And we’re now 18 weeks into our highly selective tour through the past 20 years of local news and arts in C-VILLE. This week, familiar faces and familiar structures. Some 12 years ago, we reported on what seemed a likely outcome for the four storefronts known collectively now as the Wachovia buildings: demolition. If only! As we report on page 9 this week, not only do those buildings remain largely unchanged, the prospects for redevelopment have thinned yet again. And, in other news, a look back at two culinary architects of Downtown’s revival, Tim Burgess and Vincent Derquenne, whose opening in 2003 of yet another restaurant landed them on the cover. In current news, their struggles with the Board of Architectural Review to update that eatery, Bang, gets covered in Restaurantarama on page 37. Stay tuned next week for another not-entirely random stroll down memory lane. In fact, check back every week. All year long we will continue to look back at the accumulated pluck and provocations that will power this free and freethinking institution into the next 20 years.
Paging through the archives
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“Peer into the Downtown Mall’s crystal ball, and you may still see a wrecking ball in there—doing its damage to an entire block.
“Despite the sale of Jefferson National Bank to Wachovia…City Journal has learned that the plans to demolish JNB’s downtown block between East First and Second Streets are still alive and well…
“Should Wachovia decide to go forward with the plans after it has assumed ownership (JNB shareholders are expected to vote within the next few weeks), and should the B.A.R. and City Council approve the request, it looks like those run-down buildings will indeed be rubble-ized and something bigger and grander erected in their place.
“Word on the bricked street has it that some other local developers (did someone say Gabe Silverman?) may want to try and save the buildings and fix them up…”
—City Journal, September 9, 1997
Getting covered
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“Theirs was a chance meeting in the late 1980s, when both worked in a Crozet restaurant known as The Gallery. How could the then-20somethings know that at the intersection of routes 240 and 250, Derquenne’s Parisian upbringing and Burgess’ West Virginia roots would eventually become ingredients in one of the longest lived and most successful restaurant partnerships in the City? Could they have any idea, moreover, that together they would stumble upon what would soon become a trait of Charlottesville cuisine—the new French-Southern cuisine?”
—Kathryn E. Goodson
June 3, 2003
