Roads. We hate them, we love them, we pollute them, we rename them. We cannot get very far without them, but still we cannot make our peace with them—perhaps for good reason. Few local issues rival the Meadowcreek Parkway for longevity and heat. With last week’s decision from Judge Jay Swett that the city of Charlottesville acted lawfully in transferring McIntire Park land to VDOT for the controversial road, the 40-year debate returns to the news. Three years ago we considered some of that very land in our occasional series “Places We’ll Lose.” John Borgmeyer described the nine-hole golf course that will be indelibly altered when the Parkway is finally completed (back then projections called for construction in 2008). “The McIntire course’s first hole affords a view that you can’t get anywhere else in Charlottesville (outside the master bedroom of a swanky condo, that is),” Borgmeyer wrote. “The tee sits below a canopy of gnarled trees; hit a true shot and the eye follows an arc through a wide blue sky, a path of lazy clouds that disappear over the forested ridge rippling to the east, dropping into a broad fairway of Bermuda grass among ancient old-growth oaks—some with trunks wider than a bundle of telephone poles.”
PAGING THROUGH THE ARCHIVES
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“Yeah, it’s a free society, M.G. But there is a long list of things you’re just not allowed to do.
“You can’t yell ‘fire!’ in a crowded theater (although it probably won’t do much harm at a showing of Air Bud II). You can’t pay someone to have sex with you (unless you’re first willing to pay for a plane ticket to Nevada). And in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, you’re not allowed to put up signs advertising your business on any of the road right-of-ways (unless you want to fork over big bucks for a billboard).
“Which means the sign you’re referring to that has been out on Route 250 all summer long is definitely a no-no.”—Ace Atkins, August 25, 1998
GETTING COVERED
June 13, 2006
