Elite crowd helps artisans flourish

Since 2002, the Brownell Metal Studio has produced everything from grates at the Darden School to gorgeous custom furniture. “What we do is high-quality, high-end architectural metalwork,” says Brownell. “I’d never say anything about the other shops in Charlottesville, but we do things differently.” The local boom in upper-crust construction allowed Steve Brownell to open […]

Nader to students: get angry

“So here you are: 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 years old. Where are you going to be in 50 years? What will you be doing? Do you talk about that on your cell phone?” On April 12, Ralph Nader gave his lecture, “While You Were Watching Big Brother, Big Brother Was Watching You” to hundreds […]

UVA students, staff get free ride

If you ride Charlottesville buses this spring, expect to run into a lot more University students, faculty and staff. They’re all getting free rides on city and county bus lines beginning Monday, April 2. Why do ‘Hoos skip the bill while the rest of us cough up our 75 cents? Well for one thing, UVA […]

Abode Features: Common roots

Interview by Carolyn Zelikow “My name is John Clark. In the 90s, my father was sick, so I helped him with his garden. I just fell in love with it. I don’t have room on my property to garden. So in 2000, the year following my dad’s death, I rented a 30’x30′ plot of land […]

Forty years of interracial marriage

Mildred Jeter married Richard Loving in June of 1958, expecting an ordinary life in Tidewater, Virginia, the community where they had grown up. Instead, they spent the next nine years in separation and effective exile from their home state. Mildred was black, Richard was white, and the “Racial Integrity Act” rendered their marriage a crime. […]

Vinegar Hill resurrected online

Before it was demolished in the late 1960s, Vinegar Hill was black Charlottesville’s cultural and commercial hub from Reconstruction through the Jim Crow era. The neighborhood was declared “blighted” during the ill-conceived urban renewal movement of the Civil Rights era. For the next 20 years, Vinegar Hill remained a vacant lot, the blunt legacy of […]