“If you can stay off the Downtown Mall and I don’t see you again, then I won’t take you,” said the Charlottesville police officer. “That’s not going to happen,” said Christopher Gonzalez, who had been lying on his back on the mall outside CVS. It was 5:30pm on Wednesday, July 8. The sun was shining. […]
Charlottesville’s old woolen mill, peering over the Rivanna River on the town’s eastern edge, had been gathering dust for years. Now, the rubble has been cleared, and it’s time to drink beer. In 2018, app development company WillowTree began a $25 million overhaul of the building. WillowTree’s employees will move into their 85,000-square-foot offices […]
A month ago, George Floyd was murdered by the police. Since then, Damani Harrison has led a group of artists “coming together to speak truth to power” in the multimedia “One for George” project—our cover story this week. Also in this week’s issue: The Charlottesville police department has been harming Black and brown people for […]
Arrest warrants were issued for six people accused of spray painting the street outside the Charlottesville Police Department over the last two weeks. Police say the demonstrators “vandalized the streets and the sidewalks with cruel, threatening, and hate-filled language.” The first four charges, announced in a June 25 press release, concerned paint on the sidewalk […]
Two and a half years after the events that sparked its creation, the official Charlottesville Police Civilian Review Board held its first meeting on Monday. National events have led to increased scrutiny of police departments, and so the inaugural meeting of this body dedicated to police oversight was highly anticipated (to the extent that any […]
“Coronavirus Could Be the End of Alt-Weeklies,” declared a Mother Jones headline in March. Around the country, venerable snark-slinging rags have dropped employees or shut down entirely, crippled by cratering ad revenue. C-VILLE, unfortunately, has not escaped the crash. Our staff is a lot smaller than it was just a few weeks ago. (The […]
In his two years in the House of Representatives, Denver Riggleman sided with Donald Trump on 94.5 percent of votes, according to FiveThirtyEight. But that wasn’t conservative enough for central Virginia’s Republican loyalists, who ended Riggleman’s run in Congress after just one term. At a June 13 drive-thru party convention, Riggleman lost the nomination […]
The six-story-tall equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee has towered over Richmond’s Monument Avenue since 1890. Soon, it’ll be gone, replaced by empty sky. “That statue has been there for a long time. But it was wrong then and it’s wrong now. So we’re taking it down,” said Governor Ralph Northam during a June […]
As the pandemic took hold in mid-March, Charlottesville and Albemarle’s criminal justice decision-makers started letting people out of jail. Two months in, it looks like the emergency measures have paid off: The Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail has not reported a single coronavirus case among inmates, and those transferred to house arrest have not posed any […]
“When we found out he had it, we was pretty sure he was going to die,” says a sibling of a man incarcerated in Buckingham Correctional Center. Buckingham is home to the fourth-worst coronavirus outbreak of any correctional facility in Virginia—112 inmates have tested positive. Dillwyn Correctional Center, a lower-security facility across the street, […]