Charlottesville Fashion Square, a grand debut
On paper, Charlottesville Fashion Square was a simple idea: give a college town and nearby counties the one thing they did not have, an indoor mall.
In the late 1970s, this plan came down from New York with Leonard L. Farber, a developer already known for building shopping centers in Florida and other places.
His company, one of the first in the new business of building malls, chose a spot along U.S. Route 29, about a mile north of Charlottesville and a short drive from the University of Virginia, Monticello, and the Blue Ridge…