million price tag, made up of mostly state funds, allowed the college to add cutting-edge technology that it might have had to eliminate, such as classroom whiteboards that copy anything written on them as PDF computer files, and two-way video systems that (more)

Comments(7)

Where we once got down— Club 216— will be coming down this week.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

It’s a momentous week for architect Bill Atwood. Five years after he purchased the Water Street Downtown Tire complex of buildings, once home to familiar places like Club 216, Eloise, and Sidetracks Music, it’s all coming down this week to make way for his long-planned Waterhouse project, a $20 million, six-story mixed-use complex of offices, retail space, and apartments on top of a parking garage that will span the gap between West Water and South Streets.

“The demolition will definitely change the site,” says Atwood, “but it will become a clean palette on which to finally build the building.”

Originally, Atwood had a vision for a massive pedestrian village, complete with two nine-story towers, an underground parking structure, and a park of sorts that he hoped would “reinvent the block” by rescuing the beauty of the Lewis & Clark building from its isolated perch with a compatible neighbor along the streetscape.

Fours years and a financial crisis later, Atwood is just happy to be getting something built.

Ironically, the same economic forces that have stalled development projects across the country (more)

Comments(15)

House of Chang: The former Asian Buffet building on 29 North has been vacant for years, but it’s poised to become the talk of the town.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

Brace yourself, foodies. Chinese chef Peter Chang is back… and he’s here to stay. According to a reliable source, the famously elusive Szechuan chef will be signing a lease this week for the former Asian Buffet space on U.S. 29 North and launching extensive renovations that could begin as early as next week. If all goes according to plan, the source says, the restaurant should open in December or January.

While Tim Rose, leader of the University of Virginia Foundation, which owns the 7,835 square-foot building, won’t confirm that the property has been leased to Chang, the source says Chang “really wants this space” and that they are “99.9 percent sure” it will happen.

And that’s good news to a pair of Virginia Academy Award winners. More on them in a moment.

During the short time Chang cooked at Taste of China in Albemarle Square, he created a national stir. The New Yorker even ran a piece on the Chang frenzy. Naturally, the publicity attracted people from all over to sample the fare from the spice maestro.

Not only is the Chang deal good news for foodies, it’s good news for the property, which has become a bit of an eyesore with tall grass and weeds growing up in the cracks in the parking lot. In 2002, Coran Capshaw’s WM Management Ltd. bought the site for $1.5 million. Four years later, the savvy music promoter sold it to the UVA Foundation for $2.5 million, leaving UVA to carry it through the real estate doldrums without a long-term tenant.

There have been Chang sightings (more)

Comments(38)

The Ghana delegation (Head of Warrior Group Joseph Baiden, Transport Minister Mike Hammah, and Municipal Chief Executive’s Representative Godfrey Kwame Nkrumah) meets with Worrell Water Technologies researcher Eric Lohan.
PHOTO COURTESTY WWT

When a delegation from Winneba, Ghana visited Charlottesville several weeks ago, one city official criticized those who might “poo-poo” the idea of a fourth sister city as a waste of tax payer money. An appropriate phrase, as it turned out, because the African delegation visited Worrell Water Technologies, a company known for turning sewage into fresh water.

In 2007, Worrell Water built one of its “Living Machine” waste-water treatment systems— featured in a 2009 Hook cover story entitled “The Tao of poo”— in Tema, Ghana, one of more than a dozen such systems the company has installed around the world.

What’s a Living Machine? Well, imagine a man-made, turbo-charged tidal wetland. Basically, waste water is pumped and filtered, and monitored by microcomputers, through a series of cells that use plants in porous gravel to cultivate natural microorganisms that eat up the waste. The cells continuously fill and drain, mimicking the tidal action of estuaries.

Whereas the earth only has two tidal cycles a day— nature’s way of flushing the toilet— the Living Machine replicates that cycle 10 to 12 times a day.

“It was my second visit to Worrell Water this past year,” says Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris, who tagged along with the Ghana delegation, “and I am definitely (more)

Comments(8)

What happened at the VQR?
HOOK’s 8/19  COVER

On John Casteen’s last official day in office as the president of the University of Virginia, a tragic story, one fit for the pages of the award-winning literary journal that he nurtured, began to unfold.

That Friday, July 30, the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, 52-year-old Kevin Morrissey, took his own life. Since then, UVA has shrouded VQR behind a wall of silence, changing the office locks, launching an audit, and even routing all incoming telephone calls to the University’s public relations office.

A Hook investigation reveals that behind the staid, Thomas Jefferson-designed exterior of VQR’s headquarters swirl allegations of financial recklessness, conflicts of interest, and a bizarre pattern of management-by-email that drove a staffer to quit. Some say there was also a pattern of bullying that may have pushed a fragile man into tragic oblivion.

What’s more, according to a former VQR employee, University officials have known about some of the personnel problems for at least five years.

An ambitious editor

A group called the Workplace Bullying Institute minces no words about the situation, suggesting that Morrissey’s boss, VQR editor Theodore H. “Ted” Genoways was a bully and that UVA was “unresponsive.” But if Genoways has been cast as the problem, he also appears to be a key source of VQR’s success.

Hired in 2003 at the tender age of 31, Genoways arrived with high hopes and high praise including President John Casteen’s enthusiasm for his “energetic intelligence and visionary thinking.”

He transformed VQR— long known for publishing poetry and short stories on black & white pages— with punchy, magazine-style theme issues and loads of full-color photography. Along with the new look came an expanded mission including hard-hitting non-fiction such as Toni Morrison’s account of the long road to racial integration and an on-the-ground exposé on the capture of Saddam Hussein. Just three years after Genoways arrived, Casteen’s enthusiasm seemed justified as the journal won two National Magazine Awards, bringing new prominence to VQR, and to its young editor.

For Maria Morrissey, however, the older sister of the late Kevin Morrissey, the success also brought heartache. Based on information she gathered from VQR staffers, University officials, police, and her brother’s own notes, Maria Morrissey portrays Genoways as someone who created a work environment so hostile it became unbearable.

“Our family is convinced,” she says, “by all that we have learned since Kevin’s death that, were it not for Genoways’ relentless bullying, Kevin would be alive today.” (more)

Comments(650)

Bel Rio owner Jim Baldi
FILE PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

Since the Hook first reported last week on the mysterious disappearance of Bel Rio owner James K. Baldi, local reporters have busily dug up new information that suggests the debonair 47-year-old freelance accountant and restaurateur’s impromptu vacation could become permanent.

It also appears that his 25-year-old traveling companion, Kristian Throckmorton, a former Bel Rio bartender, was indeed the subject of a missing persons report. While Throckmorton’s mother, Wendy Ellis, declined media comment when the story first broke July 20, a story in the Daily Progress reveals that the family filed a missing persons report, an action that appears to have launched a brief police investigation.

However, when the Hook spoke with Charlottesville City spokesperson Ric Barrick on July 27, he said that Throckmorton was no longer missing and had communicated with her family and friends. Barrick said police did not communicate with Baldi.

Ellis, an author who recently penned a book about being the wife of local pastor Lindsay Ellis entitled His Calling–My Purpose, held a reading and book-signing at Bel Rio last December. When contacted most recently, Ellis declined to comment on the missing person report or the nature of her daughter’s temporary disappearance.

The Progress also reported that Gareth Weldon, who, along with the C&O’s Dave Simpson, opened Bel Rio with Baldi in 2008, filed a $300,000 lawsuit against Baldi on July 7, accusing him of using business funds for his own purposes, withholding information on Bel Rio’s financial condition, and failing to pay an agreed-upon capital investment of $50,000 when the three-person partnership was formed. His lawyer, Daniel J. Meador Jr., tells the Hook that Baldi has until August 2 to respond to the lawsuit— or he’ll lose by default.

Baldi was evicted in February from a Downtown Mall office he leased for alleged failure to pay more than $2,200 in rent, and on March 15 a tax lien was filed against Bel Rio LLC by the Internal Revenue Service for about $13,000 in (more)

Comments(32)

Bel Rio owner Jim Baldi.
FILE PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

Bel Rio, the Downtown Belmont restaurant and music venue that has sparked a passionate debate over noise-levels at night spots—which led to an amended City noise ordinance—appears to have disappeared, along with its owner, without a sound.

A sign on Bel Rio’s door last week announced that the venue would be closed for two weeks for vacation and kitchen renovations, but that was news to building owner Jeff Easter.

“I still haven’t heard from him,” says Easter of Bel Rio owner Jim Baldi. “I think he’s gone.”

Easter, a critic of the proposed 55db noise ordinance, which he believes is too low, nonetheless asked Baldi to tone it down following a July 3 incident after a private party at the restaurant during which there were altercations in the street, the police were called, and several people resisted arrest. Indeed, Tomas Rahal at MAS says that customers of his were afraid to leave the restaurant to go to their cars that night.

“When you have people screaming and yelling at 2:30 in the morning,” says Easter, “that’s a nuisance.”

Indeed, while musicians, Belmont residents, and City officials earnestly debated the noise ordinance, and whether or not Bel Rio’s late night music scene was a boon or bust for the neighborhood, Baldi seemed to be staking his success, at least in part, on late night parties.

“Jim said he couldn’t make it without the private parties,” says Easter. “I told him that’s not my problem.”

Baldi partnered with C&O’s Dave Simpson and Gareth Weldon to open Bel Rio in November 2008, but Simpson sold his interest in the restaurant to Baldi in October of last year after having second thoughts about the partnership.

Weldon, too, parted ways with Baldi, but he did not immediately respond to Dish’s call for comment by press time.

Meanwhile, no one seems to know where Baldi is— or when he’ll be back. Indeed, Dish spent most of last week trying to locate him with no success.

Local realtor Roger Voisinet, whom Baldi hired to sell his house at 900 Elliott Avenue, says Baldi contacted him last Tuesday via text message, saying he was going to Chicago and giving him his ex-wife’s phone number if anything came up concerning the house.

“I texted him back,” says Voisinet, “but I haven’t heard from him.”

When Dish called Baldi’s ex-wife, a family member answered (more)

Comments(96)

UVA president John Casteen dedicates his final building.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

In perhaps his last public appearance as president of UVA, John Casteen today dedicated Bavaro Hall, the long-awaited $37 million addition to the Curry School of Education, which has doubled the size of the school. It was a fitting end for a man who has presided over the construction or purchase of 134 buildings for UVA. That’s a lot of golden shovel and ribbon-cutting appearances.

“I think this is the last thing Betsy and I will be doing in our current identities,” Casteen told the crowd.

One of his goals during his presidency, Casteen joked, was to see an open field where Bavaro Hall now stands. “I failed,” he deadpanned.

The new building was designed by Darden School architect Robert A.M. Stern, and includes multiple open conversation areas,  conference rooms, and a garden courtyard. The building— executed in a neo-Jeffersonianism complete with brick columns and hints of Boston’s Faneuil Hall— transforms a stretch of Emmet Street by blocking the old view of Ruffner Hall.

Robert Pianta, dean of the formerly Ruffner-centric Curry School, called the project a complicated one that “went off without a hitch.” He thanked Casteen for his vision and also thanked (more)

Comments(21)