My Journey Into Richmond
And What I Found There

The story thus far: Philip Gotz, an obstreperous travel writer known for his "What I Found There" pieces detailing his five-day visits to destinations, is in Richmond, Va. The visitors bureau has assigned to him as a guide Tia Chulangong -- who pretty much has his number from the moment she meets him at the Richard Evelyn Byrd International Airport. She provides running color commentary on Richmond sights and history while riding the train to bustling Main Street Station, and from there to Gotz's accommodations. Tia, however, has informed Gotz that Jennifer Royce, his novelist ex-wife, is in town on a book tour and through a scheduling error he's booked into the Jefferson Hotel where she is also staying. The writer and his guide have now gone up to the rooftop terrace of the Jefferson, where Tia is giving Gotz a travelogue explanation of the city's sights.


Conclusion: Part VI
View From The Terrace Part II

“Let’s sort of start east and work our way west.”

“Excellent.”

At the far east, the Great Turning Basin of the James River and Kanawha Canal and the Gallego Plaza with its extensive marble, stone, and iron loggias, grand stairways, arcades and colonnades. From their perspective, the turning basin shone like a mirror tilted toward the sun. The Northbank Esplanade begins there.

Tia said, “People love Gallego Plaza, You should go like on a Sunday—work off your gi-normous Jefferson brunch—there’s concerts, or the street musicians and performers all the time, to eat lunch, get pictures taken. It’s lovely all the time.”

“Silver people?”

“Pardon?”

“Do you have mimes there, in Gallego Plaza.”

“I think we may have mimes. You can’t keep them away from a public plaza. It attracts the mime action.”

“Sort of like pigeons.”

“Sort of, but not as messy. Any-way, so the boat you’ll take comes up through here, and along Gambles Hill. The neighborhood is named for the family and their house,” she pointed to a stuccoed neoclassical pile, “and it’s great to walk through because of the wrought iron porches and fences everywhere, and the views of the river from the park are pretty incredible.”

“Can’t be much better than here.”

“But you can see the river and the rapids. Below the hill, also on the canal, is the restored Tredegar Iron Works and the National Civil War Center and Museum. You want to understand what it was all about, you can’t go wrong.”

“On my list.”

He straight away noticed the battlements of an apparent small fort.

“That’s Pratt’s Castle,” she began.

Landscape designer, architect, and photographer William Abbott Pratt constructed his curious house around 1853. Pratt took the last known picture of Edgar Allan Poe when he was in Richmond before he went to Baltimore and never came back. That single association with Poe laid the groundwork for lore telling how the place was inspiration for the House of Usher or other stories, though Poe was long dead when he built the residence. Pratt’s Castle became one of Richmond’s most legendary buildings and during the late 19th century visitors photographed it more than Jefferson’s State Capitol.

“Sometimes you’ll hear it called “Pratt’s Folly,” because of how it’s behind the big Harvie-Gamble House. Like in Europe, a wealthy 19th century estate owner might construct a faux ruin in the gardens—a folly.”

“So can I move in and live there?”

“No, well, you could stay there a few nights, it’s a bed and breakfast, and there’s a small restaurant on the roof. Pricey but the view is awesome.”

Gotz from his perch was impressed by the bosky quiet of Richmond’s streets, its open places and park. Tia related the pride of the city in its “arboreal husbandry,” and she stated this absent any trace of irony. She was, after all, in marketing.

A city landscaping and design office opened around 1910. She further explained how a team of professionals responsible for the health and well-being of the urban forests shares that responsibility with the state, in maintaining The Woods. The extensive James River Parks System, with the only Class V rapids in a U.S. downtown, is the center of sports events and river enjoyment.

“We have bald eagles nesting out there, otters and herons, and even the sturgeon are coming back.”

“Sturgeon?”

“Yup. But not like the big boys from John Smith’s days, and even into the late 19th century, when they were 15 feet long and weighed hundreds of pounds. The farmers markets here used to sell caviar.”

“You know, I’m standing here, and in most other cities -- at least in this country -- I think I’d see lakes of asphalt for parking.”

“Not in Richmond, no.”

“Where’d they all go?”

Tia clasped her hands on the rail. “They didn’t go anywhere because we never really had them. The city has remained from the beginning anti-car, pretty much, especially downtown.”

“I’m sure that’s been a fight.”

“Oh, yeah. Well. Not so much these days – people have kind of gotten used to it.”

Gotz watched as a commuter train slid along near the river, and another raised tram ran toward the distant towers. A few cars moved on the streets, but what he noticed were people walking and asphalt biking paths embedded in the sidewalks.

The silhouettes of clouds slide across the city like parade balloons.

He said something, but the wind took it away, “Say again,” she asked.

“Thinking out loud. I said, ‘Urbane pastoral.’ Conjuring titles and subheads and subjects.”

“’Urbane pastoral. That’s ‘town and country.’”

“Rather reductive! Words have shades and resonances.”

“Oh, I know, but I’m in marketing, which is the communications business, and if we don’t communicate, there’s no business.”

“Town and country sounds far more hokier than this looks.”

“I’ll buy that,” she said.

Tia spoke next about the eastern swale by Gamble’s Hill, Harvie’s Canal Basin, an intermediate staging area for canal boats in their travels. “If your boat that you’re going to take is scheduled to meet another boat coming down from the west, then, what you’ll do is kind of hang out at Harvie’s, and there’s a restaurant and a bar there, and you can watch the other one go and then you start up again.”

“This really will be a slow boat, huh?”

“Which is why people take it. So, right around there, is where the state penitentiary used to be, and now there’s a park, and a memorial wall with the names of the people who died there—naturally or otherwise, including those who were killed by the death penalty.”

“Which you don’t have anymore.”

“Not since the 1930s. It’s probably in your information.”

“Richmond’s got this…thing, right? Museums to slavery, the Civil War and a park about the death penalty. Guilt’s like fertilizer around here.”

“At least we own up to it.”

“But I mean, join a 12-step or something.”

“I’d rather have a park or a museum than go to meetings, Mr. Gotz.”

He chuckled. “Wouldn’t we all.”

The William Mahone Bridge cut across into old town Manchester. Spread along the south bank bluffs a tall grove of upscale hotels. Signs announced Hilton, Marriott, and Omni. Down the hillside a building notable for its contemporary sleekness, “That’s the convention center,” Tia said.

“Looks like it’s about ready to launch into the river.”

“Yeah, some people call it The Mayor’s Yacht.”

“Why’s that?”

"Mayor Carruthers, who really wanted it at that place, and there was a big argument about its cost, and who built it. Typical stuff. But it’s great, and people love it.”

Nearby was one of the strangest buildings Gotz had seen since arriving in Richmond. First, it wasn’t 175 years old, and he recognized the unusual sweep of its lines from photographs. “That’s Richmond Symphony Space?”

“Yes. By Jamgochian, who also designed the airport, among other things.”

“What do you think of it, non-marketing aside.”

“I think that some people say it looks like the sound of an orchestra reaching a crescendo. I know, because I’ve heard him speak, that Mr. Jamgochian was inspired by the James River and the spray and rush of the rapids. Besides that, it’s a very cool place to go into and listen to music. One of the most acoustically perfect rooms in the country. Now, speaking of Mr. Jamgochian, you can’t see it so well from here, but sort of left of the hotels and all that, you can see this kind of stick figure tree building. With its branches coming out. Do you see? There?”

Gotz leaned forward, peering, and yes.

“It’s like, you’re right, some kid’s drawing of a tree.”

“Jamgochian designed that in the mid-1960s and wanted to put it on a piece of property he owned right next to the Garden Club of Virginia’s building – the Kent-Valentine House. Well, the city council wouldn’t approve it, because the preservationists were really opposed to this, even though people said they liked it. A developer saw the proposal photograph in the paper, and when council denied it, he said: build on my land. It was Mr. Jamgochian’s first commission. And it opened Richmond up to modern architecture.”

“Happy ending.”

“He also designed several of the residential high rises, over there, in Parnell and Broad Rock, you can see one – looks like a flying saucer landed on it.”

“Yes. You’re right. Let me guess. Revolving restaurant.”

“Doesn’t revolve, but it’s a restaurant, ‘Top of the Tower,’ and it’s big on prom nights and for weddings. Now, here, running north south, is Belvidere Street,” and she passed her hand over a tumble of brick and frame houses, some two stories, humble and all old. “This is Oregon Hill, so-called, because as you can see, there’s Gamble’s Hill over there, and what was then a huge ravine, and before the roads were put in, when you moved to this side of town, it was like going to the Oregon Territory.”

The community, she explained, sprung up as worker’s housing for the nearby Tredegar Iron Works. At the center, cloaked behind a wall of green and other houses, the Belvidere Plantation of Willam Byrd III, and kept now by the National Park Service. Byrd’s grandfather was given much of the land upon which the father founded the city. Belvidere was built in 1755 though Third Byrd didn’t spend much time in it, as he was off having military adventures and gambling away the inheritance of his far more industrious ancestors. His first wife went nuts and may have killed herself, just as Byrd did in 1777, at his ancestral Westover Plantation, east of the city.

“What trouble was he in that he did that?” Gotz asked.

“Money and scandal.”

“Finest kinds.”

“Except that he got so deep in debt that he auctioned his land – Almost everything you can see from here. And, during the Revolution, he wouldn’t join either side. That didn’t do much for his popularity.”

“I guess so.”

“But the house survived, more-or-less, it’s kind of an on-going archaeological and restoration project. Your slow boat will stop there, and you can go there and to Hollywood Cemetery. And they have a tram that takes you around. Seriously, though, there are presidents, governors, writers, and 18,000 Confederates. It’ll be beautiful this time of year; gorgeous overlooks of the rapids, too.”

“OK, hold up, here. So where’s the Miniborya arts colony that I’m visiting.”

“Oh, that’s way south, central, kind of through there,” Tia squinted an eye and leveled her arm past his face. “Our view here’s not quite that good. That’s deeper into Chesterfield, near Meadowbrook.”

“You say so, good enough for me. Now, that was some other rich guy’s house, yes?”

“Correct. J. Scott Parrish was a builder and contractor and his country estate—compound—was Miniborya—which had its own dairy farm and extensive gardens. When the house and grounds passed out of the family in the 1970s, a trust was set up and now it’s this big-time arts colony.”

“Looking forward to that,” he said.

Tia continued to guide him along where this slow boat would take him, past the trees, to Maymont Park and Dooley Mansion, and the Pump House, “Right about there – you see the Carillon?”

Gotz spotted the Georgian Revival bell tower poking up along the horizon.

“At the Pump House there’s a Canal Museum and restaurant, it’s very nice and with the weather we’re having, you’ll really have a good time. And then it takes you on out to Goochland, and you can stop at Tuckahoe, and there’s a rail shuttle back. Unless you want to take your slow boat to Lynchburg.”

“I’ll pass.”

They walked toward the western banister. Spread before them was the Fan District and the campus of Ginter College with its imposing red tiled roof buildings and grounds by Charles Gillette. On Main Street and across on Belvidere big, mansard buildings with interlocking courtyards interested Gotz; these were some of the student dorms. The writer wondered about the minarets above the park next to Sacred Heart’s dome.

“That’s the Richmond Shrine Auditorium, that looks like a mosque,” Tia said. “The city’s owned it since the 1930s, and it’s a public venue for performances and city functions like graduations. It’s one of our more incredible buildings, and Sacred Heart is stunning. This is Monroe Park, and over there, on the corner of Belvidere, you can see Monrovia, which is the restaurant.”

Gotz nodded toward the handsome stucco building and its big arched end windows.

“The building was a big police and fire alarm station, and now it’s a great restaurant, Amazing Southern comfort food, very good and reasonable, fantastic brunch, but if nothing else, a great place to get a drink. The bar on the first level’s called Monroe’s Tomb, mostly because Monroe is buried in Hollywood Cemetery, down the street. There’s this jazz band, Deadly Nightshade, that plays there on Thursday nights. You’d love the girl who’s their singer. It’s fun; you’ll meet some characters.”

“Sounds like a recommendation, to me.”

Luxe interwar apartment buildings faced the park and behind the Prestwould the massive spire of Pace Memorial Methodist Church displayed to the faithful the countdown to redemption with clock faces in all directions. Spreading across to Broad Street a rich variety of Edwardian splendor and the wondrous creations of Ginter’s architects. Trees obscured a detailed view of varying slants and pitches of rooftops and chimneys and dormers. Off to the west several higher rise buildings broached the horizon.


Notes on images:
1) The drawing of the Gallego Basin is from an electronic copy of Edward King's The Great South, a touring book describing the South in 1873-1874. The James Wells Champney illustrations show some of the views including this of the Great Basin. Now covered over by parking lots, the James Center and the Omni Hotel, the basin was first filled in for a railyard. During excavations in the 1980s, canal researchers unearthed from the muck more than 50 portions of canal boats and other river craft. In Tia's Richmond, Gallego Plaza is a major public space ringed by robust architectural elements.
2) Pratt's Castle is from vintagedesigns.com. Of the numerous wreckerball atrocities committed in Richmond during the past one hundred years, this loss is in the top five. The Ethyl Corporation (now NewMarket) pulled it down in 1958 after preservationists failed to get clemency for the structure. There is today no marker, no indication that it ever stood on Gamble's Hill.
3) "Richmond Convention Center" was inspired by the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, Pa. Image via Christinedavisconsultants.com. Richmond in the early 1980s could've done something like this before the fateful decision to brutalize the city to save it.

The Shows Go On:
Firehouse, Sol Cooper, Library of Virginia
The Puzzling Harry Kollatz: "No Resist'ance" by Amie Oliver, conte crayon, acrylic, wood puzzle. Image by Amie O.
Yesterday night I attended the opening performance of the Firehouse Theatre Project's Festival of New American Plays, which you can read about here. Thank you Style Weekly and Mary Burruss. Go theater art!

These are staged readings of two plays chosen from some 200 submissions to the Firehouse from a nationwide call for entries. I was one of several readers who this summer sussed through piles of these playscripts-- I wasn't fortunate to have read either of the two up for public view this weekend. Here, audiences become critics during after-show talk backs with the directors and performers. For previous years, we've had the playwrights available, too, but for various reasons that vital part didn't work out this time. [The Firehouse wants and needs an underwriting sponsor for this signature event, this way the playwrights could be brought in without any loss to their wallet or time -- anyone out there listening?]

Staged readings can be some of the more intriguing theater you'll experience. When done well what you're really seeing is an open rehearsal. Actors have scripts in hands (though this group was on the verge of not needing them) and there is minimal movement and suggested sets and props. What we're focusing on is the text and the meanings. You are making discoveries in the work often at the same time as the performers.

First up was Richard Willett's Tiny Bubbles. The ebullient title doesn't convey the underlying seriousness in this snap crackle pop piece. I enjoyed the characters and the wit of the writing. In brief, two gay roommates, one an imbiber of gin martinis and the other trying to get off the sauce. But that's just the surface of a piece that examines the delusions and illusions we keep in order to function; the difficulty of altering personal behavior and the challenge confronted by actual change. Plus, there's loads of movie trivia and though I got bellylaughs out of some of the inside cinema references, a few in the under-40 audience received the essence of the meaning, but not the intention. Such is the plesaure and frustration of ....getting old --and storing up a lifetime of arcane popular culture knowledge.

The cast was well-directed by Christopher Shorr, who is no stranger to these sorts of things, and he chose his actors well. The actors are Kirk Morton, known to Swift Creek Mill Playhouse and Triangle Players audiences, who became the gin-swilling Danny McKenna; Shon Stacy, also a Triangle alum, who is Danny's roomie Kirk Wesson; Jeanie Rule (active here, and last seen on the Firehouse stage in the out-of-New York try-out of Bill C. Davis' Austin's Bridge) who made a convincing Reverend Mother in a recurring dream of Danny's; and Abigail, played with delight and poignancy by Jen Hines-Hall, of whom I hope to see more; and Adam Mincks who portrayed three roles including a hip Rat Pack-like bartender in another one of Danny's repeating visions.

Despite the raw January weather, there was a good crowd--and an engaged one--and about half stayed for the talk back following. A good time. Warning: if you're trying to curb your martinis, either do or do not see this show. You'll either want one soon as possible, or not ever again.

Jamgochian, Interrupted

For the billion-eyed audience that got left on a cliff-hanger regarding the Neverbuilt Virginia exhibit, I continue. Image above is of Haigh Jamgochian's proposed and never constructed Spiral Tower, first for downtown Richmond where this structure would've been a landmark building the likes of which the skyline here doesn't possess, then later for Chippenham Parkway and Jahnke Road, which would've been interesting, too. Amie snagged this picture.

We left off with the also unbuilt Treehouse apartments or condos, that led to the Markel Building. Jamgochian's first mushroom-style achitectural proposal, designed with the idea that the Markel brothers were willing to write a check of with six figures, remains a wonderful design. Thing was, as often happens in architecture, the clients chose instead to back off their first price--perhaps they got skittish--and within weeks Hike had to reconfigure the entire thing.

The image here is from CoredesatChikai's photos.

He says he was inspired by a baked potato wrapped in aluminum foil that was served to him at an architect's conference at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. I can imagine his thoughts soaring as the steam rose. His radical re-realization gave to Richmond the Birthday Cake/Jiffy Pop/Flintstones-Jetsons/UFO Markel Building, now the Enterprise Center, and landmarked by Henrico County.


[Amie and I attended the landmarking event and it was like a scene out of Fellini; including a Marine color guard with bagpipes marching out of a mist and over the hillside and dale in front of the building, and because a slight mist had started, black umbrellas popped up; and Jamgochian sharing the podium with the surviving engineers and electricians who assisted him in the construction of his remarkable building]

Hike used a giant role of aluminum foil mounted on a flatbed truck to wrap his building and, he told me some years ago, with a 43 cents of nails bought from Pleasant's Hardware, bashed the metal and hammered the stuff into place. Hike says this was to give it greater tensile strength; but the years since 1966 have added other dents and holes, some patched with cartoon-like bandaids.

The building sits upon boulder-textured concrete stilts--again taking into consideration Jordan's Branch Creek that flooded in heavy rain. Before the Markel was hemmed in by lesser buildings--allowed to lax zoning--the building sat in green field as though interstellar pilots chose to land there. The curving interior corridors remind me of those depicted in the

The Markel was completed the year both Star Trek and Mission: Impossible premiered, and Lost In Space (whose Jupiter II the Markel bears passing resemblance) was already on. This was at the height of UFO sightings and media attention to space exploration. James Bond and Matt Helm were also popular film protagonists. The building has always looked to me like the headquarters either of the secret good-buy espionage agents, or the mad scientist who wants to take over the world, both popular themes in Cold War/Space Race period culture.

Jamgochian enjoyed international publicity following the Markel building, then one day his phone rang and on the other end was Howard Hughes. Not the multi-millionaire, but a Richmond used car king who fashioned himself as "Mad Mad Dapper Dan" and hawked his wares using the catch-phrase, "I'd give'em away but my wife won't let me." He was fastidious about his appearance and possessed a great head of slick black hair that during his life went from dark to grey, but like Gibraltar, never changed. Growing up in Richmond his visage regarded me from city buses and I thought he looked like cross between Tennessee Ernie Ford and Ernie Kovacs. He also enjoyed living large and playing poker.

Once Hike recovered from the shock of his non-call from the un-Howard Hughes, the car dealer said he wanted something "out of this world" for his wife Ruby and their three daughters. The architect spoke before he thought, replying, "How about like the Gemini shot, something in space?" Dapper loved the idea--but now Hike had to deliver. What he came up with for Cherokee Road, and a splendid vista of the river, was the Half Moon House.

Dapper's clientele tended toward the... genteel, and, so I was told by some old time Richmonders at the Library of Virginia opening, he would sell cars and also reposses them--garnering a certain enmity from former patrons. His house for that reason was set way off the road without trees around, because he wanted clear lines of sight. The architect sheathed the house in crumpled copper that would with years of oxidation turn green like moss on river rocks.

The startling shape refers also to car fins and cat eye signal lights. The roof overhanging the river-facing glass wall, as critic Ed Slipek Jr. pointed out, resembled the smile of a persuasive used car salesman. It could also be interpreted as the front grille of one of those bi, chrome-covered automotive behemoths that cheap gas and U.S. steel made possible. Jamgochian's design afforded privacy from the outside and for the kidney-shaped pool on a step-down terrace.

The house seemed larger than its 3,834 square feet and 11 rooms.

A large open entertaining area, fronting the river and pool, comprised part of the ultimate Spage Age Bachelor’s Pad, perhaps more hip than Dapper ever could've been. In old pictures, one can almost hear the martini glasses clinking and Dean Martin on the Zenith console.

Alas, however, the Half Moon has gone into full eclipse. About two years ago, following deliberate demolition by neglect, Chesterfield County allowed this singular house to be destroyed and replaced by someone's ego project.

This image, (and others I'll put up soon) was taken a few months before the Half Moon was obliterated. Here's terrace, with sweeping roof overhang, windows, and steps leading to the pool. Then, the damaged interior, stripped of its sleek neo-retro appointments, and the terrace with the pool.



Dapper got such a great view of the river because of his having ripped out a screen of trees. A-hem. At least he didn't build some brick-facaded Colonial Revival or Tuderbethan scheit on steroids that hurts the eyes to look at because the "designers" are trying to please clients who want the house to resemble another authentic structure that is older and added onto. They say imiatation is flattery, but in terms of architecture around Richmond, it's instead proved fatuous. What we have girding the city along the shoals of the cul-de-sac archipelagoes are, to borrow a phrase from our novelist James Branch Cabell, perjuries against architecture.

One of the worst things to happen to Richmond's built environment was the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, 50 miles east; and crass interpretations of Modernism. One infected the sensibilities of the city so that those of means, and those who wanted to live and work in buildings that resembled the class a few rungs above, decided to imulate Williamsburg's restored taverns and public buildings.

Richmond and its vicinity thus has strip malls anchored by stores that look like an oversized Capitol Building and office parks with too-big versions of the Wythe House and the Raleigh Tavern. Richmond rejected the contemporary but also embraced the concept in the characteristic muddle-headed manner for which the city is known. These recreations of the Colonial era are post modern tributes; they aren't the things, but about the things they are supposed to represent, and therefore mean nothing except, well, comfort of recognition as opposed to the shock of the new.

One of the greatest examples of this in midtown is the giant replica of the Williamsburg Inn that became the Ethyl neé NewMarket Corporation's international headquarters.


The building was alledged to have been built to honor the Benjamin Latrobe-inspired mansion built for Colonel Robert Gamble, the Grey Castle [see Historic Virginia Homes and Churches by Robert Alexander Lancaster, image, via Google Books] This insult added to the injury of the demolition of the astonishing Pratt's Castle, which next to the State Capitol, was perhaps the most photographed piece of architecture in Richmond and outlived the Gamble house by several decades.

Pratt's, built around 1853 by an eccentric photographer/architect/landscape designer, had undergone some depredations, fire being one, but could've been rescued. Preservationist urging for the uniques building's salvation got the blunt response of: you want the place so bad, you ante up for the removal to somewhere else. This is a building, by the way, from the tower of which the burnt district of Richmond was recorded by photographic panorama in April 1865.

Ethyl stated there'd be an historic marker and note made of the castle's presence/absence, but this the firm failed to accomplish. Ethyl was foremost in preserving the vestiges of Tredegar Iron Works, though the company also filled in the Intermediate Turning Basin of the James River Kanawha Canal, and held up renovations of the canal while down stream Reynolds Metals restored the few locks adjoining its property.

Fact is, having given tours of the city, out of town visitors think Ethyl's big white house is the Governor's Mansion or the Capitol. May as well.

During the unfortunate 1960s-1970s came Modernism and the plans to make Richmond Brasilia-on-the-James. The Library of Viriginia exhibit gives us glimpses of the utter horrors planned for the Capitol, including moving the entire seat of government to near western Henrico County. You just have to see it to believe. Out of this wrong headed urban renewal mishigas came our waffle iron of a City Hall, the Coliseum and the wind-swept plaza around the perimeter, and the Project One office building.

Jamgochian offered his first Markel Building idea for a new City Hall in 1969, thinking the undulant, open mushroom could be used as the formal and reception areas, with a tower behind, like the United Nations Secretariat. That went nowhere, either.

After the Half Moon House came no second act for Jamgochian. I did the first profile of him in years in the mid-1990s and included him and the Markel in a play, The Persistence of Memory, about the 1966 attempt to place a Salvador Dalí statue on Monument Avenue. A that time, traffic engineers wanted to shunt the statues aside, and make the avenue four lanes. Another bullet dodged.

So it was wonderful to see Hike, still with a full head of white hair, though in a wheelchair and recuperating from recent surgery. He still flirts with women and gets a gleam in his eye talking about his various ideas. When I asked him about the spiral building's unique fire escapes--tubes wrapped around the building--and how people would stop at the bottom he explained that the tubes took a dip, like a child's water slide, that would ease the acceleration. "You'd just walk out," he said, grinning. Hike received bad burns in a house fire years ago and this made him quite conscious of getting trapped in a high rise. [Amie O. image from exhibit]



I speculated to one of those at the opening of the exhibition that wherever the Spiral Tower had been built in Richmond, that today there'd be ultimate sports competitions for charity to see who could gain the greatest acceleration when sliding through the escape tunnels. I could see the posters in my head: "DO THE TUBE." The demonstration would show up on late night news cast clips. There'd be regular winners who'd need to figure out ways to go faster. And they'd interview Hike, surrounded by pretty girls in their Tube Speed Suits and he'd be smiling, and laughing, delighted.

Art, Architecture and Assorted

The artists of Lost and Found at Sol Cooper in Petersburg, Va., (l to r), Susann Whittier; Aimee Joyaux; Amie Oliver; Kate Duffy and Kathryn Purvis.

Greetings, Interwebs denizens. I want to direct you to these exhibitions and events that, if you are within the range of my voice, you are duty bound, nay, compelled to attend by a geas now given you through electrical-chemical means. You can thank James Branch Cabell for laying on me the geas of geas.

The Lost and Found exhibit at the Sol Cooper Gallery in Petersburg, Va., that you can see and read about here and here. My partner-in-art-for-life Amie Oliver has work in this show by five women artists in this fine new space, 306 N. Sycamore St. This is exquisite, triumphant, emotional and furtive work derived from found objects. You must see this show. And you will. Because having read this, you got a geas whammy laid on you.

You also must see Never Built Virginia at the Library of Virginia, 800 E. Broad St..



And, beginning tomorrow at 7:30, at the Firehouse Theater, 1609 W. Broad St., the Sixth Festival of New American Plays. The theater of now means you. Come out and see staged readings of two finalists from a nationwide contribution of works. See both, cast your vote, and on Sunday the winner is revealed.

I'll address all three in this first of two posts.

First, to the Library of Virginia, 800 E. Broad St., and the thought-provoking Never Built Virginia presentation of architectural drawings, plans and models of structures that weren't constructed. The reasons are varied: commissioning groups for whatever reason or another went with other designs, money fell through, or, in some cases, clearer heads prevailed. The show is up through May 31. You live or work in Richmond, no excuses are valid aside from kidnapping or commitment to an iron lung.

There is a particular (and peculiar) Richmond angle to this. A story. Architect Haigh Jamgochian--of whom more to come--was in the 1970s part of a competition to create the Unitarian Church on Blandford Avenue. His design involved imaginative cantileverage that made the structure seem lighter-than-air. During his conversation with the church's building committee Jamgochian wore somewhat tight pants of the time. He made what he thought was a good pitch and days then weeks went by and nothing. He rung up a friend of his in the congregation to ask what was going on with the Unitarians and the reply was, "They liked your building ideas, Hike, but you weren't wearing a belt."

That, billion-eyed audience, is about all you need to know about how buildings arose during the latter 20th century in Richmond, Virginia. Perhaps, this is the way it has always been.

I've noted elsewhere on this blog that a nighttime stroll along Mayo's Bridge persuaded me that the city would've been better served in terms of aesthetics had not the Commission of Architectural Review allowed any high rise constructions after about 1970. Or if by some magic wand fiat, none would've gone up on Main Street but rather on Broad, after about 1900. Indeed, that so many buildings went up during the 1910s that gave permission for the many that followed is a predicament of the city's downtown aesthetic. A cultural crime was committeed when structures obscured Thomas Jefferson's Capitol building. We have a city now lorded over by plastic and glass ziggurats for lawyers, insurance agents and the machinery of state and federal government -- little of which has anything to do with Jefferson's ideals (though a case could be made that Jefferson himself couldn't live up to Jefferson's ideals...another discussion for another post).



I'd rather we have have nothing more than seven stories in the immediate center city, and a ban on motor vehicles, making Richmond a more humane place. The most notable taller buildings in center Richmond were built prior to the 1930s, or by Minoru Yamasaki, who created the Federal Reserve Bank buildng here in 1977 as a warm up for the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. [Image via houstonarchitecure.info]

Otherwise, the skyline of Richmond is a mundane display of monuments to the lowest bidder combind with poor judgment. Not a single building is breathtaking, beautiful or bold. They are representations of architects trying to please cheap clients who don't know a damn thing about art or architecure, and furthermore, didn't give a fig.


This image, via Rvablogs, shows my fair city looking like...almost anyplace else. The distinguishing differences are the arches of Mayo's Bridge at the far right, and the bosky James River isles. Just one of those aspects was built by man, and that part got finished in 1913.

A dooming to the mundane need not have been.

Hike's Highrises


Haigh Jamgochian (b. August 29, 1924) is the son of Armenian immigrants who while serving in the Marines during World War II devised a way to slap down barbed wire and a Plexiglass sheet to trace the courses on wall-mounted shipboard maps. His parents owned a restaurant on Robinson Street for which he designed cantilevered tables and chairs that made cleaning under them easier, such as you see in fast food restaurants everywhere today. He never got patents on any of these things; he made them as necessity arose.

His first building, he once told me, accommodated his rooster pet, Tuff Row. The house involved bridges where upon food could be placed and Tuff Row could take his exercise, too. Jamgochian attended Dartmouth and Virginia Tech and, in his youth, seemed poised to make his mark in the world. He did, in his way, but he was living in Richmond.


The Markel Building, Haigh Jamgochian, 1966. From Martin Bromirski.

One building stands in this world as designed by Jamgochian, and that's a near accident. The twin brothers who ran what is now an international high risk insurance firm first heard of Jamgochian because of a project that failed.

Jamgohian's rendering for the "Tree House," intended for Franklin Street
around 1964.

The Markels wanted a signature building and they thought they'd found their man. Jamgochian had undegone a public battle to build the partment building pictured above amid the historic antebellum buildngs on Franklin Street. The city voted him down. Jamgochian's sister Vicky to this day expresses disdain for the city's then-and first-female mayor, Eleanor Sheppard, who said if he did it there, then everyone would want to; and the woman who lived across the street who claimed she was disturbed by the design as the branches seemed to her like accusatory fingers pointing at her.

Hike told me that he owned this narrow piece of land where an ordinary brownstone sat (and is there today). He was proud of his design of pneumatic tubes for mail delivery and how he'd be able to go to the bottom and collect his rent checks. What he'd not counted on was that his proposed building would've gone next to the Kent-Valentine House, headquarters then and now of the Garden Club of Virginia.

Perhaps the building might've been better, say, on the city's riverfront, where tenants would've paid high dollars to live in units that allowed total views. But Jamgochian didn't own land there. Today, a developer could take a place in history by reviving the structure for placement along the James. God knows such a dramatic building would look better than the uninpsired stuff that's gone up along both river banks the past 30 years. Notable exceptions are the former James River Corporation offices below the bluffs of Hollywood Cemetery, and the Virginia Eye Institute -- but that jaunty nautical style building is out by the Huguenot Bridge and beyond the scope of this discussion.

The publicity attained by Jamgochian's effort to erect the "Tree House" attracted the Markels who wanted to give the Richmond architect his dream project. The Library of Virginia exhibit includes a gorgeous model of his first, all-expenses-paid plan. The site was just west of Willow Lawn, in a developing close-in section of Henrico County. The small property was on marshy land fed by Jordan's Branch Creek. Inspired by the terrain, Jamgochian designed a mushroom style building with four pods centered around a courtyard, with the creek running through the middle. This was "green" before the color was part of our political-environmental vocabulary.

When I asked him if there wouldn't have been humidity issues he gave a wry smile, "All buildings have humidity. And all buildings leak."

Part II: The Flinstone/Jetsons/Birthday Cake/Jiffy Pop Building; The Half Moon and then...



Susann Whittier's version of a wing back chair..."Ascension," part of Lost & Found at Sol Coooper...image by Amie Oliver


Hope members of the billion-eyed audience may have similar wings attached who must be out in the wintry mix descending on us. Travel safe and don't forget your mittens.