Richmond's Civic Markers III: Fountains as a symbol of the Civic Good

"Consuls, emperors, and popes, the great men of every age, have found no better way of immortalizing their memories than by the shifting, indestructible, ever new, yet unchanging, upgush and downfall of water. They have written their names in that unstable element, and proved it a more durable record than brass or marble."

Hawthorne, The Marble Faun, 1860

 [Fountains] are sited throughout [Pompeii], all very similar to one another and none very elaborate. While clearly more utilitarian than decorative in form, their siting is a different matter, for as we have seen, they so clearly contribute to the general urban structure that we must conclude that their placement took more into consideration than the utilitarian demands of the hydraulic engineers.   

                                         C.W. Westfall, Learning From Pompeii, 1998.



Richard Worsham, Proposed fountain for 17th St Market

Springs and fountains can be placed in a distinct category of civic amenity, but one that merges with the subset of monuments. Like monuments, fountains have been used to mark nodes along significant urban routes.

From a purely functional perspective, Richmonders, from the earliest date, relied on springs and public wells for water. As the nineteenth century passed, Richmond joined other traditional cities in the intentional use of water to mark out the public realm and to reinforce the city’s relationship with a tamed and ordered nature, while at the same time providing access to element required for life by both people and animals.  

The city's access to water began at a very basic level. Public wells at street corners and a spring located south of Main Street sufficed for the town’s water supply in the eighteenth century. By 1808, however, the city, following national trends, used ingenuity to improve the purity and volume of the supply. Water was now conveyed in wooden pipes to the market at Seventeenth Street from a spring near Libby Hill. The resulting terminal fountain at the City Market must have been a familiar and significant destination for farmers, patrons, stall-holders, and their thirsty draft animals, not to mention the residents of all sorts that relied on that and similar public sources of water placed throughout the town.  

Richmond's City Hall, site of a public well in the early nineteenth century.

The city was constantly expanding and improving its rudimentary water system. As technologies became accessible, the city applied them to the acquisition of addition supplies of water for drinking and fire prevention. In 1816, the common hall (city council) agreed to sink a well in Broad Street near the new Courthouse, which was located at the site of the current Old City Hall [Common Hall, 27 May 1816].

By 1830, Richmond’s water supply "consisted of public wells at the street corners and several public hydrants with water conveyed in wooden pipes from a spring near Chimborazo Hill and from one in the Capitol Square” [Christian, 1912, 115]. In 1827, the Common Hall had issued an order forbidding tampering with the city’s public water supply, including wells and pumps along H Street (Broad Street) installed at the city’s expense and the wooden pipes, placed by “sundry liberal and deserving inhabitants. . . [who] have at their own expense, placed wooden pipes through which water is conveyed from the Basin of the Canal, through the Main Street of the said City as far as Shockoe Creek, and have erected fountains or jets in different parts of the said pipes, whereby many Citizens are supplied with water, and in case of Fire in that part of the city, great advantages may be experienced from the water supplied at the said Fountains or Pumps. . . .” [Ordinance for keeping in repair the Fountains in the Main Street of the city of Richmond, 16 Nov. 1827].   

In 1829, the City proposed an expanded "watering" of D and E streets (Cary and Main) from the Basin at 11th Street to Shockoe Creek, using iron pipes, at a cost of $5,631.64 [Common Hall, 28 May 1829].  A pump on Fourteenth Street was also proposed for use by fire companies. In the same year, Nicholas Mills ceded to the City a twenty-five foot-wide street through his lot from 7th to 8th street, giving access to a tract containing Gibson’s Spring, guaranteeing "open access to the said Spring . . . reserved for public purposes” [Common Hall, 8 June 1829].

A new system was opened in 1832, supplied by a water-powered pump with a capacity of 400,000 gallons of poorly filtered canal water per day. This system served to fill a 4,000,000 gallon reservoir. Water was distributed through twelve miles of pipe to both public and private locations. The first private hydrant was in the yard of Corbin Warwick on Grace Street between Fifth and Sixth Streets [Christian 1912, 115]. 


Detail from 1865 view of Castle Thunder showing an iron hydrant on the NE corner of
18th and Cary Streets. The hydrant was detailed like a fluted Doric column.

In ancient times, the provision of water in cities had been delivered at regularly placed urban nodes. From Pompeii to Paris, water outlets minimally required for the civic good have been harnessed to the larger urban project, underlining, by their sensory contributions, the significance of selected urban intersections and plazas. In Richmond, as elsewhere in the region, fountains or basins were provided at major entry points to the city for the watering of draft animals and herds. Hydrants were found at certain street corners for use in filling pitchers, tubs, and fighting fires.  

The value and provision of water to city populations was one of the many topics that exercised the minds of early-nineteenth-century planners. In thinking about public water supplies, educated persons as a matter of course compared their plans to improve hygiene with the public fountains and baths of ancient Rome. They also tried to effect the most scientific and economical provision of water for the public. 

Latrobe's Center Square Pump House, Philadelphia (1799-1801)

Benjamin Henry Latrobe, an English architect who began his American career in Richmond, was an advocate of public waterworks in Philadelphia, where outbreaks of disease had decimated the city. Such epidemics were sometimes associated with impurities in the water supply. Latrobe completed Philadelphia's public water system in 1801. In postscripts to his proposal for the waterworks, dealing with fountains and public baths, Latrobe displayed his characteristic interest in the effects of and correction of local climatic conditions and his studied opinion that the value of water justified the imitation by Americans of the indulgent practices of despotic European countries (by which he meant imperial Rome). 

According to one study, Latrobe asserted that "the fountains, which would supply the poor of the city with free water, would also provide the 'only means of cooling the air.' Air cooled by the agitation of water was, Latrobe asserted, “of the purest kind.' While it is most likely that Latrobe was referring to physical purity (here significant because miasmatic theory charged impure air as a source of disease), the word recalls a classical climactic tradition, which emphasized air as the medium which communicated the specificities of the environment to the human body" [Jennifer Y. Chuong "Art is a Hardy Plant": Benjamin Henry Latrobe and the Cultivation of a Transitional Aesthetics, Thesis, Cornell University) 2007].

Godefroys' landscape st the Capitol Square included cascades that occuied the gullies
to each side of the Capitol [Mijacah Bates, Map of Richmond, 1832].

One of the most significant ornamental uses of water were the cascades provided in the early nineteenth century by Maximilian Godefroy in the place of the former spring-fed ravines that flanked the Capitol. These aided in the transformation of a disordered landscape into the city’s first ornamental park, a suitable setting for its earliest monumental public sculpture. Later in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century the language of fountains became more elaborate and the functional fountain was joined by the purely ornamental. When John Notman redesigned the square in 1850, he added tiered fountains at the bottom of each of the two dells that took the place of the former ravines. 

1850 Capitol Square Fountain seen in 1960 [RTD, Valentine].

The city developed as part of its amenities a series of artesian springs in parks and green belts on the city’s periphery for public use. These also had a significant ornamental role, using water as a powerful symbol of the public good, organized and given form by the city. The water works at Byrd Park were developed in the 1880s, and the significance of the huge reservoir was later dramatized by a miniature cascade placed at the southern end of the great urban cross-axis of the Boulevard.    



Cascade at the Southern end of the Boulevard axis. The fountain represents the
public water supply housed in the large reservoir just behind.  

Monroe Park Fountain, Post Card, c 1905
[VCU Special Collections]

When Monroe Park was first landscaped in 1872, its center was marked by a naturalistic fountain made in the form of a pyramid of rocks, the city’s first ornamental fountain outside Capitol Square. It was later replaced by the current iron tazzo or tiered fountain. This fountain was used for a wading pool during periods of intense summer heat. The Monroe Park fountain is still fed directly from the city’s public water supply. Like most of Rome’s fountains, the fountain in Monroe Park contains clean, living, water. Current plans for the revitalization of Monroe Park call for it to be replumbed with a recirculating fountain, as if the supply of water in the James River, used to water all the lawns of Richmond, including the automatic sprinklers in the park, was too precious to trickle from the fountain’s graduated bowls.  

Fountain erected in Byrd Park by the Women's Christian
Temperance Union as a memorial to the work of the WCTU and a
 successful crusade in Ohio in 1873, the beginning of the
movement that led to the 18th Amendment banning of the sale
of alcohol in 1919.

Drinking fountains were a favorite civic gesture of temperance societies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Richmond's temperance fountain, located near the reservoir, provided drinking water to visitors in Byrd Park and was supplied with a mounting block for children. It takes the form of an elegant Roman wall fountain. The upright tablet is supported by carved granite volutes. The basin is edged by an ornamental molding resembling a wreath of bound reeds suggesting the resolution and unity of the uncompromising band of donors.  The inscription reads: "This fountain is erected by the Women's Christian Temperence Union of Richmond and Henrico County and their friends in Memory of the Crusaders of Hillsborough who went out December 19th 1873 with the weapons of prayer and faith in God to overthrow the liquor traffic."

Fountain at the Intersection of Brook Turnpike with West Broad Street [Shorpy]. The fountain has
dog water basins at the bottom. It still serves the police horses at a
location behind the Bill "Bojangles" Robinson statue on Brook Turnpike.  

Capt. Charles S. Morgan gave this marble fountain to serve draft horses at the
center of the city's tobacco warehouse district. It is inscribed
"In Memory of One Who Loved Animals." 

The fountains that provided water to animals entering the city included an ornate cast iron one, now gone, in Manchester and the plain stone structure that distributed water to both large and small animals at the point where Brook Turnpike entered Broad Street. It was later re-located to a site now behind the Bojangles Robinson statue where it serves police horses with fresh water. A third fountain for horses and oxen, made of marble, still stands at the center of the Shockoe Slip in 1905, where tobacco was deposited in one of the city's huge warehouses. Its setting has been marred in recent years by unnecessary foundation planting.


The Monroe Park fountain was followed by similar structures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including a one depicting a heron in front of the Governor’s Mansion (unfortunately replaced with a very conventional iron one during the Robb administration).  

Wayside Spring, Forest Hills Park
[https://foursquare.com/v/wayside-spring/4c73a7667121a1cda29a65d1]

Richmond residents who preferred spring water to the municipal water supply or didn't have water piped to their houses could get water that welled from the ground in artesian springs that were opened and maintained in parks around the city. These included Byrd Park, Wayside Spring in Forest Hills Park, Fonticello Park (now Carter Jones Park), where the spring has been modernized and still flows. A spring also flowed into a concrete trough along the side of Richmond Henrico Turnpike in Barton Heights. The spring water, which once poured through three lion's heads, is no longer running.

Kanawha Plaza Fountain, located as part of a plaza designed by Robert
Zion of Zion & Breen, completed in 1980

More recent fountains, such as those at the Kanawha Plaza at the James Center, installed during urban improvement projects in the mid-twentieth century, replace the conventional allegory of nature projected by earlier fountains with a literalism that fails to convince the viewer of either its natural origins or its cleanliness. 

Libby Hill Fountain, 1990s.

In contrast, the conventional iron tazzo (tiered) fountains added in recent years on Libby Hill have a much less focused connection with water as a carrier of civic meaning. They serve merely as park design amenities. These amenities (examples of the widespread rethinking of traditional fountains as superfluous “water features”) which, while they signal renewed pride in the park’s grounds and an improved level of upkeep, largely fail as markers of the public good. Their placement and form, like their recirculating contents, are inadequately related to the nature and history of the site.  

 

Richmond Theater Part One- "An Edifice Devoted to the Tragic and Comic Muses:" the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

The ‘old Theatre near the Capital’…was so far old, that the walls were well browned by time, and the shutters to the windows of a pleasant neutral tint between rust and dust colored… Within, the play-house presented a somewhat more attractive appearance. There was ‘box,’ ‘pit,’ and ‘gallery,’ as in our day; and the relative prices were arranged in much the same manner.

                                — John Esten Cooke, 1854



Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London, 1813

Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London,

The ancient building type known as the theater is, in the most general sense, where the community gathers to remember the great deeds of the past and to imagine the future. From the Renaissance to the early twentieth century theatres incorporated tightly curving plans and raked stages derived from what was known of the ancient theaters of the Greeks and Romans. This tight arrangement allowed each theater-goer present not only to enjoy the spectacle of an opera or play, but to participate in the collective experience of a gathered company. The Renaissance interpreted the form and content of classical drama in ways that continue to affect theater design today, basing their work on surviving texts and the accessible physical fabric of actual theaters.

The theaters of the continental Renaissance had virtually no exterior presence, since they served the court and were located within the princely palace. As drama became democratized in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the theater emerged from the palace to take its place as a civic building, equipped for this role with the elements of the classical orders.

On the interior, the intention was not to produce a realistic illusion, but instead, through sumptuous music and art to transform and inform the vision of an entire community. American theaters by the mid-nineteenth-century were well equipped, spacious, and architecturally sophisticated. Never simply a place of amusement, theater managers followed a conventional program incorporating in the same evening popular entertainment and dramatic works that stimulated the moral imagination. In order to take its place in the civic order, the theater was given a prominent location and a high level of architectural finish, often including a fully articulated architectural order.

Background

Most American theaters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like their European models, were urban buildings in which the height of the stage and auditorium were concealed behind a classical streetfront. While stages tended to be very deep, they did not have tall fly lofts. Lobbies were often minimal in size and scale. Demands associated with the development of the dramatic art and the expansion of building amenities caused a gradual bloating of the structure housing the theater, which continues to this day. The nineteenth-century impulse to present theaters and other buildings as singular temple-form structures became problematic as the secondary features of the theater form, such as the fly loft and lobby, expanded.

The interiors of many of the nation’s most sophisticated nineteenth-century theatres were inspired by London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. This famous building, as rebuilt in 1812, utilized the baroque horseshoe theater or opera house plan, with several tiers of boxes and sloping seats arranged in a horseshoe shape around a central floor or pit.

St. Charles Theater, New Orleans of 1843 shows the familiar form derived from the Theatre Royal, Drury lane.

Theater in Early Virginia

The first documented theater in British North America stood on the east side of the Palace Green in Williamsburg. It was built between 1716 and 1718 and was used for amateur and student plays until it was sold to serve as a city court building. It was replaced by a new structure just beyond the eastern end of town in 1751. This new theater was built for the Murray-Kean Company, a troop of actors whose first performance in Williamsburg was of Shakespeare’s Richard III. A new group of actors, probably the first professional theater troop in the colonies, arrived in Williamsburg in 1752. The London Company of Comedians, managed by Lewis Hallam, arrived in the colony and purchased and improved Williamsburg's theater building. After a season of plays, including the Merchant of Venice and the Anatomist, or Sham Doctor, the troop departed. Soon after the theater was seized to satisfy Hallam’s debts and converted into a house. The troop returned under different management in 1760 and built a new theater, used sporadically by the London Company and others over the following twelve years. The theater or “playhouse” became a popular social center and was patronized by colonial leaders like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.  There is no evidence that the theater was used after 1772 and by 1780 it had been demolished.

Study Model of The Old Theater, Williamsburg, from http://research.history.org/vw1776/revcity/





Archeology at the site of the 1752 theater shows it to have been an earthfast frame structure measuring about 72 feet in length and 44 feet in width and built of posts spaced about eight feet apart. Traces of a brick foundation at the west end indicated some sort of brick entrance. A large excavation at the center, bounded by a low brick wall near the center of the building, would have been the “pit”  which held much of the theater’s audience. The stage took up approximately half of the theater’s volume,

According to Lisa E. Fischer, whose "Douglass-Hallam Theater: Excavation of an Eighteenth-Century Playhouse," produced for Colonial Williamsburg, documented the early theater,

These itinerant companies developed a touring circuit and, whenever possible, presented their plays in actual theater buildings, sometimes even constructing their own prior to their first scheduled performances in a city. Typical Colonial theaters were relatively large structures, measuring at least 70′x30′, and resembled provincial theaters found in England at the time. The interior of the theater would have exhibited a large stage area on one end, possibly taking up as much as half of the building. An unusual characteristic of eighteenth-century stages was that they were commonly lined with a set of iron spikes designed to discourage audience members from getting onto the stage to disrupt the performance. The seating within the theater was divided into three sections. In front of the stage, sunk below the ground would have been the pit, crammed with benches. The most expensive seating was in the boxes around the sides and back of the theater. The cheapest seating was in the gallery located around the theater above the boxes. . . .An evening at the theater in the eighteenth century would have consisted of two plays, a longer opening play and a shorter and lighter concluding one, and possibly several entr’actes.                                   

Virginians were never long without access to theatrical performances.  A single thread of theatrical endeavor was nearly continuous with the colony’s urban history, beginning in 1718 and corresponding closely to the annual gathering of leaders associated with the legislative function. Theater was, however, temporarily discouraged by the authorities as frivolous during the Revolutionary War.

Theater in Early and Antebellum Richmond

The capital was moved to Richmond in 1779.  Clearly, one of the essential urban building types that moved with the capital to Richmond was the theater, direct heir of its predecessors in Williamsburg. Indeed, the second act of the “Common Council” of the newly formed City of Richmond at its meeting on July 3, 1782 was to require that Mr. Ryan, the theatre manager, account for the number of performances “since the last settlement” and pay the required tax. The first theater building for which there is a record stood on Main Street near the market. This “old theater” was mentioned in 1788 [Christian, 1912]. 

A large frame school building was built in 1785 on the “Academy Square,” in “Turpin’s Addition” on the eastern slope of Shockoe Hill. It faced west, fronting on Twelfth Street. After the academy failed to prosper, the building, known as the “New Theatre,” was leased to Hallam and Henry, a successor to the English company that had previously put on plays in Williamsburg.  According to early historian Samuel Mordecai, Hallam and Henry converted the Academy into a theater, "and here the tragic and the comic muses first bestowed their tears and smiles — in an edifice devoted to them — on a Richmond audience." The Beggars’ Opera was performed in 1787.  This building served for theatrical purposes until it burned in 1798.



The new Richmond Theater of 1808 at the back of the Academy lot, shown at the letter "P" on the Young Map of 1809.

This diagram of a 1788 English theater (The Theatre Royal in Richmond, Yorkshire)

shows the typical relationships between stage, boxes, and pit seating in a provincial theater of the period [Richard Leacock, Development of the English Playhouse. Methuen, 1973]. Trap doors provided entries for supernatural effects and tracks in the floor permit the sliding of set panels into place.

In 1798, Benjamin Henry Latrobe prepared a design for a ground-breaking theater/hotel to replace the academy building at this key nodal location where the main route (Broad Street) turned to descend the hill. The plan was never executed. Had it been built, it would have represented a new and unique building type, but it still employed a pit, boxes, and a gallery as seen in the section below.



Latrobe's extraordinary drawing of the disorderly state of the Green Room at the Richmond Theatre in 1798

Section through Latrobe's Theater

After 1802, plays were performed in the hall over the market house and in “Quarrier’s Coach-shop” at Cary and Seventh streets until a new brick theater was built in the rear of the “Academy or Theater Square” in 1806. It was this three-story building that burned, with terrible loss of life, in 1811 and was memorialized by the construction of Monumental Church on the site.

Engraving of the Richmond Theater Fire. The theater is depicted as a three-story building with windows in the front area. A central door is apparently flanked by doors to the upper floors, while windows in the body of the building are few. The building to the rear (the west front of First Baptist Church) is shown inaccurately, so the drawing cannot be treated as completely reliable, but the form is similar to theaters from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

According to several accounts, Richmonders abandoned theatrical endeavors for a time after the disastrous 1811 fire. A new theater was built in 1818 on the southeastern corner of Seventh and Broad on Shockoe Hill. In 1838, it was remodeled and named after Chief Justice John Marshall [Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Celebrate Richmond Theater (Richmond: The Dietz Press, 2002)]. An evening there was remembered by the editor of the Richmond Daily Dispatch. His description of the night provides clues to the form and fittings of the theater, which seems similar to that of the eighteenth-century examples mentioned earlier. A evening at the theater in 1820 included a performance of “Virginius,” followed by a farce called “High Life Below Stairs.” “We believe we half exhausted our power of laughing that night; for we never have been able to laugh as we did then, from that time to this. We roared, we shouted, we screamed, we fairly danced in the box, until we attracted the attention of everybody in the house. We leant over, as though we were ready to jump into the pit” [Daily Dispatch on 5 Jan 1862].

Management and funding for the theater were always a problem, but in spite of that Richmond saw about three hundred different plays, some repeatedly, in the years between 1819 and 1838, including fourteen of Shakespeare's. Twelve of these were written in Richmond [Agnes Bondurant, Poe's Richmond, 1942]. During this period Richmond was a major theatrical center, typical in its tastes and requirements to other cities up and down the eastern seaboard. 

The Marshall Theatre, of which no image survives, burned in 1862, likely as a result of arson. Losses included “the valuable scenery, painted by the elder Grain, Getz, Heilge, and Italian artists employed by George Jones; all the wardrobe and "property," including some costly furniture and decorations; rich oil paintings and steel portraits of celebrated dramatists; manuscript plays, operas, and oratorios, all are involved in the common destruction. . . in addition to the whole stock wardrobe. . . [while] the orchestra lost between $300 and $400 in instruments and sheet music” [Richmond Daily Dispatch, 6 Jan 1862]. The company and theater were managed by Gilbert. Junius Brutus Booth appeared there in 1821 in his first appearance on the America stage. The Marshall saw appearances by many of the great actors of the day, including Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman, John Drew, and Joseph Jefferson, as well as Edwin and John Wilkes Booth.   

Although no image of either the interior or the exterior survives, it seems likely, based on examples in other cities, that the auditorium included, in addition to the central pit filled with benches, a proscenium flanked by classical columns, perhaps similar to the 1798 Park Theater in New York, seen below.

The Park Theatre in New York, built in 1798, occupied a stone structure.

Richmond Times-Dispatch, 9 Oct  1938

While there was enough business for only one theater for the city's first century-- from about 1782 until 1886, it was not the only assembly hall. At first, public events were held mostly in the Masons' Hall of 1787 or the Market Hall of 1794. As the nineteenth century progressed, other venues for shows, concerts, lectures, and meetings were built across the city, often on upper floors to serve a primary purpose as meeting rooms for various organizations. Corinthian Hall on Main Street was the site of Adelina Patti’s concert in 1860. Odd Fellows Hall was used for public events from 1842 to 1858. Metropolitan Hall was opened in 1853 with the adaptation of the former First Presbyterian Church building of 1828 for secular audiences. It stood on the northeast corner of Fourteenth and Franklin streets. According to Mary Wingfield Scott, it was used for “lectures, theatrical entertainments and political conventions, and later as a rather questionable variety-house.” Mechanics' Hall included a lecture room in 1857 to assist young men learning “the useful arts.”  

Drama was important to the doomed, crowded Confederate capital city. The burned Marshall Theater was rebuilt as the Richmond or New Richmond Theater at the height of the Civil War, opening in 1863. It closed in 1896 [Christian 452], a tired and down-at-heel veteran of many scenes. It seems likely that the Richmond Theatre reused at least a portion of the walls of the Marshall, since few structures were built in the city in 1863. The Greek Revival elements of the building are, however, unlikely to have been features of the previous theatre, built in 1819. Other theatrical venues prospered as well during the years that Richmond served as the Confederate capital. According to one source, these more popular venues included the Metropolitan Hall, the Richmond Varieties, a bawdy precursor to vaudeville, and the Richmond Lyceum [Kathyrn Fuller-Seeley. Celebrate Richmond Theater (Richmond: The Dietz Press, 2002). 

Richmond Theatre seen on the 1876 Beers Map of Richmond.

The Richmond Theatre, which was about 160 feet deep (the size of a Richmond lot),  stood four stories tall. The regular windows on the front and west side do not give any clue of the varied rooms within (some windows on the west side may be false windows, but light was needed on the interior for work associated with preparing for the plays). Like most fully equipped theaters of the time, the Richmond Theater did not have a fly loft for raising sets above the stage.

Richmond Theater shortly before demolition in the 1890s.

As an important civic building, the Marshall Theater was given the full form of a temple. The building was detailed in the Greek “Tower of the Winds” Corinthian order with fluted three-quarter engaged columns on the inset front flanked by pilasters called “antae,” which continue along the west side separating every second window bay. The ornate Corinthian order was appropriate for a building used in the pleasurable festivities associated with drama. Entrance was through five openings in the first floor front, which was detailed to provide a basement to the temple front above.

The interior of the Richmond Theatre soon after the Civil War. The illustrator appears to have increased the dramatic value of the political meeting depicted by combining a view of the proscenium and boxes from the seats with a view of the auditorium from the stage.   http://richmondtheatres.tripod.com 

The images of the interior shows that it was similar to other antebellum American theaters and that it continued the tradition of a central pit surrounded by raised horseshoe seating. Like other theaters derived from English models such as the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the angled boxes to either side to the stage were flanked by colossal fluted Corinthian columns.

Interior of the Richmond Theatre, 1890, Valentine Museum. The flats for the scenery can be seen behind the painted stage curtain. Before electricity, theaters needed windows for illumination when a play was actually not being staged.

The history of theater in Richmond did not end with the burning of a significant portion of the city, in fact the Richmond Theatre wasn't harmed at all and the plays continued. The late nineteenth century saw the further diversification of entertainment. Increased disposable income among the urban working class encouraged the breakdown of theatrical productions into high- and low-brow and the introduction of competition among a growing number of theaters, although entertainment in Richmond at all levels continued to have a decidedly "Southern" plot and cast of characters.

This account is continued in Part Two, located here.

  

Richmond's Second and Third Markets

As detailed in an earlier post, the legislation through which the city was chartered in 1782 established a common council and court of hustings as the local government, a clerk of the market, and a sergeant. A city market and market square were also mandated by the charter. The newer, less developed, and more elevated section of the city located on Shockoe Hill was selected as the site of the new capitol. The state authorities, encouraged by Thomas Jefferson, planned a new city around six adjoining public squares on the hill. Jefferson’s program for the new city, enacted in 1780, included placing the market on one of the squares. The authorities, however, demurred, undoubtedly because there was insufficient population on the hill to support it. Instead, the new market was placed directly between the old town of Richmond to the east of Shockoe Creek and the new capitol city on the hill to the west.

Although the city began with one principal public market at the crossing of Shockoe Creek, as the city grew subsidiary markets would be needed in new quarters or neighborhoods. These would be built as diluted versions of the First Market, responding to and reinforcing the organizational structure of the city, in much the same way that, in later years, branch libraries and post offices would express through their relative scales its hierarchical order. Richmond would have three public markets in place by the 1890s, each serving separate neighborhoods.

The historic relationship between a successful market and a traditional conception of the city's ideal order is shown by the repeated attempts to establish a prominent market on Shockoe Hill, where Jefferson envisaged a market as part of his new capital.  A "Shockoe Market" was set up to serve this area on the north side of Broad at Twelfth streets in the early 179os.  The General Assembly in 1793 retroactively gave the “Market-House erected on Shockoe Hill” the same privileges and regulations as the first market [An Act ascertaining the Boundaries of the City of Richmond, and for other purposes. November 27, 1793]. A sketch (below) shows the Shockoe Market Hall to have consisted of a long arcaded frame building similar to contemporary market halls in small towns across the state. At about the same time, the common council had rejected a plan 1793 to place this new Shockoe Market in the middle of Broad Street like some new markets that were inserted into existing street grids in other cities.

Shockoe Hill Market Hall at Broad and 12th (on the right) with the unfinished Academy
Building beyond from a sketch by Latrobe, 1797 or 98 [From Bryan Clark Green, 1997]. 

 Site of 1793 Shockoe Market ("Old Market Square") near the Baptist Church [Young's Map of 1817].

Like the first market, the new market square was located off the grid. It was placed on the eastward slope of Shockoe Hill on a tract known as “Watson’s Tenement” where many public buildings were to be located in the coming decades. The part of this tract that had been laid off in lots was officially included in the city in 1793 by city ordinance. These would include the Academy, the Theater (and, therefore, Monumental Church), as well as the Medical College near the top of the hill and, eventually, the Lancastrian School and the City Jail at the bottom. Benjamin Henry Latrobe also proposed sites for his planned theater/hotel and church of c. 1798 at this key nodal location where the main route (Broad Street to Governor Street) turned to descend the hill. The new market appears to have failed to become established. 

The 1858 Adams Map shows the Second Market of 1834 at the upper left in relation 

to the First Market (unlabeled near the creek) at the lower right corner.

It was not until the upper town had grown in density and diversity a decade later that it could rise to urbanity by the  successful establishment of a second market. By that time, Jefferson’s program for the new metropolis on the hill was, for all practical purposes, complete.  At about the same time, the urban governing function was separated from the old First Market and moved to Shockoe Hill, where the City Court (City Hall) occupied a Neoclassical temple-form building behind and in an axial relationship to the Capitol, facing the city’s principal axis, Broad Street. 

The "New" or "Second" Market filled a lot on the southeast corner of Sixth and Marshall streets on Shockoe Hill in 1817. There are very few images showing the market house of that period. The illustration above shows it to the right. It was arcaded like its predecessor in the valley below.

The extension of Richmond's Second Market on the north side of Marshall Street 
after 1834,  showing the additional Market Hall on the left and the new square to the left 
of the central lot line [Virginia Mutual Policy of 1865].

The market square was expanded across Marshall Street to the north in 1834, and the large open area was eventually lined by shops on the north and east and by another market hall, also of a single story in height. It appears that the butchers had expanded in the original location and needed an enclosed hall, so that produce sellers needed a new market of their own.  The old hall south of Marshall was probably enclosed at this time to serve as a more sanitary meat market. 

Richmond’s Second Market on the 1876 Beers Map. The original c. 1817 Market Hall is on the south side of Marshall and the Market Square of 1834 is to the north (north is to the top on each).

 The 1889 Sanborn map shows the Headhouse/Police Station  with an arched opening on 
each side as is visible in the 1865 image below, by this time surrounded by shed roofs. 
Separate facilities for sale of fish and a large hay scale were features of most markets at this time. A new Meat Market replaced the c. 1817 market hall south of East Marshall in 1885. In Richmond the duties of the Weight Master, a city employee who certified the quality and weight of all fodder, hay, and other "long forage," were spelled out in a city ordinance dated Oct. 2, 1827.  The weight master or his deputy was employed from sunup until sundown every day except Sunday making sure that citizens were receiving the correct weight of animal feed for the price they paid.

By 1851, the hucksters had begun to block Sixth Street as far north as Broad and council responded to local concerns by extending the market boundaries to Broad and planning a police station, since the watch house was nearly two miles away at the First Market. In 1853, the city replaced the 1834 market house with a new open market house with a brick loggia at the south end containing the police station. The new hall, supported on tows of cast iron columns, also ranged along the west side of the 1834 square. A delicate trio of fanlights made a transom between each cast iron column (see also the William Sheppard illustration below).

A contemporary article commended the new market for its strength, durability, taste, neatness and convenience." He admired the two belfries. The one on the police station contained a 700-pound bell used to open and close the market and to sound alarms. The six-room police station continued cells that reflected badly on the uncomfortable "cage" that housed reprobates at the old market [Richmond's Flowering Second Market, Virginia Calvacade, Spring 1956]. A fish market, added in 1856, and the city scales were housed in separate structures to the east. Along the north side and an alley running along the east side the square was hedged in with shops. 



Leslie's Weekly illustration of 1865 showing the City Dogcatcher at the Second Market
with the 1817 Market Hall at right and the c 1834 Headhouse/Police Station
at the center with bell tower

The New Market, Corner of Market [sic] and Sixth Street, Richmond, Va.
[Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper 10 Aug 1865]. This appears to show the 
market hall on the north side of Marshall Street from the wide arch of the
 Headhouse/Police Station.     

 
The illustrations above show the head house which fronted the 1853 market hall and its interior. Like the First Market Hall in the Shockoe Creek Valley, rebuilt at the same time, it housed the police station and had a cupola and bell on the roof, looking not unlike the arched tower at the First Market. The elegant structure was designed as a two-story, classically organized loggia, with a parapet roof. It took the classic form of the medieval/Renaissance town hall or broletto, where a meeting hall for local government was superimposed over an arcaded market at ground level.  By 1889, it was surrounded by a projecting canopy (see the Sanborn Map above).

The Tholsel, Town Hall, Kilkenny, Republic of Ireland, 1761 

Witney Town Hall and Market, Whitney, Oxfordshire, England, 1770s

 The city built a new Second Market Hall or Sixth Street Meat Market, a modern sanitary facility, in 1886 on the site of the c 1817 market house.It was built by Joseph Heppert [Virginia Calvacade Spring 1956]. The regular pilasters (supporting a memorable series of bull's heads), the battered stone water table, and the segmental arched openings are remarkably similar to the Third Market building of 1892 seen below.  


The new Sixth Street Market Hall of 1886 [Valentine Richmond History Center]

Sixth Street looking south with northern part of market, including hucksters to right and the rebuilt "head house" with cupola at left. The meat market can be seen beyond [Library of Congress].

The head house/police station at the Second or Sixth Street Market was rebuilt in the late nineteenth century. The north section of the market with the head house, cupola, and bell, is seen in a pre-1909 postcard above.

According to a contemporary article, the city's three markets expanded in the last two decades of the twentieth century. In 1900, the First Market at 17th Street produced $9,000 in revenue, the Second Market at Sixth Street between $7,000 and $8,000, and the Third, located in the city's West End, only $1,000. In 1895, the city ceased taxing vendors from outside the city limits and substituted a modest sanitary tax from those who left behind dirt or trash. The Sixth Street Market, being centrally located, was the most popular. 

By 1900, most of the population purchased foodstuffs in the city's three markets, rather than from itinerant street-vendors.  They made  many of their purchases from from the huckster, who, according to the terms in use at the time, was "the regular dealer, who rents his stall in the market by the month, and has an established trade at a small scale." The "truck gardener, who sells from his cart his own home-raised productions," made up the other major class of vendors [The Markets of Richmond: When They were Established and How They Pay, unidentified newspaper, 10 Feb. 1900, files, The Valentine].   

The Sixth Street market was long regarded, from the point of view of white visitors, as one of Richmond's most colorful points of interest.  Indeed, it probably served as the principal public intersection between the races. Articles written in the 1950s, as the market was failing, document the importance of the city's markets in the eyes of both vendors and customers. 

While the meat and fish were indoors, the exterior of the market served as a large and popular flower market. It drew national attention as a busy market for Christmas greens in the winter. The market provided a popular subject for artists, including illustrator William Sheppard in 1875, local color painter Margaret Dashiell in the teens and twenties, Teresa Pollack in the 1930s, and Bell Worsham in 1956. The drawings usually show white patrons passing through the picturesque and clamorous setting of the market.

William Sheppard, Selling Christmas Greens, Harper's Weekly, Cover for
the Christmas edition, 1875. The Sixth Street market in in the background.

Teresa Pollack, corner of Sixth and Marshall streets, 1930
[Virginia Calvacade, Spring, 1956.]

A contemporary "local color" piece by columnist George Rogers describes the vendors, mostly elderly black women, who "sat crunched on boxes or leg stools, clustered around an old lard tin or iron kettle from which heat radiated from . . . charcoal or small stubs of wood. Their lower limbs were wrapped in old bed quilts, horse blankets or any available protection. On their bodies were all the clothes they possessed, supplemented with a couple of masculine coats and vests. The head covering was either an old straw hat or a felt hat that had withstood several years of usage, and protruding from the headgear were several pig tails decorated in red or white braid. The finishing touch of the makeup was a short-stem corn cob pipe from which curling smoke indicated the vendor was in business" [George W. Rogers, News Leader 24 Nov. 1956]. 

Another nostalgic writer recalled how "for generations that stretch back into the closing antebellum years, city dwellers have been able to observe the cycle of the seasons in the appearance and subsequent absence of blooms and plants. Throughout the procession of these hundreds of seasons, negro women have sat in this scene, an invariable fixture in theses colorful banks of blossom. . . . Hucksters from the nearby countryside hopefully exhibit their home-grown vegetables in the same market area. Time was when these men came into town before daybreak, riding in open or covered wagons or two-wheeled covered Hanover carts. Once arrived, they built fires on the street to take the bit from frosty mornings" [Richmond's Flowering Second Market, Virginia Calvacade, Spring 1956].

1909 Market and Armory at Sixth and Marshall streets, same view as the 

Leslie's Weekly view from 1865 seen above

Second Market- Detail of 1924-5 Sanborn Map of Marshall between 
6th and 7th Streets. It shows the Armory Building to the north and the Meat
 Market to the north of Marshall Street.

Mid-20th c view of Sixth Street Market shoppers and vendors, no date,
from Sanford, Richmond, 1975

  The town hall form, of a market with a civic meeting room above, was reiterated there when, in 1909, when a new, appropriately castellated Market and Armory was built on the same site. The market function was enclosed at the ground floor and the upper floor was dedicated to public events and the use of the Richmond Light Infantry Blues as an armory. The Sixth Street Market operated in this building until it was uprooted for the construction of the Sixth Street Marketplace development in 1985. The market function here was made visually secondary to the military. 

Terra cotta bull's head from the Second (Sixth Street) Meat Market as

reused at Seventeenth Street 

An article in the Richmond News Leader on 14 February, 1956 recounted the story of the Sixth Street Market. The city wanted the site of the Meat Market for a new parking lot to support downtown shopping. The 17 stalls were at that time rented by  total of six vendors and three stalls in the dilapidated building were vacant. The 1886 Meat Market was demolished and two of the ornamental bull's heads were placed at the Seventeenth Street Market. It was, sadly, demolished in the 1964 to make way for a multi-story parking garage. 

The Second or Sixth Street Market area from Broad, 2nd 1/4 20th c., 
showing the Blues Armory at rear with the Meat Market 
in front of it with the terra cotta bull's heads visible along 
the top of the facade [Sanford 1975]

Market halls declined in importance as time passed. Their function was transformed in the late nineteenth century by the development of new technologies for the production and preservation of food and new concerns for hygiene. These changes, coupled with the growth of truck farming and neighborhood grocery stores, in the words of Bryan Clark Green, "removed the market house from the economic, administrative, and social center of Virginia's towns."  

Third Market, Richmond Virginia [VCU Archives]

As a result of the growth of population in the western end of the city, the city planned, in 1881, a third market for the area known as Sydney (today's Fan District). The Richmond Third Market hall was built on West Main Street in the early 1890s, designed by Richmond architect Marion J. Dimmock. Like its predecessors, it took the traditional form of an arcaded market, only on a much more ambitious scale. Like the one-story Sixth Street Meat Market of 1886, which it closely resembled, the Third Market Hall consisted of a single, large open room lit and ventilated by a prominent roof monitor. 

The market did not, however, prosper at the Sydney location and was closed in 1906. It  was converted for use in the following year as a civic assembly hall, with the addition of a vestibule, dressing rooms, and a rostrum. It was known as the City Auditorium until it was replaced by the Mosque in 1928. It was rehabilitated by Virginia Commonwealth University as a gym in 1981, expanded in 2009 as the Cary Street Recreational Center.