Memorable Events of the Past

The West Grace Centennial, June 2, 2007

Organized by Dawn and Albert Schick with help from many neighbors, this gala evening event featured fabulous food and drink and the following address:

Centennial Speech
By Harry Kollatz Jr.

I want us to first consider some cardinal questions and bear them in mind while I’m droning on up here. These are: who persisted to bring us here at this time and place; what remains to testify to their successes and testify for their efforts; why did they undertake the struggle and how was it accomplished?

Sometime, around 1950, when the Lee Medical Arts Building was constructed at Allen and Monument standing so decorous there off to my right, a house was taken apart. It had also served at one point as a small hotel. Apparently, some of the mantels were removed and installed at 1800 W. Grace, right over there. This house was built around 1908 for dry goods king Junius Mosby — was designed by architect D. Wiley Anderson, who created about eight Monument Avenue houses, and this one’s twin over on Grove Avenue, in the Museum District.

The story was that Mosby wanted to put some space between his mansion and what was at first the packed, dusty earth of Monument Avenue, then the clopping of horse’s hooves and the clatter of carriages rolling across paving stones. The house today is home to the Virginia Motor Dealers. And not that long ago, a woman of a certain age came into the offices there, stating she was a relative of the family whose building was torn down on Monument, and she wanted her mantels back.

The woman was told in a polite but firm manner that the statute of limitations had run out on her claim to the mantels, and she couldn’t have them. They’re still there.

It’s appropriate that we should be here between the former Shenandoah Apartment building and what was originally the meeting hall for the Jefferson Club, a prominent Jewish men’s fraternal group.

The Shenandoah was designed in 1906 by Carl Ruehurmund. At the time this building was like an exclamation mark for Richmond’s West End. Beyond the Shenandoah, there just wasn’t much else. Yet Ruehrmund was careful to, in a conscious and discerning manner, create a building announcing what was to come next in this part of the city’s aesthetic experience – his house.

In 1907, the banner year here this evening, Ruehrmund designed 2021 W. Grace for his family — it has some of the prettiest wrought iron porch balusters in the Fan, I think.

The Jefferson Club was designed by a very prominent architect and cavalryman under JEB Stuart,  Marion J. Dimmock, in the last year of his life, 1908. Dimmock specialized in big public buildings and houses.

So here in these two wonderful buildings is a theme statement, if you will, for Grace Street’s evolution during the 20th and 21st centuries. Because their uses remained active in purpose, for public gatherings, offices of the Martin Agency, spaces for education and faith.

There is no other street in the nation that can claim that here is the house where Edgar Allan Poe gave his last public recitation of “The Raven” and where, on the front porch, Susan Archer Talley bade him good night as she watched a shooting star arc over his head, and as he departed on his final exit from Richmond.

Few others have a house like Columbia, built around 1817, by flour magnate Philip Haxall, and whose multiple later uses included classrooms for Richmond College, Confederate hospital, Union barracks and the birthplace of the T.C. Williams Law School. It awaits its next lease on life.

Now, those are just two buildings – in addition to the ones right here.

Now all along Grace, there are plenty of houses, where nobody famous lived. But the whole pageant of life unfolded, and continues to do so. But as those who live in these old places know, the thrum and whisper of the  house’s past days are just below audible range. Trapped under a dozen layers of paint, shoved into the cracks between darkened floors, here are the lives of the families who preceded you — their Christmases, Thanksgivings, births, deaths, comings together and partings, sorrow and joy. They weren’t just posed in stiff collars and big dresses, as some are pictured in the front halls of your houses, they worked, they laughed, they had parties like this one! They made these their homes. The one you are now living in.

Look at these houses and know: we are just as tenuous and slender filaments of experience as those who came before us. We shove our little ball of desires and dreams a bit way up the street, until someone else shows up to carry the weight a little further. We all want to know where is it going, what’s going to happen to us, down through time, these questions: some get their answers, some just add another layer of paint to the dining room. Red, usually.

This is an arduous journey, that’ll never really be finished, that has allowed tonight’s gathering to occur. Throughout the 1940s into the 1960s, families slowly melted away from Grace Street and its tributaries, leaving behind their houses and apartments like chamber nautiluses who vacate their shells.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so, into these places came bright-eyed, pony-tailed students — and those were the men. Settlers of “urban intentional communities” and yes, adult group homes. (And, no, they aren’t the same thing.) But there were people who looked around and could see how in the upper blocks, houses getting demolished for parking that could’ve been rescued. And so they organized.

And so in 1979, the Grace Street Association drew a chalk line on the sidewalk and said: The Slide Stops Here. In 1984, the street was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and a decade later, declared what it in fact had become due to its endurance through time: it is, after all, old and, and by judgment of historians, historic.

The people who made this happen in their day witnessed the children of the night living and sometimes dying on their front porches, or setting fires to mattresses. These people walked with the Chief of Police in patrols to urge some of the denizens to take their businesses elsewhere.

There’re been successes and there’re been setbacks. I won’t belabor Pork Chop Traffic Calmer. But, one of the worst to occur was the demolition of the Capitol Theater, razed with almost gleeful zeal, in 1995. Some of you may not know it ever existed. The theater anchored a block of diversion across from the bustling Broad Street Station; the row included the Byrd Hotel and Julian’s Restaurant.

The Capitol Theater was built in 1926 with an interior by Richmond Italian-American sculptor and plaster artist Feruccio Legnaioli. He created the region’s first “atmospheric” theater décor, imagining a Spanish garden, complete with draping greenery, urns, iron gates and statue niches. These adornments, however, didn’t survive successive “remuddlings” during the 1930s and 1960s.

The Capitol was the first in the South and the sixth in the nation to possess MovieTone synchronized sound equipment. “The Jazz Singer,” the first talkie, premiered in Virginia at the Capitol. A generation later Richmond movie impresario Ray Bentley — remember “Ray Bentley: The Movie Machine”? — started all-night movie jams there. People here saw for the first time at the Capitol “M*A*S*H”, “The Exorcist”, “Lenny” and “Silver Streak.”

It was ripped apart, over the protests of the West Grace Association and the Fan District Association ostensibly to provide for a McDonald’s — which, of course, moved up Broad.

Had the theater stood a few years more, the Richmond Moving Image Co-op or community performing arts group could’ve utilized the place. I bring this up, only to say: When a building is taken down, we deny ourselves what was and what might yet be. We deprive ourselves of coming to know the place, just as we would a friend. The more we are of where we are, the less likely we are to let harm or injury come to it.

Back in 1998, however, when the Firehouse Theatre Project was on the verge of losing its access to the century-old Fire Station No. 10 — it was the Grace Street Association and the Fan District that spoke with the city administration and urged that we be given a stay of eviction. That time allowed for a patron to come see a show, purchase the building, and in 2008, the theater will turn 15. And on June 21 the world premier of New York City playwright Bill C. Davis’s musical Austin’s Bridge opens there.
So, thank you.

I close with this illustration.

Up the street here, at Grace and Allison, is what I call the Etch-a-Sketch Corner. This was the end of original Allen lands. The Allens owned most of what became Monument Avenue and the central Fan. Their properties abutted business partners James W. Allison and Edmund B. Addison (both now street names), who developed along Grace Street. Lots along Grace and Monument in Allen section are longer than those that in Allison/Addison. It is this eccentric quality that makes Grace Street the place where you dwell now and which we choose to celebrate today, unlike anywhere else. That’s why you’re here, and why I’m here.

Thus, another hundred years from now, people who are like us, but not us, will stand here and marvel at these buildings and say: here are their witnesses, this is their testimony.

Posted 18-Nov-2007