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.  

 

HOTELS OF RICHMOND



The Union Hotel, Main at Nineteenth
streets, built in 1817 to the
designs of Otis Manson.

This is the second part of a series on the Taverns and Hotels of Richmond. The first part is found here. The demand on the part of travelers and visitors for food and overnight lodging has usually been met by the provision of rooms (or beds) rented by the night in buildings provided by private enterprise, unless capital for that purpose exceeded local resources. In that case, institutions or individual landowners would provide guest lodging.  Over time, the building types that served travelers changed in response to changing levels of prosperity and demand.  The American luxury hotel, typified by Richmond’s Jefferson Hotel of 1895, had its origins in the early nineteenth-century taverns and hotels financed by merchants and developers to ease travel, promote business interests, and answer civic and social needs.

This new building type appeared in Richmond in 1817.  The Union Hotel, located at Main and Nineteenth streets, was built for Dr. John Adams and designed by architect Otis Manson, who was associated on at least one project with architect Robert Mills (he and Mills prepared plans for a new Richmond City Jail that wasn’t built at about the same time [Records of the Common Hall, 17 March 1817]). It represented a more architecturally sophisticated response to the demand for overnight accommodations, the first to rise “above the primitive level of inns and taverns” [Scott]. 




The Union Hotel from Charles H. Corey, A History of Richmond Theological Seminary. Richmond VA: Union University, 1895. Probably originally part of hotel promotional literature.

Its architectural form responded to the development of the “first-class” hotel as a civic amenity in major American cities. The most notable example of the new hotel was the Exchange Coffee House in Boston, a remarkable seven-story structure, designed by architect Asher Benjamin, that provided 300 rooms, banquet halls, and other public amenities. “Its destruction by fire [in 1818] was a civic calamity” [Daniel Boorstin, The Americans, 1966, 136].

 

The Exchange Coffee House in Boston [Wikipedia].

Like the Boston building, the Union Hotel featured an applied exterior architectural treatment and unprecedented height. Dr. John Adams must have intended that the new Richmond hotel serve a similar role in the city. The row of tall windows on the main floor suggests two entertaining rooms on the interior.   Manson provided the four-story hotel with a tall piano nobile with arch-headed floor-length windows that was topped by a two-story row of applied Doric half columns fronting the bedroom floors. The walls, stuccoed to resemble stone, were terminated in a pattern book Doric entablature featuring carved paterae between the triglyphs. The building was sheltered under a shallow hipped roof with a balustraded deck. A three-story wing stood to the rear. The cupola in the advertising lithograph shown above was probably added by the artist to improve the view, which was intended to show how large the building was.

 

Detail of the Union Hotel's cornice, 1865.

 

The Union Hotel in the period immediately after the Civil War [VCU archive]. Like many earlier taverns, it featured a wide portico across the front.

As Bryan Clark Green has observed, Richmond hotels, beginning with the Union Hotel, had about a twenty-year life-span before they appeared outmoded [NR form, Ninth Street Office Building]. By the early 1840s, when the Exchange Hotel was built, equipped with toilets, central heat, and running water, the Union Hotel was no longer fashionable. Although it was returned to use as a hotel, it was rented as the site of the predecessor of the Medical College of Virginia when the school was opened in 1838. It was used as barracks in 1847 during the Mexican-American War, but was back in operation in 1850, when it was visited by President Zachary Taylor [Christian]. It was purchased in 1870 by the trustees of the Richmond Institute, forerunner of Virginia Union University, as the college’s main academic building. In much the same way, the Exchange was replaced in favor by the Spottswood Hotel, new in 1859-60 and the favorite of Confederate politicians and officers.

In spite of the ostensible twenty-year rule, the ancient Eagle Tavern maintained its superlative reputation for decades, even in competition with newer hostelries. In 1825, Lafayette’s dinner at the Eagle Tavern was matched by one at the newer Union Hotel. John Tyler was entertained at the Union Hotel in 1827 (and again in 1836), but John Randolph was feted at the Eagle in 1827 and the Washington birthday ball was held there in 1832. The Eagle, by this time known as a hotel, burned in 1839 [Christian]. No image survives of this popular place of entertainment. According to one source, a popular song in Richmond during the antebellum period included the lines “I dined at the Union, got drunk at the Bell, and lost all my money at the Eagle Hotel” [John K. Trammell. Travelers to War-time Richmond, America’s Civil War, Sept 1996, http://www.historynet.com/travelers-to-wartime-richmond-sept-96-americas-civil-war-feature.htm].

Exchange Hotel with the second bridge to the Ballard House.



The elevation of the Exchange Hotel can be seen in this 1845 Virginia Mutual policy at the top and the central courtyard can be seen in the 1851 Virginia Mutual policy below.

 

The cupola of the Exchange Hotel can be seen seen here from the west in a detail from an 1865 panorama [center right, Library of Congress].

 

The Exchange Bank opened in June 1841 and the new Exchange Hotel the next month. The name Exchange is a clue to the building’s proposed use by merchants and dealers to further their business. It was built near the tobacco warehouses at the foot of Shockoe Hill for a stock company of Richmond businessmen. Their intention was to encourage commerce by providing visitors to the city with a luxurious and even palatial hotel. After that date, most entertainments were held at the Exchange, including one for Charles Dickens in the following year [Christian]. The front was ornamented with four colossal, engaged, Ionic columns supporting a massive entablature and flaked by tall narrow, bow-fronted bays. The building was topped by a cupola resembling a circular Roman temple. The interior featured marble floors, a large vestibule ornamented with statuary, a “great hall,” a ladies’ dining room, a gentlemen’s drawing rooms, a dining room accommodating 300, reading rooms, and a ballroom, all surrounding a landscaped central courtyard [Bryan Clark Green et al, Lost Virginia: Vanished Architecture of the Old Dominion, 2001: 175].

 

The St. Charles Hotel can be seen to the far left and the Exchange Hotel to the right in this 1860s panorama of the city looking west from Church Hill.

 

 

Byrd’s Warehouse, site of the Exchange Hotel, in 1835. The trapezoidal site became available after the warehouse burned. Like the warehouse, the hotel was well placed at the foot of the hill between the lower commercial city and the upper capitol.

The Exchange Hotel and Ballard House seen on the 1876 Beers Map. The central courtyard of the Exchange was improved with paths and a central element such as a fountain.

The Exchange Hotel represented a new version of the ‘first-class” hotel taking shape in most of the nation’s major cities. Beginning with Isaiah Rogers’ Tremont House of 1827-30 in Boston, American hotels borrowed from the monumental forms of  public buildings.  The Tremont House gave “an unmistakable impression of elegance and public purpose, for which the Greek-revival orders, stylish in that day, were, of course, admirably suited. . . [and] confirmed a feeling as different as possible from that of the 18^th-centry inn” [Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience, 1966] Rogers’ Astor House in New York (1832-36), Jacques Bussière de Pouilly’s St. Louis Hotel in New Orleans (1838), and C.H. Reichardt’s Charleston Hotel (1839) had extensive reception rooms, fully expressed orders, and central rotundas [Pevsner, Building Types, 175-76]. These were comfortable, even palatial, buildings that employed the architectural orders on both the interior and exterior to create a sense of grandeur and importance for the commercial and social transactions that took place within. 

When Alexander Macay, an English lawyer, visited New Orleans in 1846-47, he remarked that “with us hotels are regarded as purely private property, and it is seldom that, in their appearance, the stand out from the mass of private houses around them. In America they are looked upon much more in the light of public concerns, and generally assume in their exterior the character of public buildings.” Daniel Boorstin observed that “lacking a royal palace as a center of “Society,” Americans created their counterpart in the community hotel. The People’s Palace was a building constructed with the extravagant optimism expressly to serve all who could pay the price. . . . From the early days of the 19^th century, hotels were social centers. . . . The hotel lobby, like the outer rooms of a royal palace, became a loitering place, a headquarters of gossip, a vantage point for a glimpse of the great, the rich, and the powerful” [Boorstin, 1966, 135].

 

The Ballard House was built across the street from the Exchange Hotel in 1855-56 [1865, LOC].

The five-story Ballard House was built by hotelier John P. Ballard in 1855-56 as a more modern hotel across the street from the Exchange Hotel, which Ballard had purchased in 1851. As can be seen in the photograph from just after the end of the Civil War, the Ballard was a plain tripartite building which relied on the shapes and details of the fenestration to enliven the facade.  Ballard connected the two buildings by a bridge at the second floor level allowing them to share facilities. The first floor of the Exchange was leased out to stores and the cellars were rented for storage. The hotels survived the evacuation fire and were refitted, but were unable to compete with the new Jefferson Hotel after 1895, the Exchange was demolished in 1900 and the Ballard House in 1920 [Virginia Historical Society, A Guide to the Exchange Hotel and Ballard House Records, 1865-1889].  

The main section of the Powhatan House (later Ford’s Hotel) on Broad Street in the post-Civil War period [Shadows in Silver].

The Powhatan House (later Ford’s Hotel) seen in a post-Civl War post card, at Eleventh and Broad Streets.http://[mississippiconfederates.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/lines-on-the-back-of-a-confederate-note/]

The Powhatan Boarding House, a four-story brick hotel, fronted on Broad Street north of the Capitol.  It began as a row of commercial structures facing Broad Street and known as Southgate’s Buildings, which housed shops on the first floor and a boarding house above. In 1831, James McKildoe enlarged Southgate’s Buildings to make the Powhatan House, which Mary Wingfield Scott says it was the most popular hostelry in the city before the construction of the Exchange Hotel. It was popular with politicians like Daniel Webster and Henry Clay. It was much enlarged over time. When President Millard Filmore visited in 1851, he was put up at what was by then known as the Powhatan Hotel, from which he visited the Constitutional Convention then in session [Christian 173]. In its expanded form, it was later known as Ford’s Hotel from the 1870s until the early twentieth century [Scott, Old Richmond Neighborhoods, 97]. Like the other taverns and hotels, it featured a wide portico on which guests could watch the activities in the street. The hotel featured a luxurious lobby, dining room, and the usual barroom and barbershop.

Ford’s Hotel struggled to compete with more modern hotels as time passed. It was closed temporarily for renovations in 1903: “from to-day forth the hotel will be known as The Powhatan, a return to its antebellum name. The rates of the renovated and rehabilitated house will be fixed at from 12 to 13 per day, according to accommodations desired. It will be conducted on the American plan. Baths will be put in, everything brightened and renewed and its cuisine and service will be made a feature hereafter” [Times Dispatch, 1 October 1903]. The structure was demolished in 1911-12 to be the site of a new city courthouse that was never built [NR form, Ninth Street Office Building and John K. Trammell, "Travelers to wartime Richmond had a wide choice of luxurious hotels, inns and taverns,” Civil War Times Sept 1996. http://www.historynet.com/travelers-to-wartime-richmond-sept-96-americas-civil-war-feature.htm].

Many of the hotels of the time are shown on this detail from Ferslews’s Map of Richmond (1859) including the Powhatan House , the St. Clair (northwest of the Capitol), the American, the Exchange , the St. Charles , and Union Hotel (in lower right corner).

By 1859, the city’s taverns had all been transformed into hotels. Most of these hotels were located in a circuit around the Capitol and few were left in the older part of town east of Shockoe Creek. The city’s principal hotels, listed on Ferslew’s Map of 1859, were as follows:

-The American Hotel (a five-story structure south of the Capitol, at Twelfth and Main, built c 1840). It was rebuilt soon after the war and was later known as the Lexington Hotel. 

-The Exchange Hotel (the hollow square to the right of the center, built 1841)

-The Powhatan House (northeast of the Capitol, 1831)

-The Broad Street Hotel (on the northwest corner of Broad Street and Ninth near the RF&P Railroad Depot)

-The Central Hotel (an enlarged version of the old Washington Tavern west of the Capitol)

-The Columbian Hotel (on the east die of Shockoe Slip)

-The St. Charles Hotel ((labeled City Hotel, southeast of the Exchange, a four-story building at Fifteenth and Main, converted into Confederate Hospital #8, built c 1846)

A view of the American Hotel in 1858 at the corner of Main and Twelfth streets.

The Spottswood Hotel opened just before the Civil War. Seen here in 1865 at the SE corner of Eighth and Main. It burned in 1870 [LOC].

Spottswood Hotel, 1865

Hotels built in the late antebellum years, like the Ballard House, tended to be much less exuberant on the exterior, but even more luxurious and comfortable on the interior.  The new five-story Spottswood Hotel, built at Eighth and Main, was like an elongated version of a Richmond commercial building with no discernable main entry and no colonnade above its cast iron storefronts. Not until 1895, with the opening of the Jefferson Hotel, would Richmond hotels again join civic buildings and churches in employing elaborate architectural detailing. In spite of its plain exterior, when it opened in 1860 the Spottswood Hotel became the city’s most popular destination for travelers. Competing against the famous Exchange/Ballard Hotel, it was the favorite hotel for official visitors to the Confederate capital. Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis both took rooms there until permanent homes could be found for them.  

A view of the American Hotel in 1858 at the corner of Main and Twelfth streets.

Immediately after the Civil War, the old hotels were refitted and reopened for business. New hotels, such as the second American Hotel, tended to follow the old patterns with new stylistic flourishes like arched cast iron window heads. 

Not until the 1880s was Richmond’s economy recovered sufficiently to think of building a great new hotel to symbolize its joining in the renewed growth of the New South. Lewis Ginter (1824-1897), a extremely wealthy tobacco manufacturer, played the role of civic philanthropist toward the end of his life.  Ginter was a leader in a plan which originated as early as 1882 with the city's chamber of commerce, to construct a modern hotel in the western part of the city, augmenting the superannuated accommodation available downtown [Christian, 1912, 419, 446]. The Exchange Hotel of 1841, and the Ballard Hotel of 1856 undoubtedly appeared to him to be progressive or modern. By 1892 Lewis Ginter had personally taken up the hotel scheme, determined to act as a benefactor and tastemaker to his burgeoning adopted city.  The project’s extraordinary scale, complex plan, and high cost suggest that other factors, including the effective “boosting” of Richmond, outweighed practical profitability among Ginter’s intentions.

Jefferson Hotel [Department of Historic Resources].

The rectangular site selected by Lewis Ginter for the hotel occupied approximately one-half of a square or block west of downtown Richmond, between Franklin and Main streets, in what had been the city's most fashionable residential neighborhood for many years. The pressure of postwar industry and commerce in the city’s old center sparked new construction in the old residential areas to the west. The Franklin Street front was intended from the start to appeal to an elite clientele by its relationships of scale and form to its fashionable residential setting, while the flush Main Street front, which served as an entrance for commercial travelers, responded to the commercial functions located along Main Street and the streetcar line that ran its length.



The Jefferson’s Pompeian-style Palm Court with the central statue of Jefferson.

Jefferson Hotel “Rotunda” before the fire of 1901 that destroyed the south end of the hotel [Cook Collection, Valentine Museum].

The most direct inspiration for the Franklin Street front would seem to have been the Casino at Monte Carlo by Charles Garnier (1878-79). Visitors entering on the Franklin Street front found themselves in a central foyer, called the Marble Hall, detailed in the Doric order. A central archway opposite the entry gave a glimpse of the glazed “Palm Court” beyond, detailed like a Pompeian peristyle court. A grand staircase led down to a two-story glazed court known as the "Rotunda" or "Office Rotunda" on the lower level which gave access to amenities intended for the hotel’s male visitors and city residents,  such as a bar room, grill, billiard room, and barber shop. Remarkably, Carèrre and Hastings’ Rotunda recalled the sculpture court of 1820-39 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, as roofed with glass in 1867 [see our commentary on the Ecole here].  The architects even imitated and elaborated the slender iron colonnettes that were added to support the gabled glass roof at the École.

Casino de Monte Carlo, Concert Hall, Charles Garnier, 1879

Jefferson Hotel

 

The young firm of Carrère and Hastings evoked the full depth of French academic classicism at this important project in the opening phase of the American Renaissance. The complexity and originality of the design grew out of the Jefferson's relatively small scale, generous capitalization, expansive functional program, and the personal direction of its developer.  Few commercial enterprises then or later have embodied such an ambitious effort at using art and architecture to fill a social and civic role.

 

Additional hotels were built in the years following, including Murphy's Hotel, the Hotel Richmond, the William Byrd Hotel, but none equaled the Jefferson, which, in spite of a disastrous fire in 1901, still operates in a substantial part of the original structure.