No direction home
The question about what North Garden is “north” of [“Northern Exposure,” Ask Ace, November 10], illustrates how Charlottesville-centric we are in this area. Having moved from Charlottesville to North Garden several years ago, I had the same question and the most plausible explanation I have heard is that is located (sort of) on the north branch of the Hardware River. South Garden, which is a few miles down Plank Road, is on the south fork of the Hardware. Our South Garden may only be a sign beside the road but it does exist.
Carol Jones
North Garden
Won’t you be my neighbor?
Wake up and smell the coffee, citizens! The so-called “neighborhood model” is bogus [“Where the sidewalk ends,” November 17]. It is a bunch of nice verbiage to soothe us as the big-box developers continue to pave over paradise.
Some years ago I attended a bunch of joint meetings of the city and county Planning Commissions as they discussed proposed plans for Albemarle Place, a not-yet-built C-shaped shopping center surrounding Sperry, fronting on 29 North and Hydraulic Road. Much was made at the time of the “neighborhood model,” a planning concept that was supposed to incorporate housing and retail so that people could live where they work and shop. Some problems that I noticed; the jobs created were minimum-wage retail-clerk jobs, but the housing was high-end rental units; there was no park or recreational space (the developer pointed to a plaza with a fountain and referred to a tree-lined street as a “linear park”); the northern end of the site consisted of two big-box stores and acres of parking; there was no connectivity to Commonwealth Drive, leaving people who lived just across the street at Turtle Creek no alternative to the automobile. I remember the late Herman Key (then a city Planning Commissioner) saying, “I don’t get it. The people who work there can’t afford to live there. How is this the neighborhood model?” When asked where children would play, the developer said that the people who rented the high-priced apartments would not have children.
Albemarle Place has not yet been built. But even now there is no place for a pedestrian to cross 29 North legally north of Angus Road. If someone who works at Sperry wants to eat lunch at a place across the road, that person has to get in a car.
I can’t believe the Board of Supervisors buys this b******t. Unless they they are thinking only of raking in the tax dollars.
Elizabeth Kutchai
Charlottesville