Alliance forms to help protect area’s treasures

A new group has formed to help safeguard some of the Charlottesville area’s most treasured buildings and landscapes.
During its annual meeting Sunday at Monticello’s Jefferson Library, the Charlottesville-based Preservation Piedmont announced the creation of the Piedmont Area Preservation Alliance, designed to help sustain cultural and ecological resources in the community.

Mary Joy Scala, the city’s preservation and design planner, said the idea for the alliance — which consists of 11 entities, including the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, the University of Virginia and the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society — came about several years ago. At that time, several people from the area gathered at Monticello to discuss its new visitors center, she said, and afterward realized that it would be helpful to have an umbrella group that could encourage discussion about local historic preservation and conservation efforts.

“It got started right here,” Scala said.
Although not every group in the alliance is an advocacy organization, Scala said the group is crafting priorities to determine where efforts should be directed.
“Trying to prevent demolition of resources is a big deal,” she said.
Leslie Greene Bowman, who on Nov. 1 became Monticello’s new president, said historic preservation is something that has always been near and dear to her. Formerly the director of Delaware’s Winterthur Museum & Country Estate, she helped obtain a conservation easement for 1,000 acres on the estate to ensure that the land was not vulnerable to cash flow.

“I love preservation,” Bowman said at Sunday’s event. “I’m the new kid on the block and at the back of the line, but I’m thrilled to be here.”
Eryn Brennan, president of Preservation Piedmont and a member of the city’s Board of Architectural Review, said the alliance would focus on neighborhood preservation among several other things. She cited the city’s Fifeville neighborhood in particular for being at risk because of development pressures. She said in the past year, 15 “historic” homes have been torn down for that reason.
“That’s a substantial loss,” she said.
The new alliance’s first charge will be to hold Preservation Week in April, in hopes of encouraging public discussion about local preservation, sustainability and promoting the area’s historic resources. The event will be the first of its kind for Charlottesville, despite the large number of historians and preservationists living in the area.
Before, “There was no central organization to pull everything together,” Brennan said.

The announcement of the group’s creation came in tandem with the presentation of Piedmont Preservation’s first Martha Gleason Award — given to North Downtown residents after efforts made this year to scale down the size of an incoming house did more than catch the attention of those at City Hall. The award is designed to recognize local community members who have made sizable contributions toward preserving the area’s historic resources.
“We didn’t think about what we were doing when we were doing it,” said Gayle Foster, one of the award’s recipients. Foster and many of her neighbors were outspoken opponents over an originally 8,500-square-foot house being built on Second Street Northeast, saying its size would dwarf the existing homes that average about 2,000 square feet.

Referring to Gleason, whom the award is named after, award recipient Fred Schneider said, “If she were alive she would be calling us about this house.”
Though the house was eventually approved by the City Council, its size shrunk by roughly 2,000 square feet after the neighbors’ protests.
“It was an act of preservation for their entire neighborhood,” Brennan said.