Patricia Kluge has moved to Manhattan, having lost her winery, home, and job, in rapid succession. She’s a local no longer. #
Patricia Kluge has moved to Manhattan, having lost her winery, home, and job, in rapid succession. She’s a local no longer. #
The University of Virginia’s enormous, under-construction sports practice facility on Emmett Street caught fire yesterday, every area media outlet reports, sending up an enormous column of black smoke that was visible all over town. A layer of rubber atop the roof appears to have been lit by a contractor’s errant blowtorch, starting a fire that spread over a good chunk of the roof and created a challenging situation for responding fire crews to deal with. The $13M structure was slated for completion in August of next year, though presumably that will be pushed back now.
Developers are proposing a massive new pair of buildings for West Main Street, Sean Tubbs reports for Charlottesville Tomorrow, that would put a mixed-use development on a vacant block. (Imagine you’re going from downtown to the university. You pass the train station and go over the bridge. On the university side of the bridge, on the left, is a parking lot used by Wahooptie, what used to be an auto shop, and an empty lot where a building was torn down 15–20 years ago. That whole block.) Coran Capshaw bought that block some years ago, and now he’s working with a few other developers to turn it into a 5-story and 8-story pair of connected buildings, containing 219 apartments, a restaurant, couple of retail spaces, and a parking garage. It’s being called “The Plaza at West Main.” The density of the housing and the height of the building with both require special use permits, and the Board of Architectural Review will have to approve it, since it’s in a historic district. The next step is for the Planning Commission to review it, which they’re doing next week.
In a 4-1 vote, City Council denied Black Market Moto Saloon a music permit at tonight’s meeting, Graham Moomaw writes for the Daily Progress. Owner Matteus Frankovich held live music performances at the Meade & Market restaurant for the first few months of its existence, until complaints of loud, late-night music caused the performances to come to the attention of the city, who pointed out that Frankovich had no permit to hold concerts. The owner applied to the Planning Commission for a special-use permit, who recommended a narrowly tailored permit, but City Council disagreed, presumably influenced in part by neighbors turning out and asking that it be denied. Some members of Council saw the period in which the venue was operating illegally as a good enough test run to find that it would be incompatible with the neighborhood. (Moto Saloon may not be thrilled with the April Foursquare tip that “if it gets too loud the bartender has earplugs.”) Frankovich says that his business’s success is contingent on the ability to host live music, and while he doesn’t intend to take the matter to court, he has threatened (jokingly, one assumes) to open a “nudie bar” instead.
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