When the weather warms, the downtown mall is a magnet for street performers, tourists and locals in search of food, drink and entertainment, but in the beginning this concept was controversial.
"A couple of the merchants were adamant that this was going to destroy downtown. They couldn’t imagine not having a place to parallel park," says UVA professor of architecture Beth Meyer.
When she came here as an undergrad the mall was under discussion.
"Like many small towns, the downtown suffered from the competition of suburban shopping centers that had huge parking lots," she explains.
So a newly elected, progressive city council brought-in a planner from the Bay Area – Larry Halprin – who had overseen many exciting projects like Ghiradelli Square in San Francisco and the Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis.
"He was one of the most creative, audacious landscape architects I’ve ever met. He had a real social sense of what design could be," Meyer recalls.
In Charlottesville, he proposed closing Main Street to cars, trucks and buses, paving eight blocks with bricks, installing fountains, special lighting, a hundred chairs and trees that would grow to be 60 feet tall.
"A street like that, in the South, without shade would be uninhabitable. The shade also changes the airflow, so you get more air flow and breeze. I think any of us sitting there in the summer feel that," Meyer says.
It took a while for the place to catch on, and in the 80’s some merchants insisted the chairs be removed, because too many people were just hanging out. At the same time, a growing number of businesses demanded private space for outdoor seating.
"There was a limit on the number of cafes for maybe the first decade, and then that opened up, and increasingly every single spot under the trees has become a café space."
That’s frustrating for people who want to relax on the mall without having to buy something, and there are on-going debates about some of those who occupy this public space.
"You can talk about the inclusion in racial terms, but it’s also a class issue," Meyer says. "It has to do with meanness towards those who are unhoused and a lack of consideration for what it means to be a teenager and want a place just to hang out."
In the years to come, planners will have to figure out how to replace the trees which are old now and – in some cases -- dying, but Professor Beth Meyer notes Charlottesville’s downtown mall is one of the few that have survived the test of time. Many others have reopened to traffic, but this one is likely to last – especially since, this year, it was designated a National Historic Landmark.
