THE MATRIX ROUTE IN RICHMOND

Main Street looking West in 1865 [LOC] showing early nineteenth-
century one-, two-, and three-story brick basic buildings in the
process of replacement by four-and five-story commercial
blocks and hotels during the period preceding the Civil War. 

“All this is evident in colonial towns such as New York or Buenos Aires in which routes were not originally traced with different cross-sections or with complimentary roles, but as a chessboard of joint blocks. Time has produced in them a more or less exact hierarchy, yet partially compensating for the sequential nature of the plan, because it gives rise to routes with an insufficient cross-section to bear their hierarchical role. . .” 

Gianfranco Caniggia, Understanding Basic Building, 185

Italian School of Processual Typology 

Americans tend to think of their cities as two-dimensional grids of streets that were gradually infilled as the population grew. In fact, the way cities evolve is much more complex and interesting. Cities actually form along connecting routes in obedience to rule sets that can be recreated by a critical reading of their current fabric. According to the Italian School of Processual Typology, founded and developed by Saverio Muratori and his students, city development follows predictable patterns that are analogized to biological processes. 

As understood by this highly developed theory of urban morphology, cities grow in direct relation to generative “matrix routes.”  The routes (and the building tissue along them) are “polarized,” not only by distant destinations, but by nodes that occur along their lengths, where two routes intersect or where a route branches off. This polarization affects the intensity of development along a route, a factor which changes both in relation to factors of time (diachronic diversification) and location (diatopic diversification).  

During periods of “civil continuity,” when “spontaneous” (traditional or vernacular) building is operative, serial building tissue multiplies along a matrix route and along the secondary “planned building routes” that the city provides parallel to it. The building tissue is made up of buildings constructed according to a “typological process,” whereby the maker is guided by a mental plan that corresponds to an invisible grammar of building, passed down among owners and builders over time.  

As the city expands, it develops “aggregations” of buildings that correspond to building types.  Most aggregations are made up of basic buildings (the least personalized  kind of urban building, conditioned for the use of one or more families over time and space) or specialized tissue, which includes aggregates that correspond to special building types, like those serving government, religious, or other communitarian functions. Building tissue can exhibit seriality (made up of interchangeable elements) or organicity (characterized by peculiar shape or position). Building types continually change as specialization increases or functions are spilt off. 

By reading the city’s tissue, it is possible to recreate its development and reconstruct the formerly invisible rules by which basic and specialized tissue has been extended. Then, the planner or architect makes use of “critical conciousness” to place new buildings or features into the existing city in a way that reinforces, rather than undermines, its form.  

Richmond's Matrix Route during the eighteenth century (shown diagonally from lower right to upper left). The route corresponds to Main, Governor, and Broad streets.

The Matrix Route

Each matrix route is lined with two “pertinent strips” (a series of “built lots" along a route that relate to it). In Richmond, the form of the pertinent strip was conditioned by surveying practices learned by colonial officials and an energetic cadre of surveyors during the seventeenth century, from experience in laying out towns in Virginia over a period from the platting of the new town at Jamestown in 1620 to 1680 when twenty new towns were ordered by the government [Hughes 70]. It was also affected by the lack of previous European settlement on the land, although the influence of Indian uses on the placement of routes, river crossings, landings, fields, and settlements on European adaptation of the Virginia landscape should not be underestimated.  

By the second quarter of the eighteenth century, a century of development had resulted in a regional surveying tradition. By now, however, the planning of towns was no longer performed at the order of the government, but was done for individual landowners speculating in land. It was undertaken by roughly trained county surveyors or untrained proprietors.  The form of towns was often the result of the simple production of the requisite number of half-acre lots on a given tract of land, sometimes without regard to topography. Four of the lots were often combined into a square block. As Sarah S. Hughes has observed, similar gridiron plans are typical of towns founded by the English along the eastern seaboard and, more generally, by Europeans wherever foreign territory has been colonized, since the expansion of the Greek civilization [Sarah S. Hughes, Surveyors and Statemen: Land Measuring in Colonial Virginia. Richmond VA: Virginia Surveyors Foundation (1979) 59].  

Detail from the c1865 Mickler Map of Richmond showing First, Second, and Third 
Streets crossing Main Street, showing how lots were subdivided and buildings 
placed over time in a residential area

The uninflected nature of the blocks in the gridded town of the colonial period made it possible for the lot holder to orient the buildings toward one or the other of the two streets that edged each lot. This choice was directly related to which of the two streets was the more significant route within and through the town. Since all of the first lot owners in a town were involved in promoting or conducting commercial endeavors, lot orientation was entirely based on which street carried the larger volume of the traffic each business was trying to attract.
 

Lots were rapidly subdivided along the most intensely used routes. Development in new towns was limited to the sides of a main street or other route (including river landings or cross streets) linking the town to sources of trade or production.  During this initial development period the majority grid may have been less than fully apparent. As the town progressively developed and expanded its range of functions, services, and civic activities, the grid was manifested in an ever-changing hierarchical relationship with the changing routes of the principal traffic.   
        

The grid was undoubtedly placed so as to be as closely aligned with existing routes as possible, especially when, as at Richmond (and the corresponding town of Petersburg at the falls of the Appomattox River), there was an extant, less formal settlement already on the ground adjacent to the proposed town. In an all-encompassing grid plan like that extending over the several sections of Richmond, the same process of infilling was even slower, and the grid, although there from the start, was only manifested over a period of decades as development required it. Where geography intervened, the grid was circumvented or suppressed. In this way, the grid of planned streets and blocks can be seen as a matrix which conditions the form of the aggregations of buildings and of routes, but does not block the orientation or the position of the routes and aggregates themselves. Caniggia suggests in the quote at the head of the post that American gridded cities prevent a full expression of urban hierarchy. 
 

The city extended along the “matrix route,” which took the form of an armature that extended from the eastern end of Main Street at the port of Rocketts to its western boundary on Broad Street. The route climbed the steep side of Shockoe Hill by means of a curving “county road” that became Governor Street. All taverns, hotels, shops, and many houses were at first located directly along this matrix route, and all civic buildings were placed in relation to it, whether facing towards it or placed deliberately away from it. 

Poles, Nodes, and Axes

The route through Richmond ran historically from the intensely settled areas to the east (Jamestown, Williamsburg, and later cities like Hampton Roads) to the resource extraction sites in the west (Siouan-speaking Indian trading centers, coal mines, tobacco plantations). The road from the east, originally “Powhatan’s Road” ran from near Jamestown to the falls and connected to an ancient path towards the mountains, later known as the Three Chopt Road. These destinations gave polarity to the city’s principal route.  According to a contemporary account, British forces, who traveled to Richmond from Westover along “the common road” entered Richmond through a wooded area between the river and the bluffs. This road intersected with a road from the high ground to the northeast which descended to the new town by following the ravine now occupied by 26^th Street. The main road ran along the gently sloping terrace above the river until it reached Shockoe Creek. The road continued beyond the town to the west as a trading route. 

Nodes are significant points where routes intersected and where routes meet significant geographic features. In eighteenth-century Richmond these included the crossing of Shockoe Creek (and the falls that blocked shipping), and, to a lesser degree, the intersections of the Brook Road and the Westham and Three Chopt roads west of town. The earliest, the informally organized settlement known to William Byrd II as “Shackoes” was the site of the first tobacco warehouses. These had for many years been located on the high ground on the west side of Shockoe Creek, forming what was probably the most important node in the early eighteenth century community, before it was absorbed and obscured by urban growth. 

On a matrix route, building tissue forms at a pole or at a node between poles. The settlement established by William Byrd II at Shockoes at some point before 1730 was just such a place. It is what Caniggia would call a “proto-urban nucleus,” a village with commercial and industrial functions. The irregularity of the lots shown on the west side of Shockoe Creek on maps in the early nineteenth century show the signs of spontaneous building along a pre-existing route. This was followed by the regularizing of the matrix route within the grid of planned building routes, beginning in 1737, except where geography intervened on the slope of Shockoe Hill. Near the nodes where the routes split west and north of the city grew up small settlements at Bacon’s Quarter Branch and Scuffletown, later absorbed by the expanding urban agglomeration. 

Each urban nucleus has a center and periphery. In the same way each town is made up of secondary nuclei that exhibit their own centers, outskirts, and boundaries. These nuclei or neighborhoods exhibit both linear nodalitiy (routes that act as elongated nodes) They are measured across from the axis of the matrix route to the outskirts on either side) and punctiform nodality (a point on a route). These are measured from the center of a nucleus to its outskirts along the path of the route. Both are directly related to the matrix (principal) and secondary routes. In this kind of a system, Caniggia notes, “a complex system of hierarchies naturally forms between axes and boundaries and between nodes and anti-nodes, whose complexity depends on the expansion of the urban nucleus under review” [168].  In modern cities there are often centralizing axes (commercial streets) and dividing axes (traffic routes). Along the streets in between will be found warehouses and parking.    

Punctiform Nodalities

Important special buildings will tend to be found at the intersections of nodal axes, where their organic form makes them difficult to place in the body of basic buildings. These buildings often have a single large room, such as a church, theatre, or hall. The special buildings, like branch libraries, schools or markets, that serve neighborhoods and their catchment area and function can change over time, and they can lose significance as the building use diversifies and expands into other building types. This can be seen in the sequence Market House [18th c]; Market House, City Hall, Assembly Hall, Jail, and Firehouses [19th c]; Market House(s), City Hall, Exhibition Hall, City Courthouse, Sheriff's Office, Police Stations, Jail, and Firehouses [20th c]. By the late twentieth century, changes in transportation had rendered the First Market House, which had once housed most of the official uses of the city, nearly obsolete.    

Neighborhoods

Each neighborhood (to use another name for what Caniggia calls “sub-modules” within the town or city) has its own axis, center, and boundary and over time, the building tissue resounds to these forces in a variety of ways. In the eighteenth century, for instance, the parallel “planned building routes” flanking Main Street in the oldest part of the city-  Franklin and Cary streets- held residential accommodations. By the mid-nineteenth century, these squares and lots housed mostly industrial tissue. Today these lots have been returned to use for residential purposes, albeit with a very different building type in play. At the same time, the block of Main Street between 13th and 14th Streets was perhaps the most intensely commercial street in the city in the late nineteenth century, and those commercial uses spilled onto Cary and Franklin in that area. 

Hierarchy of Urban Routes

The position of each element in the city and neighborhood, whether a route, a building, or a square,  in relation to nodal or antipodal points or axes, determines its identity, role, and level of continuity with its neighbors. Special buildings are also placed in relation to nodes and axes. By this rule there is also a hierarchy of routes within a neighborhood, in relation to the axis and the boundaries. For instance, according to Caniggia, the first route flanking a commercial street will sometimes be the least likely to have shops along it, rather providing access and service functions for the main street, while the second flanking street will be more likely to fill up with stores [184].       

For example, the pressure of the commercial uses along Broad Street from the late nineteenth through through the mid-twentieth century meant that it lost its former residential character as commercial tissue expanded onto Leigh, Grace and Franklin. 

Sanborn Map showing Second Street north of Broad Street in 1950

The importance of Second Street as a cross thoroughfare meant that the lots on the east-west streets like Leigh and Clay were realigned so that even some corner buildings faced Second Street (see map above). This street served as the center of African-American life in the early twentieth century, requiring a second, separate set of special buildings, such as theatres, churches, lodges, and funeral homes, to serve the segregated community. Another example of change over time is in the area along South 17th Street near the First Market in the era from 1897 to 1907, as studied by Drew Patenaude as part of an urban studies class at the University of Richmond. He documented the gradual replacement of small businesses operated by African-American merchants with consolidated warehouses and light industrial operations located between the market and the city docks.  

Sanborn Map showing the 600-800 blocks of Broad and Grace Street in 1886

Sanborn Map showing the 600-800 blocks of Broad and Grace Street in 1905

Sanborn Map showing the 600-800 blocks of Broad and Grace Street in 1905

Similarly, Charles Hancock traced the changes along the 600-800 blocks of Grace Street from 1884 to 1924 (see the three maps above). This street, one block south of the commercial axis along Broad Street, was occupied by houses and churches. By 1905 hotels and small shops were found among the houses, but by 1924 changes in population caused the residential and commercial uses to be crowded out by the expansion of the churches and hotels.   

Infill

Infill building, according to Gianfranco Caniggia, occurs where serial tissue (such as row houses) fills both sides of a matrix route. At this point the back yard (pertinent area) of the buildings occupying corner lots increase in value and is “changed into a buildable, albeit undersized lot from its previous role as unbuilt are annexed to a house.” This practice is apparent throughout Richmond, conforming to  Caniggia observation that these infill lots tend to acquire variants of the adjoining basic building, but of later date and smaller scale [Caniggia and Cataldi. Interpreting Basic Building, 139]. See the Sanborn maps above for examples.

MORE TO FOLLOW

Critical Consciousness and the Unchanging in Architecture

‹‹Bisogno fare qualsiasi cosa, fuorché l’invenzione di cose nuove: la vera invinzione è il non inventare nulla. Chi si rende consapevole di tutta l’inventabilità dell’inventabile è colui che non inventa nulla, perché ormai tutto quello di cui è capace questo nostro sistema planetario è già stato prodotto, ed è tutto qui: più esso sarà reinventato e piu sara posto in crisi. 
Ma occorre viceversa capirlo.
Dunque pianificare vuol dire lasciare lavorare la realtà, comprendendone il senso del miglior utilizzo››.
S. Muratori, Autocoscienza e realtà nella storia delle ecumeni civili, a cura di G. Maranucci, Roma 1976.

One question is of singular importance to the contemporary architect attempting to return to the classical tradition amidst the dissolving wake of the modernist movement. That question is “what is unchanging in architecture?” Tradition, in this sense, is the means by which we access truth. The adjective classical denotes works of architecture which are prized as the finest exemplars of a tradition. These are held up as models for the guidance of current practice and for the assurance of future success. Therefore, the form that the examples in a classical tradition take is necessarily contingent on the material requirements and propriety connected with both time and place.

The classical architecture of one era will not take shape in the same way as that of another, nor will the architecture of one place necessarily resemble that of a different place even at the same time. Conventions such as patterns of use, fashion, language and ways of building change over time and in different places, gaining their correctness through general acceptance and habit. This accepted knowledge and these skills and customs—-means by which we pursue the true, the beautiful and the good—-are guarded and handed on by the custodians of tradition to succeeding generations. As part of this transfer, the means of accessing truth is developed and changed according to the requirements of time and place. The tradition of one place may not be the same as that of another. The purpose of tradition is to bring into conformity the way we each pursue our ends in the particular with the best possible means of achieving those ends in the universal. In other words, tradition is the way in which our judgment is informed through the comparison of the way things are with the way things should be. Thus tradition is not about preserving a unique way of building, but of ensuring that our buildings are the best they can possibly be.

The concept of imitation is essential to an understanding of tradition. The idea of mimesis, first formulated by Aristotle in his Poetics, became an explicit principle of creative formation and procedure from ancient Greece until the end of the Renaissance.[i] As James Ackerman has noted, the concept of imitation was understood in two ways both for the ancients and the thinkers of the Renaissance.[ii] Imitation in art occurred both in mimesis—the imitation of nature or human behavior, and in the imitation of preceding artists. The first mode of imitation forms the framework in which moral judgment is made possible, while the second provides a means of translating these universal truths for a particular time and place.

Imitation, as Quatremere de Quincy enunciated as late as 1823, was seen not as mere copying of natural forms or previous works, but as the embodiment of apparent universal rules governing the production of beauty in the work of art.[iii] These rules could be extracted from nature and perfected over time through the imitation of predecessors in a tradition. As Ackerman points out, imitation is inherently forward looking. By this he means that the artist is able to use imitation during the creation of the work of art. This view is in opposition to that of modern art historians who use the concept of “influence,” an idea only debatable after the creation of the work of art and in the service of the art historian.[iv]


How are we then to judge what is essential in a tradition? What can be discarded in the face of improved technology, or to suit changing political or physical conditions? This question has undoubtedly been the starting point of all architectural endeavors and probably troubled the architects of the fourteenth century as much as it did the proponents of the eighteenth and nineteenth century revivals. In a world so full of varying forms it has been difficult to determine what concepts and categories should guide contemporary practice. Compounded with a seeming abundance of choices, the void left by modernism’s denial of tradition has exaggerated its self-proclaimed goal of severing us from the past. We are faced not only with the questions raised by the contingent reality of tradition itself, but by any attempt to restore a tradition that has been systematically eradicated.

As citizens of the United States our tradition is that of the West. This is not to say that the tradition of Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian architecture is the only one in our country, or the first, but that it is the visible part of our “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The need to separate our new republic from the colonialism of England and justify our classically derived system of government prepared the United States for the embodiment of its constitution in an architecture of Western classicism. Little wonder that the author of the Declaration of Independence should also design the new Capitol of Virginia using the classicism of the Roman temple.

Fiske Kimball in his American Architecture asserts that “the classical ideal thus embodied was ultimately to rule in America to a degree unknown in Europe.”[v] Indeed, it was to precede it by more than a decade. The embodiment of the political order in the architecture of America is significant in that it points to the most essential truth of the classical tradition: the understanding that the highest good in life is the perfection of our nature, a good held since the Greeks to be accomplished through the moral life led in community. This is the self-evident truth behind the most just political systems of the past and the guiding principle in the American founding.

What this understanding means for architecture is that our ability to pursue our highest end as individuals is dependent on the freedom insured by our government, and that architecture serves this good as the embodiment of the state.[vi] In other words, architecture is the visible part of the more important activity of politics. Conversely, it is only in the freedom provided by well-ordered politics that architecture can be pursued. Vitruvius opens his De re aedificatoria by noting that it is in the realm of peace brought about by the Emperor Augustus’ conquest of the world that the opportunity and need for civic buildings arose, thus grounding architecture in a particular relationship with politics.[vii] Not only can mere building become architecture, but architecture can embody the polity and legitimate its claim to authority. By doing so, it can establish the means for its citizens to pursue the moral life.

Traditions are necessarily conventional. This means that they are contingent on materials, climate and circumstance. Conventional knowledge is particular, temporal and accidental, meaning that it could have been otherwise. Limited by the contingencies of both time and place, knowledge of convention is gained from experience and hearsay. The best pitch of a roof is dependant on the climate and characteristics of the location. That there exists a hierarchy of architectural orders and that they include an architrave, frieze and corona is not necessarily true (although the predominance of such features across traditions could point to a correspondence with a larger order). So too, the rules governing a given order’s proportions may vary with the changing requirements and traditions of the building and its purpose. Gaining as they do their acceptance through trial and error, such conventions are not necessary truths, or a priori knowledge, but point to a correspondence with an order outside of sense experience. Conventions have been adduced to be the best possible way of embodying the necessary truths of political life. Conventional knowledge on its own may be factually true and empirically verifiable, however, by its very nature it cannot be true in every instance. It can only tell us about the actual world and hence what is the case; it can say nothing about the ideal world and what should be the case.[viii]

When the American founders referred to the self-evident truths of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness they were invoking the necessary truth of nature, the repository first described by the ancient Greeks of the true, the beautiful and the good.[ix] As a priori knowledge, these truths of nature can be known through reason independently of experience or empirical evidence and are understood as incontrovertible imperatives. In platonic terms Nature can be described as the intuitive realm of perfect forms; for Vitruvius she was “the architect [who] placed the hinges as central axes” of the earth.[x] For our purposes it is sufficient to say that nature is the totality of universal truths both known and unknown including the laws of physics, the rules of geometry and logic, and the truths described in the American Constitution such as justice, liberty, the equality of man, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed, nature includes not only the natural objects around us such as plants, animals and rocks, but the system of principles by which things can be explained according to reason and which were true prior to their discovery. More importantly, nature provides the mark against which rational judgment is made possible, the moral order which allows us to state confidently that democracy is the best form of government because it has as its goal the good of every citizen, and the goal of all our efforts as human beings.

We can posit the idea of democracy, though a state where every citizen has been treated equally has never existed, because we can see that a state where some or all are not free is imperfect. In other words, the truth of nature is revealed only through the comparison of things we experience or accept with things we know to be true through reason. The truth of nature is self-evident, but it can only be accessed through our experience of conventional truth. As Socrates points out to Meno, people do not enquire into what they fancy they know, though they may in fact be entirely ignorant of it, unless they begin to compare what they think they know with the truth of nature.[xi] For example, we are gifted with the concept of justice at birth, but we must experience different embodiments of justice in practice to be able to understand perfect justice, and we must always be ready to reexamine our necessarily incomplete knowledge of justice. This Socratic doubt leading to the discovery of the order of nature—to the intrinsic, universal and enduring—is made possible only through out experience with the extrinsic, particular and transient we encounter in the here and now.[xii]

For the pagan writers of antiquity truth was embodied in number. The comparison between knowledge of convention and nature could be expressed through the concept of the part and its relationship with the whole. Number and the relation between numbers, or proportion, were seen as ideal frameworks upon which the basis of nature was modeled. The application of number and proportion to conventional material resulted in measure, and the correct use of number and proportion resulted in the beauty of the building. To phrase this another way, measure was meaning embodied in experience through beauty.

For Vitruvius, architecture depended upon number in the form of Order, Arrangement, Eurhythmy, Symmetry, Propriety and Economy. In the first place, “ordering is the proportion to scale of the work’s correspondence to an overall proportional scheme of symmetry.”[xiii] In other words, for the work to be beautiful it must initially conform to a geometrical framework extending to the subsequent design.[xiv] Arrangement, eurhythmy, symmetry, propriety and economy are aspects of this proportional application of number to material and depend on measure, which determines the relationships that make up proportion. At the center of this ideal proportional analogy Vitruvius placed the human body, described in the correspondence between the form of the extended human figure within the perfect geometric shapes of the square and circle.[xv] The anthropomorphic analogy was subsequently taken as the beginning of classical imitation and dominated architectural theory well through the sixteenth century.

According to Vitruvius the architect employs both conventional knowledge gained through experience, which Vitruvius termed fabrica, and the knowledge of the necessary truths of nature to explain a work’s beauty through ratiocinatio, or reasoned judgment. Just as the limbs of the body are proportioned in relation to the whole within a meaningful framework, beautiful buildings must have a relationship between their elements and the whole corresponding to their enduring purpose. The perfect geometrical forms within which the finite proportions of the human body are inscribed allow us to explain their beauty according to a higher meaning. Thus measure is essential for Vitruvius in the application of proportion to material, but only insofar as it serves the meaning inherent in the number it defines.

Renaissance thinkers such as Leon Battista Alberti took the tradition of Socratic skepticism, or the understanding that expertise must include both the knowledge of convention and of nature to its highest level, analytically breaking up all accepted thought into its constituent parts and reassembling them in a way that could answer the requirements of new and changing circumstances. Alberti, in his own words, "never stopped exploring, considering, and measuring everything, and comparing the information through line drawings, until [he] had grasped and understood fully what each had to contribute in terms of ingenuity and skill,” or until he had determined through measure the dimensions imitated by the ancients from nature.[xvi] Critical to this ability was the understanding that the content of a thing was more important then its form, and that form served as the access to a thing’s content.

The essence of the modernist movement lies in the mistaken belief that this Socratic doubt, instigated by our encounter with conventional truth, can only be answered by conventional truth, or fact. When Enlightenment thinkers realized the possibilities of the connection between natural and conventional truth based upon improvements in the science of measurement their Socratic doubt of received ideas turned to a revolutionary doubt in the very meaning of the universe. As soon as the measure of a thing (formerly a means of extracting a material object from a universal idea) became the thing’s very meaning, the imitation of nature by architects became pointless. While previous thought had held that regardless of the form of a thing such as the universe, the meaning behind it was immutable, the new view held that the way we perceive the universe, or the form of a thing, was all we could know about it, and therefore the way it should be.

Artists and architects, in the tradition of Socrates, have always questioned accepted truths and sought to translate them into the language of their own time. However, the Enlightenment’s rejection of inherent meaning required that artists’ translations could only be descriptive, meaning that they now relied on measure devoid of meaning. Imitation, in order to avoid the trap of mere copying, must be undertaken analytically. This means that, just as Alberti carefully studied all the ways in which the greatest buildings had treated specific conditions thereby arriving at an understanding of the universal they all pointed toward, imitation must be undertaken with a thorough knowledge of the whole body of traditional architecture and extract from each model pieces of the eventual solution for the given set of conditions. Imitation in the Enlightenment became the descriptive copying of the measurements and particulars of specific buildings. It was no longer the analytical treatment of precedents as a kit of parts capable of innumerable possibilities, all working within the framework of a building’s inherent purpose.

In order to judge what is essential in a tradition and what may be discarded in the face of improved technology, it will be necessary to recover our ability to think analytically. In other words, we must recover the understanding of imitation. The twentieth-century Italian architectural theorist Saverio Muratori has posited the existence of two types of consciousness essential to all architectural traditions. Spontaneous consciousness is entirely conventional and, though invariably traditional, lacks the analytical capacity for imitation. It could be described as something quite similar to Vitruvius’ fabrica, or practice. Spontaneous consciousness is simply the way things are built. Critical consciousness, on the other hand, represents the theoretical side of architecture. "When someone builds his own house with his own hands, he does not follow the dictates of the various architectural schools or currents and does not choose to build it out of structural steel or tree trunks without distinction: he does it as a house is built at that particular moment and in his own cultural area, thus acting in full spontaneous consciousness. Acting with critical consciousness is almost the opposite: when we are going through one of those critical periods . . . people are obliged to choose what they are doing, but let us make it clear, they do not choose having acquired greater maturity but out of uncertainty that what they are doing is right or wrong, in the absence of their community codifying what is right and wrong."[xvii] Muratori describes this modern absence of communal consensus as a crisis, carefully reminding us that the term does not necessarily denote a catastrophe, but rather the point at which an unresolved question is recognized and addressed. Critical consciousness is for Muratori both the cause of modernism and the only means of returning to and continuing architectural tradition. "If it is impossible to resuscitate spontaneous consciousness when we no longer have it, it is wise to exercise critical consciousness for the best. And the best that this can produce is to stick to the world of spontaneous consciousness, i.e. to recuperate what we would do if we had continued to operate through it."[xviii] It is only with our critical consciousness that we can regain the necessary ability to compare what is with what should be.

This is accomplished, according to Muratori, through the analytical “reading” [lettura] of the great buildings and cities of the past and the extraction from them of the essential human patterns of building. Rather than merely copying details—roof pitches, façades, column diminution or plans—the traditional architect must break down all the examples of the way in which buildings in the tradition conventionally treat specific problems, and from them reassemble a theory of universal types of architecture, both on the scale of the individual building scale and that of the larger city. Central to this endeavor is the understanding that although there may be new uses for buildings and cities, there are a limited number of building and urban types. These types derive from universal constants among buildings and cities.

Modernism attempted to replace spontaneous consciousness, a principle intimately linked with tradition, with a wholly theoretical vision of the future. As a result, however, architects have come to rely completely on conventional knowledge and the denial of analytical thought. In the attempt to enthrone critical consciousness as the sole means of producing art, modernist thinkers have been forced back upon conventional truth utterly devoid of theory and meaning. Modernism, for all its insistence on originality and freedom from tradition, is in fact a slave merely to the way things are done. Neoclassicism, the ultimate manifestation of modernism, is motivated to copy only particulars in just the same way that twentieth-century modern architecture can do nothing more than conform to the whims of its architect.

In order to comprehend what is unchanging in traditional architecture, we must understand that while conventional truth cannot prescribe the way things should be, it is the only means by which we are led to compare the way things are with the way they ought to be. Practice informs theory. Conventional knowledge provides the means by which we can access the order of nature. It is only through the analytical imitation of convention that we can apprehend the universal order of nature and make manifest the city of God.


NOTES

[i] Aristotle. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. (New York: Random House, 1941), 478.
[ii] Ackerman, “Imitation.” Origins, Imitation, Conventions: Representation in the Visual Arts. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002), 64.
[iii] Quatremère de Quincy. An Essay on the Nature, the End, and Means of Imitation in the Fine Arts. Trans. J.C. Kent. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., Cornhill, 1837), 11.
[iv] Ackerman, 65.
[v] Kimball, American Architecture. (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1928), 75.
[vi] Westfall, Carroll William, and Robert Jan van Pelt. Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 49.
[vii] Vitruvius, Marcus Pollio. Ten Books on Architecture. Trans. Ingrid D. Rowland. (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999), 21.
[viii] Westfall, Architectural Principles, 56.
[ix] Westfall, Carroll William. “Architecture and Democracy, Democracy and Architecture.” Democracy and the Arts. Ed. Arthur M. Melzer, et al. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. 72-91), 76.
[x] Vitruvius, 109.
[xi] Plato. “The Meno.” The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 389.
[xii] Westfall, in Architecture and Democracy, Democracy and Architecture, has described this doubt as “pious skepticism,” which has been replaced by the impious skepticism of modernity.
[xiii] Vitruvius, 24.
[xiv] Vitruvius, Commentary, 149.
[xv] Vitruvius, 47.
[xvi] Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Trans. Joseph Rykwert. (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1988), 155.
[xvii] Gianfranco Caniggia and Gian Luigi Maffei. Interpreting Basic Building: Architectural Composition and Building Typology. Florence, Italy: Alinea, 2001), 36.
[xviii] Caniggia and Maffei, 42.

The City's First Market

Commerce must always be civilized. A market’s prosperity provides the material basis for the citizens’ pursuit of justice, but the goods of the market are not the same as the good of the citizens. The manner of conducting the market, and the visible place the market occupies in the city, must make clear this hierarchical distinction that allows the civic values that embody transcendental ends to predominate in the lives of the citizens.

Carroll William Westfall. The City in the Image of Man.  

Journal of Anthropological Psychology No. 11, 2002.

Richmond's rise from provincial entrepot town to the status of a city occurred as it became the capital of the new commonwealth. One of the first acts of the new city government, founded in 1782, was to provide a market. The city was able to endow the market with a hall in which to conduct and regulate the market with fourteen years.

The town had earlier been given permission to hold two-day fairs on the second Thursday in May and November of each year "for the sale and vending of all manner of cattle, vitals  provisions, Goods, wares, merchandises whatever," as part of the act of establishment in 1742. Such fairs, often organized where there was no market, were occasions of general celebration as well as commerce. An act of 1705 provided for twice-weekly market days and annual fairs in the towns of the colony. The first fair to be mentioned in the Virginia Gazette was organized on St. Andrew's Day in Hanover County in 1736. The fair included horse races and prizes were awarded for country fiddling, dancing, singing, football, jumping and wrestling. A pair of silk stockings were given to the "handsomest maid" at the fair (Virginia Gazette, November 26, 1736 quoted in Colonial Williamsburg research paper "Markets and Fairs, c 1950).

Study of the Richmond market's history in the context of American and European traditions makes it clear just how closely associated the market is with the life of the city.  As Carl Lounsbury has observed: “the most basic function and one integral to towns of a certain size and economic diversity is the marketing of goods, particularly foodstuffs such as meat, poultry, cheese, eggs, butter, and vegetables. . . . At the heart of any town's prosperity was market day where tradesmen and itinerant higglers retailed their wares in the open market place. . . . The local market was not a free-wheeling, open-ended emporium of petty capitalists, although there was a strong push to make it so in many English and American towns in the eighteenth century, rather it was a highly-regulated system watched over by the clerk of the market in concert with other corporate officials” [Carl Lounsbury. The Williamsburg Market House: Where’s the Beef? 1990, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library Research Report Series 245].  


Market halls, in the eighteenth century, before most regulatory functions were hived off to purpose-built city halls and jails, were the centers and regulators of civic life. Here were located official scales and timepieces, constables and lockups, magistrates and courts, and the public records. Public punishment, including floggings and duckings, as well as important announcements, took place at the market. In many cases, the town's fire-fighting equipment was stored here as well. 

Markets, since time immemorial, were located and ordered to serve the public interest. They were places of carefully regulated competition, where sellers were licensed, weights and measures were standardized, quality was guaranteed, and selling outside the market not permitted. Medieval traditions of market laws, continued in the New World, functioned to protect citizens from profiteering, fraud, and cheating, provided a ready supply of high-quality produce to townspeople, and guaranteed the "market peace," which meant a safe and profitable setting for both consumers and vendors. This applied to foodstuffs as well as other produce of the farms around the city. Sellers were not permitted to sell outside the market.   

The Richmond City Market, like the Henrico County Courthouse and the Capitol, was built on public land off the official grid. In this case the market stood on the commons or public land along Shockoe Creek, on the edge of the original town. It served as the seat of one of the three governing bodies hierarchically ordering the life of the city and promoting the civic good. The county seat remained in the center of the old town along the river, while the state government established itself in Jefferson's redesigned new city on the hill to the west. It was not surprising that the city government placed itself directly in the middle. The market hall was built at the hinge between the two sections of the city, at the point where the main road crossed Shockoe Creek, not far from the boat landing and the long-established tobacco warehouses.    

Richmond was chartered as a city in 1782. The legislature established a common council and court of hustings as the local government, a clerk of the market, responsible for oversight of the rules of market, and a sergeant, responsible for keeping public order. The new section of the city on Shockoe Hill was selected as the site of the new capitol. The state authorities, encouraged by Thomas Jefferson, planned to make a new city around and on six adjoining public squares on the hill. Jefferson’s program for the new city, enacted in 1780, included a market on one of the squares. The market, however, failed to materialize, undoubtedly because there was insufficient population on the hill to support it. 

The Richmond City Market in 1814. Virginia Mutual Assurance Society policy. The building to the left is the end of a new brick row on Main Street west of the “Market Bridge” over Shockoe Creek.

The “Market of the City of Richmond” was founded by city ordinance in 1782. It was sited on the side of Seventeenth Street on public land beside the green, sloping common along Shockoe Creek next to Main Street and near the crossing, where it was convenient to the landing, county roads, and set apart from the town. The first, temporary, market house was supported on locust posts. Temporary "arbors" were set up nearby to provide shade to outdoor sellers. Wednesdays and Saturdays were set apart as “grand market days.” All goods carried into the city on those days were to remain in the public market until noon. It was significantly located at the hinge point between the new and old cities, at the nexus of major roads and port. During the next 150 years the City Market, with its daughter markets in the western sections, became, for most residents and their suppliers, the center of urban life. For the first one hundred years, the market was emblematic of the entire urban order. Police, judicial, and city government functions were housed in the central market hall, before they split off into specialized buildings during the nineteenth century.

Richmond City Market in 1814. Detail of Market House of 1794 from 

Virginia Mutual Assurance Society policy. The three arches to the right were an addition.

The Richmond Market House was similar in form and detail to the 1773 Market House of Providence RI, before the addition of the third floor and the vestibule seen in this c 1870 photograph.

Every market stood in some sort of precinct or square associated with the boundaries of the market regulations. The original market boundaries must have been informal, because in 1793, before building a market house, the Common Hall tasked a committee with the laying out of a market square. This square was somewhat different in form from the current market district. It occupied a 150- by 300-foot rectangle between the platted town and the creek. This square spanned Main Street, with equal space to either side of the street. The east end of the new stone bridge over Shockoe Creek projected fifty feet into the center of the west side of the square.  The brick Market House was built in 1794 on the north side of the street and the southern half of the square must have served as an open-air market.      

           Plat of Market Square, Minutes of the Common Council, 21 Dec. 1793.

The old frame hall was was torn down and sold, except for an addition that served as a fish market, that was retained for a while (malodorous fish markets were usually restricted to a separate structure).  A plan was been drawn up by December of 1793 and the building was contracted out in the following spring under the direction of a committee appointed by the Common Hall. Records indicate that the brickwork was executed by Bartholomew Trueheart and the woodwork by Reuben George. 

The building measured thirty feet wide by one hundred feet long and appears to have been formed into eleven nine-foot bays, each containing an arched opening, although the later insurance drawing shows twelve arched bays in the main building and three in an extension to the north. A wide arch in the south end gave access to an eighteen-foot aisle flanked by six-foot-deep stalls corresponding to the arcade bays.  The west wall, which backed up to the creek, was lined with nine stalls. The five stalls on the east alternated with four openings to the exterior. The 18-foot-wide central space would have housed a double row of stalls in addition. At other markets in Virginia the interior stalls eventually tended to  accommodated mostly butchers, with vegetable sellers provided with stalls under awnings or sheds to each side.  The northern two bays (eighteen feet) accommodated a "meal house" in the northwest corner adjacent to an eighteen- by twenty-foot space labeled "country market" where farm produce could be displayed. 

                Plan of Market House, the Minutes of the Common Council, March 18, 1793

The 3,000 square-foot market house was originally conceived as a one-story building. But before it was completed, the Common Hall had added a second story that was used for public purposes, including meetings of the Common Hall, assemblies, balls, and occasionally as a temporary school or theater. The upper floor may not have been fully finished at first, but the Common Hall ruled that it was to be used henceforth as a place of meeting instead of the Henrico County Courthouse, where they had been meeting previously.  The upper floor had more than one room: in 1816 the Common voted to allow the new Lancastrian school to use the front part of the upper floor of the market house provided they did not prevent free access to the room on the same floor still used as a council chamber by the Common Hall. [Common Hall Minutes 22 March 1816].

There is a gap in the city records, but the hall reappears in 1808, when the room above is to be fitted up and "conveniences provided for the called meetings of the hall". In 1811 and 1812, as the city government prepared to move to a new city hall, the market hall received  considerable attention. A partition was added to accommodate the offices of the Market Clerk and the High Constable. The city refurnished the upper room to serve as the hustings courtroom and gave the city's rifle company permission to hold meetings in the upper room.  At the same time posts and rails were place around the market square and the cage was repaired. A one-story addition of approximately 600 square feet was made to the north in 1812, seen in the 1814 insurance drawing above and the entire market house re-floored in brick to match the level of the new section. 

The ground to the west of the market was laid out in lots and a street developed along its western side. The “way now used as a street” from the northern boundary of the town by Tate’s Tanyard and the Market House and along the western side of Robert Mitchell’s tenement to the river was to be laid out as an official street as part of a general filling-in undertaken in the undeveloped area on either side of  Shockoe Creek.

Lawsuits between reviewed by the Virginia Supreme Court in April of 1860 reveals significant information about the market. The "arch and bridge" that carried Frankin Street over the creek were built between 1814 and 1817. According to Col. Edward Carrington, in 1815 or 1816, the fish market, "which had formerly been on the east side of Shockoe creek, between Main and Cary streets, where a flat rock was situated, which was used as a fish bench, and where country carts used to encamp, was moved to the lot in controversy [land on the east side of the creek just south of Franklin Street] by the permission of Richard Adams, who wished to build on the ground between Main and Cary streets. 

The fish market consisted of nothing but one or more benches, none of which were placed on the lot in controversy, but near it, and the fish carts used the said lot and fish were washed in the creek near thereto. The fish market remained there until the extension of the market building, which was probably a year or two after a condemnation of land in 1827, for the purposes of the market." The lot in question was "almost a quagmire"  [Thomas Johnson Michie. Virginia Reports, Vol. XVI, July 1, 1860- April 1, 1865, Richard D. Mitchell vs Angelo Baratta, Charlottesville VA: Michie Co, 1901].

Eventually, as the adjoining land was laid out in lots, the market stood in the middle of a widened section of Seventeenth Street lined with shops. It was composed of a long arcaded loggia for stalls and a second-floor public hall. As the city grew, the market was extended for a further block north to Grace Street [this may have occasioned the condemnation of land in 1827 referred to above]. As was the case at the Second Market, meat markets tended to separate from the other market sellers, although it is not clear what each of the sections of the market housed as it moved north.

A city ordinance passed on October 2, 1829 appointed a Weigh Master to certify the quality and weight of "hay, fodder, and long forage" used to feed the city's horses and cattle. The Weigh Master or his deputy attended the Public Scales that had already been erected at the market from sunup to sundown every day except Sunday. This official served to protect citizens from recent "frequent and great abuses . . . in the sale of Hay, Fodder and other Long Forage, whereby considerable gain has attached to the seller, at the expense of the purchaser."

What appears to be a clock is shown in the pediment of the principal facade facing Main Street. This served as another representation of the ordering function of city government. Since each town set its own time in relation to the movement of the sun, it was necessary that there be an official timepiece by which watches and clocks could be set. At first the market did not have a bell.  In 1793, the Governor had loaned a bell belonging to the capitol to be used as a public bell in the cupola of the nearby Masonic Hall (completed in 1787) to call alarms and signal the opening and closing of the market.

The administration of justice at the the city's level was centered at the market hall. Punishment of minor offenses was prosecuted by exposure in the nearby stocks, a ducking stool, and by placement of those who were apprehended after 10:00 PM in the elaborate structure next to the market house that was called The Cage (see separate article here). The night watch was based at the market. Similarly, regional (county) justice was served at the courthouse and jail in the center of the original town and at the provincial (state) level at the Capitol and the new Virginia State Penitentiary on the western edge of the city. The three political scales were expressed architecturally at three points in the city, regionally in the east, locally at the center, and provincially in the west. Given the geographical barriers between sectors, each of the three polities were closely associated with an historic section of the city and with a differentiated building tissue.

Typically, this order was confirmed by civic pageantry organized during the period, when parades would originate at the county courthouse, run past the market house, and climb Shockoe Hill to end at the Capitol, beginning as early as 1824, with the welcoming procession for Layfayette, and continuing with James Monroe in 1831, and numerous events connected with Washington's birthday [Christian].

Market Halls at Como (1215, left) and Peterborough (1671, right)

Market Typology [Richard Worsham]

The market hall is the earliest type of European government building. It is found from medieval Italy to the Netherlands in the Renaissance. From its earliest known example at Como in 1215, cited by Pevsner, the building type incorporated an arcaded market loggia on the ground floor and a single room above used for town hall and court. Although the government and market functions diverged in large cities during the late Middle Ages, the close identification of market and local government continued in regional market towns. The costs of local government were largely borne by the income derived from the stalls, as was its architectural manifestation in the form of an arcaded loggia. This pattern transferred for economic as much as political reasons to the colonies. Medieval market buildings with ground-floor arcades gave way to more classical forms, but the form most often remained very similar.

 Faneuil Hall, Boston, MA, before additions by Charles Bulfinch in 1809.

There were no market halls in the colonies until there was a sufficient population to require them. A small frame market house was built in Norfolk, possibly in the late seventeenth century. The form of the market hall was used for the frame Boston Town House in Massachusetts built in 1657 which stood in the middle of State Street. It was replaced in 1713 with the brick State House, which housed a merchant exchange on the first floor and the colonial government on the second. Faneuil Hall was built in 1740-42 and resembled many English-style market halls built during the following, years, including Richmond's First Market.

Virginia Capitol at Williamsburg

The arcades of the 1794 Market House at Richmond are related to a long tradition of civic architecture. The market are almost always associated with extended arcades for both practical and symbolic reasons. Examples of arcades at hand include court houses and the Williamsburg Capitol. As Carl Lounsbury has observed, the compass-headed window or door opening was generally reserved for public buildings. The Virginia examples had their models in England. The arched piazzas found at the Williamsburg Capitol and incorporated into courthouses in neighboring counties have their roots in English market halls and the courtyards of mercantile structures in London, Oxbridge colleges, and local buildings such as almshouses built in the seventeenth century. 

Market Hall, Fredericksburg, Virginia, 1817. Virginia's only surviving early market hall was located facing an enclosed market square on the interior of a city block.

Virginian political leaders were equally aware of the classical sources of civic architecture and of their intermediaries in England. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English use of the term piazza for a covered walk or portico is connected with the elite emulation of Italian Renaissance squares and is ultimately derived from the Roman forums. As Carl Lounsbury has noted, Christopher Wren observed of his Trinity College arcades that “according to the manner of the ancients, who made double walks . . . about the forum.” As in Virginia, English market halls stood in or adjacent to the squares provided for commerce in many market towns. Stalls displaying wares for sale were protected from the weather in an arcaded loggia beneath a second floor housing official functions. The American market took a different, but related form, in the late eighteenth century. The market house occupied the center of the market square, sometimes extending in a long line down the middle of a widened street to maximize access and ease of movement both for internal and external traffic.

Linear Market at Market Street seen from Front Street, Philadelphia PA, 1838

The Charleston City Market at Charleston. South Carolina seen from the lower end. The land on which the market stands was ceded to the city in 1788 and the market building were built between 1804 and 1830s. The linear structure consisted of a series of low,   buildings, of successively diluted form,  housing meat, vegetable, and fish markets extending away from  The temple-form Market Hall at the far end was built in 1841 to the designs of Edward Brickwell White.

In Virginia loggias were attached to the fronts of courthouses or capitol as places for the gathering of the community. They served to house the informal portion of the political or legal activity and for the rare opportunity for social interaction that life in a dispersed rural colony discouraged. It permitted, on specified days of each month, much the same purposes as the European square or ancient forum. In a way it was the forum turned inside out. The internally oriented European court or piazza, disposed in front of town halls, palaces or churches, became the arched or columned American piazza from which the citizens observed the cultivated landscape or the grassy public squares of the new republic. 

Hanover County Courthouse, Virginia, 1735

The way in which Americans approach landscape, as Carroll William Westfall has noted, is different from that found in Europe. “In the United States the greensward replaces the piazza. The result is a continuity between rural and urban in the built-upon and cultivated landscape that supports the polyvalent system of governmental jurisdictions defining the multiplicity of overlapping duties within the civil realm” [Westfall. The City in the Image of Man. Journal of Anthropological Psychology No. 11, 2002]. The early Richmond market hall stood at first, like the Virginia country courthouses and like the new Capitol on Shockoe Hill, on broad expanses of open land. One contemporary remembered the “green pasture” of the town common that extended from the market house down to Shockoe Creek. Eventually the area around the market was lined with shops and it took on a more enclosed form.

William Sheppard, Harper's Weekly.  First Market in 1868

As the city grew the market at Seventeenth Street, known as the Old Market, retained its significance. The large room on the second floor was known as "Military Hall" and filled a need for place to meet or drill among the city's military companies (later, in 1909, the Richmond Light Infantry Blues would be given its headquarters over the city's Second Market). The street on the west side was extended from Franklin to Grace Street as the market grew north. When the market was expanded north along Seventeenth Street, the new one-story market building was linked to the old by a tower carried over Walnut Alley on an archway. The market as shown on Mijacah Bates map of 1835 has a form familiar from larger urban markets of the early nineteenth century (like Alexander Paris’ Quincy Market in Boston), which feature a central hall surmounted by a dome or cupola. 

First Market in 1835. Detail from Mijacah Bates' map showing original market hall at the lower end, connected to the north wing by the wider central archway. Q is the recently erected Scale House. Until Shockoe Creek had been straightened out (old and new stream beds are both shown) shops could not be added along the west side of the square.

The central tower and the north wing are visible in the background of the 1865 Harper’s Magazine illustration shown below. The cupola on top of the tower is of a style and form consistent with the 1830s or earlier. The market bell marked the opening and closing hours and was used to ring the alarm when the town was threatened by fire or other danger the bell survives in the current market shed. The bell was cracked during an alarm in the Civil War and was recast. 

By 1853, the market building was judged by a city committee to be inadequate. The section of the market "from Main Street to the arch opposite the Watch House" was replaced in the following year at  cost of $18,300. The Italianate-style two-story building was likely designed by the City Engineer, W. McGill.  The dramatic second floor featured tall arched windows and a cornice with paired brackets. It was supported on a long cast-iron colonnade terminating in an arcaded loggia at the south. The colonnade concealed an inner arcade on each side that aided in supporting the floor above.  A "window of appearances" with a balcony overlooked Main Street at the south end. This feature was a familiar feature of market/city halls and confirmed the building's role as a place from which public announcements were made. From this time on the old market was referred to as the "First Market." 

                 First Market as shown in Harper's Weekly in 1865. Note arched base of     

                                  tower and arcaded extensions to north. 

Detail from illustration in Harper's Weekly in 1862 showing the northern section of the market
between Franklin and Grace streets and its cupola at center right. 

Open market pavilions extended to Grace Street and hucksters lined adjoing streets on markets days. The market hall served as courtroom and police station in the years before and after the Civil War. The hall was used for various purposes, including polling station, convention hall and military drilling. In 1855, the city permitted the Western and Southern Commercial Convention to hold its meeting there. In 1862, it was the scene, not only of the assembly, conscripting, and meeting of troops but also the site of a charity ball and a hospital for wounded soldiers. 

       This detail from an 1876  panorama of Richmond by Lutz 

          shows the First Market Hall at left with the cupola behind it.

The Market Hall was the scene of a riot in 1870, when the mayor appointed by the Federal troops refused to turn over his post to the elected mayor. Federal soldiers and a recently enrolled opposition police force battled over the occupancy of the Market Hall.  The second floor was removed in the early twentieth century, leaving the loggia at the south end and a bell tower with a domed cupola at the north, connected by a long central colonnade. The market hall continued to serve a variety of public purposes: the Rev. Moses Drury Hoge of Second Presebyterian Church held religious meetings there for years following a visit by evangelist Dwight L. Moody in 1885. In 1903, the motormen and the conductors of the Virginia Passenger and Power Company met in "Old Market Hall" to discuss a breakdown in negotiations with management concerning an increase in wages, ultimately resulting in five weeks of sabotage and violence and the calling out of a large show of military force [Christian 489]. 

           Third Building at Richmond’s First Market site plan from Sanborn Map of 1889. Photo of first state (built 1854) below on left and with second-floor hall removed on the right. 

In 1913, the city replaced the First market with a new building, now also gone, seen below. Like its predecessors, it put a classical facade to Main Street., but it provided the sanitation and refrigeration that enclosed markets could supply.  Unlike them, it did not include any assembly or office space to functionally link the market with the political life.