URBAN PALIMPSESTS

                

             
                   Urbanismo took the opportunity of spring-like weather last week to explore the urban fabric of the oldest part of Richmond.  A small company, including an obliging photographer, walked the boundaries of the original 1737 town. A pedestrian's view of the city brought home the geographic, historic, and architectural complexity of the neighborhood. Since we walked the boundary of the district (with a few divergations), we didn't, by any means, look at all the buildings and streetscapes. We began, as seen above, with a walk south along 17th, beginning at the location, since 1782, of the city's market.  17th Street (originally 1st Street) was the westernmost edge of the town until the 1760s. The market was built on the city's common, where washing was done in Shockoe Creek, which flows underground just beyond the former YMCA Hotel in the background.

               A quick review: The conventional "Tidewater" town of Richmond was laid out at the falls of the James River in 1737.  An uninflected 28-block rectangular grid was organized along an axis formed by a pre-existent road on the natural terrace above the river’s edge, extending southeast from the ford of Shockoe Creek that separated it from an earlier settlement called "Shockoes." The market was eventually located just left of the added range of lots identified by the letters A to O on this copy of the famous Mayo plan. Lots 97 and 98 at the upper right were donated to be the site of the town's church and churchyard by William Byrd II. Our trip takes us around the outside edge of the grid starting in the lower left-hand corner and proceeding counter-clockwise.

        Each two-acre block or “square” contained four nearly square lots and was separated from adjacent blocks by sixty-five-foot-wide streets.  The banks along Shockoe Creek and the waterfront outside the grid were designated as a common for the use of residents in pasturing, fishing, or other activities. The lots filled in over the next 130 years. The section is seen in the 1864 woodcut above looking west from the east end of town with Church Hill on the right.

                
                   We moved down to the southwest corner of the town, not too far from the edge of Shockoe Creek and the now-invisible site of the Rock Landing, where goods were loaded for the trip down river. This view shows the overhead railroad tracks that create, with the elevated Interstate 95, a shadow over the old landing place.  These are some of the late-nineteenth-century industrial buildings that replaced the houses, shops, and warehouses that made up the former streetscape near the edge of the port of Richmond.

                
               The ancient connection of this section of the city with the sale and processing of tobacco is apparent here on 18th Street near Cary and in later photographs that show the many warehouses and factories dedicated to its preparation for sale. The two buildings flanking the street, with their tall, deeply shadowed facades, are the among the most architecturally powerful of Richmond's industrial structures. 

               Urbanismo continued along the southern edge of the 1737 town. This parking lot at the corner of Cary and 19th streets is an example of the open land that serves the parking demands of the city but works against the potential urban heath of the district.

           The long, impressive row of twentieth-century tobacco factories, converted for institutional and residential purposes, line the terrace of land above the city's historic port. Before the change to heavy industry, the section facing Main Street had been home to several generations of stores with accommodation above for the shop-keeper's family. Several fires in the early nineteenth century prompted the replacement of the frame shops with brick commercial buildings, often built by developers in rows of two or more stores. 

          The squares on the south side of Cary Street (to the right in the snapshot) were part of the town's common land and were sold in the 1780s to finance the construction of the new public buildings associated with the move of the capital to Richmond.

            The lots became waterfront property in 1816 with the construction of the Richmond Dock on the north side of Chapel Island. In about 1850, John Enders built a row of fourteen warehouses on these lots between 18th and 21st streets to serve the shipping of goods by boat. Several of the warehouses burned, but those that remained (seen above) were utilized by the Confederate government to house Libby Prison.The warehouses along the water-front were replaced by lumber yards and small industry in the late nineteenth century.

           Here the tour proceeded east along Main Street. The factories fill much of the southern side of the street, while a later generation of twentieth-century stores occupy the north side and sections of the south.

            The location of the old Henrico County Courthouse always seemed strange, since Richmond was removed from Henrico in the late eighteenth century when it was made a city. It persisted at this location and served as the heart of the city's public life until the city received a government and a market hall in 1782. 

           The courthouse was built in 1750 and located in the middle of 23rd Street. Since the town lacked any public land on Main Street, the court took advantage of the cross street to provide a specialized building at an urban scale and in a position that rhetorically accentuated its public purpose. That building was replaced in 1850 with the building shown above. The current building, embedded in the factory row, was constructed in the late nineteenth century. 

                The extraordinary miniature bridge of sighs built of corrugated iron and leading from the jail to the courtroom had eluded the attention of Urbanismo for many years. 

          This poured concrete addition to the rear of the courthouse has architectural atractions not unrelated to Regency-era London. 

           The view from the original courthouse location shows the dominance of the site on the bluff of the eighteenth-century home of the prominent Adams family. Their neighbor, William Palmer, built the house still standing at the summit of the hill about 1810. Enlarged in 1859, it forms the centerpiece of the nineteenth-century Convent of the Visitation, now the ecumenical center called Richmond Hill. Franklin Street runs at the foot of the bluff.

   

         This image shows the buildings that crowned the bluff in the late nineteenth century. In the foreground is the 18th-century Richard Adams House. The enlarged Palmer House is seen in the distance.

                  This store/residence on the north side of Main Street between 21th and 22st streets is one of few along the street to date to antebellum times.

          The surviving row of brick shops across Main Street, although built in the late nineteenth century, provides a valuable sense of urban continuity.

               The strong brickwork and articulated facades of these factories provides an exhilarated perspective of the city dock, elevated railroad, and the river beyond.

              At Main and 25th streets, Urbanismo paused to better understand the topography, so easy to miss from a car.  Main Street slopes gently up from Seventeenth Street. Here we stand at the eastern end of the William Byrd II town looking up 25th Street toward St. John's Church. Although the slope has been amended during the nineteenth century, it is clear that this was always the place where the bluff could be ascended.  

            As we proceeded up 25th Street, the character of the revitalized neighborhood of Church Hill overrides the mixed building stock of Main Street.  Early nineteenth-century buildings, like the 1846 frame house in the center distance, survive amid bland infill, like the Charity Square Condominiums on the right and antebellum tobacco factories like the Turpin-Yarbrough Building on the left, now known as the Pohlig Brothers Paper Box Company.  

         Building on hilly land involves a lot of grading and has the potential to make ideal places for urban gardening. Here are some of the granite retaining walls found all around Richmond. This one is seen from the alley on the east side of 25th Street north of Franklin. The early spring garden belongs the frame house seen in the previous photograph.

 
            The first section of Richmond and the addition to the town on Shockoe Hill were laid out, as was the long custom in Virginia,  in two-acre blocks (always properly called "squares"). The owner of each half-acre lot was free to build facing any adjoining street and to subdivide the lot in any manner he chose. Thus standard lots and regular alleys are not to be met with in Richmond east of First Street. Such alleys as exist are the result of the provisions of generations of developers and of negotiations between adjoining owners.                

          
              The ways of alleys in the older parts of Richmond are unpredictable. A brief detour also provided a great reward. The alley between Grace and Broad streets turned and dwindled to a narrow cobbled path as we approached 25th Street not far from St. Patrick's Church. 

              
                   As we turned the corner at St. John's Churchyard and walked west on Broad Street, the northern edge of Richmond in 1737, we looked across at the Patrick Henry Park, a well-meant bit of 1950s urban redevelopment. The park and the adjacent firehouse were part of the deliberate effort to give a dignified setting to St. John's Church by the removal of a square full of "unsightly and unsuitable" buildings.  In fact the square remains empty most of the time and robs the churchyard of a strong northern edge.  As currently laid out, the park contributes less to the civic good than would a block of houses and shops. 

                The high brick walls all around the churchyard show the degree to which the streets have been cut down to improve street grades.

               
                  Carrington Row, one of Richmond's most important examples of Neo-classical domestic  architecture, is a row of three dwellings unified with a marching row of stucco antae (a kind of Greek pilaster) and an abstracted Greek Doric entablature. Carrington Row served in 1957 as a pilot project for the creation of a kind of "Old Town," which at that time Richmond wholly lacked.  The managers of the Historic Richmond Foundation were able to act with more abandon in 1957 than they would be today. All over Church Hill porches were removed or restored, and at Carrington Row the restorers whimsically left the added Greek Revival porch at the east end and the Italianate hood at the west end. Only the central opening retains its original appearance.    

              The gardens to the rear and the brick and cast iron urban mews park along the alley are wonderful evocations of the restraint, humanity, and civic largesse that could be brought by landscape designers and their patrons to urban projects in the post-War era.  These gardens, designed by the firm of Griswold, Winter, and Swain of Pittsburgh and carefully maintained for fifty years by volunteers, manage to express the scale, detail, and ease of a private landscape in a public setting.  

              Here is a good view also of the characteristic treatment of paving in Church Hill. The sidewalks are laid in red paving bricks in a herringbone pattern. The alleys are paved with cobbles, laid with less rigor, but always with a central gutter. A distinctive apron is provided wherever the alleys cross the sidewalks.  In some cases these aprons may be the remains of the adjoining street paving, but it provides an important and consistent color and material palette giving welcome depth to the city's design language.  

             Our trek brought us now to the long slope down from church hill to the bottom of Shockoe Valley. It is hard to realize that Broad Street did not connect across the Shockoe Valley or climb Church Hill until well into the nineteenth century.  As we walked the old herringbone sidewalks, we enjoyed looking a the variety of houses that still line Broad Street from the top of the hill to the bottom.  Whether built in 1850, 1880, or 1910, the houses have a remarkable family resemblance. The emphasis on decorative fashion that we learn from publishers of style handbooks conceals the essential typological continuity of the Richmond urban house.

               As we saw at the top of the hill Richmond  houses were often built by developers in block of two, three, or more row houses. Where the land is sharply graded and an alley is impossible to provide, some Richmond houses have narrow tunnels between the English basements to allow service access to the rear. In this brick double house midway along Broad Street the chimneys shared by the two dwellings are supported on overhead arches.

            This lot on the south side of Broad Street, is typical of the many empty spots in the Shockoe Valley. Infill housing had begun to re-edge Broad Street just before the recent economic collapse. While much of the new housing is shallow in its concept and detailing, it is in the right place.  

            Here we turned south along the western edge of 1737 Richmond. The Market is ahead of us and the cupola of the Masonic Hall visible to the left. There is a lot of empty space in this area, much of it parking for the nightspots in the market area. This is the area that would have be radically transformed by the proposed ball park.  It isn't clear what will happen in the next decade, but the past one has been great for the urban fabric of Richmond. Fueled by the Historic Preservation Tax Credit, the citizens of the city have renewed the vast majority of the city's historic buildings in much the same way that they were built, spontaneously. There has been little government intervention in the historic area, few large-scale development schemes with the influence to make changes at an urban scale, and there are few franchise restaurants or businesses in the historic area. 

            A variety of owner-operated businesses, dense occupied housing, and active foot traffic gave evidence of Richmond’s health and the depth of its revitalization.  Another, less obvious, demonstration of the city's strength was the extreme diversity of building types and ages.  Instead of a homogeneous fabric of historic buildings, the variety of buildings indicates the depth of history and the long-term vitality of the city in the American context. In fact, only three buildings survive from the eighteenth century and very few from even the antebellum period. Most date from successive rebuildings in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. 

               Urbanismo promises to keep walking and keep looking. Next week we plan to examine the street patterns of the old town of Shockoes and of Council Chamber Hill, followed by an expedition to examine the boundaries of the 1768 plat of the extension of the city onto Shockoe Hill. 

Rural Extensions: Dinwiddie County Architecture

All through the winter, Urbanismo has been at work far from our customary haunts. We have been occupied several days a week with the cataloging of old houses in one of the quietest and least urban of places: Southside Virginia. There we have visited some of the most powerfully evocative places from a seemingly ancient past in the venerable county of Dinwiddie. The landscape is made up almost entirely of small winding roads, modern agricultural businesses, crossroads churches, pulp-wood plantations in every stage of propagation from clear-cut to mature, and abandoned country stores (the stretch of Route 1 south of DeWitt is startlingly beautiful, quiet, and undeveloped). The county has been spared much of the devastation of suburban sprawl due to a large extent to the lack of economic growth in the adjoining city of Petersburg, yet it has suffered a terrible forgetting nonetheless.

The small houses of freed slaves and tenants, the farmhouses of the proud black and white landowners of the post war and early twentieth century can be seen in overgrown fields, most abandoned and unrecorded. Great plantations and middling mansions, set up to be showplaces of order in a now invisible landscape, are to be seen only in truncated remnants, sometimes perched uncomfortably in center of now-dated housing developments, many shorn of their accompanying villages of outbuildings and barns. When these outbuildings survive to be recorded by us, they are usually dilapidated and disused. Often the old houses serve as weekend or commuter homes. Our experience shows that almost no-one is at home during the week in Dinwiddie County.

While much farming takes place in the county on a variety of scales from small to large, a drive down one of the many newly forested roads is a constant reminder of the wreckage of a farm-based life across the state. Here there is none of the lush but shallow horse-oriented landscape that has replaced authentic small farms in areas colonized from the cities. Hunting camps and clubs abound. The most rewarding winter sights are the silhouetted groves of oaks that cluster around many farm houses and churches, set aside for the comfort of the muggy Southside summers.

The traditional farm life lives on among a number of older farmers, some of whom spoke to us of farming with horses and mules in the 1960s and later and whose farms are still replete with granaries, corn cribs, hay barns, and the tall log dark-fired tobacco barns so characteristic of the county’s fields. The old patterns of stability continues at a greater depth under the surface, harder to detect for those who don’t take part, but the empty trailers and proliferating roadside Cape Cods indicate the rise and triumph of another way of using the land. One is reminded of the closing, elegiac words of Henry Glassie’s now-classic study of conservative architectural and farming traditions in the Piedmont counties of Goochland and Louisa:

The old farmer of Middle Virginia is left standing alone at the end of a row. He watches, without motion, the dust spun from the auto’s tires settle through his garden. He lifts his chin from the back of his hand, his hand from the hoe. He shoulders the hoe and crosses the yard, glancing to the left at the sleek mule in his pen, and drops himself into a chair on the porch, where, efficient and swift, the hands of his wife click snap beans into a pot. Staring down into the middle distance, he says to himself alone, “Many changes, many changes, many changes, many changes.”

Henry Glassie, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia, 1976.

The first forgetting of Dinwiddie was the destruction in the Civil War of all its public records before the 1830s. A survey sponsored in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration first inventoried the county’s oldest houses, already in attenuated condition. The loss of memory was scarcely made up by a thin record of owners and dates attached to blurred and enigmatic photographs. Antiquarianism had overtaken the recorders; in keeping with the times, 1830 was considered the terminus ante quem of significance in furniture and architecture. Everything later was discounted. The eighteenth century was most honorable. Invented dates have since been assumed for many houses far in advance of possibility. It is astoundingly difficult to say for sure when and for whom many of the oldest and most important houses were built (and there remain quite a few).

The second forgetting has been the destruction of the historic landscape. Since the mid-twentieth century the loss has been disheartening. Two-thirds of the houses recorded in a survey of pre-1830 houses done in 1969 are vanished. Where ten years ago, most old houses looked out at the world through the refractions of mortised wood sashes, today almost every occupied dwelling in Dinwiddie stares at the viewer with the irrevocable, sterile glare of lightweight vinyl windows. Similarly, vinyl siding renders mute and hulking the delicate solidity of a well-built country church. To the eye of an historian of the rural landscape, the visible wreckage is so great in a few areas of the county that it is almost as if a war has devastated the countryside and left only ruins. The invisible transformation of the people of Dinwiddie may only be less palpable to outsiders.

The industrialization of the activity of building and of maintaining existing building completes the process. It becomes increasingly impossible to make traditional decisions, due to the cost and unavailability of materials and workmanship and of the memory of their meaning. In the end, however, it turns out that it is not the houses that matter but what goes on in them. As traditional patterns are lost, the rural order deteriorates from community into mere arrangement. It is all too likely that cataloging of artifacts serves no civic purpose here, except perhaps to set apart some products of the former times, undeniably hallowed by their close connection with the powerful current of human life lived in liberty, what Aristotle called “the Good Life.”

The Cage

"The cage" is, I believe, a term peculiar to Richmond, as applied to the receptacle for offenders. It originated from a structure, so called, erected at the north-east end of the market bridge, some fifty years ago when it terminated close to the market-house; its long parapet-wall of brick, surmounted by a capping of free-stone. This cage, of octagonal form, had iron gratings on three sides, about ten  feet above the street, and the floor of this prison was arranged ampitheatrically, so that each occupant could see, and what was worse, be seen from the street." Samuel Mordercai 1858

Richmond's administration of justice at the city-scale consisted, at first, of the punishment of minor miscreants, using the ancient means of public shaming and of more serious offenders, by flogging. In addition, English market halls often included a cage, or other enclosure, where those who were picked up at night for disturbing the peace were held until they could be brought before a magistrate in the morning. Lock-ups, variously termed "cages," round-houses," or other fearsome names, were built in villages across England during the late eighteenth and wary nineteenth centuries. Night watches were re-instituted in 1802. One was appointed for each of the city's three wards. They called out the hour by crying “O yea! O yea! Twelve o’clock and all’s well" [Christian 1912].

The Roundhouse at Wavertree, near Liverpool, built 1796, hipped roof added 1869. Unusually
 elaborate two-story version of the lock-ups found across England from the 1780s to the
1830s, when the establishment of a police force rendered them redundant. They do not appear to
 have been used, in any instance, to exhibit the offenders to the public gaze. 

These served for the temporary incarceration of persons, such as vagrants and drunkards, who had offended against public order. There was something of a crisis in these kinds of offenses by villagers and outsiders, in the years following. The enclosure of land and the increase in industrialization. In some cases, these tiny buildings were given rather ostentatiously octagonal or circular forms, as if in remembrance of the market cross and its association with public penance. 

Incorporated towns in Virginia also maintained lock-ups or cages as short-term holding cells. Richmond, for many reasons, had a similar problem with bad behavior, particularly in the area around the market.  City records show that on 12 September 1785, a night watch was authorized to arrest and confine suspected and disorderly persons after 10 PM and a ducking stool was established. A committee was appointed to make repairs to a building called "the cage" and for necessities for the night watch.  

The city's common court eventually devised an unusual structure to house offenders, known, like its predecessor, as “the Cage.” In 1811, a post and rail barrier was placed around the market house and cage. 

 Richmond City Market in 1814. Cage as shown in context of Richmond City Market. 

Detail from Virginia Mutual Assurance Society policy.

Located beside the Market Hall, the elaborate brick and stone cage contained open cells where “night-owls,” or other "disorderly persons" were held in a structure designed in the  form of a three-story cupola. The second and apparently third stages were divided into wedge-shaped cells protected by gratings. The structure was built on a stone first floor and, with what may have been an ironic intention on the part of the city's leaders, was surmounted by a dome.  Unlike most contemporary lock-ups in Britain, which were dark and tightly enclosed, the Richmond cage left the occupants exposed to the gaze of the citizens and to the weather. In this way it combined the function of the stocks and the jail. 

The octagonal cage was dated by Samuel Mordecai in 1856 to fifty years before, or about 1806. As we have seen, there was an earlier cage that was repaired in 1785. The building type was mentioned in 1814 by a traveler, Thomas H. Palmer, who mentioned that the cage was "a small room on the ground floor of jails for the confinement of unruly persons. It is generally in a public part of town, and the gate being formed of iron bars, the culprit is of course exposed to the view of the passengers." As Bryan Clark Green has observed, this kind of shaming was seen as appropriate for the maintenance of civic order: "the punishment meted out for the violation of corporation law was a public act: both actions emphasize that the offenders can be seen in the cage and that this public shaming was an essential part of the punishment. . . . in  what was perhaps the busiest public place in the town: the market." 

 Richmond City Market in 1814. Cage as shown in detail from Virginia Mutual Assurance Society policy.

The building type the Cage most resembles, and from which it most likely took its form, is the market cross, a small, often octagonal structure that was a fixture of many English market squares. It evolved from the symbol of God’s blessing on the commerce of the market town to a secular representation of political authority from which proclamations were read or to which shackles were attached for public whippings [Mark Girouard. The English Town].

The cupola as a rooftop architectural element often housed a clock or bell, which, in the absence of any other chronological standard, established the time around which daily life was ordered. It was usually reserved for use on official buildings as a sign and function of the authority of government in both England and the colonies. Here, it almost appears as if the market hall’s spire had been placed on the ground next to it in order to perform its function as regulator of the community’s order in a most literal fashion. 

The Cage did, in fact, house a bell [Common Hall records, 1816-1819, 271). It may have served as the original market bell, that marked the opening and closing of the market and was used as an alarm for the whole town. A new bell may have been purchased for the tower that formed the center of the enlarged market created in 1817-18 [Common Hall, 5 July 1817].

The cage was ordered demolished in the same year and the bell was to be sold by the Master of Police. A successor to the cage was probably located in the base of the new tower that connected the original market building with the addition of 1817-18. A cage is said to have been in use until 1827 and, in 1830, it was listed as a responsibility of the mayor to "daily, on each morning, to attend at the City Cage and direct the punishment or discharge of such persons as may be there confined, and in relation to whose cases he may be authorized to decide finally" [An Ordinance. . . establishing a Regular Police in the City of Richmond and prescribing the duties of the Mayor. . . [and] the Night Watch thereof, May 10 1830].

As the city gained new institutions like a court house (City Hall, 1818) and a city jail (1830), the role of the market-place in punishment receded. Stocks, pillory, and whipping post were likely maintained at the Henrico County Public Square on Main Street and also constructed at the new City Jail. As the marginal common land on which the Cage had been built became the site of new commercial buildings during the antebellum period, the infliction of punishment for crimes receded from the center of public life. After the Civil War, with a replacement of the old methods of shaming by increasing levels of long-term incarceration, corporate punishment receded behind the high walls of the county and city jails. 

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.