Today, I begin an epic and not just any epic.
The Greeks had their Odysseus; the Romans, Aeneid, the Saxons, Beowulf. While Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall Renovation Epic has yet to find its protagonist and villain and will not be written in poetry, it will nonetheless be a long arduous journey, full of political nonsense, citizens with nothing better to do than complain and the occasional money-grubbing consulting group. If we are lucky, maybe we can have a citizen task force which will be tasked with important things, like hiring a consulting group to consult on the task of hiring consultants for bricks. I digress…
In the beginnings of Charlottesville’s deathly hot summer, human character is tested. The heat drives many men and women mad. So mad in fact that war was on the horizon. This was not just any war. Charlottesville had faced the worst of it three generations prior when the country had fought itself. This was the war of the bricks, the beginning of the end.
At the heart of Charlottesville was a pedestrian mall, filled with the imfamous mallstars and international businessmen. It all began the day the Queen of Farmington visited the mall early on a Saturday morning. Walking in heels, she suddenly tripped and fell. She vowed to replace every brick on the mall because she could not walk in heels.
Soon, she found that this renovation wouldn’t be cheap. Despite her husband’s objection to the $7.5 million renovation, she wanted it done. She hid his Viagra, threatened to sue for divorce and even told him that she would tell the local papers about his mistress. But, alas, her husband’s trust fund was hit hard because of the economy. She decided to get the local government to do her bidding.
One year later, after many countless hours of debate, there emerged two warring factions.
The Short Fat Bricks vs The Tall Skinny Bricks
The Tall Skinny Bricks fit a profile of the old guard. They were racist, 4×12 and had old money. The Short Fat Bricks (5×10) couldn’t afford ACAC and threatened to dredge the Tall Skinny Bricks if they didn’t accept their inevitable demise. The downtown mall ghosts could not decide which brick group to support. It was Chaos.
Charlottesville planned a meeting at the old chambers to reveal the plan. The decision would be made by the high elders on June 30th, 2008. But not just any decision.
The elders stuffed their faces with expensive food and wine. They wanted to maintain their power, so they convinced the people to focus on a vote… A VOTE FOR THE TIMELINE FOR COMPLETION. None saw the truth, except..Scowly. He had a plan.
(to be Continued)
Popularity: 43% [?]
Tagged as: bricks, debate, Downtown Mall, growth, Questions, rennovation
you know the little line of water that runs from the miller’s patio to the miller’s doorstep? the miller’s river? well it’s fucking disgusting, and one day i got some of the goo in my flap-flaps. this has nothing to do with bricks at all, but seriously, miller’s, fix your river.
goo in my flap-flaps
Photo. Looking good, parlington.
I like to go fishing on the Miller River . . . for bass . . . ale.
My comment got eaten? It was hilarious, too. Damn.
You boys don’t even know. Them damn bricks are heel-eaters. Also, please fix the patio in front of Sneak Reviews/Vivace. Every time I go to return a movie, I almost die.
a landscape architect told me this weekend the type of brick matters a whole lot less than the way they are laid down. Apparently, the current way is totally wrong (something about sub material…?) and that is what has lead to all the shifting.
I wish I could be more specific but I was way drunk.
5– it’s so disorienting to be walking around just fine and then suddenly find that one of your feet is anchored to the ground because it’s found a gap exactly the size of your heel. I dare anyone who is against renovating the mall to walk end-to-end in any pair of heels. (and yeah, that one board on the Sneak Reviews stairs that bows up is a KILLER)
6– yeah, it’s a matter of whether there’s a concrete fill underneath or sand, I believe. I think UNCUS has a big article on it this week.
It’s true, if you’re going to do heels downtown, your best bet are wedges. Anything else will get ripped apart like Janet’s bra at a super bowl half time show.
The current underlay mortar is the main issue. Secondary to that is the issues of drains etc. The DVD of the pipes show some nasty stuff built over the years. Sanding the joints ala mall extension gives more flexibility in repair and upkeep. Additionally, their is no difference I could note in the alternative cement bricks other than it being much cheaper to buy and simpler to use and faster to complete.
WRT proved to have some decent ideas for a city with a budget of…Philly, but the work of MMM has been much more realistic and while over 20 businesses went kaput in the first renovations, they seem sensitive to the climate currently and I suspect no one will get toasted.
To hell with the bricks!
Rip ‘em up and put back the asphalt!
‘Nuff said.
Why don’t we just go with the dirt ground and raised planks.. old school style!
Corruption that’s your answer. They may have been caught just in time, but don’t count on it.
So, as it
seems, the issue is whether to mortar the bricks (which is more expensive, time consuming, and doesn’t last as long) or to use sand matching the renovation on 3rd street.
Why are they still discussing this?
The mortar is what causes all the problems on the mall now. Girls’ heels wouldn’t get caught between the bricks if they hadn’t been mortared. There wouldn’t be any gaps.
I could think of a couple better uses for 7.5million to spruce up downtown. How about renovating and improving the community center across from the 7day junior? How about levelling the 7day junior? How about an economic stimulus to encourage small businesses on the downtown mall? Fucking bricks….
Um, like, I was totally teetering when I went to get my grande skim latte with shot a raz, vanilla, strawberry from mudhouse today. Like, so not cool. It’s like totally annoying.
Brix need fix. But that flak about standard sizes was unmasked by intrepid press hax. Somebody had a contractor lined up and a neat spiel, a la dam pipe.
Grit is the shit, mortar crax.
17: I’m not sure how I feel about colfer’s new poetry-slam style of commenting, but I’m going to go ahead and tentatively endorse it.
@18 lawls
That’s an amazing post title, but even those that can walk superbly, sublimely, spectacularly well in heels are going to have experiences like comments 8, 7 and 5. They should just hire Moe the brick layer, and he Larry an Curly can just go down the mall gradually replacing it for a few hundred thousand. Then with that money that was saved, we could brick over all the sidestreets and Belmont too.
and how much did the city spend on doing Court Square area? …. I think it was 3.5 for one square block. Just saying.
But now it’s just faaaaaabulous. Thanks ever so much, City.
@17: more, please.
To think that there is already talk of ripping up something that is merely (what?) 30 years old just bites my arse. We’re such a throw it away, get something new society. I appreciate what I’ve seen, since arriving here a few years ago, of Cville’s attempt to not do anything rash and to TRY to keep history flowing -but ripping up the bricks to save a few high heels seems a bit extreme. Just think what Europe would look like if they’d done the same to those century old winding streets and squares everyone clambers to see. I can’t imagine the Hauptstrasse in Heidelberg nice and evenly bricked or horror of horrors - PAVED!!! Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!
Excellent point cafe75001…. the 60 year old crack smoking transvestite prostitutes that roam the
Reeperbahn in 5″ stilettoes just put on their big girl panties and get on with it. You won’t see Fifi La Bouche in a pair of Birkenstock’s, just in case she turns her ankle on the way back from giving a quick hand job in a cobbled alley.
This isn’t just the story of a couple of high heels being broken, or wasteful Americans wanting something new. It’s a matter of a job obviously botched from the beginning– if you walk across the mall, you’ll notice bricks that shift under your feet, or that you can even pull out of the ground without so much as a tug. That doesn’t happen on the streets of older European cities, because it was well done in the first place (and compacted by centuries of use). I promise you, if there were a cobbled street so dislodged & broken in Germany, you better believe they’d do something to fix it.
Yep, they’d FIX it - not change it. Get it? That’s the difference between us (U.S) and them. And how in the heck are we supposed to have the opportunity to “compact” it “by centuries of use” if we rip things up after 30 years? I lived in Europe for over 10 years - I’m well aware of the time, effort and money (Hello! That kind of upkeep isn’t cheap) that European nations put into conserving what they have… are we so naive to think that it’s “just like that” in Europe? That somehow they are just lucky to have maintained such beautiful architecture??? I lived in an attic appartment in Germany that was built in 1650 - no one tore it down because a few beams or whatever happen to start going bad. THEY FIXED IT because they respected the integrity of the building and their town. Maybe that’s what it all comes down to…….respect. Where’s ours?
@17 - Colfer, you’re right on the money about “Grit is the shit, mortar crax”
Watching the workers repair the cobblestone in Europe always fascinated me - filling in all the cracks with the sand, sweeping it away… it was always amazing how wonderful it looked when they were done; like someone who’s had a bit of Botox (just a bit). You can tell something is different, but aren’t really sure what. They’re still the same, yet different….
Having respect for something that was poorly built in the seventies just doesn’t seem feasible. I understand the desire to fix historically valuable architecture/city structure, but if there is anything historic about the downtown mall, that brick is not it.
Plus, no one is going to go through the mall and grout those broken bricks back together. “Fixing” the mall, in this case, is replacing the brick, and possibly changing the underfill to something that will last longer– that would be respecting the integrity of downtown. If we gave the downtown mall centuries of use, it’d turn into pea gravel.
27: So you’d like them to use the existing bricks but re-set them? I’m missing your point.
it’d turn into pea gravel.
Once I had a kidney stone. I, too, peed gravel.
also, there’s a BIG difference between bricks and cobbles.
I do kind of have to giggle about the ugliness of 70’s architecture (not my favorite by far), but think about this - how many of those quaint buildings that we just loooooooove about Europe were ever really thought to be architecturally significant when they were originally built or even 30 years thereafter? Well, they weren’t. They were built, maintained and preserved for centuries mostly out of economical necessity. Europeans lived and continue to live in city CENTERS - not surburbia. They were required to do as best as they could with what they had (and have). There is not a lot of room in Europe for the population, they simply can’t sprawl. They’ve had to adapt, amend, renew, reuse…two eco principles invoked before one even gets to the recycle part. So, I must politely agree to disagree with you regarding redoing the mall. And I wonder what the mall would look like as “pea gravel” - aren’t the paths in the Tuileries and Versailles “paved” with such material???
Also, the aforementioned Hauptstraße in Heidelberg is from the seventies as well. Sorry to burst your bubble cafe75001. As a street it’s much older, but not unlike the downtown mall it’d been turned into a pedestrian zone only 30 years ago. It was precisely in the seventies that many German (and other European) cities went wild with taring down older buildings in a craze of uncompromised modernization.
@30 - Stanley, I hear that is not possible - correct?… and yes, 32, there is a big difference between cobblestones and bricks, but I stick with my argument from 33 and ask this question,
“What would we do if we simply had no option but to use what we have and fix it???”
No, really. I’d love to know. What if that was our only option (as was for European towns for years)? What if there was NO money to do anything else? No other options? How would/could it be fixed?
I hear that is not possible - correct?…
I believe this is accurate. Since they’re mortared in place, they can’t be saved, at least not inexpensively. Which is why I’m not sure what your prescription is. New bricks are the only option. But this time, they’ll do it right.
Oh boy, those poor fellas in Europe all poor and everything having to restore historic downtowns because apparently that’s cheaper than taring down and building in pre-fabricated 70ies fashion. (which I like by the way!)
Psst, Byard—and I say this only because it’s liberty day—here in Amuricka, we spell it “tearing”. Otherwise, I’m laughing at your sarcasm. Très funny.
cafe—
This is not a matter of architectural significance (and any discussion of aesthetics concerning the size of the bricks only comes up because the necessity of a re-do has already been established). It would be wonderful to be able to adopt a policy of reuse– bully for those who can– but from a structural standpoint, there’s nothing to reuse for long-term stability. It would be great to re-grout those bricks and go on our way (and I do wish that could be the case, because it would mean this project wouldn’t disrupt our lives for the years that it will), but in that case the City will be having this discussion again in ten years’ time. Bricks are, in comparison with solid stone cobbles, a poor building material, and the re-use of broken and eroded bricks is just not feasible.
35: sure, there are plenty of creative arguments that could be made. I think the elephant in the room is City Council and the glut of money in Charlottesville, and therefore we don’t have to (and really can’t) approach the matter from that perspective. Regardless of how one feels about it, it’s going to be approached from a certain angle (of having the money to do so)– lucky for us, because it means that it (hopefully) won’t have to be redone in a decade.
and to clarify, I don’t mean that since we have the money, we ought not to think of alternative solutions. I mean that since we have the money, it’s just not going to go down any other way in City Council. That’s just how it is. We can argue ourselves hoarse about romantic ideals, but you know as well as I do it doesn’t make a damned bit of difference.
@41 - you’re totally right, Chartreuse. I AM a hopeless architecture romantic. But I am a pragmatic and I think you’re totally right. It has to be fixed so that we’re not having this conversation again in 10 years.
As Stanley said…
“But this time, they’ll do it right.” Probably so - Live and learn as long as you learn. Maybe the current disrepair and lack of a way to “fix’ will keep the same mistake from happening again. Just too bad it can’t be done with the same size brick and pattern (which I really like).
@37 - Never said it was “cheaper” - to the contrary, very expensive - economy of space, not money.
And so, a toast - to the new downtown mall and all the dust we will be inhaling with our coffees and wine during the renovations!!
@42: prost!
Cheers to that!
@ 38 Geez, you should have told be when I misspelled it the first time. Also I always though “tearing” had to do with tears…you know like “being moved to tears.” I can’t even begin to think about what possibilities this opens up in the pun department….
Can we get a brick expert on here?
46: Someone with an AT&T phone?
I’M HERE……. oh crap sorry Thor. I misread. My bad.
SNARK AWARD!
now you’re just fucking with us.
we have another feature coming.. everyone is on vacay.
Vacay? Obvi! Whatevs. Deets? On the DL? No big.
This is even older than the old news.
[…] word on who gets to keep the old bricks, but I’m sure the brick replacement will be a nightmare and end a year later than expected. First problem? It’s hard to find who makes these […]