My Journey Into Richmond

-- And What I Found There III

Part III

“I have thought it wise to live for the future and not the dead past. While cherishing honorable memory of its glories, I have thought that we should look to the future for life, power and prosperity…”

William Mahone, Readjuster and ornery cuss, 1882

Just a different set of problems…

Come now, and walk alongside an obstreperous travel writer who is researching an extensive feature about Richmond – a different version than the one with which you are familiar.

He—like you—has never been to the Richmond described here-- but he’s applied himself to studying the story, and he receives able guidance by indulgent, patient and hospitable residents.

In this Richmond, people are no less venal and slothful, nor more gracious and industrious, as they are in the city around you now.

They just have a different set of problems.

The subjects of conversations in its boisterous bars and busy cafés are textured by a history quite altered from the one recorded in Virginius Dabney’s book.

Nobody could blame you, though, if you’d like to move there.

The story thus far: Philip Gotz. a well-known travel writer for print and online media, is taking one of his five-day "What I Found There" excursions to Richmond, Va. He was met upon his arrival at the Admiral Richard E. Byrd International Airport by Tia Chulangong. a representative of the city's tourism office. While riding the airport train to Main Street Station, Tia explains to Gotz about Richmond's development during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including a zoning provision forbidding high rises in the center city, and the green belts girding the town, which one developer derided as a "noose of weeds and vines." At Gotz's behest, they've stopped to have a drink on the station's Main Street balcony.

(Image credits at end)


3. The Balcony Scene



“So Cap’n Trice mentioned something about restaurants and lounges,” said Gotz as they alighted from the train and stepped onto the platform. But his next thought floated away as he observed the important bustle under the steel supported canopy. Gotz pulled up his recorder, “Main Street station train shed big enough to park a zeppelin.”

The baggage handlers puttering on their whirring lorries, families with maps and questions and making sure everybody was together, a gaggle of seniors and their jaunty capped guide holding up a sign, “Mature & In Motion,” and the European college kids hauling massive backpacks. He stood for a moment and breathed in the sensations.

Electronic klaxons, the slow building whine and chuff of one train backing out and the corresponding announcement, “Now departing from Track Thrrree, the Tidewater Express, bound for Petersburg, Williamsburg a-a-and the Citeee of Ham-pton Roads.”

Other announcements of arrivals and departures echoed overhead and a hanging screen noted in red and green to expect the Washington D.C. high speed express in two minutes.

Tia at some paces ahead turned to see Gotz standing, his big chin raised and eyes closed as if in communion. She let him do his thing, since he was enjoying himself, until he realized how long he’d remained there. He realized this, smiled, and joined her.

The noise of the platforms didn’t allow for speaking but as they passed through the doors into the station house he said, “You ever see It’s A Wonderful Life?”

“Too many times.”

“There’s that great line – and places like this remind me of it, and my whole profession. George Bailey asks Uncle Billy what he thinks the three most exciting sounds in the world are, and Uncle Billy says, ‘Breakfast is served – “

Tia joined, “-- lunch is served, dinner – “

Gotz nodded. “Then George says ,’No, no! Anchor chains, plane motors, and train whistles.’”
Tia asked, “Which do you like the best?”

“’Breakfast is served,’ I think. I’m worthless without my coffee. But speaking of drinking —“

“Which we weren’t.”

“But I’m getting to it,” his eyes swept around the coffered ceilings and gilded columns, the newsstand bristling with colorful enticements, the various fast food come-ons in bright lights. While not as grand as Union Station in Washington, or as self-important as Grand Central, Main Street conveyed the sense of comings, goings and busy schedules to keep.

“Howzabout those restaurants and lounges?”

“We can get something on the terrace; the balcony. Beautiful day for it.”

“I’ll follow you, to the balcony, or even off it.”

Tia indulgently pursed her lips. She said, “That wouldn’t be good for either of us.”

“Depends, depends,” Gotz airily replied.

They strode across the wide marble floor to the arches of the loggia where a young brunette woman in crisp whites at the host stand knew Tia well enough to say, “T! How are you,” and embrace her.

“Audrey Thomas, this is Philip Gotz, the travel writer, and he’s spending five days in Richmond for a piece he’s writing about us.”

Audrey beamed, shook his hand, “Welcome to Richmond! You have the best possible guide.”

“I’m thinking you’re right.”

“So we’re just having a drink,” Tia said and reached into her little purse for round lensed, tortoise-shell sunglasses

They followed Audrey onto the ornate Main Street balcony furnished by café tables and chairs. Buses, taxis, and trams provided a hopping energy accentuated by a lattice of railroad bridges and viaducts that criss-crossing over the street.

The busy rhythm was punctuated by a procession of dormered, step-gabled, third-floor arch windowed, lush-corniced 19th century commercial buildings marching west up the hill toward the business district.

Tia sat Gotz facing west and that allowed her to point out sites while she did not drink from her chardonnay. He sampled a Richmond brew, Legend porter.

They tapped glass together, “To you, and welcome,” she said, and he replied, “And here’s to the startling qualities of Richmond guides.”

“I’d feel better if I didn’t think you said that to everyone.”

“But you’re wrong,” he said, and tried the beer, nodded, and drank more. “If this is any indication, Tia, it’s going to be a great visit.”



He peered over her shoulder toward 15th Street. Red signs and arrows indicated the Edgar Allan Poe Museum. “Ah, so here it is,” he said. “Been reading about Eddie’s foray into journalism.”

Tia, one hand under her chin, turned, “Yes, that’s the Southern Literary Messenger building,” she jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “His first real writing job.”

“We’re going there –“

“Um, tomorrow, later in the day. So, what you’re seeing here,” she swept her lithe arm across the storefronts and peaked and corniced rooftops, “are some of the most historic places in Richmond. And they’re still here, which considering all that’s happened, and all that could’ve happened, kind of a small miracle. For example, a lot of what you’re seeing here was supposed to be demolished for the interstate.”

Gotz nodded. “But you Richmonders got all up in arms.”

“Biiig time,” Tia said, widening her eyes. “Marches on the Capitol here, convoys of protestors to D.C., the Governor making his declaration,” and she squinted to recall the words, as though some pledge taken in an elementary classroom. “‘The roads will not run through Richmond, nor any of our cities where the people are opposed.’ And the Congressional delegation protesting how the Interstate Highways Commission was just handed money without going through an allocation process. It was big, nasty, loud and long.”

“Sounds fun.”

“Knew you’d say that. But, anyway, it wasn’t but so much fun because Virginia lost millions and millions of dollars in government money – punishment -- not just for the highways; but the actions here inspired cities nationwide to follow Richmond, and places fought to keep the highways from knocking down their central city neighborhoods.”

“Bunch of troublemakers, is what you are.”

“Thank you! We make our best effort. Anyway, behind you can just see the Riverwalk which really starts here," she turned and pointed toward a high arched stone bridge festooned by iron lamps. A promenade walkway connected to the bridge. A streetcar rolling over it reminded Gotz of that ancient Toonerville Trolley comic strip.

"That's Shockoe Creek, which until the 1920s flooded every spring, but we started our water control project in 1923, and it became the River Walk. That runs directly to the river, and between it and the Flood Wall, they really saved this neighborhood. A regional arts project created that mural of the historic riverside.”

“Ah, yes. Sort of fools your eye for a minute. It’s like a stage backdrop.”

“Beyond that, is the real James River Kanawha Canal – “

“Where I’ll be taking a slow boat.”

“That’s right. Tuesday I’m putting you on the slow boat to Tuckahoe.”

“Looking forward to it.”

“You’ll be getting aboard at the Gallego Plaza – the canal boat offices are at Eighth Street. I’ll show you where it’s at on your way up to the Jefferson. Two blocks over, behind us, is the 17th Street Market, the oldest farmers market in the country, and behind that is the National Museum of Bondage and Liberation—we’re going there day after tomorrow—and it’s built over Lumpkin’s Jail -- holding pens for the slave markets-- and what’s interesting is that around the corners the floor is clear, so you can see the foundations and other things they found below the surface, the black cemetery across the street is part of the museum, and there’s some exhibits, too, in the St. Charles Hotel building which is next door.”

“Tia, be honest with me. Do people actually go to a slavery museum?”

“Yes, they honestly do, and more and more of them.”

“Not something you do on a light-hearted whim.”

“Yeah. I mean, of course, it’s a serious place.”

“One would hope.”

“We’ll see it; the scope of it is not just the 400 years —but the abolitionists and attempts to gain freedom, as individuals, or through group action – “

“We’re talking Nat Turner, right?”

“And Touissant L’Overture in Haiti. And Gabriel Prosser, too,” Tia added. “And John Brown.”

“Serious place, for sure, ” Gotz said and drank.

“But it’s about slavery here, elsewhere, past and current worldwide, and how people have fought for their freedom. Before the Civil War, here, the slave markets were all around where we’re sitting. Then the big fire destroyed almost this entire district.”

“How Wagnerian.”

“Most of what you see was built just after the war.”

“But now Shockoe is where all the fleshpots and iniquity are at?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You really need the opium dens.”

“Richmond’s progressive about many things, but I don’t think that’s one of them.”

“Brothels?”

“Not legal in Virginia.”

“Amazing. You have casino gambling and horse racing, but no opium dens or brothels,” and Gotz performed a profound disappointment. “This is turning into a very boring story.”

“Would you want to live next to an opium den or a brothel?”

“You live around here?”

“Yup; actually just past Shockoe," she squinted her left eye and pointed over Gotz's shoulder.

"Fulton...now remind me. This is one of those revitalized neighborhoods."

"H'mmm. Yes. Well, it'd gone through a few, I guess, cycles," she twirled a hand in the air. "So, it was a working and middle-class neighborhood, whites, immigrants, and by the mid-20th century more African-Americans. But the community pulled together, got historic status and urban redevelopment money, a levee along the river, and now it's a really great, I think, I mean I live there," and she allowed a smile punctuated by dimples. "A mixture of all kinds of people."

"Pricey, though?"

“Depends. But the city is right out your front door. Some people say it's too far away from downtown, and the fun, but we got our own cafes and restaurants, galleries and movie theater. Plus, I tell people this because it’s true, I haven’t owned a car since high school. I just don’t need one here. My money goes to other things than oil changes and insurance.”

“A very public relations response –“

“Well, that's my job. And, speaking of which: Mr Gotz –“

“Phil.”

“Well, the office informed me,” she breathed in and pushed a strand of errant hair behind one ear. “Your former wife is here this weekend.”

Gotz pushed out his lower lip and raised his shoulders.

“We’re adults. It’s a big town. Which former wife, by the way?”

“Ah, Jennifer Royce.”

“Book tour I bet.”

“She’s reading at Cokesbury tomorrow.”

“Good for her!”

“She’s staying at the Jefferson, too.”

Gotz blinked, then chuckled.

“Well, long as we’re not in an elevator and the power goes out, we should be fine. Tia, don’t look so anxious.”

“It was a booking confusion and I’m really really sorry.”

For a moment, Tia’s sharp professionalism popped like a bad cable television connection. Gotz shrugged.


“Really, it’s fine. I mean, you didn’t do it. Did you?”

“Ah. Like I say, it was a scheduling error.”

“That wasn’t an answer.”

“Somebody at the office fouled up.”

“You mean fucked up.”

Tia sipped her chardonnay.

His brow furrowed and he raised his nose. “H’m,” he said. “Somebody’s smoking the world’s largest cigar.”

“ That’s the tobacco across the river. There’s several factories here. Not as many as years ago.”

“This is the city tobacco built, huh?”

“At first, flour and textiles, then tobacco, yes,” Tia began, happy to speak of history less emotionally freighted than ex-wives. “We can thank Lewis Ginter for that, whose company invented the cigarette rolling machine and he formed American Tobacco here, then the U.S. government split it up and several of the smaller firms kept headquarters in Richmond. By the 1940s, we produced about 85 percent of the tobacco products consumed in the United States.”

“Tobacco put the ‘rich’ in Rich-mond, is what they say, right? ‘Cigarette City.’”

“And other not-so-nice names.”

“Like, for example, what I’ve heard, Carcinogenville, Big C-Town…”

“Because of health considerations, and changes in the national economy, many of those plants closed or moved,” Tia explained. “They’ve been turned into apartments and lofts. But, when the wind blows the right way, you can still smell tobacco.” She turned toward Main Street and added, “I don’t smoke, but I like the smell.”

About the images and notes: Exterior of Main Street Station, with balcony arches, from weddingmapper.com Interior version of balcony arches from the Archer Pelican blog.
Interior of unfortunately empty Main Street Station, mlight.typepad.com and from Kim Schmidt.
And Shockoe from the balcony, perpetual headwinds.com. I've tried finding interior images online of the wondrously restored building showing people and movement -- to no avail.

Some of the most depressing images I've ever seen of Richmond history is that of the concrete support stanchions for the so-called "Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike" marching into Shockoe like Imperial Walkers, and almost crushing Main Street Station. The before and after images of this cultural atrocity, shown stark and large at the Valentine Richmond History Center's exhibit Battle for the City: the Politics of Race 1950s-1970s, were enough to provoke in me a physical, nauseated sensation.

The Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike was an extension of I-95. Despite two public referendums denouncing the plan for the highway's course, the then-powerful Main Street business and private club coalition nudged their collaborators in the General Assembly to form a special "authority" to create the turnpike. Thus, blunt-minded engineers drew an unforgiving line through the mid-section of the city, direct through Shockoe, Union Hill and Jackson Ward, for the most part occupied by poor blacks, or consisting of residential housing considered substandard and not worth saving. More structures were destroyed by this hamfisted solution than by the Evacuation Fire of 1865.

A similar methodology caused the creation of the Richmond Metropolitan Authority to oversee the Downtown Expressway that forever lanced the city and was not just stupid engineering and policy -- designed to bring suburbanites into the city -- but bad feng shui. Richmond was cut off from its riverfront by lanes of asphalt and an important section of the James River Kanawha Canal obliterated.

Scott M. Kozel provides a valuable, detailed and, to my view, pro-road builder history of the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike and Downtown Expressway at his Roads To The Future site. The image below is from that site; note Main Street Station at lower left. In the Richmond that Phil Gotz is visting, the "spaghetti works" doesn't exist. That Richmond has a different perspective on automobiles and their proper place.



Due to the series of unfortunate rail and transit policy botches and bollixes Richmond's great stations, Main and Broad Street, were stranded in the mid-1970s after Amtrak chose to move from its urban stations into suburban "Amshacks" to theoretically accommodate suburban commuters (a mistake realized too late). Both Richmond stations suffered the indignities of abandonment and neglect. Main Street resisted floods, fire and the vagaries of municipal governance. Both came within an ace of demolition. The domed, John Russell Pope-designed Broad Street received rehabilitation as the Science Museum of Virginia, but spur tracks remained, allowing the now defunct American Oriental Express to pull in there twice a year.

Main Street is caught in a perpetual "multi-phase" rail redevelopment plan, due to the nation's false economy and historic wretched priorities of transit planning that champions wasteful highways over passenger rail. This is why for several decades the long-needed straightening out of the mess at the Acca Yards remains unaccomplished, and the upgrading of rail leading between the Staples Mill suburban station and downtown goes uncompleted.The country, not to put to fine point on it, is screwed up big time regarding efficient, safe and aesthetic transit.

The Southern Literary Messenger building is from freebase.com. The building was torn down just prior to World War I when 15th street was supposed to undergo widening; the war intervened and the street expansion never occurred. Richmond lost yet another one of the actual physical spaces known by Poe. The preservationists who rescued the Old Stone House, today the Poe museum, acquired the bricks and used some of them to construct the wall surrounding the rear garden and construct the pergola. The Messenger site, and that of the next door Allan tobacco offices, is now in part occupied by Club Velvet.

Tia's residence in Fulton may throw some readers; in our Richmond, there's Fulton Hill, but "Fulton Bottom" (never called that by those living there -- the "bottom" designation was a class-based pejorative), was allowed to be ripped up and torn down by the city (and a few neighborhood Quislings) during the early 1970s for "urban renewal." Supported and allowed to exist, Fulton would've perhaps provided a funky alternative to other pricier neighborhoods, as a mixture of Church Hill and Oregon Hill, an architectural mixture of brick single family residences and townhouses, churches and stores, and old frame buildings, too. The image row houses along Denny Street come from Richmond Then And Now.com.

Further description of Fulton in the current Richmond's timeline, from a back-issue article of mine here.

" In the late 1960s, Fulton had 3,000 residents in some 836 buildings spread across 330 acres. The neighborhood counted seven churches, one of which, Rising Mount Zion Baptist, was more than a century old. Fulton was restaurants, stores and schools, and at least one small movie theater, The Lennox, at 514 Louisiana St.

In 1930, Fulton boasted a 30 percent home-ownership rate that was, according to urban-studies writer Chris Silver, substantially higher than those of other working-class communities.

During the 1940s, home ownership actually increased because families of limited means could afford to own. A number of those houses didn’t have indoor plumbing or electricity.

The character of Fulton shifted due to layoffs at the C & O railroad when it switched from coal to diesel and unemployment from the closure of the nearby Richmond Cedar Works in 1957. White families left. Rental properties proliferated, but they weren’t properly maintained. City inspectors seldom visited Fulton, and housing codes weren’t enforced. Poor blacks displaced from neighborhood obliterations in Navy Hill and along North 17th Street arrived in Fulton because they had few places to go. Break-ins and robbery, nearly unknown in Fulton, proliferated after 1961, and heroin arrived in the community’s streets in about 1964.

St. Augustine’s Catholic Church was in such dire shape in the mid-1960s that [artist Don] Crow remembers his foot smashing through a floorboard during Mass one Sunday. Fulton itself slipped through the cracks of planning and oversight. Still, neighborhood leaders, as Silver writes, “rejected the slum stereotype and sought through political mobilization to resist” massive demolitions.

Scott O. Davis, in his book The World of Patience Gromes: The Making and Unmaking of a Black Community, a memoir of his time as a social worker there, records nip joints and bootleggers with alcoholism and the domestic squabbles they produced, the gamblers, pool sharks, hoodlums and a rising tide of despair. Richmond’s officials couldn’t figure how to solve Fulton’s problems except, ultimately, to get rid of Fulton altogether."

Given the dramatic shifts in urban planning and policy in the Richmond where Tia lives and Phil Gotz is visiting, it's unlikely Fulton would've turned into empty green fields lately filling in with vinyl-sided tract housing, The flight of both white and black middle class into the cul-de-sac archipelago hinged on first, integration and second, the collapse of the public schools deprived of tax dollars to operate and maintain them.

. But this alternate Richmond's situation is different -- as we shall see.

Finally, Methodist-based Cokesbury books, still a presence in the Richmond region, occupied an entire downtown building and I often visited the racks and aisles there when I wore a younger man's clothes on a thinner frame. The main floor on Grace and 4th was a regular, secular store with an excellent selection, and in this Richmond, it's still there.

Super Collide, Baby, Super Collide!
Hadron Turns On, World Still Here

"Is that a super conducting super collider, or are you just glad to see me?"

Here, from 2004, is Maria Spiropulu at Collider Point 5/CMS within CERN's Large Hadron Collider, and this part of it is somewhere under France. She wrote in postcard fashion then, "I just moved recently from the now highest energy machine in the world — the Tevatron at Fermilab — and there is a change in the scale of things. If what I knew I called grand this is brobdingnagian."

World To End, Monday, Nov. 13

The world shall end on Monday, Nov. 13, according to the University of Vienna's renowned astronomer Professor Rudolph Falb. This assured pronouncement appears in the Richmond Times, on Sunday, Nov. 12, 1899, next to the "Confederate Column" of war reminisces.
The piece is complemented by a weird graphic, of the earth's face getting split as if struck by the fist of heavyweight boxing champion Jim Jeffries. The matter-of-fact caption reads, "The Comet of 1866 Will Strike The Earth Monday And This Is What Will Happen."
Richmonders thus apprised of the world's imminent destruction read other nervous reports. Wars crackle and sputter in the Philippine Islands and in South Africa, as the United States and Great Britain battle for imperial supremacy. The Philippine-American conflict, borne out of the lop-sided 1898 victory of the U.S. over the Spanish, is in late 1899, a strange savage hell of ambushes, massacres and vengeance killings.
Same as it ever was.

It's All Done With Magnets

"There it is," said Lyn Evans, the director of the Hadron project, as the first beam raced around the subterranean circular track in hyper NASCAR fashion, and, the scientists involved with the super collider effort, like spectators at the racing event, are anticipating with some excitement the crashes. But there, way beneath Switzerland and France, the smash-ups will between particles, not drivers Kyle Krisiloff or Michael McDowell.

And with the under statement by Evans, the greatest physics experiment in the history of the science was off and running. Despite cost overruns and a cascading series of problems, including yahoos thinking that the world would blow up when the thing began operating and even death threats against the scientists, the massive undertaking that few understand and that may or may not generate actual usable real-world results -- except that the LHC could alter the way we understand the universe -- is humming.

You can read all about it on the BBC.

Below, a reprise of a post from earlier this summer.

And you just got to love Spiropoulu who a) Handles heavy machinery capable of smashing atoms together at a high velocity to blast the fat off matter to reveal the lattice underneath, b) can use brobdingnagian correctly in a sentence, c) once played drums in a band called Drug Sniffing Dogs and d) can kickbox.

Spiropulu is one of the immense brains behind the experiments that are gonna tear. your. playhouse. down. And that's gooood thing. Oh, yessss.

Billion-eyed audience, I say politics, schmolitiks, the fix is in, the game is rigged, we're all screwed, including the obstreperous fixers and devious riggers. Politics, important as they are at a local level, are otherwise transient structures. What matters in the long haul is art and science.

Subatomic Submarine Races

What it is is, is one of the most remarkable achievements of humanity on Earth to date.

Quoting from the May 15, 2007 New York Times:

"Starting sometime next summer if all goes to plan, subatomic particles will begin shooting around a 17-mile underground ring stretching from the European Center for Nuclear Research, or Cern, near Geneva, into France and back again — luckily without having to submit to customs inspections.

Crashing together in the bowels of Atlas and similar contraptions spaced around the ring, the particles will produce tiny fireballs of primordial energy, recreating conditions that last prevailed when the universe was less than a trillionth of a second old.

Whatever forms of matter and whatever laws and forces held sway Back Then — relics not seen in this part of space since the universe cooled 14 billion years ago — will spring fleetingly to life, over and over again in all their possible variations, as if the universe were enacting its own version of the “Groundhog Day” movie. If all goes well, they will leave their footprints in mountains of hardware and computer memory."

A question the Times article does not answer is whether the CERN commissary is called the Hadron Supper Collider. A gross journalistic oversight.

For about the next month they are cooling the collider down to minus 271 degrees in preparation for switching on the power to make those atoms spin around and slam dance their way to discovery.

One shouldn't get one's hopes up, though. The results of this experiment, 13 years in the making, won't be known for quite some time. I think it's a bit like looking for extraterrestrial life. Whatever's going to happen will take a while. With energies this high, and subatomic particles being...well, subatomic, creating these fundamental conditions won't be easy. And whatever is found will bring with it some surprises, to be sure.

A reasoned assessment of the LHC is worth repeating here, via poster at The Register.

The sky is falling!
By Flocke Kroes
Posted Tuesday 24th June 2008 13:02 GMT

If financial experts say "there has never been a significant collapse in the financial sector and we don't expect one now" then it is because the expect to make a profit from saying that.

Nuclear PR flacks might have said "there has never been a significant loss of life nuclear incident worth worrying about," but they if they did, they would clearly have been lying (Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Chernobyl).

Reports of leaks at Windscale used to be a regular event, but after they changed the name to Sellafield, the reports slowed down and stopped. The fire in the core of Windscale Pile Number 1 was caused by design flaws. Nuclear engineers will not make those mistakes again.

The Three Mile Island incident released more radiation into the environment, but no deaths were attributed to it. Sickness was attributed to stress caused by reports on the accident (The reports were more frightening than the ones for Windscale.)

Chernobyl caused about 35 times more fallout than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It caused about 50 direct deaths and around 9000 deaths from cancer. These numbers are very political. You could get different numbers from other sources.

Chernobyl and Three Mile Island incidents both involved running reactors that were not ready for operation. Perhaps we should delay building nuclear power plants until electricity is rationed, then build a dozen plants in a rush.

The Earth has not been eaten by vacuum bubbles, black holes or strangelets yet, even though it has been around for a few billion years. The Earth is made out of material ejected form super nova explosions. These explosions are far more powerful than LHC. If you are trying to say LHC is not safe, you first have to explain why LHC could cause a problem that supernovas have not.

If LHC could make vacuum bubbles with different rules of physics that grow without limit, then supernovas would have done this and we would not exist.
If miniature black holes did not evaporate promptly, then the Earth would be a black hole, not a planet.

If strangelets could convert normal matter into strange matter, the Earth would be made of strange matter caused by strangelets from supernovas.

If a theory is not consistent with the results of previous experiments, then the theory is wrong.




If the LHC is spending tax dollars on saying "LHC is safe" it is because they have to counter the silly law suit started by the modern day Chicken Lickens Walter L Wagner and Luis Sancho. I hope these two will meet the modern equivalent of Foxy Loxy and have to pay some extra taxes to make up for the waste they have caused."

You can find out more about the Large Hadron Collider at its very own home site, here. A National Geographic piece with the provocative and reductive headline (which headlines are supposed to be, to get you to read) "The God Particle," referring to the theorized Higg's Boson, is here.

Theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, (shown here touring the Hadron) is an atheist, by the way, and his original name for his speculative particle when he conjectured the thing during a 1964 walk in the Scottish mountains was the "Goddamn Particle" because of its being so difficult to imagine, much less find.


A Time/CNN article about him is here, and a Daily Telegraph (U.K) video here.


Image credits: Top, via edge.org, second, with guy in over alls -- I grabbed this so long ago, don't know; Maria in billed cap, theory.chicago.edu via the New York Times, photographer Lloyd DeGrane; emerging from the transporter chamber? -- don't know; peering into the distant past -- and you, fnal.gov, Dr. Higgs from the compelling Science, Culture and Integral Yoga site.

Eureka!

And if that miniature, gobbling black hole forms to grow into a world-eating doomsday, oh well. Maybe we'll go down in a Big Gulp, and come out again in yet another Big Bang, and something else better will emerge.

Edgar Allan Poe in a 19th century essayist’s voice sought in his strange and little read 1848 "prose poem" Eureka! to explain life, the Universe and everything. What’s weird is, he got things right that weren’t accepted in mainstream physics for more than a half century after his death. His view of cycling, unlimited universes, created in what we call a Big Bang and ultimately winding down into a Big Gulp that is, actually, a Big Bang, too, is on the edge of contemporary cosmological theory. Lucky guesses? Poe couldn’t get enough money together for a literary magazine, but he understood—for his own satisfaction—cosmic mechanics.

"Let me declare only that... there does exist a limitless succession of Universes, more or less similar to that of which we have cognizance...If such clusters of clusters exist, however—and they do—it is abundantly clear that, having had no part in our origin, they have no portion in our laws. They neither attract to us, nor we them. Their material—their spirit is not ours—is not that which obtains in any part of our Universe. They can not impress our senses or our souls...Each exists, apart and independently, in the bosom of its proper and particular God."

Essayist David Grantz says further of Poe's analysis:

"Just after the "great End".... Poe continues: "Of this End the new Genesis described can be but a very partial postponement." Near to the conclusion of Eureka, Poe asks: "...are we not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief–let us say, rather, in indulging a hope—that the processes we have here ventured to contemplate, will be renewed forever, and forever, and forever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine?" (Poe 75).

The hypothesis of simultaneous and successive Universes had been suggested by Anaximander in the 6th Century B.C. However, the possibility of the existence of cyclical Universes appears as a physical theory only after the aforementioned solutions obtained by Friedman, specifically the one corresponding to a positive curvature of the spacial part of the space-time, which generates a closed and cyclical Universe (Sartori 316). This alternative has a higher probability to occur if the abundance of the dark matter, foreseen by Laplace and Poe, is high enough."

He may have been on to something. Or, given the exigencies of his own experience, he was hoping and wishing that somewhere, another Poe was having a much easier and successful time. He wanted a different set of problems. And I can sympathize.

See Grantz's discussion of Eureka here.



Soon to be a major motion picture:

The Annual Fire Ball Gala!

Saturday, March 29, 7 PM at The Firehouse Theatre!



Do you the HOTTEST Ticket to the COOLEST Party in Town?

If your answer is YES, then we know you are busy assembling your outfit, determining your high bid, and kicking back as you anticipate the multitudes of pleasures that await!

If your answer is:
A. Not yet
or
B. I've been planning to, but...
or
C. I will, soon!
then
What's the holdup? Get on the stick! Click on the ticket purchase link; click directly on the link; do not pass GO, do not collect $200!
Got it? Good!





But if you need a little more persuasion, may we tempt you?



Don't Miss:
Fun with your favorite actors, friends, & Firehouse family!
Dancing to live music by our favorite, the R & B, Motown sounds of Legacy!
Fantastic food & drink with our popular wine & martini bar!




Auctioneer: Scott Wichmann, actor/entertainer extraordinaire!

Auction items include:
- One-week time-share in Hawaii
- Vacations at Wintergreen, Sandbridge, & "Da Rivah"
- Fashion Makeover on "The Avenues"
- Firehouse party for 100, with DJ, food, and drink
- Night of fine art, wine, and theatre for ten friends
- Dinner for two at fantastic restaurants
...And More!

All proceeds benefit The Firehouse Theatre Project.
Only a few tickets left - so don't wait!

Get Your Tickets Here!
Two price points, three ways to buy!

Singles: $100
or
Save BIG on a pair: $150 for two!

To Purchase:
Click here to purchase tickets online, or
Call the Firehouse at 804-355-2001, or
Mail a check to the address below, payable to The Firehouse Theatre Fire Ball Gala.
Don't forget to indicate the # of tickets in the memo!

A portion of the ticket price is tax-deductible.
Out of town? Car broke down? We know you'd be with us if you could. Don't enable those guilty feelings - just click here to support us and feel better already!

Theatrical Black Tie Attire! Be There!

The Firehouse Theatre Project
1609 W. Broad Street
Richmond, VA 23220
804-355-2001
Photo credits: Image of Scott Wichmann, um, borrowed from his My Space Page. Fire Ball 2007 photos courtesy the Firehouse Theatre staff.

About The Firehouse Theatre Project

The Firehouse Theatre Project, a non-profit theatre company, was founded in 1993 to present important contemporary American theatre pieces with an emphasis on plays not previously produced in the metropolitan Richmond area. The company, which is under the direction of Carol Piersol, Founding Artistic Director, is housed in the former Richmond Fire Station #10 at 1609 West Broad Street. For more information about the Firehouse Theatre Project's 2007/08 season, please call 804.355.2001 or visit the website.

Website: http://www.firehousetheatre.org
The Firehouse Theatre Project
Stacie Birchett
Public Relations and Marketing
email: stacie@firehousetheatre.org
phone: 804-355-2001

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The Goat: Or Why Is Harry On TeeVee?

The billion-eyed audience can check out me talking about Blue Shingles in a Mark Holmberg segment (click the thumbnail underneath the train, "White Goat") about its current occupant on WTVR-Channel 6 ("The South's First Television Station," don't you know--in that clip, push toward the end to see the title card).

Mark's piece aired this past Monday at 11 p.m. and Tuesady evening, at 5:30, though you can just go to the link above. Yes, he's interviewing me at, surprise, the New York Deli where I arrived thinking that he'd be there with a pad and pen, but he doesn't do that anymore, which I full well knew but didn't think to remember--and so he caught me live in my native habitat.

Mark was kind to give True Richmond Stories a little nod (soon out in its second printing in finer bookstores, and Barnes & Noble.com and Amazon.com).

How it happened was that Mark was pursuing this tale about a wild goat roaming around in the 14 acres of woods and rocks that once formed the estate of Blue Shingles. The three-tory, five bedroom house stood from 1922 to 1968 and was designed with Mediterranean flair by Otis K. Asbury (1905-1959). Asbury gave the house blue copper shingles.

Alma W. Evans, wife of Richmond coal and fuels executive Lorenzo Sibert Evans, in 1922 purchased the 14 and a half acres from Richmond News Leader publisher John Stewart Bryan. The Evanses built their five-bedroom, three-story river view Mediterranean-styled dream house at the end of a curvy road leading from the end of present day Blue Shingles Lane, off Butte Lane. The Evanses had a son, Lorenzo Jr. and Mary Anne.

The property was then bordered on its eastern edge by the arched buttresses of the Atlantic Coast Line/Belt Line Rail and a stretch of the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac railroad. Douglasdale Road and the Powhite Parkway bridge later framed the grounds.

Alma Evans employed the expertise of landscape artchitect Charles Gillette to create formal gardens to the east and southeast of the house, and terraces were around back and facing west. (The Library of Virginia keeps Blue Shingles drawings and plans in their archives.) The view would've been marvelous of the river and surrounding countryside from the Blue Shingles plesaure gardens. One can envision the cocktail parties Lorenzo Evans held in connection to his business, the tinkle of ice cubes in whisky glasses and Big Band music playing at background level on the hi-fi.

Asbury ultimately designed at least five houses on West Franklin Street and Monument Avenue. A 1926 Blue Shingles cousin designed for the Raab family is at 2502 Monument Avenue.


You can go to the Monument Avenue Internet Repository, stored here, thanks to the Elams, but go to MAIR and search by block. Which is where the image is from.

Asbury, son of a North Carolina architect, worked as a draftsman in Charles K. Bryant's (c.1872-1935) high end Richmond firm for at least five years. After that partnership split apart, Asbury set up shop with Herbert C. Whitehurst, the son of a prosperous Richmond manufacturer of sash, blinds and doors. Asbury went out on his own after World War I. Most of his known surviving examples are in the Colonial Revival and Tudor Revival mode and resemble early Duncan Lee, a renowned niche-style architect of the day.

Asbury would’ve been a known quantity when 48-year-old Evans commissioned him to build his Blue Shingles.

The first floor public rooms of Blue Shingles were decorated in handsome walnut paneling, the drawing room in English style with a ceiling of parquet plaster and the dining room was executed with a French flair. The Evans family crest, on a stone plaque in the foyer, greeted visitors. The main staircase steps were made of railroad ties and adorned by wrought iron railings and balusters. Five bedrooms and four baths, dressing rooms and large closets rounded out the second story. The third floor was plastered, with cedar room storage space, servants’ room and bath. A recreation room dominated the full basement that also contained the laundry, connected by chutes to the upper floors, and a bath, “most convenient for yardman or chaffeur,” as described in a period real estate publication.

Two tragic events occurred on or near Blue Shingles.

On Easter Sunday, 1955, World War II and Korean War veteran Lorenzo Evans Jr. stood beside the ceremonial entrance fountain and shot himself. On December 7, a military training jet crashed into the nearby posh neighborhood of Windsor Farms and destroyed two houses. An audio clip of veteran WRVA radio correspondent Alden Aaroe reporting the event is here.

One long-time resident recalled to me that rescue workers in search of the pilot found what was left of him below Blue Shingles. He recalled the incident to me as a collision.

"We were there when the two fighter planes crashed, one landed in Windsor Farms and the other in the water behind Blue Shingles. They [the rescue workers] didn’t know how to get around. The overflow from the springhouse deteriorated and eroded the land that created this backwater, off the canal and river; it was tricky to get in and out. But us, playing around there, we’d done it at night and could guide them.

Kind of a valley where Rothesay [Circle] came around and Blue Shingles took up [195/Downtown Expressway didn't exist then] and they didn’t know how to get down there. The rescue people were following the eastern plane, they were following it and they got to Blue Shingles, and the house was closed so there was nobody to tell them how to get down there.

We were up playing, we were just hanging out, we were back above the Blue Shingles property at Butte and Sunset. We watched that plane crash, and you heard the emergency vehicles.

I took them down…We used to catch frogs down there. I’ve never heard an explanation of how it happened. That was the final flight of the P-47 squadron that was leaving the airbase there, it was a quite a hassle, they could’ve gotten through several ways, but I got them down there. I recovered a boot with a foot in it. I didn’t get close to it once I saw it, I backed up and pointed. Best we could see, he [the pilot] tried heading for the river and didn’t make it."

(I'm still not certain about how one version of events squares with this memory, but that's another project. )

Update 2009: The gentleman in question confabulated two crashes that occurred a decade apart over Windsor Farms. A Sept. 1, 1945 crash dropped a plane into field near the 200 block of Canterbury Road, killing the pilot. This is the origin of the gruesome foot-in-a-boot story. I've since noted that story elsewhere. On Dec. 7, 1955, two jets nicked each other mid-air and one spiraled into Windsor Farms. I wrote about it here.

By the 1950s an assessor noted that, " The Blue Shingles have now turned green."

In happier times, the Evanses enjoyd parties and held Christmas open houses. But in the latter years, the riverfront terraces were favored by neighborhood youths. A long-time resident reminisces, “You’d sit out there in the evening with your friends, pass around the grapefruit juice and gin and at night a cold breeze would blow up from the river. Great to snuggle up under a blanket with somebody you knew well. Or somebody you wanted to know well.”

Evans Sr. died in 1958, aged 83, and was cremated in Washington D.C. Alma remained at Blue Shingles until age overtook her. In late December 1966 daughter Mary Ann Evans Steele sold the house to quarry magnate C. Merle Luck Sr. Luck and his wife had restored the Bellona Arsenal in Chesterfield where they lived from 1941 to 1963. He envisioned luxury apartments along the bluff. Luck had none where Blue Shingles was concerned, though. Financing and zoning thwarted the plan.

Teenagers meanwhile claimed Blue Shingles as a party house. A 1967 Times-Dispatch article described every window broken, the walnut paneling stripped out, the Evans crest in the foyer removed, the French doors bare, the formal gardens dug up. Mary Ann Steele said, “The vandalism has been the most vicious thing I have ever heard of. There is nothing there they have not wrecked.”

Blue Shingles wasn't old enough to gain historic recognition. By 1968, the hasty departure was well underway of many whites and blacks from Richmond's established neighorhoods into the suburbs. The Carillon neighborhood was integrated, and quite proud of the fact. A ravaged, decrepit old mansion, set at the end of an isolated road, didn't attract any takers. The name of Otis K. Asbury didn't cause preservationists to leap to the cause of saving what was, by then, a ruined hulk of a house, no matter the grandness of the view.

After the 1968 demolition numerous unsuccessful ventures attempting to build high rent high rises met strident neighborhood objections. An intense slope that makes approximately two-thirds of the property undevelopable has thus far protected the land. Further, the one road into Blue Shingles, which snow storms (back when Richmond experienced such phenomenons) would block, makes the land difficult to access. Contemporary zoning requires a road for emergency vehicles that would have to come off Douglasdale Road, and the community doesn't approve of such an effort.

Thus, goats and an occasional stray bear today make Blue Shingles their home.


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Southern Man of Mystery: Harry Gives Good Talking Head


Not long ago I was asked by videographer producer Ryan Eubank to participate in a documentary he was making as part of a series of biographies for Henrico County publc access cable. You can read about Ryan, but scroll down, here.

The result, Southern Man of Mystery: Edgar Allan Poe is pretty cool. I'm one of several, all far more knowledgable than me, but apparently I give good talking head.

The airdates are as follows: on the EVEN HOURS: Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, the week of March 31st. It will air on Channel 17 on Comcast in Henrico, and on Verizon channel 39 throughout the metro area.

The image here was one of at least two taken by William Abbott Pratt--himself a curious cat--right here in Richmond several weeks before he left town for the last time. As I say in the piece, Baltimore has his body, Richmond has his soul.

I wrote of the daguerreotype session between Poe and Pratt in 2oo7:

"One morning in late September 1849, an impatient Edgar Allan Poe sits for his portrait under the second floor skylight of daguerreotypist William Abbott Pratt’s Gothic-style studio. Between them, Poe and Pratt are perhaps Richmond’s best-known eccentrics.

Pratt knows Poe as Richmond’s most famous artist son. He’d interrupted Poe as the writer passed by his studio while bustling down Main Street intent on other business.

British-born Pratt opened the Virginia Skylight Daguerrean Gallery in 1846, seven years after the daguerreotype was introduced into the United States. He took an estimated 35,000 images throughout his career.

Poe is 40 and worn out. His stay in Richmond began in mid-June when he was on verging on a mental collapse, but the town he considers home greeted him like a proto-alt-indie rocker. He is seeing how that in the place he considers home his writings matter.

He’s been busy lecturing, writing, trying to squire a former teen-aged flame now a widow on Church Hill, Elmira Royster Shelton, and attending temperance meetings. He told Pratt she wasn’t dressed for a portrait, but daguerrean process fascinated Poe.

The tiny four-by-three inch Pratt pictures show a gaunt, haggard Poe with sunken and bagged eyes. He’s plopped down upon the portrait chair. The first image shows a sprig of evergreen in his vest lapel, (Did Pratt stick it on him for esthetic effect? Was it Poe’s idea? In the second image, it’s gone.). His “steamboat” collar is turned down, his cravat untied – he looks uncomfortable and just off the humid street. His hair is disarrayed and a big handkerchief thrust into his waistcoat; perhaps, one historian suggests, hiding threadbare material. By the second image, his hair is pushed up, his vest straightened out.

Contemporaries consider Poe proper and almost courtly in manner. Poe is amusing Pratt and trying to be polite. But here, he’s eager to be on his way.

The second pose has an enforced calmness. Still, whether it is the turn of his face, the fullness of his lower lip and the shadow of his moustache (which he didn’t grow until he was 38), Poe may be making a weary attempt to force a slight smile. Perhaps Pratt kept up some banter to ease Poe’s impatience.

The images would’ve taken 15 minutes to develop, but Poe didn’t tarry, and left them behind – perhaps because he couldn’t afford them at the time, and knew he’d soon return for them.

But on Oct. 7, 1849 he died in Baltimore. There are some 24 theories about what killed him.
The original images (they were copied) became known for later owners, the “Thompson” for John R. Thompson, an exploitive Poe lecturer, and the “Traylor.” Elmira Shelton purchased one of the images from Pratt and kept it until her 1888 demise; then it passed to Robert Traylor, a Richmond Poe aficionado. Around 1900 a botched cleaning attempt made the little picture more spooky but less detailed.

About a decade after taking Poe’s picture he built Richmond’s strangest house, sited upon Gamble’s Hill, one of the city’s best vistas. Besides Thomas Jefferson's Virginia State Capitol, Pratt’s Castle became among the most photographed building in Richmond.

The place was built of rolled sheet iron, perhaps from Tredegar Iron Works at Gamble's foot, that Pratt scored and painted to resemble stone. The foundation was of James River granite. The rooms were of irregular shape and ecclectic design. Pratt installed stained glass windows he purchased in England. There was a dungeon--that is, a coal or wine cellar--and at least one hidden room and a secret staircase. While not the House of Usher, Pratt's Castle and his tagential connection to Poe caused, in urban myth fashion, stories to sprout that Poe had visited and written stories while staying there.

Pratt's studio building was consumed by the 1865 Evacuation Fire. Pratt died in Waynesboro in 1878. The castle was taken down in 1958 for Ethyl [NewMarket] Corporation’s headquarters. A plaque promised by the company to mark the site of Pratt's was never installed and the whereabouts of the stained glass windows are unknown.

Whirlybird: The Prez Alights, Then Leaves--
No West Wing for you!




So, billion-eyed audience, I'm sitting at my desk around 11 a.m. frowning into my computer screen and gripping my hair while trying to figure out what to do next, when this reciprocating thudding rattles the windows. I look out to Broad Street and there, descending from the gun metal grey skies was, if my West Wing nomencalture was correct, Marine One.

I'd seen in the paper today that POTUS was paying call in RVA to bestow a President's Volunteer Service Award to Paul Anderson, who serves the Central Virginia Foodbank, which is just a few blocks from our offices. Then the Chief Executive is to heigh over to Berkeley Plantation, where I guess he's seeking some Colonial-era pointers about landowning aristocrats and their chattels. Hope they show him the escape tunnel that's there--built perhaps to outwit uppity natives, or later, slave insurrection.

Anyway, so Portia, Kate, Jack and me ambled in the chill air over to the Division of Motor Vehicles offices (that are out of character to the cityscape, and plopped down in an ocean of parking, resembles some kind of 1970s corporate headquarters).

I wondered aloud in a hopeful voice, "Is Martin Sheen on [the helicopter]?" I'd just seen the doco Who Killed The Electric Car? which he narrates -- as usual with these pieces, I found corporate stupidity and venality displayed therein almost unbearable. Kate said, "Or even Michael Douglas," referring to his role in another Aaron Sorkin-penned entertainment, The American President. Even Jeff Bridges, who was in the excellent-except-for-the-last-10 minutes The Contender (filmed, in part, rahtcheer in RVA), would've been better: a fake as opposed to a fraud.

Another guy, in a pea coat, said there was a helipad behind the DMV. The Governor uses the pad on certain occasions. The lot is also used for driving school, where those trying to get points shaved off their record can get their strikes expunged. Peacoat said there was more than one 'copter.

Guess they motorcaded POTUS from there over to the CVFB. Anyway, we got to the corner of Broad and DMV Drive, where emergency vehicles with their lights whirling added a sense of drama to this ordinary Presidential errand, and a squadron of Richmond bicycle-borne police shooed us away, though another one said, "Yall can walk up through the parking lot." Which we did, and we got far enough down the sidewalk to see--as our hanger-on mentioned--that there wasn't just one, but two dark green helicopters. Then a bike officer, a she, with a long blonde ponytail came riding up and admonished us with autoritative urgency, "Yall need to turn around and go back the way you came." As we did she offered, "Sorry about that, sorry," and rode off.

That was our at-a-distance non-encounter with POTUS. The most recent visit in these parts was for a George Allen campaign fundraiser at the Science Museum of Virginia, which is right next to the DMV. On that occasion a cloud of protestors showed up to hiss and boo the long black line of war machinist limos. The event didn't do Allen much good, though he proved that he didn't do himself many favors, either.

More later
I have a backlog of news and notes I want to get up here. For one, we went up on a bus tour to D.C. and I took in Jeremy Blake's "Wild Choir" show. I've still not watched Theresa Duncan's collaborative with Blake and artist Karen Kilimnik History of Glamour, though, and I'd like to discuss the two at once.

Also, last night, one of the reasons the Partner In Art and I can't ever agree to cancel cable, because on occasion, a good film comes on -- like Joyeux Noel (Merry Christmas) -- a joint German, British, Belgian, French and Romanian production directed by Christian Caron. On Starz! which surprised me. We've seen a big portion of the film before, but as she painted and I vaccuumed and put away dishes, the confabulated story--taken from different incidents along the Western Front during the holiday season of 1914--filmed with an artist's eye and a remarkable sense of scale and human proportions--resonanted more with me as I've just finished Modris Ecksteins' brilliant Rites of Spring that recounts the cultural, intellectual and historical underpinnings of World War I's eruption, and how those same ingredients within the aftermath bred rampant, hyper-idealistic nationalism whose figuration became Hitler.

You know, the Blue Raccoon carries a mournful and neverending rememberance pertaining to that catastophic enterprise of 1914-1918, and wishes with fantastical might that the conflaguration would've never happened as known to our history.

[And yet another way: in August 1914, Germany goes on the defense in the West, respecting Belgian neutrality and thus the British have no immediate prompt for war; instead, Germany uses greater force--and airborne reconnaisance, such as was used with great effect at Tannenberg-- against Russia that liberates the Tsar's satellite states and precipitates a collapse of the Romanov government in much shorter order. Lenin need not apply. The arrangement would breed eventual civil unrest, as the Germans would extract economic concessions from the Ukrainians, Belorussians and Baltic nations, and the Kingdom of Poland, too, and that would eventually bubble over, and give a truncated Kerensky-democratic/socialist Russia enemy-of-my-enemy allies against imperial German designs. A fight would ensue, over time, with the British due to colonialist pursuits and a naval arms race. The French would become the aggressors of 1914, or, perhaps more the case, sit across the border stewing and seething and hurling anti-German slogans but not bombs, in a 1914 version of the 1939-1940 "Phony War."]

As Brane theory suggests, that in an universe next door, "in the bosom of its proper and particular God," as RVA's favorite non-adopted, un-son Edgar Allan Poe described in his befuddling Eureka--that there is a reality where 170 millions or so didn't die from WWI and its evil spawn, WWII.

The continuing horrors are thus avoided of the Soviet Union, Pol Pot, Mao, a split Korea, the Cold War, Vietnam, and a chopped up and dangerous Mesopotamia. It'd be wonderful for the world to just have a different set of problems than the one like landed on the DMV helipad this morning.

Um, but that's all for later.