"When Joan Fenton appeared before City Council last week wearing a black pullover sweater and black pants, with her glasses and shock of dark hair, she looked more like an elementary school teacher rushing in after a yoga class than Charlottesville’s official arbiter of taste.

That is her role, however, as chair of the City’s Board of Architectural Review. Fenton also owns two Mall businesses, April’s Corner and Quilts Unlimited. On Monday, November 17, she appeared before Council arguing that the City should regulate some of her direct competitors, the Mall vendors and the merchants at York Place.

“The Mall is starting to look like a flea market,” Fenton complained to Council. “If the vendors look better, we all do better.”

Fenton was there to urge Council to adopt a list of guidelines, crafted mostly by BAR members, which would impose new regulations on Mall vendors. Many of the rules are picayune––black skirts (not dark green) around tables, umbrellas no higher than 8' with a maximum of one dark color. The proposals that really bothered vendors, several of whom turned out for the Council meeting, however, were the prohibition of racks for hanging clothes, the $400 license fee (up from $125) and a rental fee of $2 for each square foot of red bricks they occupy.

The City says the fees would generate about $20,000 annually to cover the cost of administrating and enforcing the new rules.

James Muhammad, a 10-year vending veteran known as Cupcake, said that except for the fee hikes and the prohibition of clothes racks, the new rules aren’t that different from the current ordinance, which the City admits isn’t effectively enforced. Council will revisit the vendor question at an upcoming meeting.

“I don’t think all the other vendors should pay the penalty for that,” Muhammad said. “It would be a hardship for a lot of vendors to pay that kind of money.

“I don’t understand the problem with clothes racks,” Muhammad continued. “I don’t see how you can sell clothes without one.” He reminded Council that in the early 1990s he and other vendors pioneered Downtown at a time when the desolate Mall looked like a failed experiment.

Now the Mall mostly rocks, although as some businesses flourish others, like Sandy Ruseau’s gallery of watercolors in York Place, are, in Ruseau’s words, “just fighting to survive.”

In September, York Place owner Chuck Lewis wanted to put new signs on his building. According to Neighborhood Planner Mary Joy Scala, City development director Jim Tolbert said the signs, which protruded from the York Place façade, were probably O.K., and so the signs went up. Additionally, Scala referred the York Place signs to the nine-member BAR, which on September 16 unanimously deemed them inappropriate. According to the minutes of that meeting, Fenton said the signs were “loud and noisy with too much coloran obstacleand a precedent she did not want to start.” Fenton’s own Quilts Unlimited sign, next door to York Place, is a blue rectangle with red graphics and white letters; at April’s Corner, the sign comprises bronze-colored wooden letters. Both signs lie flat against their building fronts.

After the BAR ruling, the York Place signs came down, and on October 21 the BAR approved a plan that included signs that would sit flat against the façade. The flat signs went up, but the tenants and Lewis appealed to City Council.

On November 17, Lewis and his tenants swayed Council by presenting evidence that their business had spiked with the protruding signs in place, and showed photos of existing protruding signs on the Mall. Council seemed especially influenced by Lewis, who said, “If I had to do York Place again, I wouldn’t do it. It’s hard to get people in the building.”

After Council voted unanimously to overturn the BAR, Lewis declared, “This is so cool. We were outvoted, but we rallied.”

The current economic climate, say the shopkeepers, makes for increased competition. With businesses fighting harder to survive, Downtown business owner Fenton seems faced with a conflict of interest.

When pressed on the question by a reporter, Fenton first exclaimed, “I think Jim Tolbert had a bigger conflict of interest than me. He lives in York Place.”

Later, Fenton said she “could see how someone might think that. I’ve tried very hard to be fair. I have probably bent over backwards not to do anything that benefits me.”

Then, Fenton admitted, she plans to take advantage of Council’s ruling by installing protruding signs, just like those she opposed on York Place, on her Quilts Unlimited store. Within days of the Council meeting, a new freestanding sign appeared outside the store—a blue wooden square lettered in white and resting on an ornate black tripod." (John Borgmeyer, C-Ville, November 25, 2003)