Category: neighborhood

High Street

entrance corridor

Charlottesville has a riverfront! Though hidden, inaccessible and
underutilized, it is a potential amenity with appeal to countless City and
County residents and visitors to the area. Nowhere is this fact more
significant than at the East High Street and River Road corridors. Attempts at
reclaiming the riverbank for recreational uses in the form of trails, playing
fields, and both passive and active green spaces, pay obvious dividends in
enhancing the quality of life for residents. Environmental and economic
benefits are likely to accrue as well. Incorporating Best Management Practices
for controlling storm water runoff as part of a river front park will help both
aspects. Less obvious, but tremendously important for the City’s continued
economic health, is the role that such amenities play in attracting a highly
skilled talent pool to a region. Increasingly, employees in the New Economy
are considering the proximity of recreational amenities to job and home as
they ponder multiple employment offers from companies in competing
geographic markets. The degree to which Charlottesville can integrate new
employment venues with such recreational (as well as urban) amenities, the
easier it will be for its companies to compete for talent. This will, in turn,
enhance the City’s ability to retain and expand its roster of New Economy
corporations.–pg 154 High Street Corridor Study December 2000, Torti Gallas and Partners CHK

domain-route-high-street

connectivity

east on market south on franklin
Tiptoe in on 18 wheels

directions
The City has put up signage but it is of the advisory type. Doesn’t speak to the wallet. Steve contradicts the GPS, free
pedestrian advice to errant drivers.

right turn on the framework street
This truck was starting to turn turtle. Its drive wheels were no longer in contact with the pavement. Teetering between
two historic properties, the Pireus store (ca 1847) and the Woolen Mills Chapel (ca 1886).

John Warner Parkway
In the future possibly the City will consider one of these signs, here protecting the John Warner Parkway.
Discipline vehicles. Context sensitive. Note to City regarding context: the Woolen Mills is a city treasure,
not a high speed industrial corridor. People old and young, walking, biking and driving.
Those with the most power, in the neighborhood context, should yield to those with the least.

framework street?

Ian Lockwood
I wish I was going to Buffalo next week for CNU 22 , confab of new urbanists. My closest approach
was sitting in a room with Ian Lockwood this past week.

framework streets
Ian shared his transportation philosophy, spoke earnestly about connectivity, and showed a map
that alternately intrigues and terrifies. What exactly is a framework street? Reserving judgement until it is
possible to learn more. Does the finish detail of the Duke of Gloucester Street qualify for a modern framework street?

network
Some new wine doesn’t belong in the old bottle.

paving season

modern art asphalt
I never complain about the pavement in neighborhoods because when the membrane is allowed to deteriorate sufficiently many benefits accrue.
There is the traffic calming benefit, travel speeds are reduced, drivers moderate their speed.
This is a poor man’s pervious pavement, allowing some recharging of groundwater levels.
I wonder if there is a correlation between condition of streets and median income of the surrounding neighborhood?

Bus Stop

1600 block e market
As long as I can remember there has been a bus running east on Woolen Mills Road (aka Market Street).


Sixty or seventy years.
That service stops today.
(Woolen Mill/Park Street bus photo courtesy of the Bobby Taylor Collection)