India Sims’ favorite place in Charlottesville is 5th Street Station, the large shopping area anchored by Wegmans supermarket. It’s one of the few places in town where her presence feels expected rather than just tolerated. For Sims, who is in a wheelchair and has been partially paralyzed since she was 10 months old, finding welcoming […]
Amyrose Foll is fond of quoting the statistic that the human brain can process 1,500 words of speech per minute. And she does her best to pack in each one. The farmer, food sovereignty activist, lecturer, and founder of Virginia Free Farm has more projects than can fit into the hours of the day—except that […]
In the fall of 2010, Alexis Zeigler and Debbie Piesen set out to see if they could live independent of fossil fuels. On land just north of Louisa, they started building Living Energy Farm, their vision of a self-sufficient, off-grid community with zero carbon footprint. Last March, the off-grid systems and technology they developed won […]
Why isn’t more public green space used to grow food? Highway medians, the small lawns between sidewalks and apartments, public parks, all have the potential, and Richard Morris thinks about this more than most. The co-executive director of the food justice organization Cultivate Charlottesville knows the challenges and rewards of choosing a good garden location. […]
Woodson’s Mill is alive. The green lawn is speckled with people in conversation. There’s smoke from a wood-fired pizza truck, and a number of vendor tables display local food and handcrafts. Rising above the gathering is the four-story, clapboard mill building that has stood there since the 1790s. Inside the historic building, the sound of […]
There is still some mystery about who’s buried in the Daughters of Zion Cemetery’s modest plot opposite Oakwood Cemetery. The grounds are not crowded and the headstones are found mainly in clusters by family, but the peace that presides there now must have been hard-fought. The property was purchased in January of 1873 by the […]
You might expect that The Bradbury—that monumental, stone building with carved columns on the Downtown Mall—has a storied history. It stands out with an allure of grandeur. That expectation is realized by stepping into the tiled grand hall with parallel rows of towering columns and a high, echoing ceiling. Designed in 1916 by prolific Charlottesville […]
Charlottesville’s tattoo culture is on the rise, with enough shopsopening in the past two years to nearly double the town’s total. While the saturation of body art doesn’t rival that of neighboring Richmond, which consistently ranks among the most-tattooed cities in the country, Charlottesville does absorb some of that energy and talent. Tattoo parlors and […]