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Remembering Charlottesville’s Downtown Belmont

7/24/2014

Once upon a time Charlottesville was a cluster of shops and houses around a courthouse. One hill away to the east, and almost within sight, was a cluster of houses around a senescent plantation called Belmont.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont_(Charlottesville,_Virginia)

There was a railroad track running between these two locales. Pretty soon, generationally speaking, these two communities grew until they met at the railroad line. Belmont then became a neighborhood of Charlottesville—the classic other side of the tracks. The center of Belmont, not many paces from the old plantation, was a jumble of cross streets. The three main streets closest to the tracks formed a kind of sideways Y that led to a lazy X. Both of these haphazard intersections, evolved for mule-drawn wagons, were complicated further by the addition of side alleys. This was downtown Belmont.

Downtown Belmont was an easy stroll from all parts of Belmont and it featured a diner or two, three or four competitive local groceries of the antique general store variety, a gas station and garage, a variety of small repair businesses, barber shops, beauty parlors, contractors and other small fry.

All of it was small fry. This pattern circa 1890 or 1900 persisted with little change despite electrification and street paving, the building of the Old Belmont Bridge in 1905, and the building of the second bridge in 1961. As of this writing, the Charlottesville City Council has just approved a design for a new replacement bridge.

Somewhere in the 1960’s, downtown Belmont began to fossilize But since neighborhood life in Belmont was largely lived on the porch, or in the yard, or on the sidewalk, or in the street itself if traffic allowed, the old downtown intersection was soon the only part of Belmont that could really be called deserted. You could not fit more irony into a two-block area.

I had cousins and grandparents living in Belmont, and as a child I spent a lot of time in Belmont, though I was readily identifiable as a south Charlottesville kid and not a Belmont kid.

When I joined the Boy Scouts, I joined a Belmont troop. This might have been the roughest, meanest scout troop in American history. All we did was fight. Any snapshot or given moment in the history of that troop should include at least one kid with a bloody nose. I remember being assigned Golding’s Lord
of the Flies in the 9th grade, several years after leaving scouting behind, and feeling irritated at how feeble the characters were.

Boy Scouts have ranks. Our troop almost entirely stalled at Second Class Scout because the jump from Second Class to First Class required too much organized activity. It would have interfered with our natural pecking order, which was not based on merit badges but on the ability to pick other kids up and throw them on the ground.
When I think of scouting, what comes to mind first is the gratifying whump of other scouts' ribcages hitting the red clay earth. Some recollections of that troop have crept into a paragraph or two in the Vietnam section of the
novel I’m currently working on, Astral Bodies. Several of the kids in my old troop wound up in Vietnam for a year
or so.

I used to walk to downtown Belmont to buy chewing tobacco for my grandfather Earl, my father’s father. Here’s Grandaddy as I best remember him, along with my grandma Edie Mae.

Earl chewed Red Man. His choice seemed rational since he rather resembled the Indian on the pouch. Like my other grandfather, Leighton, who happened to be Earl's brother, Earl was a rather dark-skinned man with native Virginia features. He chewed tobacco most of the time he was awake. Like his brother, Earl was a railroad man, a hard, strong, tough man in body and spirit, and he came from a world where trying to take care of your health was not what people did. He lived his fourscore years and then some, long enough to see his world vanish almost entirely. His grandchildren respected him without reservation and so did his six children, which was quite a feat.

The noble leaf was taken for granted in all forms. It was perfectly legal for me to go get Grandaddy’s chew for him. Those stores smelled of a mixture of moist sweet tobacco, floor wax, kerosene, bacon, sugar and Wonder Bread. There was a carousel of comic books by the candy counter. What would we buy—it was always a thrilling moment. I favored Sgt. Rock and the entire Weird Tales genre of shock and horror comics, which appear to be having a revival although in modern terms I wonder how many of the over-12 crowd would still be thrilled.

http://www.amazon.com/Haunted-Horror-Banned-Chilling-Archives/dp/1613777884

http://www.comicvine.com/sgt-rock/4005-3604/

In those days no store keeper would have hesitated to sell a pouch of chewing tobacco to a grade school kid such as myself. Here's of photo of me, with book, and my brother Alan, from around this time. We are visiting our Granddaddy Leighton and Grandma Evelyn at Christmas in their house in Lynchburg.

Eggs weren’t necessarily refrigerated in Belmont's stores and vegetables never were, so a limp vegetative smell often mixed with the indefinable flowery bubblegum scent and the scent of fresh pulp ink as we got our paper bag with maybe as much as 90 cents worth of merchandise in it, collected our dime of change in those days before there were store taxes, walked home to Grandma Eddie Mae’s house past the brick factory where blind people made brooms, and read our comic books.

As far as horror comics are concerned, real dead people never do much of anything. As far as Sergeant Rock was concerned I had uncles and great-uncles who had actually been on Tarawa and Leyte and Kasserine Pass and Bastogne and Okinawa, and yet somehow Sergeant Rock seemed vivid and interesting and they didn’t. I guess reality is never going to be an adequate substitute for fiction.

The Belmont world was small. My grandmother’s neighbor on one side was also named Mawyer but did not consider himself a relative. Her neighbor on the other side was a cousin-by-marriage from the Davis branch of the family. We were warned not to play with the Hogwaller Boys from the area beyond Monticello Road, which we called Lower Belmont, because they were too ornery. They were so violent and tough they didn’t even have a Boy Scout troop. Pure anarchy down there.

Downtown Belmont has been partly gentrified now, but it was never entirely coarse to begin with. Its downtown remains much what it was, with a couple of buildings adapted into tasty restaurants and coffee shops, and other structures resting peacefully, silence and dust gathering inside them.

All photos of Downtown Belmont by Karen Mawyer

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The Corner -- The University’s Downtown

7/17/2014

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I’ve worked across the street from the Corner, the commercial strip on University Avenue across from the grounds of the University of Virginia, for decades, so I see the place most days.

Astral Bodies, the novel I’m currently writing, is largely set at and around the Corner in 1969 - 1970. I wrote my first draft of Astral Bodies between 1972 and 1975, and it is amusing to see how much period detail I captured. Recently, to help refresh my memory on a few points, I picked up Coy Barefoot’s book, The Corner:
A History of Student Life at the University of Virginia.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Corner-History-University-Virginia/dp/157427113X

The cover of Barefoot’s book shows a group of post-WWII UVA students at the bar of the old Virginian, a very narrow diner that still exists on the Corner. To the right, when I frequented the “V,” was a row of well-worn wooden booths, set flush against the wall. To the left, behind the bar, was a wall-sized mural of dogs shooting pool by Cassius Coolidge, unless my memory fails me. But that is the problem with memory. It is also possible that someone else did the dog mural, or that the dogs were playing poker or just drinking beer like the people in at the bar. Each booth had its own juke box arrangement, with tabs listing the available tunes. An art deco light fixture hung above each juke box. Anyway, the “V” is still there, but the dog mural at some point must have been deemed too déclassé, and is sadly gone.

The Corner: A History of Student Life at the University of Virginia touches on more than just student life. At every step the book's account of student life morphs into an account of passages in University history. And University history turns into Corner history, which may be architectural, or be a kind of business history, before reverting back to student life or just life in Charlottesville.

Charlottesville, the University of Virginia, the Corner, and the students, faculty and Charlottesvillians are so entwined in so many ways that a history of any of them is inevitably a history of all of them. This is what it means to be a Downtown.

As memories pile up over the years, chronology becomes harder. Restaurants and bars, tobacconists and drugs stores, clothing stores, banks and shops of all kinds have flitted in and out of the buildings on the Corner in a steady procession, though a few businesses have stuck tight the whole time. The Corner doesn’t inspire vacancy. Collapse of a business occurs from time to time, but anyone who wants to try just about any kind of enterprise could hardly pick a more bustling location. When the new enterprise goes under, there’ll be somebody ready to take its place. Businesses vanish or their purposes change but somehow it doesn’t really matter.

I well remember as a high student buying a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra in the basement bookstore on the Corner under Lloyd’s Drug Store, the way I remember buying tins of smoky, honey-scented latakia and rich, musky Turkish cigarettes when Mincer’s was still a tobacconist, but I have trouble recollecting an “earliest memory” of the Corner.

My first solid memories of the University probably begin when I was in grade school, with football weekends.
End-zone bleacher seats cost 50 cents and any kid who could crawl could sneak in for free, so the neighborhood kids nearly always went. We took footballs with us, because we generally got bored watching the game and wound up playing football ourselves on the stadium grass behind the bleachers. But we loved seeing the Cavalier ride in on his charger, waving his sword. They still do that, many Cavaliers later. The great Cavalier exodus to Virginia may be a myth, and there may be reason to believe the great exodus was post-Restoration and
composed more of Roundheads, but it would not be the same if the mascot was a Virginia Parliamentarian Ironsides wearing a lobster-tail helmet. That would not be romantic at all.

Of course the many curious old buildings around the University would interest any kid. What we now call the Central Grounds was a bit more beat up and a lot less crowded than today. By the age of 10 or 11, I had already perfected the habit of wandering around the Grounds repeatedly, and I was especially fascinated with Poe Alley and Edgar Allen Poe’s old room with its stuffed raven. It all seemed terribly real. I avidly read and re-read Poe’s many stories and poems. Somehow the stories and poems also seemed terribly real.

In memory it’s all a sort of pastiche: the hot scent of oak trees in the golden dust of summer; candy-colored traffic tootling past the Rotunda on University Avenue; moonlight and honeysuckle in gardens singing with cicadas; the wonderful old Southern Gothic graveyard where it almost seemed a privilege to be dead and buried; stuffed ravens and peculiar colonnaded brick buildings musty with lack of upkeep; white columns, out-at-the-elbows professors, drunken (male) students practically staggering back up Alderman Road bowlegged as they finished off the dregs of their bourbon after yet another terrific defeat at Scott Stadium. Their dates inevitably wore plaid and mohair. It was that time of the world.

The Corner has changed in one way. Historically it was always a hotbed of books. One did not have to walk far to
come face-to-face with a wall of books for sale at student prices. Originally I came for the books. Later I came for the beer. In between, I came for billiards.

Early in my high school career, some pals and I discovered the old University Billiard Parlor. From then until I got married, my chums and I haunted the place. I don’t think we were the only ones haunting it. History haunted it. The University Billiard Parlor held itself out as “the largest pool room in the South.” In ancient times it had been on the professional circuit. The massive fin-de-siècle mahogany tables, the oak wainscoting, the green baize, the racks of ancient cues, the dead weight of real ivory, the dim light and the ingrained smell of cigars, all bore testimony that anything one could imagine might be true. This was not a hobby room for Wahoos. It was a temple. Somehow we knew that. You were only welcome if you cared. Mr. Van Lear and Lightnin’ are vivid in
memory to this day, although I can barely recall any of my teachers from those years.

During the work week, I generally walk to and from my car down the alley where the University Billiard Parlor used to be. Several times a week for quite a few years, much of my life as it happens, I’ve walked past the boarded up door and the remodeled windows that used to let a little sunlight into the smoky pool hall.

The ghosts click ivory balls stained with age and never go away, as if Mr. Van Lear with his shaggy head of snow-white hair is still there deciding whom to allow in. Pool itself was so ridiculously pure, so much in the realm of light, that it attracted sin and needed it. It was a kind of symbiosis. We were indifferent to sin. I still don’t care about it. Maybe we had to be there to understand it. It’s also possible that we were there because we didn’t understand it.

The Corner defies the rule that old downtowns tend to go senescent and become derelict. The Corner’s never even slowed down. At least in my lifetime, and the lifetime of my parents, the Corner really hasn’t changed much in any of the ways that matter. It’s the same kind of place, with the same landmarks, and students, faculty, townspeople, and visitors still frequent the shops and eating places, rubbing shoulders with the ghosts.

http://www.arch.virginia.edu/housinghistory/BH/Corner.htm

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Remembering Charlottesville’s Downtowns – East Main Street

7/13/2014

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My earliest memories of downtown Charlottesville are from the late fifties, but my early recollections are a little hard to separate from later memories of the early sixties. At that time “downtown” meant East Main Street, a couple of blocks downhill from Court Square, which was the original “downtown.” Charlottesville was small but in the past there had been even smaller hamlets next to it with their own commercial centers. Belmont, now a neighborhood, was once outside of town and had a commercial intersection that is still sometimes referred to as
Downtown Belmont. In the opposite direction, the west end of East Main, called Vinegar Hill, was the core of the Black community and lined with small shops and businesses. Further west was West Main and the University of Virginia. Once the far reaches of West Main were considered a separate town, called University, with its own equivalent downtown blocks, known as The Corner.

Here is a rather amusing map, not in scale but showing the relative locations of Charlottesville’s various “downtowns”:

http://www.discoverymap.com/#!/Virginia/Map-of-Charlottesville/11

By World War One the outlying reaches had knitted together and all the disparate foci became secondary to East Main Street, the unmistakable downtown center of Charlottesville life.

www2.iath.virginia.edu

In the waning years of the Eisenhower Administration, my mother would collect my brother and me on most Saturday mornings and we would walk five blocks to the nearest bus stop and catch a bus downtown. It was Mama’s way of getting out of the house once a week. This wasn’t really a shopping trip as much as a looking-at-things trip; it often involved a Coke or a dish of vanilla ice cream at Woolworth’s Five and Dime; sometimes we would go to a movie at the Paramount or the Jefferson Theater; we might go to Standard Drug or Gleason’s Bakery. The post office and the library were also common stops. Then we would catch the bus home. I’ve not been able to find a snapshot of us downtown, but the picture below shows Mama, my younger brother Alan, and myself in front of the Rotunda, on a late fifties outing.

Charlottesville gets suffocatingly hot and humid in the summer, and it can be worse at night than in the daytime. On summer nights when the house was too muggy to endure, my father sometimes packed our family of four into the car and drove downtown just to get some air. The breeze would flow through the windows of the car and
provide some relief. This was a common practice. Even though the stores were closed in the evening except for the theaters and the Dixie News Stand and a couple of diners, Main Street would still be backed up end to end in both directions, from Vinegar Hill to the Belmont Bridge. Every traffic light in a three by five block grid would be jammed. With the headlights and the traffic lights and the neon, you might have sworn there was commercial
activity going on. But in reality, not much; people in cars cruised downtown to get some breeze. Some percentage of them might go to a movie.

When my brother and I were still in grade school, my mother went back to work, unusual for mothers in that era. It’s not easy to sort out my memories of our Saturday trips downtown in the late fifties from the late elementary school or middle school trips I later took downtown on my own. I sometimes caught the bus but 15 cents was a vital amount of money to me. (I made about two bucks a week in summer and fall mowing lawns and raking leaves and I got another quarter a week from my father; later, I worked a paper route with another kid, which gave me a bit more spending money.) So, I usually walked downtown; it took about 40 minutes and the bus only ran once an hour anyway.

The most important places to me in this period included a hobby or toy store that had the kinds of military models and figures I collected, the Dixie News Stand which had paperbacks I could afford, and an office supply store that had the art supplies I wanted, chiefly ink and calligraphy pens and sketch books. I don’t remember the names of the hobby store and the art store.

Most of the stores I remember are gone now, though the buildings remain. The theaters have been painstakingly restored and renovated. The Dixie News Stand is long gone. McCrory’s Five and Ten Cent store burned down in the sixties, and where it once was an outdoor fountain now anchors the downtown mall’s "Central Place.” The handsome post office/federal building on Market street, one block over, became the library. The McIntire Building, which housed the library, became a senior center and then the home of the Albemarle County Historical Society. The façade and shell of Gleason’s Bakery is still there, but the bakery closed years ago; an events venue, the Old Metropolitan Hall, has taken its place. Much of Vinegar Hill was sadly razed to the ground in the so-called urban renewal of the early sixties.

Though the uses of most of the downtown buildings have been altered to some degree, a few establishments are still what they were—for instance, the New Dominion Bookshop is still a bookstore, Timberlake's Drugstore is still a drugstore with soda fountain, and Standard Drug is a CVS.

Downtown Charlottesville fell into senescence in the late sixties. With the spread of affordable air conditioning even the nocturnal summer parade of cars with nowhere else to go fell off. The construction of the Barracks Road Shopping Center, and later of the Fashion Square Mall, the new-model supermarket, and improved television reception were also part of the reason.

The old downtown died fast and hard, and the city reacted with a daring foray into the realms of planning, plunging ahead with the reinvention of downtown, closing traffic on East Main Street and building a pedestrian mall. This is not a story about Charlottesville’s pedestrian mall. Suffice it to say, for the first several years the Downtown Mall was still fairly deserted. The things that killed the downtown didn’t exactly help the new mall. The few remaining businesses steadfastly shut their blinds shortly before sunset and went home to dinner. The theaters, a couple of diners, Standard Drug and the newsstand still owned the night, insofar as it was worth owning.

But in due course, the boutique movement, the restaurant renaissance, and the discovery of outdoor seating and public music all contributed to today’s bustling daytime activity and vibrant nightlife on the Downtown Mall. It is again a true center of town activity, though no longer the only center.

Photos of contemporary Charlottesville Downtown Mall by Karen Mawyer

To me, though, downtown Charlottesville is a place of ghosts—ghosts of bygone buildings, bygone traffic and people of the past. I remember when the line of moviegoers wrapped around the block twice for the opening of Goldfinger at the Paramount. I was in that line. I worked downtown. I went to Lane High School (now the site of the Albemarle County Office Building) downtown. I mopped floors at night in the old Standard Drug until I had exactly enough money to buy my first typewriter, a seafoam-blue Swiss Hermes; ironically, it was the cheapest typewriter in the shop, because the keys were in the AZERTY alignment. I wish I still had it. It seemed expensive at the time; now I would say they were giving it away. The day I bought it I called the drug store and quit. I
hated mopping floors. I must have thousands of recoverable trivial memories of downtown.

The old downtown was different things to different people. A few years ago the church I belong to paired up with an African American Baptist church then located close to downtown to share fellowship and get a larger idea of
community. Thus one evening I found myself at a table in the basement reception hall of that downtown church with a number of elderly black ladies of my mother’s generation, not really sure what to talk about. “I’m an Episcopalian” is a conversation-killer in basically every context, so I said, “Do you remember McCrory’s?”

They certainly did; these wonderful old ladies remembered everything. In minutes they brought Old Charlottesville back to life, memories of where things were, what people did, how it was. This may sound dull. It was actually thrilling. I’m exactly the right age to have seen the tail end of a bygone way of life that was, to say the least, different from today.

But memory is rarely free of loss and regret. The old ladies were remembering a Charlottesville that was segregated. Segregation was a background detail for most white people but a foreground detail for all black people. When these ladies rode the bus, they rode in back. They went into the theaters by a different door, and sat in the balconies. They could not sit at the lunch counters. They could be customers in some stores and not others. Downtown was one of chief locations where black people and segregation came into contact.

Segregation was not a custom, it was the law. For these old ladies, who at the time were young ladies, downtown was a place of official encounter where the lines were most sharply drawn. You could get into trouble by accident, by putting your foot wrong, by saying the wrong thing or even without doing anything. What I remembered from childhood as a safe and convenient place of stores and shops, mostly a good bit above my means, these ladies remembered as a place of restriction and potential threat—a place they had to go from time to time, but where they also had to follow an intricate body of special rules designed to shape how they could go, and what they couldn’t do or had to do.

Decades later they remembered all of this, not without hurt and regret, and they still couldn’t understand it.

Of course they couldn’t understand it. No one understood it. It was the law, which often is a substitute for thought and understanding. Few could imagine then how something entirely legal, mandated by the state and upheld by city officials, could also be completely wrong. Few could congeal the thought that something literally evil, designed by corrupt legislatures to inflict harm on innocent people, would naturally be enforced by the police with badge and club.

“People didn’t know what they were doing,” I said feebly to the old ladies in the basement of the Baptist church. “The people they thought were supposed to be in charge handed them an evil law, and they blindly went along with it because they were stupid and irresponsible. There’ll never be a shred of excuse for it. Even the children knew better.”

That’s roughly what I said. Other things I didn’t say: black Charlottesvillians were not merely innocent of segregation, they were innocent of the kind of thinking that created it. So were the white local rustics, out in the woods and fields raising pole beans and eating squirrels. It came from the Downtown people, the mayors, attorneys, business owners and judges and the people the lunch counters were built for.

The old downtowns are still full of ghosts and scars, lurking in the shadows of the new boutiques and tasting bars. We do well to take heed of Santayana’s warning, and acknowledge these ghosts.

In a couple of upcoming blog posts, I’ll write a bit about Downtown Belmont and The Corner.

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Remembering Charlottesville’s Downtown Belmont

The Corner -- The University’s Downtown

Remembering Charlottesville’s Downtowns – East Main Street

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