Last week, about a dozen neighbors gathered in a room in the Tonsler Community Center to do some basic event planning for a community day with an official from the city Parks and Recreation Department. In terms of event planning, it was your standard stuff—figuring out whether or not to rent a dunking booth, how to organize a three-on-three basketball tournament, picking out the churches and businesses to hit up for money—but for some of the neighbors in attendance, it represented much more than that: They hoped that by working with those who lived in the area surrounding Tonsler Park, they could create a sense of community and a common purpose for the hundreds of very different people who live in the area usually called Fifeville.
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Walled off behind the 225 condos of Walker Square, which went up in 2004, is a neighborhood most of us know as Fifeville. Many Walker Square residents, however, seem to eschew the neighborhood as much as possible, taking a path across the train tracks rather than walking through the eclectic streets on its southern side. |
| More feature articles:
Fifeville in flux One way to keep residents in homes The incredible rise in Fifeville assessments Remembering The Gambling House The Purple People Eater |
Many residents feel that a larger sense of Fifeville community has been missing, and it’s not hard to see why. A working class neighborhood, Fifeville has some of the city’s least expensive housing in one of the most desirable locations in town. Plot on a map Charlottesville’s two magnetic poles—UVA and Downtown—and Fifeville is the area just south of West Main Street, the road that connects the dots. It’s one of the only addresses that offers a 10-minute walk both to the UVA hospital and the Downtown Mall.
During the recent real estate boom, a lot of developers, investors, realtors and homebuyers found an incentive to look past a reputation for crime to see cute fixer-uppers and cheap land easy to clear for condos. What had been a working class, mixed-race neighborhood on the western side and a working class, predominately black neighborhood on the eastern side got a quick infusion of mostly white UVA professors and young, white-collar families. For the convenience of city planning and real estate listings, both neighborhoods were mushed together as “Fifeville.”
A common look unites those two areas. The streets are laid out in a dense grid of old eclectic houses on small lots. Some homes are utilitarian and modest—pattern houses bought at the turn of the century from a Sears and Roebuck catalogue, or squat one-story affairs—while others are ornate and expansive, with elaborate molding and idiosyncratic architectural flourishes. Though called “single-family,” some have been converted into duplexes or multiunit apartments. They show all levels of upkeep and living style. Some porches are cluttered with tricycles and fertilizer and furniture that has nowhere else to go, while others are immaculately groomed, with a couple of chairs and well-tended flowerpots. Paint peels from some houses while others shimmer in fresh pastels. Weeds overtake one lawn, but next door, every inch of open space is a tribute to mankind’s grooming impulse. It’s a neighborhood of contrasts, which is much of its charm.
On the streets that make up “Fifeville,” it’s easy enough to get a sense of camaraderie and neighborliness. A lot of people sit on their front porches. Most people acknowledge each other when they pass on the street, particularly amongst African Americans. Because the houses are so close to commerce and bus routes, the streets get a lot of foot traffic.
But on a larger level, there has been no organization to pull those living in “Fifeville” together. By most accounts, the neighborhood association is dysfunctional and its meetings are a turn-off to anyone interested in getting stuff done for residents. They are attended by only a handful of diehards, events where developers can go to say they’ve met with “the neighbors.”
“I’m shocked at how negative people’s reactions are to a neighborhood association,” said Jason Pearson, one of the main participants in the Tonsler Park meeting.
That’s why some in the Tonsler Park Recreation Center were excited about a simple meeting to plan a community day event—it was a way to come together that didn’t involve contentious terms like “Fifeville” or “neighborhood association.” Tentatively, they’re calling themselves Friends of Tonsler Park. Attending the meeting were several UVA grad students and middle-aged women, a couple of children and a Legal Aid attorney. The group was overwhelmingly young and white, but the people seemed very interested in creating an event that better reflected the make-up of the area.
“As neighbors, we disagree about a lot of things,” says Pearson, a young white man who works in fundraising, and is also currently the chair of the city Planning Commission. “The Tonsler Community Day is framing the possibility of the diversity of the neighborhood coming together in a really positive way.”
A walk down Fifth Street SW
To see a microcosm of the neighborhood as it has become over the last five years, walk down Fifth Street SW from West Main Street. It’s not particularly enticing—a narrow sidewalk on only one side of the street with train tracks and a towing lot. But like much of Fifeville, the unassuming entrance grows on you, a secret portal of sorts loved only by the initiates who know the beauty of what lies beyond.
Chances are that the people coming and going on Fifth Street will be black, but that’s not the only race you’ll see—perhaps a Korean grad student clutching a model for an architecture project scurrying toward West Main Street, or a white woman and child returning from a walk to the Downtown Mall. If you’re willing to meet their gaze, just about everyone of every race is willing to spare a friendly nod or a short greeting, and it doesn’t take long to recognize a few faces—Ellison “Tow Joe” Jackson with his Midway tow truck as he comes to maintain his property, or Ampy Smith, tending his rental property.
“This is a funny neighborhood,” says Daniel Howell, a renter and newcomer who moved to Charlottesville in 2006. Howell, who is black and works for UVA and the Hope Community Center, went to college at the University of Wisconsin, where he says the neighborhoods were distinct—this area for students, this area for the poor, this area for the rich. But on Fifth Street, he sees grade schoolers, college kids, families, professors, drunks, dope dealers, crackheads and hookers all walking the block. “And everybody is starting to get spring fever. It’s going to be a crazy summer.”
Almost immediately after crossing the tracks, you come to the demanding colors of the Oak Lawn Cottages and the Fifth Street Flats condo building—known not-so-affectionately by neighbors as “The Purple People Eater.” It’s this type of development that makes the area feel under siege. Built only in recent years, the cottages and condos face an internal parking area rather than the street, blocking out the rest of the neighborhood. Their residents seem mostly young and white.
Just past this new enclave are the Green Leaf apartments, along with a series of duplexes and houses rented by Ampy Smith mostly (but not exclusively) to blacks. Smith, an older black man, doesn’t live in the neighborhood, though he rented a room at 402 Dice St. when he first moved to Charlottesville from Nelson County in the ’50s to work at a UVA dining hall. In the ’60s, he started a cleaning business and began buying property.
“This wasn’t a rowdy street in the ’60s and ’70s,” says Smith. “People was different. I remember a time when you could sleep in the street out here with your pocketbook and no one would rob you.”
Smith’s area of Fifth Street is sited such that it could continue the trends of the recent development on upper Fifth Street. It was Smith who sold the vacant land that became the Purple People Eater to developers Dan Walters and Bill Atwood for $750,000. As Smith gets older, he says, he’s selling his property so he can get out of the property management game. Smith laments that the city has designated one house that he owns an individually protected property, which means that he can’t change it or tear it down without city approval.
“All of this is for sale if the price is right,” says Smith. “I’m getting out of the city and the taxes. The taxes eating me up.” The best price would come from someone looking to redevelop, which probably would involve demolition.
Beyond Smith’s property, the street becomes a hodgepodge of single-family residential housing—much of it recently renovated. About 50 percent of the homes between Dice Street and Cherry Avenue have changed hands since 2000. As residents have aged and died off, many of their children—having moved away and started families in other states—either sold the houses or let them fall into disrepair.
For the last five years, Mike McMahon has been buying up area property, including four houses on Fifth Street. A white realtor-turned-property manager in his 30s, McMahon fell in love with the neighborhood for all the usual reasons—its price and location—and has stayed in love with it because of the people.
“It’s a real vibrant community,” says McMahon, originally from western Pennsylvania. “I try to stay out of all the politics. The places are slowly improving.”
What he describes is also a labor of love rather than a labor of profit. Fixing up a place and keeping the tenants without dramatically raising the rents costs a lot more than tearing it down and starting from scratch. McMahon is careful to avoid displacing tenants, and only started paying himself last year. He has, however, bought a couple of vacant houses he’s rehabbing and looks to sell. He’s also fixing up 301 Fifth St. for himself and his wife.
“I bought two different houses that are completely boarded up,” McMahon says. “The plumbing wasn’t on. People don’t realize this stuff goes on in Charlottesville. People were basically squatting in this house. There’s no way I could ever fix those up and rent those out and cover the costs.”
Some of the houses on Fifth Street are still owned by black families who have held on to them for years. And some of the houses were rehabbed and resold, often to working white couples, by nonprofits and professional flippers.
When Karen Firehock, an environmental planner and UVA lecturer, first saw the insides of 311 Fifth St., it was a decrepit shell of a former general store. The wood floors were completely black. The roof was so damaged that it was raining both outside and inside. The brick wall badly needed to be redone in places. A section of floorboards had rotted past the point of being salvaged and had to be replaced with tile.
But Firehock helped oversee renovations in 2003 (done by workers waiting for the nearby Walker Square project to get approvals), and bought it for $179,000. Now it’s a three-bedroom house assessed at $257,900 that could probably sell for far more.
Rehabbing the houses and its results
These days, rehabs in the area don’t sell for nearly as cheap. When I look at 513 Dice St., I see a tall rectangular house with wood siding oddly positioned on a lot, priced well beyond my journalist’s means at $490,000. When Charles Jones, 60, looks at 513 Dice St., he sees The Gambling House. During the ’70s, a craps game would be in action in one room of the basement, a skins game in the other.
 Ampy Smith, a major property owner on Fifth Street SW since the ’60s, overall thinks that the neighborhood has improved in recent years. But he’s looking to retire from the property management game and is willing to sell for the right price. |
“They would sit there and play that game for three days and three nights before any of them would go home,” says Jones. “They’d send somebody out to get something to eat—chicken or something—eat and keep playing.”
When its owner passed away, the Gambling House went out of business, and languished under a succession of landlords until Jane Covington, a professional rehabber, bought the place in 2005.
By all accounts, Covington has done a remarkable job restoring the house, and the price tag (which has since dropped to $460,000) reflects that. Jones had figured that the house was only fit for demolition, so when he saw the rehab underway, he was amazed.
“They took three kinds of siding off of that,” says Jones, who works for Dominion Power. “Even the beams running through the house looked like the termites ate them. No foundation—just bricks sitting on the dirt. I don’t know how the house stood up.”
 Karen Firehock has lived on Fifth Street SW since 2003, after getting priced out of Belmont. Some neighbors were fascinated that she moved into the former Bell’s general store. A man once came to upholster furniture for Firehock but got distracted by reminiscences of falling in love at the store when he was 14. “Probably 100,000 people have walked on those floors,” Firehock ruminates. |
But the rebirth of The Gambling House in some ways marks the demise of the neighborhood that Jones grew up with. Nicknamed “The Sarge” because of his military service, Jones was raised in slums around Garrett Street without running water, using an outhouse that emptied into a creek. To cross Ridge Street into the Fifth & Dice area was to cross into a genteel and established world. He remembers a tight-knit neighborhood where misbehavior wasn’t tolerated.
Before drugs forced the neighborhood’s decay in the 1980s, Fifth & Dice was a solidly middle class neighborhood. The blocks started developing before the Civil War. Wealthy whites owned houses on Ridge Street, but tucked behind them were a cluster of homes on continually subdividing lots—a neighborhood that was mixed race. As Oak Street resident Antoinette Roades has documented, many of the houses were built by Allen Hawkins, a brick mason who helped build the Lawn. His house at 418 Fifth St., built in 1832, is the second oldest in the area (the oldest is the Oak Lawn Mansion, where the Fife of Fifeville fame lived, and where descendent and former Charlottesville mayor Francis Fife lives. Fife did not return calls for this story).
Hawkins built many houses for rich men, and some of them remain on Ridge Street. But he also sold land to his apprentices, and though a slave owner himself, he even extended that to black apprentices, according to Roades’ research. He was never very rich, however, and parcels were constantly being sold off to cover his debts. So up sprung the area between Fifth and Ridge streets.
Most of the rest of the neighborhood between Cherry Avenue and the railroad tracks was sold by Robert Herndon Fife after the death of his father, James, to be subdivided and developed in 1888. What happened in Fifeville in the late 1800s was but a version of modern development—a landowner sells off a large parcel of undeveloped land on the outskirts of the city and builders put up the houses.
 Charles Jones, 60, remembers a different neighborhood around Fifth and Dice streets and spent some evenings in a neighborhood casino called The Gambling House. |
What architectural historians love (as do many the rest of us, even if we don’t have the vocabulary to talk about it), is that homebuilding then wasn’t the highly specialized and efficient industry that it is today. Instead of having crews build all the houses roughly at the same time, giving them that cookie cutter look that so many people loathe about conventional developments, houses were usually built by separate homebuilders, one at a time. A family might build the house with neighbors, or assemble it from a mail order kit. And there were builders like Hawkins and his successors, who specialized in brick houses.
The folks who moved in were not rich. They were workers, many of whom were attached to the railroad that ran so close by. The eastern portion was probably mostly white, but the west was a salt and pepper of the races—at least until segregation. After the thaw of Reconstruction, segregation came back in full force around 1900. In 1912, Charlottesville City Council passed an ordinance “to secure for white and colored people a separate location of residing for each race.”
Seven 1/2 Street became the dividing line between the races, with whites living in Fifeville on the west side, and blacks living in Fifth & Dice to the east. But neither portion was a slum. Benjamin Tonsler, a respected principal at the Jefferson School, a friend of Booker T. Washington and the namesake of Tonsler Park, lived in an eclectic residence on Sixth Street starting in 1876.
“Regardless of what you hear, it’s not in Fifeville,” says Ann Carter, a retired teacher and former resident who grew up on Sixth Street. “It never was. We just called it where we lived.”
“When people then got a piece of property,” says Carter, who is black, “it wasn’t as it is today: ‘Oh, we’re going to get this piece of property and we’re going to build it up and then we’re going to sell it off and move into another area.’ If they got a piece of property, white and black, they tried to hang on to it because it was so hard to get it. And most of them tried to pass it on to the next generation. This is the home place.”
But with the death of longtime residents and the scourge of drugs, property values declined and the neighborhood took on characteristics of blight. Even today in many quarters of Charlottesville, Fifth & Dice is considered a crossroads of crime, an area to avoid for fear of robbery or assault. Jones points to the wall on Fifth Street that served as an open-air drug market in the ’80s.
“Everybody who were users of drugs knew where to find it,” says Jones. “People with money, big influential people.” Ampy Smith, the property owner on Fifth Street, remembers cars filing through the neighborhood at all hours and occasional gun battles over turf or sales gone awry.
Piedmont Housing Alliance (PHA), a nonprofit developer of affordable housing, bought several properties with the idea of rehabbing them as affordable units. PHA sold some of its properties to a rehabber named Joe Mallory, who, in an effort to rebrand the neighborhood, petitioned the city to change the name of Dice Street to Fife Street—a conscious effort to lump it in with Fifeville. Mallory was a notoriously shoddy rehabber, who would spruce up an exterior with vinyl siding and a colorful new paint job without properly attending to the structure and interior. But he touched up houses just enough that families, and not just slumlords, would buy them, even if many have had to sink more money into further repairs. (Mallory did not return calls for comment.)
The cumulative work of professional flippers like Mallory, nonprofits like PHA and families simply interested in buying a house within walking distance of UVA and Downtown—all fueled by the easy credit of the real estate boom—led to neighborhood assessments that increased an average of 23 percent annually over the past five years compared to the city’s overall annual increase of 11.6 percent. A Fifeville home assessed at $75,000 in 2003 would have jumped to $209,430 by 2008. That also means that the property tax bill would have jumped from $830 to almost $2,000—a hard hurdle to leap for someone on a fixed income.
Charles Jones points to other houses on Fifth Street that have been resold. He is appreciative that crime dropped off, but he also seems saddened by having other folks move into the houses on Fifth Street—people that he doesn’t know.
He sees the overall trend as this: People who moved out to the county because they had money are now moving back into Charlottesville, because of its walkability. They fixed up the houses, driving up taxes for longtime residents. He points to a house on Fifth Street. “That old lady right there, she in contention with that house right there, the house across the street, that house, this house,” he says, pointing around the neighborhood.
“No, this hasn’t been a good thing.”
But not all—or even most—of the people moving in are wealthy county snobs who ignore the longtime residents. Firehock, who is white, grew up in mixed-race neighborhoods in D.C., attending a predominately black elementary school. Since coming to Charlottesville, Firehock had lived in Belmont, serving as an active president of the neighborhood association, but when she wanted to move to a place with more space in 2003, she couldn’t afford another Belmont home. So she moved into the rehabbed store on Fifth Street—a store where Jones, as child, would buy penny candy.
Like the Gambling House, Bell’s store has gone through a lot of changes. It has been a Black Masonic lodge, a black taxi company, an apartment building, a catering business and a crack house (a system was even worked out such that money would be put in a brick in one side of the house, and then the drugs would be put behind a brick on the other side of the house). Had someone like Firehock not been willing to move in, it likely would have continued to serve as a drug house, or at best rented out as substandard housing, gradually declining until it had to be condemned.
“I think now we’re in the best position we’ve ever been in—it’s sort of stabilized a bit,” says Carter.
“When the houses were run down and people had drugs and stuff, and shootings and stuff going on every night, it was bad,” says Smith. “But now, all that stuff is gone. Since 2005, this neighborhood has turned around.”
Firehock, and the property owner McMahon, acknowledge skepticism at first from neighbors. But by sticking it out, inviting people over and trading garden plants, “we’ve been accepted by the neighborhood—at least the immediate neighbors,” says Firehock, who has herself taken advantage of the city’s property tax relief program.
An acquaintance who lives in North Downtown once told Firehock that she couldn’t believe that Firehock lived there. “She said she thought it was wrong of me because it was a predominately black neighborhood,” Firehock recounts. “What I should have said back was, ‘So you believe in segregation?’ The best way to learn to get along together is to live together.”
Historic district creates more problems than it solves
Ugly rifts in the shifting neighborhood were brought to public light when the city moved forward with making “Fifeville” a historic district in 2006—an effort city leaders thought would be welcomed as a way of helping preserve the character of the neighborhood in the face of development pressure, but that instead has left residents even more suspicious of the city and of each other.
The seeds for the district were planted in 2003, when Ben Ford, then president of the nonprofit preservation advocacy group Preservation Piedmont, sent a letter to Jim Tolbert, the director of Neighborhood Development Services.
“As you are doubtless aware, property values of single family homes in the downtown area are skyrocketing and development pressures are on the rise,” Ford wrote. “Important checks on these pressures come from historic districts and individual landmark designations. …Bearing in mind the need for such protections, we are concerned that no plans exist to survey the Fifeville and/or 10th & Page and Starr Hill areas. These are among Charlottesville’s oldest African-American neighborhoods. They are close to the Downtown Mall and West Main and, though not located directly on designated corridors, they are of considerable interest to both individual and corporate developers. We believe it is imperative to document those neighborhoods before they completely disappear and the time to document them is now, not in a few years.” Ford pointed specially to the intersection of Fifth and Dice streets as a possible focus if funding wasn’t available for the other areas.
Part of what exacerbated the crunch on neighborhoods like Fifeville was the city’s decision in 2003 under Mayor Maurice Cox to rezone large swaths of Charlottesville in order to encourage developers to increase the city’s density. The 2000 census figures showed a declining population, and the city hoped to revitalize itself. Long City Council meetings ensued, with excruciating discussions on architectural details. Yet not long after the city had implemented the rezoning, it suddenly found it needed to do more to slow development in certain sectors.
The first section where concerns led to city action was in the University area, where student-housing developers were particularly quick to cash in on the extra density. The city put together the Rugby Road-Venable architectural design control district, in order to stem demolitions. Only afterwards did the city get the district on the national historic register, which requires more documentation and meant duplicating work done for the design control district. When tackling Fifeville, city preservation planner Mary Joy Scala thought it would make sense to do the national historic district first, and then pursue the more controversial design control district.
The two sound similar—design control district and historic district—but they are very different in what they mean. A historic district is a national and state designation that is largely honorary, but does allow tax incentives for property owners who renovate properties. A local design control district means that any exterior changes—including demolitions—need the approval of the city’s Board of Architectural Review (BAR). In other words, the historic district provides a carrot—tax credits—for renovations; the design control district is all stick, making property owners work harder to tear something down. Appearing before the BAR isn’t a task that many people relish. The meetings involve a language of architecture and design that few nonprofessionals are comfortable with, which can make BAR’s decisions seem arbitrary.
Jane Covington spurred on the historic district process for Fifeville. After buying 513 Dice St. in 2005, she hoped to get historic preservation tax credits. She put together a prospectus for a historic district, which formed the basis of a city grant application. The grant helped fund the $30,000 for preservation consultants Maral Kalbian and Margaret Peters to put together the full nomination.
Then everything blew up.
What Scala didn’t anticipate was the fractured dynamic of a Fifeville community that had already changed significantly. Compounding racial mistrust between old Fifeville and old Fifth & Dice was the fact that the historic district’s biggest public advocate was a professional rehabber. It didn’t help that Scala was completely upfront about the intentions for a local district—as one might expect, the historic district and the design control district became intertwined in the minds of many neighbors, who rightly saw that by taking the carrot, they were making room for the stick.
To further exacerbate the historic district, the city’s legacy has not always been so good when it comes to neighborhoods like Fifth & Dice. The large African-American neighborhood on Vinegar Hill was torn down under the guise of urban renewal, and other parts of black neighborhoods had been chipped away over the years through eminent domain.
It’s little wonder, then, that new ideas coming from the city were met with skepticism and fear. The city may have felt that it was trying to do right for neighbors, that it was trying to slow development, but the neighbors were worried that the district would increase gentrification and impose processes that they didn’t understand.
As one man explained during an early meeting on the historic district, he didn’t care about tax credits for fixing up his house. He didn’t care if it would help his property value go up so that he could make more money when he sold it—he didn’t want to sell it. He didn’t want his children to sell it. But the increases were making it harder for him to afford to live there, and it would make it harder for his children to live there as well. He didn’t care about the house itself as much as the plot of land for his family to live.
But without a doubt the most public, and vociferous, opponent to the historic district was Antoinette Roades, a white woman who lives on Oak Street. From the beginning, Roades had a lot of issues with the districts—the core issue, according to a letter sent to officials, being that Allen Hawkins didn’t get the credit he deserved for building so many of the area’s houses in addition to training many other builders. She thought that the boundaries should be redrawn so that it included the complete Fife subdivision of 1888, and also so that the portion closer to Ridge Street be linked instead to the Ridge Street Historic District. Yet the issue that gained the most traction was her dispute over the proposed name, Fifeville-Castle Hill.
“If the line had been drawn differently, I wouldn’t have made a squeak,” says Roades. “I would have been the one going around the neighborhood explaining the value of a historic district if I’d never heard ‘Castle Hill.’”
It’s unclear who first proposed the name Castle Hill, but it came from a reference in a memoir by Fifth and Dice resident Rebecca McGinness, a black teacher who died in 2000. “Our community was very close-knit,” she said in a 1991 interview. “We called it Castle Hill because it sat on a hill.” The consultants putting together the report called the Fifth & Dice area Castle Hill as a way of distinguishing it from the historically white neighborhood of Fifeville.
Roades, however, saw it as a made-up name. When the consultants released a draft report, Roades tore it to shreds in a 25-page letter to the state Department of Historic Resources (DHR). “The fundamental flaws and myriad errors in the submitted application and the equally flawed process that produced it leave me with no choice but to ask that it be rejected,” said Roades in opening the letter, before presenting a heavily documented rebuttal.
The consultants’ report wasn’t bad as far as historic register nomination reports go. But the paid consultants, used to working within a certain standard, produced a document that didn’t live up to the history that Roades, a diligent historian herself, expected. Students accustomed to turning in grade school work were suddenly getting asked to defend it as if it was a doctoral thesis.
The nomination was shelved and moved off the DHR docket. The consultants incorporated the corrections and additional information from Roades’ letter into the nomination, which went back before City Council in December.
When she read the revised report, Roades was livid that her work was going into something she didn’t support. At the December City Council meeting, she accused the consultants of plagiarism. Part of the city’s resolution to send the nomination forward asked that the “intellectual property issue” be addressed. Roades’ information was cited in the nomination as an “unpublished manuscript,” and the city and the state attorneys found that it was used legally as part of the public record. Roades so far has opted not to press the issue legally, though she did note in a letter to DHR, “I consider this a moral matter. …It is just not right to take from an individual over her express protest of her long, hard, good work to enhance a product she unalterably opposes.”
In the end, the district will go through, largely because it’s too hard to kill once it’s started. While it only took city staff and Jane Covington to get the ball rolling, it requires notarized letters from one half of affected homeowners to quash a nomination. In the case of this one, more letters were submitted against it than for it, but that was far from the 100-plus that would have been necessary to stop it. At the DHR meeting in Richmond, even a former City Councilor who voted for it came down to speak against the nomination going through. Kendra Hamilton cited questions over Roades’ research, as well as concerns that it doesn’t detail enough African-American history.
The state review board approved it conditionally in March, asking that the African-American history get beefed up, and that the Castle Hill name be reconsidered.
“This is not the definitive nomination on resources associated with the African-American community,” said Margaret Peters, the preservation consultant hired by the city to put together the nomination, after the state review board meeting. “What we’re registering is buildings. We’re not writing history.”
“It is fundamentally a proposal that is meant to recognize a neighborhood qua neighborhood,” said Kathleen Kilpatrick, DHR’s director. She pointed out that the historic district could be changed, that boundary lines could be expanded, and that the area closer to Ridge Street could be incorporated. “It is what it is.”
The open questions of Fifeville’s future
The historic district won’t do anything to stop demolitions directly, and it could encourage gentrification, in the sense that the people most inclined to seize tax credit opportunities will be those who have taken advantage of them in the past or those who have the money to hire an architecture firm that has. In other words, not the working class people who have lived there for a long time. Jason Pearson thinks that, in an effort to protect the houses from demolitions, the city forgot to protect the people, which should have been what really mattered.
When I first started to report on this, it was hard to think that anyone really cared about what the neighborhoods were called. So what if one is named for Fife and another is named Castle Hill? Who really cares what it was called, as much as what it is called now?
Then I thought about my own hometown and what I called it, and quickly realized the degree to which it does matter—how much kinship it creates when someone else recognizes the names we use for things. I tell the stranger I am from western North Carolina, and only if the stranger shows any knowledge do I begin circling closer to where I’m actually from—Asheville, Marion, Old Fort. It is a peculiar excitement that comes when I meet someone who knows Bat Cave Road, or, even better, Hickory Nut Mountain. And there is a big difference between Asheville and Old Fort—I don’t really want to be known as an Asheville boy. Growing up, people from Asheville were high-falutin city people who acted above us hicks down in McDowell County. Old Fort is where mountain music is played at the fire department on Friday nights—Asheville is where you go to the arts theater or a vegetarian restaurant.
In the end, the historic district—and the various agendas of those affected by it—brought to the fore the fact that this area that city maps call Fifeville is really several separate neighborhoods. And that even some of those overlapping neighborhoods contain people who have very different ideas of what the neighborhood is. Antoinette Roades’ notion comes from her commitment to historical research, which suggests that a historic district should celebrate mankind’s original markings of his presence on a piece of land. For Ann Carter, that idea is different, and comes from the racial boundaries that marked her youth. For others like Ampy Smith—who owned property in the neighborhood but who had fewer emotional connections to the place—the houses are just old houses.
And then there are people like Charlie Jones, who do have a strong emotional connection to the place. To them, the neighborhood is a place full of ghosts. I don’t mean that Jones is superstitious, but rather that what makes 513 Dice St. special to him is not that it’s 147 years old or that it was built by Virginia Shackleford or lived in by the Bannisters in 1912. It’s the ghosts of those folks playing craps and skins in the basement. Of old man Rice driving around in his Mercedes. Of a younger version of The Sarge throwing around the remains of his Friday paycheck and laughing with his friends.
But does that mean that a place should never be torn down? After all, people develop powerful connections with a lot of places—and if we were to preserve them all, there could never be any changes. Jones is certainly amazed at all the layers of siding that came off during the restoration of 513 Dice, but he doesn’t seem to really care that it wasn’t torn down.
 Antoinette Roades stands at the home Allen Hawkins built in 1832 for himself. Her campaign against the Fifeville-Castle Hill Historic District was driven in part by a desire to see Hawkins, a builder with enough gall to twit Thomas Jefferson, get more recognition. “Instead, [the consultants] treated him like so much fill.” |
Yet maybe that’s not entirely true. When Jones talks about Vinegar Hill, he says that when it came down, he understood it and thought it probably was a good thing. But today, knowing what he knows, he thinks it was a bad thing.
“I thought it was going to be for the better because it was a lot of slums, but it’s what people call their neighborhood, their home,” says Jones. “And they lived the best with the salaries they got—they couldn’t afford nothing else. Now that I look back, it’s terrible. You tore down the history of Charlottesville.”
The area city maps call Fifeville is changing. What is uncertain is what will happen to the racial and class commingling currently occurring in the neighborhoods. Are the white families who moved in only pilot fish who will bring schools of others—and others with less tolerant views of what their neighbors should look like? Of how “junky” a neighbor’s yard can be, and how faded a paint-job can get? At last, 40 years after the end of segregation, can the area city maps call Fifeville become a truly integrated neighborhood—even if they don’t all call it Fifeville?
