Feats of clay and clay feet

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Feats of clay and clay feet				April 14, 2012

I’m not very big on nostalgia, but I have to tell you that I’m going to miss the old ramshackle collection of dingy buildings that were once the Williamsburg Pottery.

Gone is the weed-infested parking lot in the front that used to sit empty. Gone are the hastily constructed rusty tin buildings that promised outlet prices on everything from tools to cigarettes, and gone are the dirt-floored buildings across the tracks that offered all kinds of bargains, from oriental rugs to picture frames, to those willing to search them out. But perhaps worst of all is the demise of Skid Row.

Gone, too, is the scruffy restaurant with its pinball machines and the joy of hunting for a checkout counter where they would wrap your purchases in newspaper.

Dingy and unkempt as it was, the place had a certain aura, though I use the word loosely, that captivated millions since the days that Jimmy Maloney first set up shop with his pottery at the edge of the old two-lane road that now bears his name.

In its place, we now have a fancy new parking lot, behind which sits a gaudy conglomeration of what look like papier-mache facades that are supposedly reminiscent of a European village. Having traveled through many a European village, I’m here to tell you that none of them looked like this.

While Kim Maloney and other dignitaries who hosted the grand reopening a week ago Thursday assured us that Jimmy would be delighted with it all, I’m not so sure. It will be a long time before the new “village” attains the irrepressible personality of the old complex.

Gone, too, is the single traffic light at the Pottery that rarely turned red for those driving on Route 60. In its place are two light stanchions with multiple turn signals that always seem to be red. Now, as cars going east back up at them, there is now a logjam of traffic heading for the horrid light complex at the Outlet Mall. Waits of 15 minutes to inch your way from the Pottery to the Mall are now more fact that fiction. And pity those in the left lane who are jammed up behind cars waiting to beat the short signal that allows a left turn onto Lightfoot Road from Route 60.

Once again VDOT seems to have shortsightedly and without studying traffic patterns created a nightmare for drivers. The only answer is synchronized lights, but that seems to be beyond VDOT’s ability, as we’ve seen elsewhere around town.

But that might not be the only problem.

Thanks to a Gazette scoop by Cortney Langley, we now know that a major snafu has arisen in the Pottery’s march to a second birth. Whether it was a sleight-of-hand maneuver on the part of the Pottery or another example of county ineptitude, underground utility cables were laid in what was supposed to be an untouchable landscape buffer.

What is troubling is that, while the county knew that construction and landscaping were proceeding apace for months on the Pottery site, there apparently was little oversight on the county’s part. And it wasn’t until two days before the Pottery was to reopen that the county informed construction managers at the site that the utilities had been improperly placed.

The upshot is that the county has now informed the Pottery that it might have to close it down until the utility cables are properly located. Apparently a leeway of six months has been granted.

Given the fact that the reconstructed Pottery is now a fait accompli and that the county allowed it proceed to the point of being just that, it’s hard to imagine that some accommodation can’t be worked out. Whatever happens, some discussion of the need for more hands-on county oversight relative to works in progress is definitely called for.

At this point, one has to wonder if Jimmy Maloney didn’t have the right idea when he located the major buildings of the old Williamsburg Pottery across the railroad tracks.