Halsey Minor is the victor in his dispute with Lee Danielson over the Landmark Hotel, Rachana Dixit writes in the Progress. The former business partners took their dispute to arbitration, with Minor wanting $12M from Danielson, and Danielson wanting $6M from Minor. The arbitrator found that Danielson was guilty of “deliberative and reckless conduct” and “gross negligence,” and has ordered him to pay $6.4M to Minor. (A stunning $2.2M of that is in attorneys’ fees.) This tells us nothing about the future of the hotel. There’s still the matter of Minor’s lawsuit against Silverton Bank—and vice versa—the outcome of which may help figure out what’s going to happen to the big, empty tower.
By way of reminder, this whole thing started with Lee Danielson back in 2003, when he bought the Boxer Learning/Central Fidelity building for $3.3M. Three years later he hadn’t done a thing with it, and Oliver Kuttner bought it from him for $3.7M. Though he’d said he was thinking about turning it into affordable housing, he ultimately returned to Danielson’s plan to build a hotel, and sold the whole thing back to Danielson and Minor. Within months, Danielson and Minor couldn’t even agree as to whether they were still building a hotel, started squabbling publicly, and early last year the lawsuits started.
How many times do people have to learn not to do business with Lee Danielson?
Halsey Minor has filed a lawsuit against Lee Danielson over the Landmark Hotel project, Will Goldsmith writes for C-Ville Weekly. Danielson was running the project for Minor, and now Minor alleges that Danielson has committed fraud and breach of contract, apparently blaming the faltering project on his former business associate. Danielson says that he’ll be suing Minor, too. Given that each guy has a history of business deals going sour, it may well take a court to figure this out. The squabble between the two has gone on for months, so this isn’t a particularly surprising outcome.
The bigger question is what’s to become of the enormous building shell, since construction stopped weeks ago, with no sign that it’ll be continuing. It has the potential to be downtown eyesore for years to come. In the meantime, though, maybe that barricade could be moved off of Water Street, opening it up to three lanes again, and that man-made pothole could be filled in with an asphalt patch?
The above is a photo of a parade through downtown held in 1917, featuring the Monticello Guard, taken by Rufus Holsinger. UVa’s Special Collections Library has 9,500 photos taken by Holsinger in the first decades of the last century, mostly portraits, but many depicting the goings-on around town during his time. Just under 3,000 of these photos are available on the website, including 800 of Charlottesville and 1,100 of UVa. Most of the Charlottesville ones from the the nineteen-teens.
Some of my favorites are Albemarle Grocery Co. (the pink warehouse), Brown Milling Company, (Beck Cohen), Chancellor’s Drug Store (Qdoba), the Charlottesville Dam, downtown, the Gleason Hotel, McGuffey under construction, Midway (West Main and Ridge/McIntire), a drawing of the National Bank (Wachovia), the post office (the JMRL central branch), the Southern Railroad Depot (Union Station), Temple Beth Israel, Timberlake Drugs, Monticello mountain as viewed from Pantops, and a Charlottesville & Albemarle Railway Company trolley car.
If you’re at all interested in local history, you’d best plan to set aside an hour or two to troll through this list. I’d love to see somebody do a then-and-now series of pairings of some of these images. Maybe one day UVa will provide coordinates and direction data for each of these photos. It would be great to map these.
TrvlnMn writes of Oliver Kuttner’s nine-story hotel proposal:
Kuttner opts to make money, chooses hotel option. Proves he was just paying “lip service” to the affordable housing issue. Perhaps the token gesture greased the wheels for BAR approval.
He had proposed building affordable housing, right on the Downtown Mall, but now it’s looking more like the nine-story hotel originally proposed by Lee Danielson some years ago.
In last week’s C-Ville Weekly, Will Goldsmith wrote about Oliver Kuttner’s planned work on the old Central Fidelity bank. In it, Oliver says that he’s considering doing something audacious:
Kuttner wants several floors of retail by opening up the basement as a courtyard along the side street and creating a second floor of retail fronting the Mall. He plans four apartments above the retail in a first phase of redevelopment. The second phase will be a larger structure closer to Water Street that nears the nine-storey limit, which will contain either a 72-room hotel–or affordable apartments at around $500 a month.
$500 apartments on the Downtown Mall? That’s awesome. Oliver would be a minor hero if he did that.
(Via Dave Norris)
Developer Lee Danielson announced in 2003 he’d be building a nine-story hotel downtown, on the site of the old Central Fidelity building (and briefly Boxer Learning’s headquarters) at the corner of 2nd and East Main. It was his only remaining entanglements in Charlottesville after he was all but ridden out of town on a rail. By all accounts he never actually did anything to make the hotel happen, and now area developer Oliver Kuttner is buying the 22,000 square foot building for $3.7M, Courteney Stuart reports in this week’s Hook. Kuttner had sworn off any more developments in Charlottesville, having bought up a good chunk of downtown Lynchburg (an area poised for a real renaissance) in the past few years, but he’s apparently changed his mind. He intends to keep the exterior intact, while gutting the interior for restaurant and retail space.
Lee Danielson has announced that he intends to replace the two-story Boxer Learning building (formerly Central Fidelity), at the corner of 2nd St. SE, with a nine-story hotel. He describes it as “a very high-end boutique hotel” It’s the only property that the now-California-based developer still owns in the city; he bought it in July of last year for $3.3M. Danielson will be presenting his plans to the Board of Architectural Review in a couple of weeks, and would like to have the project completed in a year or two. Liz Nelson has the story in today’s Progress.
What with the debate over the Sperry property, cvillenews.com regular Jackson Landers has written a timely piece on the topic. This is the very first article in our new satire section (note the icon), a category to which Jack is likely to be providing a good bit of material. Read on.
Dear Big Development Company,
I’ve really appreciated and enjoyed the time that we’ve spent together. You’ve made me feel special in a way that no out of town developer has since Lee Danielson blew into town.
I know that you’re looking for a real commitment. You’re not going to be happy until you know that you can move right into that old Sperry Marine property. To spread your wings and build a multiplex theater, a hotel and some day even have a cluster of big box stores that we can call our own. I want those things too, but I’m just not ready.
When Sperry Marine left town, it left a big hole in my life. My head may be downtown, but my heart will always be on route 29, right across from the Post Office and kind of near Chi-Chi’s and Marshalls. That traffic light has been green for no one for a long time now. But I’m just not ready to move into a new relationship.
I don’t know if it’s just fear of commitment, fear of getting hurt again. You know how it is. You go through all the months of zoning and bulldozing and permits. Then the next thing you know, that special someone runs off and ‘merges’ with some high-tech corporate bimbo and it’s over.
So I’m sorry, Big Development. I’m just not ready to commit to this. I’ve been hurt too many times. All I can tell you is to remember that there are other fish in the sea. Try Northern Virginia.
Sincerely,
Charlottesville City Council
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