Follow the Red Brick road

Arts and culture district holds promise of growth in Staunton

Story by Chris Graham
newdominion@ntelos.net

It’s not the yellow brick road, but Staunton’s new Red Brick District could put the Queen City on a path toward a kind of economic Oz.

“Tourism is a lifesaver in this economy in a city like Staunton right now. A lot of other industries are hurting, but tourism is the one industry here that’s been on the upswing,” said Erik Curren, the director of marketing at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, and the driving force behind the new Red Brick District, a partnership of arts and culture organizations and City Hall that will promote the arts and promote economic development at the same time.

The effort grew out of an attempt to adapt a similar undertaking up the Valley Pike in Harrisonburg to fit Staunton, and it has fit like a glove given the city’s stock of arts and cultural offerings, from Shakespeare to the run of galleries and music venues downtown.

The name Red Brick District is itself distinctly Staunton. “We’ve got the red bricks in the sidewalks that they’ve been laying down in the historic district, and of course we’ve got the red bricks in the Victorian buildings, and that’s something that Staunton is known for. We thought the name Red Brick District would encompass both those things, both capture what’s good about Staunton and suggest that this is the kind of place where you can get that arts and culture atmosphere,” Curren said.

The initial focus of work for District organizers has been on developing and distributing a marketing brochure highlighting the District’s offerings. The brochure is an example of how the District has been from the get-go a ground-up initiative, with the member organizations footing the bill for the development and printing of the brochure, and planning ahead to bear the costs of additional marketing early next year.

“We’d talked about having more organization, an executive director, all of that. I said, You know, we don’t need all that,” said Beth Hodge, the executive director of the Staunton Augusta Art Center, and an early participant in the informal arts and culture council that gave birth to the Red Brick District.

“The reason why I feel like we don’t need that is, even if we had the money, look around this table. These are people who are leaders in this community. They’re volunteering their time. We can get a great deal accomplished without having to have a structure to work under. We never felt like we needed the organization. We just went right on,” Hodge said. Read more

‘A true community’

Once a fixer-upper, Staunton’s Newtown now shining light in Queen City

Story by Chris Graham

People thought Michael Organ was crazy. That old home in Newtown was jaw-dropping beautiful, sure, but who in their right mind would stay at a bed-and-breakfast where you were as likely to get your hubcaps stolen or run into a prostitute or drug dealer as you were to enjoy the sunrise over Betsy Bell and Mary Gray?

“Gutsy” is the word Organ uses to describe his idea of the popular view of his move in 1982 to develop what has become the Belle Grae Inn, which encompasses the bed-and-breakfast, apartments designed for longer-stay corporate guests and an 80-seat restaurant.

There were people buying and rehabbing properties in Staunton’s Newtown neighborhood before Organ, but his move at the Belle Grae Inn is seen as a turning point in the historic neighborhood’s rebirth. More than 200 homes and business storefronts have been renovated in Newtown since 1982, and a recent tour of the neighborhood led by Newtown Neighborhood Association president Craig Peterson reveals that things are really just getting started to that end.

“There’s still a lot of potential here,” said Peterson, who bought his 703 West Beverley home in 2001 and set to renovating the structure that dates to 1792 immediately.

It ended up being a project several years in the making. “The half over here was livable. This one was not. We just thought, Well, we’ll fix it up and move in in 90 days. A year and a half later, we moved in,” Peterson said.

“It’s as finished as an old house is ever going to be,” Peterson said. “The older it gets, the more work it’s going to need. And it probably will need work forever. But what we’re doing now is the fun stuff.”

Part of the fun stuff is being a part of a neighborhood that has an active neighborhood association. You don’t get that as much - or at all - in subdivisions.

“It’s a neighborhood in transition, and in our experience neighborhoods in transition have a lot of opportunity for people to either build their personal life there, renovate a home, renovate an apartment or something, or conversely start a business that then becomes an anchor in the neighborhood. We sort of took both routes,” said Brian Wiedemann, who opened the George Bowers Grocery just down West Beverley Street from the Petersons last November and is engaged in an ongoing Newtown home renovation at the same time. Read more

Downtown living: Urban Exchange sets a new course for Downtown Harrisonburg

Story by Chris Graham 

Harrisonburg leaders have a vision for how to make their downtown thrive. Barry Kelley is helping bring that vision into a reality.

“I know downtown pretty well. And I thought this was the perfect area for the kind of project that we were thinking about doing,” said Kelley, who with fellow property developer Andrew Forward has turned a Downtown Harrisonburg parcel that was most recently a used-car lot into a four-story, mixed-use architectural wonder called the Urban Exchange. Read more

Inside the new RMH: No stone left unturned in construction, layout of new hospital

Story by Chris Graham

It’s not even a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Dennis Coffman is getting to do something that only a relative few people have the chance to do in their lifetimes.

“What we’re doing here is setting the course for the delivering of medical services at RMH for the next 100 years,” said Coffman, the point man on the $300 million Rockingham Memorial Hospital project, which is on pace for a move of patients from the Downtown Harrisonburg location that has been the home to RMH since 1912 to the new site on Port Republic Road just outside the Harrisonburg city limits in June 2010.

Coffman, the director of facilities planning and development at RMH, is the kind of guy who as the cliche goes leaves no stone unturned. The overriding motivation for Coffman is to ensure as much as he can that the new hospital makes the best use of the new location that is possible. Read more

Hard days at the Mall: Can Staunton Mall endure another near-death experience?

Story by Chris Graham

You want to say the Staunton Mall is dying, and it’s not like you’re seeing something that isn’t there. Steve & Barry’s was a coup for the Staunton Mall when it set up shop there a few years ago, so it has to be considered a huge loss now that it closed up its Mall location as part of its bankruptcy. And then there’s the space across from the old Steve & Barry’s space. Books-A-Million has left the building to focus on its new Waynesboro Town Center store.

Read more

Historic recycling: Developer gives old asylum, prison new life as upscale town center

I’m taking an intern from UVa. on a drive around the Valley one summer day a few years back. We decided to stop for lunch at Wright’s Dairy Rite in Staunton. It seemed the touristy thing to do.

“What’s that over there?” he asked, gesturing at the old Western State Hospital complex, then in use as a state correctional facility. “That’s got to be the country club.”

The kid had foresight. Fast forward to 2009, and the old asylum and prison is in year three of a 20-year makeover that is turning what had threatened to be a vacant 80 acres in the heart of the Queen City into a eight- or nine-figure mixed-use, New Urbanist development with 1,000 residential units, a high-end hotel and spa, an array of office buildings and a retail center.  Read more

The rebound: Growth is in the forecast - will you be ready?

It was good news, sorta, kinda, the notation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that the unemployment rate in Virginia didn’t go up yet again in April, and instead remained unchanged from March at 6.8 percent.

Forgive Janelle Davis if she didn’t feel all that celebratory. “With the market taking the toll that it did, it was just dramatic how quickly everything happened,” said Davis, of Stuarts Draft, who lost an early casualty of the downturn, and is now embarking on the next phase of her life as a college student. 

Davis had attended college after high school but dropped out 53 credits short of her degree. After working in a quality-assurance job in a local manufacturing facility, she moved into real estate at the height of the housing bubble, only to fall victim when the bubble burst.  Read more

The sun’ll come out tomorrow: Local attractions holding steady despite doom and gloom, laying groundwork for brighter future

It’s not exactly an ideal time to be opening, say, a new exhibit at the ol’ museum, what with the economy being what it is and all. But you can’t always account for what shape the economy is going to be in when planning has to begin several years out. Read more

Seller beware: It’s a buyer’s market, not a seller’s, and not a builder’s

Story by Chris Graham

Elizabeth Barnes is “wiped out.”

“We priced it right, too,” said Barnes, talking about her 325 Lee Drive, Waynesboro, home, that she put on the market in July 2008 at a list price of $275,000, $40,000 below what she was going to list it at a year earlier when she had flirted with the idea of moving then. Read more

Cash flow: Local bank, credit unions doing well in spite of financial crisis

Story by Chris Graham

I’m reading an article in Time magazine a few weeks back, and there’s a report on how a few new local community banks seem to be doing well in spite of what would seem to be the conventional wisdom on banks and business across the board.

It occurs to me that there’s a new local community bank in the Greater Augusta market, Frontier Community Bank, which opened its first and to date sole branch in Waynesboro on Lew Dewitt Boulevard in February 2008. Read more

Two shades of green: The green economy in the Valley proving profitable for local business

Story by Chris Graham

There’s an easier way to run a restaurant, but Ian Boden wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t doing it the way he’s doing it.

“It’s a lot of work, and logistically it’s a pain in the neck. But it’s completely worth it,” said Boden, a chef and owner of Staunton Grocery, which uses local produce and meats and dairy products as the core of its menu offerings. Trained in New York and New England, Boden plunked down in Downtown Staunton two years ago with the idea of doing something different in the local restaurant business. “I spent my first three months in Staunton meeting farmers,” said Boden, who learned the value of having good relations with local producers in his time in New York, where the local food movement has been a fixture for years. “That’s all I did. I went to their farms and hung out with them, ate dinner with them, and they eventually introduced me to more farmers. It’s an ongoing thing. I got products in today from a new farmer for the first time. It never ends, and hopefully it never will end,” Boden said. Read more

Building green, saving green: Market moving to incorporate energy-efficient, ecofriendly designs

 

Story by Chris Graham

What makes the house at 124 Forever Court, Waynesboro, any different than the house beside it or the one across the street? That question threw Dwayne Caricofe for a loop as he put the 1,500-square-foot ecofriendly-designed home on the market last year.

“You need to get people in, let them see what they can see, and explain it to them,” said Caricofe, a Realtor at Kline and Co. Realty, which got a sale on the house built by EarthCraft Builder member R. Uhler Construction in Staunton, and in relatively short order in today’s tough market, within 90 days of putting a sign out in the front yard.

“If you look at us from the street, you probably don’t have any clue that this house is any different than any other house. Education is so important, and that’s the dilemma we had in marketing this house. We knew the benefits, but we had to figure out a way to get that across in the marketing. You look at this house and the house across the street, why is this home better? Well, you’re going to get a 30 percent savings right off the bat on your utility bills,” Caricofe said.

And who isn’t into saving money in this day and age, right? That’s the selling point for green homes. The catch, assumed, anyway, is that you pay more up front to be able to achieve those savings. It’s that catch that has kept the green building movement in its nascent stages going on 30 years now. Read more

Turning the South River Green

  

Column by Beau Beasley

Like many rivers across the country, the South River, a relatively small waterway that runs though much of Augusta County and through the heart of the city of Waynesboro, has had its ups and downs.

The river has been widened in some places to help prevent flooding, which has strained some of the river’s inhabitants because this widening removed structures that fish and other creatures used as shelter. The river has also been dammed in a few places, and this has caused the wamer to have an unnatural flow, and subsequently raised the temperature of the water, thus further stressing the fish. Perhaps the biggest threat to the river came in the mid-’70s when it was discovered that mercury had entered the river. Like most waterways near developing cities, the South River was used by industry where water was needed for processing and or support in making commercial products. At the worst of times, when a corduroy plant was located near the river, you could actually determine what color pants the factory was making by watching the color of the river change colors. One local even relayed to me a story passed down from his father, of how the river actually caught fire one day.

In the summer of 1999, a new hand was dealt to the South River from the business community, but this one was quite different than times past. A little-known nonprofit group called Waynesboro Downtown Development Inc. had the task of promoting businesses near the city’s center. One day while brainstorming ideas about how to promote the area as a tourist destination, an idea was proposed to create a fly fishing festival. It was logical that people would be willing to travel to Waynesboro for such an event, given the city is easily accessed off of Interstate 64 and the South River provided a perfect venue. Read more

Black and white and red all over

Story by Chris Graham 

You’re reading this for free. It might be your first time reading one of my works; maybe you’ve been reading me for years. Either way, chances are you’ve not paid a single solitary cent for anything with my byline in it.

Whether you’re in the business world or not, you’re probably thinking to yourself, How does this make any sense? And more importantly, how does he pay his bills?

I’m not the only media mogul struggling with this, incidentally. Everybody up to the Old Gray Lady herself is trying to figure out the answer to the question that has the entire media industry flummoxed.

“We have more readers than ever before. So the big newspaper crisis isn’t getting people to read, it’s profiting from it,” said Lee Wolverton, the editor and general manager at The News Virginian, who like the rest of us in the biz is trying to make sense of the diverging trends, namely that the total number of news-media readers is up even as the circulation of print newspapers is down due to sharp increases in online readership, but nonetheless none of us are making much money at it even so.

Read more

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