A Visit to the Blue Ridge Sanitarium

There are many cool places on Monticello Road but this place might be the best. It's mothballed for now, until some truly compelling future use comes about.
In the days before Big Pharma, prescriptions for serious illness routinely called for maximum fresh air dosed out in rural settings. Instead of being connected to beeping machines that make it difficult to sleep with oxygen piped through hoses, patients in country sanitaria rested on screen porches surrounded by birdsong and pastoral views. The current state of the medical arts is moving in that direction but an authentic historical example of the old kind of facility still exists, in a mothballed state, right on the edge of Charlottesville.

The Blue Ridge Hospital occupies a large green triangle between Monticello, Piedmont Virginia Community College and the city’s southern border. The facility’s still-operable back gate opens to a beautiful valley portion of Monticello Road’s historic right of way and as we think about reopening that ghost road for recreation and heritage, the old sanitarium will be an inevitable ponder.

Garrett Street Mural is a Step Forward

The site chosen by the Tom Tom Founders Festival (the corner of Garrett and 6th Street in Charlottesville) for its City as Canvas mural project was already slated for a capstone expression in the Bridge PAI’s Play the City program. My initial reaction was to ask myself, “Doesn’t anyone talk to each other around here?” As I dug deeper and spent time with artist Mickael Broth and his project, I came to the conclusion that it really doesn’t matter. We should just celebrate the mural, which is pretty cool and it's real.

The site was not just a blank wall—it’s at the heart of a major urban renewal project that effectively erased a neighborhood and replaced it with a new housing project, which is in its turn now the subject of intense speculation. Bitterness about the erasure of history cohabits the zone with nervous speculation about the future, along the historic 6th Street right-of-way and steps from multiple public housing complexes with many children. The location offered a tremendous opportunity for the community to work through some of its issues through the arts and make a strong statement with its own ideas about its specific dreams and desires. That’s an ambitious goal.

Meanwhile, the Tom Tom organizers saw an opportunity to make a mark of their own. They reached a private deal with the landowner (no public bodies needed to be consulted in this case) and they hired an artist from Richmond, essentially freezing out community discussion. The result would undoubtedly be livelier than the status quo, but perhaps a missed opportunity to have something more layered, in line with advanced contemporary thinking on public art.