Author Archive for Waldo Jaquith

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City Police Cracking Down on Cyclists

Published by Waldo Jaquith on February 14, 2014 in Transportation. 9 Comments

City police are issuing a lot more tickets to cyclists lately, Maggie Ambrose reports for Charlottesville Tomorrow. We’re talking about small numbers here—an increase from nine tickets in 2012 to seventeen tickets in 2013—with a plurality of the citations occurring along West Main / University Ave. (A map of every citation location is helpfully included in the article.) Bicyclists are obliged to follow the same transportation laws as motor vehicles, but some cyclists don’t seem to know or care that this is so, and ignore traffic lights, one-way signs, bike on sidewalks, etc.

Interestingly, cyclists who are cited by police are receiving points on their license, as if they had committed the same infraction while driving a car. Given that operating a bicycle doesn’t require a driver’s license, it’s hard to even see why a moving violation on a bicycle should have any impact on one’s driver’s license. (Should somebody who drives a car perfectly but a bicycle badly be punished by prohibiting them from driving a car, thus requiring them to travel by bicycle, which cannot be prohibited by the court?) That said, looking at § 46.2-492, it appears that this practice is required under the law, as there is no exception for non-motorized vehicles.

Downtown Regal Becoming Arthouse Theater

Published by Waldo Jaquith on February 5, 2014 in Art, Business and Development. 8 Comments

The Downtown Regal is being seriously overhauled, Graelyn Brashear writes in C-Ville Weekly. It will no longer be a Regal, and its owner and her new business partner are going to add a restaurant and cocktails. The owner of Violet Crown Cinema in Austin (it gets 4 stars on Yelp) wants to make this the second location in what he hopes will become a nationwide chain of such places. Regal’s 15-year lease recently ran out, not long after they managed to drive Vinegar Hill out of business by moving to showing mostly independent films. The new facility is slated to open by November.

President Visiting Monticello

Published by Waldo Jaquith on February 4, 2014 in Government. 10 Comments

President Obama and French President François Hollande will visit Monticello on Monday, The Hill reports. That’s just one day before Hollande’s state visit to the White House. In a statement, the White House said that “the residence of Thomas Jefferson, one of the United States’ earliest envoys to France, Monticello reflects Jefferson’s affection for the people of France, the long-standing relations between our two democracies, and the shared values we hold dear: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” There is no reason to think that this will be a public event.

LexisNexis Building Sold

Published by Waldo Jaquith on January 28, 2014 in Business. Closed

LexisNexis has sold their downtown Charlottesville building, the Daily Progress reports. A holding company bought the property for $9.3M. Lexis built the structure 22 years ago to replace their facility on Market Street (rechristened the Old Michie Building by Gabe Silverman). Lexis has slowly laid off hundreds of employees over the course of years, and they’re now down to just 175 people. They’re leasing back space in the building from the new owner, and claim that they have no plans to shut down the Charlottesville office.

DTM Interviews Downtown Attackers

Published by Waldo Jaquith on January 12, 2014 in Crime. 14 Comments

On The DTM, proprietor Dave McNair interviews the two men accused of a gleeful, random attack on the Downtown Mall last month, and the picture that the accused paint of themselves is rather opposite of the one painted of them by the thousands of angry racists who descended on C-Ville Weekly’s website to post vile comments.

For starters, Malcolm Stevenson (25) and Richard Spears (23) are both openly gay. Stevenson is a graduate of the University of Virginia, and is a manager at Eppie’s. Spears is a soft-spoken, full-time student of the Virginia School of Massage, where he’s studying to be a massage therapist. Their police records are minimal: Stevenson has a few traffic violations, Spears was once charged with swearing in public and intoxication. Although these facts in no way demonstrate that they are or are not guilty of the attacks, these men certainly are nowhere close to fitting the gangbanger stereotype that Matt Drudge and his followers presented them as.

The two men say that they’d been drinking, and admit to a physical altercation with Marc Adams and his girlfriend, Jeanne Doucette. But they accuse the two of being drunk, and having started the altercation, saying that Doucette called them “black faggots” and that Adams aggressively pursued Stevenson. They say that a third man—a stranger—stepped in, trying to break it up, and that it was he who punched Adams in the face.

Stevenson tells McNair that he understands that he’s going to be charged with something—that’s what happens after a fight—but that “if I’m going to be held accountable for my actions, then they need to be held accountable for theirs.”

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