Gutenberg's Upper Room & Barnes & Noble To Come


Pratt's Castle, Gamble's Hill in Richmond, Va., ca. 1854-1958.
This is the site of the present NewMarket/Ethyl Corporation
headquarters.



Monday night I regaled a group of history folks about True Richmond Stories in the upper room at Café Gutenberg. This is one of the Richmond's great commercial rooms; wooden and book-lined with mis-matched tables and chairs and views of Main Street, the market and train station. All of Richmond's history is there, or nearby, from 1607 onward, just in the market itself.

I was treated to wine and dined afterward, signed books and talked to a young man about those persistent rumors about Richmond 's "Undreground" that somehow the city has this vast series of sewer tunnels like Jean Valjean got chased through, or Harry Lime in The Third Man. I think these rumors get started because of the series of steam tunnels linking the State Capitol to MCV's campus. These notions are perhaps fueled by wine cellars and coal rooms in Church Hill, the railroad tunnel collapse, the spring beneath the Byrd Theatre, and perhaps enduring memory of Pratt's Castle. That place had a coal storage chamber, wine cellar, and hidden passages and secret rooms. In this plaque-crazy town, there's no mention near the site of what was one of the most photographed (and strangest) building in Richmond.

Thursday I'll be reading at Barnes & Noble, Libbie Place, and that'll be my first presentation in a non-indie store. I'm curious as to how it'll go.

Meantime, I hear how Verizon surrendered the right to privacy to the government because they asked. And you still can't get continuous cell service in Goochland County.

Reading At Café Gutenberg at 7 p.m. tonight &
Who was Mr. Brown?



Yee-haw! This was not at the National Folk Festival on Brown's Island this
past weekend, but the 8th Annual Cinco de Mayo Festival in 2004.

I hope, near enough members of the billion-eyed audience, that you got out to the National Folk Festival this past weekend, which populated Brown's Island and the banks of the lordly River James with 175,000 people of every shape, size, race, creed and hue during the three days of the event.

While there, Fountain Book Shop's Kelly Justice informed me that True Richmond Stories was doing well, due to the amount of visitors in the town coming by her place.

Tonight, I'm reading and signing at Café Gutenberg at 7 p.m.

But while at the Folk Festival, a gentleman asked me, "So who was the Mr. Brown of Brown's Island?"

And at that point I wanted an ACME Products portable hole that Wile E. Coyote used to try and trap the Road Runner, so I could jump into one. I couldn't answer the person -- and so much for Mr. History.

I've since schooled myself on the Brown of Brown's Island.

Gunsmith Elijah Brown (1781-1850), acquired the land in 1826. For a time, it was called Neilson's Island, after a subsequent owner, but the name Brown's Island proved more reasonable to the Richmond tongue. This was the site of a munitions plant which blew up on Friday, February 13, 1863, killing at least 30 young woman workers. Richmond’s Civil War mayor Joseph Mayo said this was where he wanted to put all the lewd women.

Just east of Tredegar Iron Works, at the bend north of the Haxall Canal, was around 1801 where thrived the Haymarket, a terraced recreational park with “serpentine alleys," perhaps shaped boxwoods. The attractions included a thousand person capacity music hall where masquerade balls were considered “dangerous to virtue,” playing fields for quoits, bowling, and shuffleboard, an organ, and an ice cream parlor. There was the “the Riding Machine or Flying Gigs, wherein eight persons can be conveyed at the rate of two to five hundred yards in a minute…its effects are delightful to the riders and peculiarly efficacious to those of weak nervous habits.” And shades of recent headlines, there were cock and bear fights.

John R. Johnson Co. operated the Richmond Steam Forge on the eastern portion, which was once separate, and called Johnson's Island. The 1972 filling of a spillway made the two islands one.

The island became part of the Richmond's James River Park in 1987 after improvements sponsored by the James River Discovery Program.

I need to visit the Library of Virginia to determine how much Elijah Brown spent in buying that hunk of rock and dirt in the James, and anything particular I could learn about who he was as an actual person.

Advertisements for Myself, another in a continuing and irregular series
The GRTC True Richmond Stories Book Tour begins!


Portrait of the author and joe, by Chris Smith, location: Cafe Gutenberg

Well, billion-eyed audience, just when the very thought of anymore excitement from these quarters makes you weak in the knees, I'm pleased to announce that the official "True Richmond Stories GRTC Autumn and Winter Book Tour" begins with a reading tomorrow evening at Fountain Books. There amid the cobblestones and Edward Hopper red brick buildings, Kelly Justice carries the torch for good books and fine reading. I refer to this as the GRTC tour because most places I'm reading can be reached by bus. And it just doesn't get much better than that.

I'll be appearing (not in a nimbus of light, nor with thrones of angels singing my arrival) at Fountain Books, 1312 E. Cary St., at 6:30, and I'll read some pieces and sign books and even act all author-like and stuff.

If you can't catch me there, I'm next on October 15 at Cafe Gutenberg at 7 p.m. and a conceptual-type presentation will occur in conjunction with partner-in-art Amie Oliver's exhibit Walk The Walk at Plant Zero Art Center, 0 E. 4th St. in Manchester (South Richmond), where books will also be available. For more of this scintillating info, see truerichmondstories.com.

Meanwhile, who stole Autumn?

About a month ago, I was enjoying walking to work in crisp mornings under blue skies and while in my vests and long sleeves. Then, somebody forgot to pay a bill. Where's this coming from? I loathe these nasty gunmetal grey skies and 90 degrees and at the same time, trees dropping leaves as if not in accordance with their aborial clock, but from complete exhaustion.

House chores

Though I know True Richmond Stories fever has seized Richmond to the extent that little real work can be conducted in most offices, including mine, the final installment of the official National Folk Festival opens next weekend. Though the intention is to carry on with the festivals into the future, the folks of the Folk who got it up and going here, will get it up somewhere else.

The Partner and I are amid a massive reclamation project of our domestic life in order to receive out of town guests who've extended to us, on many occasions, gracious hospitality while visiting them and our favorite music event, MerleFest.

People, let me just tell you. Don't let your house chores creep on you. Do a little every day, or every day, or just clean up after yourself, for cryin' out loud. Don't plan big projects in tandem. And don't dig big holes in the back yard only to discover you've not found buried treasure, but a hernia.

And don't toss out your partner's lime before she's done. Did I mention that already?

Marina Project for Intermediate Terminal

So the Governor-Mayor has announced yet another unfunded mandate without a clear administrative corellative and perhap joins the Shockoe baseball diamond and the the City of the Future, among other ambitious rhetoric that is independent of reality. We'll see. Not that a marina isn't a good concept--that Richmond has gone without when every other town and burgh along the forks and tributaries of the James, York and Rapahannock rivers manage to boast of a few is worse than embarrassing, it's plain pathetic.

I hear through people who actually have boats and know something about them that placing a marina there, though, may not be the best location, due to tides and flooding. Closer to Great Shiplock Park (location around 1900 of the Trigg Shipyards, see True Richmond Stories -- because it is not mentioned much anywhere else) is perhaps better, or across the river, where Newton Ancarrow-- an early and staunch river and wildlife advocate and builder of high speed boasts--had his landing (see TRS, too).

So we'll see. Who'll actually run this shindig is another entire question.

One of my biggest laughs this weekend.

From artist Bill Fisher, at a social event, joking about how at a 1708 Gallery opening where a couple who didn't know him by sight, commented in a rather dismissive way about his work while he stood nearby, "Oh, he's just a process artist."

Bill guffawed. "Yeah, that's me, it's like Play-doh, I have a big extruder and I just pump'em out."

By the way, Bill's on exhibit right now in Boston. Which is where that link above takes you.

Mr. Marmalade, bye-bye.

Firehouse Theatre closed Mr. Marmalade on Saturday. I dropped in to the after party--late, as usual, pulling a Mr. Marmalade myself--but managed to see director Rusty Wilson, entire cast, incandescent Laine Satterfield, authoritative Andrew Boothby, sultry Erin Thomas, funny-by-being-onstage-that-jerk-we-all-known Tony Foley, kinetic Larry Cook, and poetic Billy Christopher Maupin -- and not a weak link in the bunch. One of my favorite scenes in the show is when Tony and Erin became Larry's invisible plant friends -- it was absurdist revenge on children's theater. And those actors I'm sure have served their time in vans criss-crossing vast tracts to perform for the yoots. And I got to visit with Joe Inscoe, by gum, and that was quite enjoyable.

I ended up in this very sophisticated wine discusison--to which I listened-- on the back stairs of Tadd Burrell's apartment that gave me a hankering for red wine and chocolate. O! Canada!

If you see these two on this page, you know what's up...


That's right, these tragedy/comedy ladies--at a far away opening at the long ago Three Miles Gallery--indicate to the billion-eyed audience that it's once gain First Friday in Richmond ; and on this humid evening of gunmetal grey overcast which refuses to rain, the big inaugural event is preparing to uncoil like a Chinese dragon all along central Richmond's Gallery Row. Or Rows, as there's the big one on Broad, and another on West Main.

My partner-in-art is tending bar at 1708 so I'll be down there. So much going on and a juicy piece in the Times-Dispatch this ayem.

The art season has erupted in earnest and this week, between us both, has been just busy as all get out. I had my book release on Tuesday, and already this seems to have occurred further in the past than just four days ago.

Below, left, is the reading from the book during the launch event (about 120 people attended) with the Wickham-Valentine terrace providing about as dramatic a backdrop as I could ever expect. That's a teeny tiny dl Hopkins in the center of this small picture -- bigger ones to follow. On the right, me with my Ed and Lorena, the ones that brought me into this world. Amie took all these pictures.














This is AOK, the dynamic duo...Don't we look almost famous?



And me, goofing it up with an old manual typewriter, upstairs at Cafe Gutenberg, where we adjourned afterward. Got to get cranking. Another book due in April....


Hope to see folks out and about tonight. More on this and that and assorted during the weekend. Amie and I have to take some time for some major domestic activity, as between her opening and my launch, we've just abandoned housework to the cats, who are notorious in their ineptitude in that regard.