Hallowed Grounds

The Rotunda credit: photograph by Rob Howard

While wandering the historic downtown one day just after I’d moved to Charlottesville fifteen years ago, I was brought up short: Before me was a man in eighteenth-century knee breeches and waistcoat, a red-haired ringer for the great man himself, “Mr. Jefferson.” The impostor was Jefferson’s direct descendant and he dressed up like his distinguished forebear quite regularly. He was so well known that no one else on the street paid him any particular notice. That was my first hint that Charlottesville prides itself, quite rightly, both on its local eccentrics and on all things Jeffersonian, including its splendid architecture.

In honor of Jefferson any proper architectural tour begins at the Rotunda, his white-domed homage to the Pantheon in Rome, which presides over the University of Virginia and serves as a reference point for every visitor. The original buildings and grounds of the university, conceived by Jefferson, opened in 1825 and now rank with the Taj Mahal and other marvels as a World Heritage Site. A fire in 1895 reduced the Rotunda to a shell, but Stanford White, superstar architect of the Gilded Age, reinterpreted Jefferson’s classical monument in grandiose Beaux-Arts style. This bit of architectural hubris was painstakingly undone in the 1970s when the building was restored to its Jeffersonian splendor. Wander through the Rotunda and its suite of handsome oval rooms. Ascend to the Dome Room, site of the original library, with its oculus atop the curved ceiling, and peer out the floor-to-ceiling windows to witness the majesty of Jefferson’s idyllic “academical village.”

Students and faculty still reside and study here in Jefferson-designed housing, a living architectural museum facing out onto a long rectangular greensward known as the Lawn. (FYI: At UVA, never use the word campus lest you be mistaken for a Yankee.) These coveted student rooms have no bathrooms—thus the undergrads walking outside in bathrobes. There are other advantages, however: status and coziness, and working fireplaces.

Behind the faculty residences known as pavilions are gorgeous gardens enclosed by serpentine walls—curving single-layered brick walls that had both an aesthetic and a practical appeal for Jefferson: They required fewer bricks and created small oval pockets, perfect microclimates for plants. The Garden Club of Virginia restored and maintains the Pavilion Gardens, each one unique but reflective of Jefferson’s design schemes and plantings at Monticello.

Additional rows of original student housing flank the outer edges of the gardens, paralleling the Lawn rooms. Behind Plexiglas at Room 13 on the West Range, Disneyland meets UVA: Edgar Allan Poe, one of the decidedly odder students ever to matriculate, has his own re-created room complete with quill pen and stuffed raven. Press a button and a disembodied voice describes Poe’s time there in 1826: He lasted less than a year on “Rowdy Row,” until his gambling debts did him in.

Beyond T.J.
At the far end of the Lawn is the White-designed Cabell Hall. Contrary to Jefferson’s original conception, the building impedes a view of the beautiful mountains in the distance, but it also contains a pitch-perfect, lovely concert hall. With luck, you can hear students rehearsing, and perhaps even catch local artist Lincoln Perry (husband of celebrated writer Ann Beattie) at work in the lobby finishing the last panels of his large-scale mural depicting a young woman’s experience attending the university. (Of course, Jefferson would never have imagined that either.)

For murals of an entirely more macho sort, go through the colonnaded walkway next door onto McCormick Road to Clark Hall, the original home of the then-all-male law school. The main hall features full frontal male nudity. A mural entitled “The Law” portrays comely young men in ancient Greece arguing a legal case stark naked.

At the intersection of McCormick and Alderman roads is a double cemetery, one section of which holds the remains of nearly eleven hundred Confederate soldiers. An adjoining graveyard in a quiet grove under spreading Southern magnolias and cedars shelters university faculty and their families, including a law professor who tried to stop a student riot on the Lawn in 1840. He was shot and killed.

Stars and Frats
Those with stamina should continue to walk up McCormick as it winds up a steep hill; be sure to look down to your left for a great view of the brick-and-columned football temple that fills on fall weekends with sixty-thousand-plus fans. At the hill’s highest point is the Leander J. McCormick Observatory, which is open for nighttime star viewing. The Victorian interior looks like some mad scientist’s lab from a 1930s horror flick.

For the final leg of the tour, retrace your steps to the front of the Rotunda, cross University Avenue, and stroll along Rugby Road. On an elevated perch to your left is Carr’s Hill, the university president’s imposing official residence, which serves as a final nod to Stanford White: Before the architect could finish the house’s design, he was gunned down at Madison Square Garden by the enraged husband of a former lover.

Across the street is fraternity row, with its lineup of august mansions on a hillside and, in front of it, a playing field known affectionately as Mad Bowl (or Mud Bowl in days past), site of fabled parties and mayhem. Burning couches and middle-of-the-night football games are still fondly recalled by misty-eyed alums. Perhaps not quite what Mr. Jefferson had in mind.