Just by threatening to show up in Charlottesville to put on their tired “God Hates Fags” routine, the Topeka, Kansas-based Westboro Baptist Church spurred hundreds of students to protest the protesters on November 14. Westboro had posted on its website that the church, led by Fred Phelps, would come protest UVA’s performance of The Laramie Project, a play about the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. The church never showed, but it gave University students a good excuse to come together on a Friday evening.
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House down
The City of Charlottesville issued a stop-work order on Friday, April 26, at 521 Park Plaza in the North Downtown neighborhood. When it served the document, the city discovered the three-bedroom house had been demolished. At some point late last week, a yellow excavator smashed the one-and-a-half-story structure into pieces. City records listed the home, […]
Circling back
Construction is on the horizon at Premier Circle. The former Red Carpet Inn was transformed into an emergency shelter during the COVID-19 pandemic, and helped nearly 100 people exit homelessness. The facility closed in June of 2023, leaving a gap in Charlottesville’s network of shelter services, but construction on the next phase of the project […]
Shuttered
On April 18, 10 days after the termination of its fraternal order agreement with the University of Virginia, the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity posted an unlisted video to its YouTube channel. In the video, Justin Buck, the national organization’s executive vice president, sternly addresses his fraternity brothers. “For the first time since March 1, 1868, […]
