TALKEETNA, ALASKA: "WHERE THE ROAD ENDS, LIFE BEGINS"

Talkeetna, Alaska, has been many things: supply station and winter base for prospectors, miners, and trappers in the area around Cache Creek, a port for riverboat shipping, and a  railroad depot on the Alaska Railroad midway between Anchorage and Fairbanks. It is located 85 miles above the sea at the head of shipping on the shallow Susitna River. Today it has attained new significance as the primary jumping-off point for climbing expeditions to the summit of Mount McKinley in the nearby Alaskan Range. The development of the town’s story is wrapped up with the transportation history of the remote Alaskan wilderness. It involves foot travel, water transportation, dog sled, horse, rail and airplane. 

Remarkable view on July 3 of the summit of Mt. McKinley, usually concealed by clouds.

Main Street looking west from the Town Park with Nagley's Store at center.

A recent visit to the unincorporated town of Talkeetna (pop. 876) revealed remarkable continuity of form between the early Alaska railroad town and the tourist depot that it is today. The town is made up of a Main Street that extends from the station to the river, paralleled by Front Street to the north and First and Second streets to the south. It is crossed by streets named A, B, C, and D. Flooding and erosion have reduced the town by two blocks to the west, but what remains shows the kinship of Talkeetna with planned towns around the world. Information here is derived from exhibits at the Talkeetna Historical Society and the National Register form for the Talkeetna Historic District.

David Lawrence Cabin (c 1920)

Prospectors arrived as early as 1896 with a gold rush in the area around the Susitna River. The tiny port of Talkeetna was established by the Alaska Commercial Company in 1910, soon after the discovery of gold on nearby Cache Creek in 1906. It served as a supply center for miners who spent the summers on their claims and the winters hunting and trapping. The supply center closed in 1912, but the town’s use as a home base by miners in the Yentna District lasted until the end of the mining era during World War II. 

In 1916, the Alaskan Engineering Commission, a federal agency responsible for building a railway to open up the interior of Alaska to development, selected Talkeetna as the location for a construction headquarters, station, and post office. With the completion of the railroad in 1923 the town lost a significant section of its population, but its purpose as a supply center was sustained. From 1920 to 1932, the Alaska Road Commission maintained a road crew in Talkeetna, building and repairing 22 miles of wagon roads and nearly the same number of miles of sled road giving access from the depot to the back country all around.

Map from the National Register form for the Talkeetna Historic District [National Park Service]

The AEC used its authority to plat a grid of eighty lots in 1918 and sold them to merchants, freighters, and miners. The town previously consisted of informal lots flanking a route running back from the river landing. Many occupants were able to establish “preference rights” to purchase approximately half of the lots since they had already made improvements to them. In 1920, the population included 53 men and 17 women. 19 of the men were miners, 5 were trappers, 7 worked for the railroad, and 22 were involved in commerce. 

The main intersection and the commercial center (at least since the loss of the western end of town to erosion in the 1940s) is found where Main Street is crossed by D Street. One corner is occupied by a triangular park, probably established by the Alaskan Engineering Commission in 1918 as a site for the rail-related buildings. Such parks were commonly included in post Civil-War town developments in order to allow for additional railroad buildings and to impress visitors by ordering and ornamenting what would serve as the gateway to the town. 

When the 30-foot-wide Talkeetna Village Airstrip opened in 1938, it was positioned immediately adjacent to the town as a continuation of D Street, so that airplanes could readily load supplies from the trains and take off directly over Main Street. This new transportation center may partially account in part for the importance of the intersection of D and Main streets.       

Fairview Inn, Talkeetna, (1923), view from intersection of Main and D streets on July 3.

Not until 1964 was Talkeetna connected by road with the outside world. The streets were unpaved and the buildings fronted directly onto the streets, probably with boardwalks in heavily traveled sections. A section of boardwalk has been maintained in front of Nagley’s Store. The rough and even primitive character of the edge between lot and street is what gives the town its peculiar historic atmosphere. Although the streets have been paved, the lack of sidewalks and presence of wildflowers and native shrubs give the sense of continuity in time and place.   

Street edges in Talkeetna

Ole Dahl Cabin #1 (c 1918)

Nagley's Store (1920/1945)

Of the thirteen historic buildings built between the late 1910s and the 1930s, most are located along the Main Street. As a town with limited functions and restricted demographics, the number and variety of civic and other specialized buildings was limited. There was no school until 1936, when the Alaska Territory built a one-room school house (now the town’s museum). There was no church and the only public building for many years was the railroad station. The Fairview Inn, the only hotel, was built between 1920 and 1923. It stands across the street from Nagley’s Store, built by Horace Nagley out of reused parts brought in by barge in from an older supply station about 1920. It was relocated in 1945 from the lower part of town after it was threatened by erosion of the river bank. 

The Frank Lee House (1917), known after 1940 as "the Talkeetna Roadhouse," a longtime headquarters for Mt. McKinley climbers, located on the corner of Main and C streets.

Detail of logs at the David Lawrence Cabin

All of the early buildings, other than the depot and the Fairview Inn, were built of logs. Many of these have v- and square-notched corners that are protected by boxed corner boards. A two-story, gable-front log house was built in 1917 on the corner of Main and C streets by Frank Lee, a river freight operator. At 21’ x 32’ feet, it is one of the largest. It was converted into an inn and restaurant (“the Road House”) in 1940. Other houses include the small and low-ceilinged (13’ x 20’) typical “trapper’s cabin” built by Ole Dahl about 1918 and the David Lawrence Cabin, which measures 15’ x 20,’ and the second Ole Dahl House of c 1920, which was built after his marriage and measures 20’ by 26.’ By the 1930s, houses continued to be built of log, but were supplemented by frame buildings like the school. 

Letter to a Professor

Caro Professore,

I have really appreciated your willingness to discuss the issue of what I will call uniformity in architecture, or perhaps more appropriately, urban scale architecture. Obviously this is a point of contention among architects and urbanists and I will need to be able to justify my position. As I understand it your argument is predicated on the belief that modern issues in urban design can only be addressed by a carefully composed variation in architectural and urban forms, rather than a single unified vision. Unity in this view is achieved not through uniformity, like an endlessly repeated theme, but through differentiation which provides for the individual “character” of a place. This now commonplace approach is founded in the work of Leon Krier.

I think we can both recognize a pattern in our discussions this semester; namely, the role of regularity and uniformity in architectural design and in urban planning. I am convinced that there is truth to what I am attempting to put into words and buildings. I can see it both in writing and traditional architecture and urbanism; it is my lack of eloquence that is doing it a disservice. This is something I have finally had to defend because it helps me explain how architecture integrates commerce into the civic realm. So, I will try to first do the best I can to describe in writing what I have been trying to say, and secondly, attempt to defend it.

Beginning with my conversations and work with Mario Gallarati, based on the Muratori school of urban design a year and a half ago, I began to be interested in the study of formal Renaissance squares. As a student of the Muratori school, Mario Gallarati has consistently worked within the understanding that cities and buildings are composed of a number of scales and that to be successful each part must engage its appropriate station in the hierarchy of the city or state. Given this understanding, it is not surprising that I am interested not only in individual buildings, but in the concept of the formal square, and on a larger scale, the form of cities. The Muratorian approach is based on this idea of an intelligible system of architectural scales. These urban scales can be described or “read” using “synoptic tables” that compare traditional building similarities and differences from the scale of entire regions down to the scale of window treatment. I began to read the few translations available on Muratori and his students. I tried to test it against the indubitable theory of my professor Carroll W. Westfall. So far I think them consonant in their essential ideas; the main difference being their focuses on theory and practice respectively, and the empirical approach of Muratori in contrast to Westfall’s reliance on rhetoric. Together they give me a compelling theory of architecture combined with an “operative system” of practice. I am afraid I am an inadequate evangelist of this theoretical combination and have barely scratched the surface of understanding either thinker, but I am enjoying making the best of what I have.

From what I understand of Westfall and Muratori it seems that the different architectural scales of the city embody the order of communal life which has the common good as its end. These various scales are hierarchically more or less important according to the degree to which they deal with the public realm. More directly, parts of the city on the architectural, or building scale are subordinate to the urban scale (Muratori), or “urban ensembles” in the words of Westfall. Urban ensembles are members of the city, but are in turn, wholes composed of building members. Significant events in the urban scale might include civic places such as law courts, libraries, markets, theatres and baths. These places are more important than private buildings, but in turn subordinate to the larger, more public building which is the city.

The various scales are represented by their use of similar components. Without similarity between these scales comparison between them would be impossible, and yet without difference their location in a higher order would be equally unintelligible. Comparison is not the same thing as finding out where you are.

Building Scale
Buildings can appear related to each other only by virtue of their parts being obviously related to one another, or obviously different in a similar way. Westfall explains this as the “pattern of the assembly of the components” and gives the examples of basic compositional types: temples look like temples, houses look like houses, etc. because they are made of the same parts. Those parts, however, are never assimilated in the same way. Buildings also relate to one another according to the physical character of these components i.e., materials, ornament, size and level of finish. These scales operate by increasing in their level of realization as they reach higher importance in the public realm. The capitol or royal palace is the most fully ornamented and finished building in a state, the city hall the best dressed of all the parts of a republican city and so forth down to the most diluted branch post office or library. Within individual buildings many different activities can take place, however, every building, according to Westfall, is in some way a dwelling, whether it be of a god, a king or a pleb, and that specific purpose of the building is what drives its overall treatment. Different floors, wings, and rooms are realized according to their individual purpose, but on a subordinate scale within the context of the building.

Urban Scale
The urban scale works in exactly the same way. In a city the urban scale is almost always the most important. Occasionally, the territorial scale may override it (as in the Palazzo del Capitaniato in Vicenza, or the Virginia State Capitol), but they each require varying levels of a related treatment. More important streets such as those linking significant nodes in the city or territory are represented as such by their relative width, or because the buildings on their “pertinent strip” are collectively on a grander scale. The level of finish or ornament of a street is the degree to which it is treated in a related or unified way. Perhaps it is lined with arches, or the buildings facing it share the same cornice, etc. The most important public places, traditionally public squares, receive the highest levels of ornament and most thorough treatment in terms of their realization as single bodies made up of different parts. Traditional squares are often wrapped with arcades or colonnades that are made up of related components, the most important receiving the most unified treatment. The distinctness with which the various purposes of the buildings surrounding the street or square are represented is proportionate to their relative importance in the life of the city. The cathedral may remain entirely distinct in even the most formal European squares because of its complete dominance in the public life of the city. Conversely, commercial or industrial activities serving the private realm will almost always be entirely invisible.

These traits are common to almost every city in the Greco-Roman tradition to some level or another. Often, as in the case of S. Petronio in Bologna, an element of the city will remain unfinished. To say that the building is better as it is today is debatable, but to argue that the intention of the architect was to leave it half-finished is preposterous.

So too with the urban scale. The charm of Italian piazzas is often attributed to the informal character in which Goethe encountered them in the 19th century. This is the beauty of the relationship between contingent reality and an ideal. Perhaps a piazza embodies more of a city’s order through its un-realization. I certainly find them beautiful, livable places. Perhaps they are more beautiful in ruins or incompletion, but we would never have had even the failed attempt had someone not once striven for an “inevitable” solution, in the words of Professor David Mayernik.

I personally find the intentional design of picturesque urban forms and elements today known as “New Urbanism” to be at best arbitrary and at worst contrived. There will never, ever be a shortage of reasons that the most ideally visualized urban form or building will in the end have to submit its rigor to the contingencies of reality. Perhaps, repetition or uniformity may be repellent to individual taste. I, however, am attempting (how successfully remains to be seen) to form an argument based on reason, not taste. Such a hierarchy would, I feel, expand the possibility for true variety, not limit it. An alternate feeling that uniform urban or architectural forms are the product of autocratic forms of government falls into the same fallacy as the argument that ancient Greek architecture is the architecture of democracy.

To design a piazza that looks like an ancient agglomeration is to imitate symptoms of successful urbanism, but to miss the actual operative principle that makes it an enduring place. That operative principle, I am arguing, is the concept of urban scales of building which explicitly represent the order of the city according to a dilution of the unity of the whole.

Sincerly Yours,
Richard Worsham

Richmond As Provincial Capital

Map of the Prize Lots in William Byrd's Lottery, 1768

When William Byrd III and the trustees responsible for liquidating his debts decided on a lottery to be held in 1768 as the best method to dispose of his land west of Shockoe Creek, they divided the land into plots of about 100 acres each, except for a tract immediately west of the creek which straddled the county road and was labelled "town land."



1768 plat of the Town of Shockoe as found among Jefferson's papers with undifferentiated grid pattern. The  pr-eexisting tenements and lots along Shockoe Creek are shown at the right.   

These 400 acres were also numbered and distributed as part of the lottery. As the Town of Shockoe, this area was incorporated into the town of Richmond by the General Assembly in 1769.  The relentless, undifferentiated, grid pattern of the new section continued the lines of the 1737 plan of Richmond and spread from the lowlands along the river up and over the knobs and ravines of Shockoe Hill. Its boundaries, as well as the boundaries of the many lots to the north and west, set the pattern of development that guided the city's growth from that time forward. Previous holdings, or "tenements," of irregular shape make up the previous settlement  of Shockoe's, the original settlement along the west side of the creek. These account for the irregularities of the street layout in the area between the towns of Richmond and Shockoe. The lots along  Main Street on the west side of Shockoe Creek became a popular location for businesses. While many lots undoubtedly sold on top of the hill, the upper section was slow to develop.

The act of 1779 which relocated the capital from Williamsburg to Richmond included a number of unusual directives. In it, and in the execution of the act that followed, the hand of Jefferson can be discerned planning, compromising, and revising a suitably urbane setting for the purposes of the new state government. In order to facilitate the transformation of the town of Richmond into the new state capital, the General Assembly appointed the Directors of Public Buildings. This board of five (later nine) members included Thomas Jefferson as an active member.

"That six whole squares of ground surrounded each of them by four streets, and containing all the ground within such streets, situate in the said town of Richmond, and on an open and airy part thereof, shall be appropriated to the use and purpose of public buildings. On one of the said squares shall be erected, one house for the use of the general assembly, to be called the capitol, which said capitol shall contain two apartments for the use of the senate and their clerk, two others for the us of the house of delegates and their clerk, and others for the purposes of conferences, committees and a lobby, of such forms and dimensions as shall be adopted to their respective purposes: On one other of the said squares shall be erected, another building to be called the halls of justice, which shall contain two apartments for the use of the court of appeals and its clerk, two others for the use of the high court of chancery and its clerk, two others for the use of the general court and its clerk, two others for the used of the admiralty court and its clerk, and others for the uses of grand and petty juries. . . .; and on the same square last mentioned shall be built a publick jail; one other of the said squares shall be reserved for the purpose of building thereon hereafter, a house for the several executive boards and offices to be held in: Two others with the intervening street, shall be reserved for the use of the governour of this commonwealth for the time being, and the remaining square shall be appropriated to the use of the publick market. The said houses shall be built in a handsome manner with walls of brick or stone, and porticoes where the same may be convenient or ornamental, with pillars and pavements of stone."

The squares referred to were six blocks of the existing or proposed town (amounting to twelve acres). The Directors of Public Building were to select the site, which could be in areas already platted or in a new section of two hundred lots “adjacent to such parts of said town as to them shall seem most convenient” (this refers to a section of lots on the north side of present-day Broad Street adjoining the Shockoe plat of 1768. The double measure of land (four acres) associated with the Governor’s House was required to provide domestic areas and for associated paddocks and gardens. The caveat “for the time being” may refer to the presence of a existing dwelling on the lots intended for the governor’s house, that was to be used as a “palace” until a new dwelling could be substituted, which would not occur until 1813. 

On closer examination, it appears that the series of public buildings, and the porticos of stone were intended to form some sort of architectural unity. Closer reading of the directions shown above suggests that the contiguous squares ("six whole squares of ground surrounded each of them by four streets, and containing all the ground within such streets") were intended to form one great square (forum).  The design likely included some sort of hierarchical relation between the buildings and functions, 

Urban historian John W. Reps points out that this is the first time in an American city that “the three major branches of government were given recognition in the physical plan of the city (Tidewater Towns, 927).” Craig A. Reynolds has observed that it was a radical step to call for a "multi-temple district" involving a "standardization" of public buildings. According to Reynolds, Jefferson was likely thinking, somewhat impractically, of the project for a reconstructed Roman forum shown in Palladio's Book Four. His copy described the forum as a central square or market surrounded by a two-tiered continuous portico giving access to bankers' offices, with a curia (senate ) and basilica (courthouse) on either side. Similarly, Livy described the forum as a central square combining commercial and governmental functions in Book I: he mentions a prison and senate house overlooking the forum and "also spaces round the forum were assigned to private individuals for building on; covered walks and shops were erected" [Craig A. Reynolds, "Jefferson's Temples of Liberty on the James and the Potomac," paper delivered at the Virginia Commonwealth University Architectural History Symposium, 2012]. 




Book III, Plate XV, Leoni Edition of Palladio's Four Books showing the "Squares and Forums or open places and Markets of the Romans." The forum or market is in the center surrounded by the porticos sheltering the
offices of bankers, the basilica (court) is to the left, and the curia (senate house) to the left.

By including a market in the grouping, Jefferson may have been hoping to place the three specialized government buildings, legislative, judicial, and executive, in direct relation to a public market square on a relatively level, but as-yet unselected hilltop site. It may even have been his initial intention to give it a unified form based on the Palladian forum, much as his design for the University of Virginia would to be linked by a colonnade, but here to be lined with the commercial lots of private individuals. 



The Halle au Blé at Paris

That Jefferson had imagined the market as an architecturally distinguished structure is clear from his first thought on viewing the great new glass-lighted dome of the covered courtyard at the Meal Market (Halle au Blé) of Paris in 1786. In a famous letter to Maria Cosway he imagined it as a model for the market in Richmond: 'My visit to Legrand & Molinos had publick utility for it's object. A market is to be built in Richmond. What a commodious plan is that of Legrand & Malinas: especially if we put on it the noble dame of the Halle aux bleds." 

Likely in the summer of 1780. Jefferson sketched a plan for a "Hall of Justice," a two-story rectangular building measuring 70' wide and 90' long that was intended to be one of the three principal state buildings.  Although not shown, a portico at the main entry would have given the building the "cubical" form he often referred to when discussing temple architecture. Entrance was to be through a two-story, square central stair hall inside the door, flanked by offices and smaller rooms. The two principal courtrooms were placed on each side of a passage that extends to the rear pot the building. The second floor had a similar plan. The "hall of justice" appears to have been conceived as a temple form building only a little smaller than the hall for the legislature, suggesting that it was intended to have taken up a flanking position in a symmetrical  tripartite arrangement, on the opposite side from the "State House" for executive boards and committees and representing the three parts of the government.    

As reported by Reps, in 1780 the General Assembly responded to recommendations of the directors by a new act that designated Shockoe Hill as the site of the new “capitol, halls of justice, state house for the executive boards, and house for the governor.” This “open and airy part” of the town had been laid out in lots in 1768 and was already sparsely occupied. A number of old, irregular tenements, mostly on the eastern slope of the hill, and all the streets and squares were to be regularized, unless “by varying the said intervals” (such as is seen today in Governor Street) “more favorable ascents may be procured up the hill.” The location for the public market had been reconsidered and was now to be located below the said hill, on the same side of Shockoe Creek [a block west of where it was built on the opposite, east side of the creek]. In addition, the streets of Shockoe Hill, which were continuations of the undifferentiated Mayo plan of 1737, then all of the same 66-foot width regardless of importance or location, were all to be widened “to a breadth, not less than eighty, or more than one hundred and twenty feet.” Streets were to be laid out “whether straight or curved” to provide access to the tops of the hills from the valley below.



Early 19th-century map (Young, c. 1809)

The uniform street grid was adjusted by the Directors of Public Building in a more subtle way than that mandated by the statute. H Street, the major street on the hill that received the traffic from the old town below by way of the curving County Road, was widened to 120 feet by removing land from the lots on each side. Its unique scale prompted its renaming as Broad Street in later years, Interestingly, H Street was labeled Main Street on a plat of c 1787, indicating its continuity with the principal route through the older sections of the lower town [Richmond City Legislative petition 11 Nov. 1791]. The parallel streets G and I (Grace and Marshall) were to be widened to 100 feet. All the remaining streets, as shown by dotted lines on Jefferson’s drawing of the public squares in 1780, were to be enlarged to 80 feet as directed by the assembly. However, in actuality, Grace and Marshall were not widened as shown.



Jefferson plan of three public squares, 1780, showing
Capitol and Bank streets as laid out at top and bottom.

Jefferson himself traced a proposed plan of the town on Shockoe Hill in 1780. He overlaid the existing undifferentiated grid with the new creation of three squares between Franklin and Grace streets and between 9^th and 12^th streets. These were appropriated for the public buildings with an addition of several lots to the east along the edge of the hill east of Twelfth Street. A revised plan shows a new approach not unlike what was finally built. Grace and Franklin streets are blocked east of Ninth. These vacated streets are added to the total size of the public land and new streets created out of the inner lots in the blocks to the north and south. The public land is consolidated into “three separate parcels,” probably since the commercial function (public market) had been removed from the plan for a modern version of the forum. This would have permitted the separate control of the three squares crowning the hill by each of the three branches of government.

In spite of the irregular terrain, Jefferson shows and describes in a proposal, three elongated public squares separated by widened segments of Tenth and Eleventh streets. The southern half of each of the parcels consisted, however, of steeply sloping terrain that completely precluded the actual extension of the intervening streets shown by Jefferson, so it was inevitable that the parcels, barely outlined on maps for decades, should be conflated into one large square, neatly edged on the north, south and west, but irregular on the east where the main route, the “county road,” climbed the steep slopes of the hill.

While the three squares are not labeled, the central square, occupying the most dramatic and advanced knoll above the river, was to become the site of the Capitol. It is possible that Jefferson intended an advanced central legislative building to be flanked by the Halls of Justice on the west and an Executive Building (Council Chamber was the name given to this structure among the temporary government buildings). As the costs of building and the limitations of revenue became apparent, Jefferson was forced to consent to the combination of all the branches in a single structure, the Capitol of 1785-88. At the same time the three squares were combined into a single "Capitol Square."



R.B. James, Map of Richmond, Henrico Co., c. 1804, showing area of the Capitol Square and the angled route of the county road around it to the east and north.

While his direct involvement with its urban design had ended with his second term as governor in 1781, the city had not strayed too far from his vision as it grew. 



Capitol Square as laid out by Maximilian Godefroy, from R. Young's Map, ca. 1817.

The Capitol was deliberately placed to be seen in the Virginia landscape. Architect Robert Mills understood its power in the landscape: "I remember the impression it made on my mind when first I came in view of it coming from the South. It gave me an idea of the effect of those Greek temples which are the admiration of the world" [Fiske Kimball, American Architecture, 1928]. Fiske Kimball recognized in 1915 the significant of the Virginia Capitol as a "landmark of the first importance" in the "development of modern classical architecture." 

Charles Brownell, in an overview of the Capitol published in 2002, describes new work by his students at the University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University and others who have established provocative connections between the building and its historical context in a number of directions. They established that the temple-form building related to well-known use of temples for senate houses in Imperial Rome. Others have shown that the first study that placed the Capitol in a temple-form building dated to the early- to mid-1770s, well before the actual project was begun for a new capitol. When the Directors sent floor plans to Jefferson for his use in Paris, they showed a rectangular  building with porticos on four sides.

In addition, the placement of the "cubical" temple-form building on a prominent hill above the city was shown to be closely associated with Palladian precepts for the location of temples (and the original Capitol, the most significant place in the city of Rome, a temple to Jupiter that stood above the Roman forum).  Finally, a list of four temples that Jefferson associated with the building during the design process added to the understanding of his goals. He intended the Capitol to serve as a museum of the orders to be used as models by the citizens in improving the architecture of the city and state, and he planned to use the columnar orders on the exterior and interior to make a complete "suite" of orders for that purpose.  The interior of the building, including the rotunda and dome, differs greatly from Jefferson's intentions and appears to be the work of architect/builder Samuel Dobie, who was charged with executing the incomplete sets of drawings [Charles E. Brownell, Introduction to the 2002 Edition, Fiske Kimball, The Capitol of Virginia: A Landmark of American Architecture (Richmond VA: Library of Virginia, 2002) xv-xxxix].    

The public square was, as a result, placed in an anti-nodal position away from commercial activity, although Jefferson's original idea seemed to have intended it for a commercial center by including a market. On the contrary, as built on its "open and airy" site, it occupies a distinctly anti-nodal position, rather like the church of 1742 on the top of the corresponding hill to the east. Maximilian Godefroy, a French-born partner of Latrobe’s, applied French formalism to organize the ravines and eroded gullies of the hillside site. His terraces, tree-lined allees, and curved walks imposed a garden-like imprint of order on what had hitherto been almost a desert.

Capitol Square, c. 1850

The official placement of the market along Shockoe Creek in 1782 recognized the reality of the city's composite form and the inevitable separation of state and city functions. The area around the square grew up to be a quiet place of deliberation and reflection far from the business of commercial Main Street below and the constant traffic of Broad Street to the north.

Appropriately, when the city grew sufficiently large to warrant a specialized government building or courthouse of its own it was strategically placed to mediate between the commercial rough-and-tumble of Broad Street and the cultivated and artificial landscape of the Public Square. Rather than provide a civic square for the new building, as was often done, it was oriented toward the public square that already held the Capitol.  Robert Mills provided the design for the new City Hall, which was begun in 1816 and first occupied in 1818. The carefully placed building took its place at the urban scale. It fronted on Capitol Street on axis with the Capitol and stood between it and Broad Street.

The Passaggiata in Hell

Richmond has lost the key to its stockpile of urban meaning. Meanwhile, the commercial life of the city has been transported to the outer suburbs. Short Pump Town Center (and Stony Point Fashion Park) are Richmond's newest shopping centers.

Short Pump is an urban desert. It is a parody of a city. Its architecture is sterile, banal, and without imagination, exhibiting no architectural unity or integrity. This was not entirely true of earlier shopping centers. Mid-twentieth-century shopping centers and malls such as Willow Lawn and Southside Plaza were unified by an architectural idea- in this case, that of modernism- much as the great metropolitan markets of the past exhibited architectural unity. As a commercial mart, Willow Lawn made no attempt to memorialize the past. And at any rate the shopping centers of the 1950s were aligned with major shopping streets.

Willow Lawn soon after construction

“Downtown Short Pump” represents an unprecedented intrusion into the ancient patterns of humane life. It well merits its nickname at Urbanismo: “the Outer Circle of Hell.” Like chaos, Short Pump is without form and void, because it is changeless, timeless, one-dimensional, and circular, an endless passaggiata.

An axial view of one of the tentacles of Short Pump Town Center

Short Pump is changeless (the owners pride themselves on its seamless maintenance program). It is timeless (the recorded music is always playing). It is one-dimensional and undifferentiated, while the city is endlessly varied but unified (it is differentiated within an underlying matrix of order). It is circular-even though there are different paths, ultimately the experience consists in walking in circles, like the mall-walkers who avoid climate and traffic to get relentless exercise. Such anti-urbanism was not a characteristic of earlier manifestations of the shopping center. The ancestor of the mall, the nineteenth-century galleria, functioned as a street and was an integral part of the city, aligned with the larger civic life.

Galleria Mazzini, Genova

Short Pump has a few of the traditional features of a marketplace. Its monuments, such as a trite statue of Patsy Cline and the central fountain made up of a variety of hand pumps are humorless, literal, and derivative tropes on the monumental program of the actual city. It is a controlled environment with a fully developed literature of commerce. In its attempt to supplant the city, Short Pump Town Center has constructed a diminuative founding myth.

The "Short Pump Fountain" at Short Pump Town Center

Markets are properly miniature cities. The order of the marketplace is immediately apparent. Orthogonal aisles like streets organize the stalls. The market is placed in the urban context and responds to its patterns. While markets and fairs are controlled sectors of the city, they contain individual proprietors who are responsible for their success or failure. Although the quality of their produce is carefully policed by the city, markets offer no guarantee of happiness. Unlike the vapid crowds at Short Pump, markets are frequented by people from all stations of life. A flaneur is unlikely to find pleasure at Stony Point Fashion Park.

While its open air plan is welcoming to pedestrians, Short Pump Town Center is the antithesis of a real market and far less subtle even than an American shopping mall. Its essentially circular form defies any ordering principle both locally and on an urban scale. It doesn’t matter where you are in it. A sleepy urbanist might mistakenly see it as an improvement over a shopping mall because it more self-consciously resembles a town. In fact, it is not a fragment of a city but a commercial whirlpool.