ALMOST RIGHT, BUT IS SOMETHING MISSING?

"All great cities are a mixture of shopping, culture, and history. Richmond has all of those, and Carytown is a big part of that." Amy Talley, President of the Carytown Retail Merchants Association in the Homes section of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 5, 2011.

ALONG THE BANKS OF RICHMOND'S SHOCKOE CREEK

                                Detail of the Market area from the 1879 Beers Map of Richmond. Shockoe Creek can be seen running to the left of the long Market Hall

Today Urbanismo walked the area of the First Market on Seventeenth Street and the Richmond Slave Trail, a poignant reminder of the nefarious trade in slaves that was based in Richmond. A heritage tour  is being developed around archeological resources connected with Richmond’s slave markets.

Market Square in 1793 (north is to the right) 

Markets, since the earliest times, have been placed on the edge of built-up parts of towns, where access by wagons and animals is easiest and the noise and refuse associated with them can be segregated. The Richmond market, and, presumably, the semi-annual fair which preceded it, was placed just beyond the plat where the bottomlands prevented easy settlement, beside the bridge which connected the original town with the newer suburbs on the hill to the west. Over time edge markets are surrounded by shops and fully incorporated into the town.

As we have detailed elsewhere, the city government laid out a formal market square in 1793. It ran between the town and the creek and extended 123 feet to the north and south of Main Street. A two-story brick Market Hall was built in the following year on the bank of the creek on the north side of Main Street. While the market hall survived for many years and has been succeeded by three more structures in the same location, the original market square layout was abandoned as the former commons was laid out in irregular lots and streets over the following decades.

Former trestle extension into Main Street Station

Our winter afternoon walk, one of a series of explorations begun last year, started at the north end of Main Street Station, in a parking lot located between the elevated railroad tracks that split apart to pass on each side of the station. In 1879, this was the location of the Chesapeake and Ohio Freight depot that stood between Broad and Grace streets (see Beers Map below). When Main Street Station was built in 1901, the tracks were carried over the streets on cast iron trestles and the tracks fanned out in this area to allow six locomotives to enter the great train shed which fronted on Main Street and ran back almost to Grace. Franklin Street ran below the station, although this was blocked off when the shed was enclosed in the 1980s. The iron trestles taken from the north end of the station were used to create decorative gates at the new side entrances to the train shed.

1905 Sanborn Map of the area along Shockoe Creek showing the large train shed (1901) in yellow and the long Market Hall of 1855 to the right. Shockoe Creek can be seen running vertically between buildings in the center. The site of Lumkin's Jail is near the angled building in red and yellow northwest of the train shed

The area where Main Street Station was built, west of the market, was a natural one for construction of a massive new structure and for the interstate highway which would later overshadow it. The area along the curving route of the creek was subject to regular flooding. Except for a continuous streetfronts added in the early nineteenth century along the valuable lots on Main and Franklin streets, the banks of the creek were nearly empty. Between Franklin and the James River the creek had been confined to a straight channel running perpendicular to Main Street, but once north of Franklin it wandered back and forth under the steep eastern slopes of Shockoe Hill.

Main Street Station seen from the Seaboard Depot

Freight wing of the Seaboard Depot sen from the northwest

The Seaboard Freight Depot, built in 1909

Where Franklin Street once ran below the great train shed of Main Street station, seen from the west.

A gently rising terrain extended for about two blocks west of Main Street Station. It was once a tightly settled neighborhood of shops, modest houses, and foundries, but is today a parking lot for state employees and the location of the two-story, early twentieth-century Seaboard Freight Depot, fronting on the short stub of Franklin Street that remains intact on that side of the station. A long freight wing extends to the north. The construction of the Richmond Petersburg Turnpike (Interstate 95) in the late 1950s so altered the eastern slope of Shockoe and Council Chamber hills that it is difficult to see their historic form. The elevated highway, wrapping closely around the southwest corner of the station’s ornate tower, also placed much of the area south and west of the station in shadow below the huge concrete highway spans. The earth fill supporting the highway north of Franklin Street creates a steep edge along the valley.

The site of Lumpkin's Slave Jail, marked with stone blocks, lies here beneath fifteen feet of fill

It is in the area of the state-owned parking lots south of Broad Street that archeologists have found foundations of the infamous Lumpkin Slave Jail, one of several dealers that operated on the fringes of the city's commercial center. Much of the slave jail and associated buildings are buried beneath the slopes of fill added as part of Interstate 95. A trail with signage has been developed around the theme of slavery, including the results of the archeological explorations. A larger program of interpretation, including a museum, is planned. Similarly, a large African-American cemetery, abandoned in about 1816, is located below Interstate 95 and to the north of Broad Street.

The area along the creek was mostly residential by the late nineteenth century. The descent was steep from the hill, as can be seen in the postcard shown below, so that the Egyptian Building housing the Medical College was on the edge of the hill, as were the Brockenbrough House (Confederate White House) and the First Baptist Church (later the First African Baptist Church). The land at the bottom of the hill on Marshall Street was parceled out by the city to secondary public buildings, principally the Lancastrian School and the City Jail.

View east along Marshall Street from Shockoe Hill, Online Postcard Collection, VCU Library

The view from the the top of the hill on Broad Street probably looked similarly steep in the early nineteenth century. After Broad Street was extended to the valley in 1845, Shockoe Creek flowed through a narrow bridge under the road. Parts of this still stand, as seen below, although the creek, uncovered throughout the nineteenth century, is now fully underground. The area between the rail tracks was an ideal one for unloading materials. Hungerford Coal and Oil Company is located here. The huge timber bins into which coal was emptied and sorted remain to this day although no coal has been sold since the major flood of 2004.

Stone wall on the south side of Broad Street The stone wall marks the spot where Shockoe Creek passes beneath Broad Street.

Stone abutments on the north side of Broad Street. Rutherford's Row, a continuous line of small
 dwellings described on late nineteenth-century maps as "negro tenements," once lined the north side
 of Broad Street in this area.



Ornamental coping on the top of the walls on each side of Broad Street

Coal unloading facilities at Hungerford. Coal was bagged in the small shed until 2004 

A well-preserved, cobbled section of N 16th St. north of Broad Street, west of the tracks

View looking north from Broad Street under the pylons of the railroad.

The area east of the tracks and north of Franklin Street has been used for parking for many years, but in the early twentieth century it was full of tightly spaced shops. Of these only one large building on the northwest corner of Grace and Ambler (formerly Union) streets remain. This housed Loving’s Produce, a wholesale company, until c. 2008. In 1905, it was the warehouse of the Richmond Branch of Armour and Company meat suppliers.

Loving's Produce Building facade facing Ambler (Union) Street

Continuing with the tour, we visited the area between the Market and Main Street Station. The YMCA Hotel, which corresponds to the French Renaissance detailing of the station in style and material, replaced a block of nineteenth-century shops in the early twentieth century. It sits back from the street to match the setback of the station, permitting a corner view of the market shed. Shockoe Creek once ran uncovered in a narrow straight channel just west of the YMCA Hotel. It then curved to the west and ran under the station. It is now entirely underground.

The Main Street front of the YMCA Hotel Building, east of Main Street Station

Arch or Walnut Alley from the above the path of Shockoe Creek looking east to the existing Market Shed

Early buildings between the Market and the railroad station relate to the market function of the area. include the fine, three-story commercial building on the northeast corner of Seventeenth and Franklin streets. The one-story Acme Tomato Company Building, dating from before the Second World War, occupies the space between the three-story building and Main Street Station. 

The well-preserved three-story commercial building with the Acme Tomato Co Bldg.  beyond

The desert-like parking area north of the market bore the brunt of the 2004 flood, which washed
 away much of the paving. It was, however, the site of a full block of shops in the early twentieth
 century, of which the Loving's Produce Building is the only remaining example.

Here we ended our tour of the fragmentary urban tissue along Shockoe Creek with a visit to Havana '59 for some much needed refreshment.

Concinnitas, or Beauty Reconciled

What does Alberti mean by concinnitas? How does he learn what it is so that he can introduce it into his building? and what role, then, does concinnitas play in investing a building with beauty?

Concinnitas, Alberti’s powerful term for “the absolute and fundamental rule of Nature” denotes, with such a description and by its very nature, a difficult, and illusive theory. While Alberti makes no more specific statement than that concinnitas composes parts “according to some precise rule,” the very framework in which concinnitas is conceived will help the thoughtful architect, philosopher or political thinker in its pursuit, for concinnitas is more than a mere pattern book rule to be followed. Rather it is the way in which Beauty is reconciled to the particular example on earth. Concinnitas translates the ineffable idea of Beauty to us through minute adjustment of proportion, thereby rendering it perceptible to the senses. The pursuit of concinnitas is the highest goal of the architect, or indeed of man in general.

“Everything that Nature produces is regulated by the law of concinnitas, and her chief concern is that whatever she produces should be absolutely perfect.” Concinnitas flourishes in birth and death, in creation and destruction, and in every changing state between these extremes. Indeed, there can be no written formula for such an idea because it is not a static result, but a defining action whose very meaning is to take parts which are in every case different, and arrange them such that they form through their correspondence a complete and perfect whole. Concinnitas is the final and defining quality of architecture, or art in general. As such, it surpasses the crude necessities of shelter and protection, enters the realm of beauty, and becomes something that arouses delight in the beholder.

Thus, a discussion of concinnitas must begin with the understanding that it is something which governs both the practical and aesthetic qualities of building; it is behind and above decisions concerning the material or order of building. What Alberti is telling us is that no truly functional thing can be made without concinnitas, and that any discussion of concinnitas must therefore govern and surpass that of firmness and commodity. Architecture, Alberti tells us, in agreement with Vitruvius, is worthy of praise when it is commodious, firm, and delightful. Yet for Alberti, the final requirement is the most vital. “Of the three conditions that apply to every form of construction – that what we construct should be appropriate to its use, lasting in structure, and graceful and pleasing in its appearance – the first two have been dealt with and there remains the third, the noblest and most necessary of all.” In other words, firmness and commodity are necessities not just of a palazzo, but also of a barn. What sets great buildings apart is that they delight our senses with the beauty arising from their proportions, not just relative to themselves, but to the cosmos.

“All care”, he tells us, “all diligence, all financial consideration must be directed to ensuring that what is to built is useful, commodious, yes – but also embellished and wholly graceful, so that anyone seeing it would not feel that the expense might have been invested better elsewhere.” Thus, architecture for Alberti is most concerned with beauty, in that every good which architecture brings to humanity is a result of its grace and appropriateness. “To have satisfied necessity is trite and insignificant, to have catered to convenience unrewarding when the inelegance in a work causes offense.” The task of the architect is to reach beyond necessity and evoke pleasure in the viewer. This is accomplished through concinnitas.

Central to Alberti’s theory of concinnitas is the idea that architecture is a composition of various individual parts that follows a rational arrangement. Beauty, Alberti tells us, “is that reasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing may be added, taken away, or altered, but for the worse." It is in the correct manipulation of these elements that beauty is achieved. “When you make judgments on beauty, you do not follow mere fancy, but the workings of a reasoned faculty that is inborn in the mind… for every body consists entirely of parts that are fixed and individual; if these are removed, enlarged, reduced, or transferred somewhere inappropriate, the very composition will be spoiled that gives the body its seemly appearance.”

The theory of concinnitas is grounded in a perfect composition of the various parts. If these elements such as cornices, windows, walls, columns, doors, and porticoes are altered from their perfect manifestation in the whole, concinnitas will no longer be present in the work. Indeed, one might also say that, just as a “reasoning faculty is in born in the mind,” so too a “natural excellence” exists as a potential in every building. The individual building in this description already exists as a perfect idea which the art of the architect attempts to emulate. In other words, a failure to correctly arrange the parts according to the rules of concinnitas regulating the composition of the whole will results in an unsuccessful building, or one that does not attain the perfection it is innately capable of.

How then do we achieve this proportionate arrangement? If beauty is the reasoned harmony of all the parts, then that harmony may be described, Alberti tells us, using Number, Outline and Position. For Alberti number was a quantitative relationship between things in a formula, but more importantly, it was also a qualitative entity in its own right. As George Hersey so beautifully explains, there were whole churches, cities, kingdoms and heavens of numbers, each with its own particular character and even genealogical structure. Outline is difficult to understand as it can mean several things. I believe it is directly tied to Alberti's idea of lineamente, or the lines and angles, which form the building (as opposed to the material, or structura). Regardless, it is something like the form, or type of the building, in that in the outline informs us of the building's purpose (to some degree this is also accomplished by ornament). Branko Mitrovic has called lineamente shape, which I think is not far from the truth. Position has to do with Alberti's use of the term collocation, or the placement of the parts of a body in such a relationship that the whole, which they form, has the quality of beauty. We will return to this.

“But,” Alberti continues, “arising from the composition and connection of these three is a further quality in which beauty shines full face: our term for this is Concinnitas; which we say is nourished with every grace and splendor. It is the task and aim of concinnitas to compose parts that are quite separate from each other by their nature, according to some precise rule, so that they correspond to one another in appearance.” In other words, concinnitas takes varying numbers of things which have different shapes, and lie in various positions, and creates (according to a “precise rule”) a complete and beautiful whole.

Concinnitas is not simply the combination of number, shape, and position, or a glorification position only, it is rather the manipulation of the three qualities such that each is altered to form a suitable and distinct whole, appropriate for its unique location and purpose on earth. To make this distinction more apparent, let us even say that position is sufficient to compose a literal version of a building’s heavenly counterpart, but that concinnitas breaths the life into an otherwise inanimate copy. Concinnitas fractures the perfect harmony of ideal beauty just enough for man to comprehend it. In short, concinnitas is like the bending of a perfect rectangle to fit the curvature of the globe it would otherwise be incompatible with.

After the Earthquake: Repairing Richmond's Urban Fabric

Urban historian William Carroll Westfall has asserted in his web-based study “Learning from Pompeii” that those who would restore the torn tissues of American cities can learn a great deal by studying the formal histories of successful urban centers of the past. In Richmond this begins with a renewed understanding of the different standards observed by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Virginians observed when they laid out their principal provincial towns and proceeded to enlarge and rebuild them over time. Most importantly, the designers of our cities placed greater emphasis on the public realm than we do today. According to Westfall, like the Romans who rebuilt the much earlier Samnite town at Pompeii after an earthquake, our task in repairing our devastated cities should honor the “urban ensemble rather than the individual building. . . . mutilated by neglect or, in the case of the last half century or more of building activity, marred by a disregard for the common good.”

In contrast to modern American practice, traditional cities placed “greater value on public places than on private ones while we do the reverse.” Traditional cities were

compact and cut off from the countryside rather than loose and sprawling as our cities are. . . . built with a range of architectural and urban elements clearly belonging to the same general range of components while our cities are much more diverse--cheek and jowl is a miscellany of buildings in different architectural styles, a jumble of industrial and transportation equipment and their related yards and dumps, fields of abandoned buildings, wastelands, and miscellaneous pieces of equipment in varying states of deterioration, all diffused across open rural landscapes or depopulated urban areas. And while the expanding sprawl of our cities forces us to drive more and more to get most of what we want, most of what a person in Pompeii [and Richmond] needed to live a full and abundant civil life was accessible with the most democratic means of transport, going on foot.

In his attempt to understand a traditional city with a layered history, Westfall asks two questions: “First, What kind of life was lived in this place, that is, Why and how did its builders build as they did? And second, what rules with general validity and applicability did they follow?” If we can ask these questions of Richmond, we may discover some guidelines that may help us to recover the good life here and now. The myriad actions that result in the complexity of even such a small city as Richmond make it seem almost as difficult to untangle as Pompeii, but the effort can give us some clues about how to think through our own decisions and make needed responses to the great tradition unfolding all around us. 

Understanding Richmond's Civic Order

Most accounts of Richmond’s urban and architectural history have examined the city’s buildings as individual monuments rather than as part of an urban whole. Tyler Potterfield, in his history of the city’s landscape, and Charles Brownell and his students at VCU have done a great deal to dispel a good deal of the fog surrounding the deeper structure of Richmond’s overall fabric and of the history of its specialized civic architecture at the urban scale. As a further attempt to excavate some aspects of Richmond’s civic order, we have posted to the right an ongoing series of essay on some of the building types that make up the city’s tradition of public buildings.

Virginian cities were directly related to the urban structures of the ancient world, informed by later intellectual developments, in particular Renaissance Humanism and English political theory. The changing form of our city and its layered fabric can be traced by an excavation of its political structure and of the building types that correspond to the elements of civil life. Most important, in urban historian Carroll William Westfall’s view, is the relation between civic life and architectural form. Most significantly, in the light of the civil and architectural disorder evident in modern Richmond, traditional cities employ civil functions and architecture to demonstrate how that the civic life orders and enlivens both private and commercial activities. Westfall asserts, in Learning From Pompeii, that “Roman cities illustrate a general principle: In cities that take the civil life seriously, the physical reinforces the civil and vice versa, with the one used as a means of achieving the ends of the other.”

Urban life, variously religious, political, social and commercial, requires venues where public activities can be accommodated and ordered. Virginia’s most familiar models of civic order were to be found in the towns and cities of England. Basic elements of any town or city in the English civic tradition include the church, court, tavern, and market.  In England, as Mark Girouard has shown, these activities were traditionally manifested in a hierarchy of scales. Town, County, and State each accommodated these and other civic functions, in some cases conflated in a single architectural form.  Town government and markets stalls were conventionally housed in a single building. Similarly, as ancient seats of justice, the great halls of county castles were adapted to serve as courts and indoor regional market on the regular court days that drew a larger population to the county seat.  Westminster Hall in London served a similar role at the national level.

Eighteenth-century Americans transformed English civic order and its architectural expression in ways that suited the changed circumstances of the colonies and new nation, but the forms of urban design and architectural expression continued to show their roots in Post-medieval Northern Europe. The few public buildings of the mid-eighteenth-century town at the Falls of the James- the Church on Richmond Hill and the Henrico County Courthouse- occupied sites and took forms that shaped the civic life by their careful detailing and rich materials and their placement outside the regularity of the grid of conventional lots. The church, facing due east at an angle to the grid, was placed in an elevated, anti-nodal position away from the bustle of the principal street and the courthouse was located in the middle of a principal cross street at the center of commerce and near the county jail. 

When the town was selected to become the capital city after the Revolution, it acquired a new set of civic functions and a greatly expanded form. As it grew, the city’s local institutions lent civil order to the enlarged scope of commercial activities, while the market brought the prosperity that made the civic architecture possible. The institutions proper to a city included a market for commercial transactions, scales to assure fair measure, a hall for the council and court, a lockup, a constabulary to keep the gathered populace in order, and a place for the storage of records.

Following English and American tradition the city’s institutions were, at first, housed together in a new, classically detailed Market Hall, placed on the public common at the hinge between the old, county town and the new capital district. As the city civic institutions multiplied, the new public buildings, including the jail, a school, and a police station, most were located on the nearby land along Shockoe Creek.  However, by the time that the Hustings Court and City Council outgrew the Market Hall in the early nineteenth century, the valley location no longer seemed the center of the city. A new, domed City Hall with a temple front was built on Shockoe Hill in a nearly axial location directly behind the Capital on the main route though the city.  A new, second market was constructed nearby.

The new state government district was strategically placed on the Richmond’s Shockoe Hill. Existing streets were widened hierarchically, a public square created, and a program for the addition of a full range of buildings projected, adapting a previous unarticulated street grid. The working out of the state’s program took several decades and underwent many transformations, but it resulted in a powerful amalgam of public and private architecture, with a series of public buildings surrounded by a landscape of architecturally distinguished villas designed by some of the nation’s most competent architects.

A group of citizens, advised by Thomas Jefferson and a series of well-informed European immigrants, such as his associate, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, provided designs for the new city’s public and private realms. They enriched the English tradition in which they were immersed with political, urban and architectural theories imbibed from a variety of sources. Jefferson and his colleagues redefined the city’s institutions, elaborated its program, enriched its layout, and ornamented its fabric with a series of public and private buildings of exceptional quality. The planned institutions included the legislative, judicial, and executive arms of the government, an armory, and a jail (later known as the penitentiary). The massive, temple-form Capitol was placed, like an acropolis, on a knob of Shockoe Hill overlooking the river. Together with the other institutions of government, it was located on a calm, expansive public square in an anti-nodal position away from the principal thoroughfare.

Theaters, churches, and educational institutions were not at first included among the civic institutions in the capital district on Shockoe Hill, but instead clustered around the market. Unexecuted designs by Latrobe for an elegant theater/hotel and a new church failed to secure a sufficient level of interest or funding.  Latrobe and his clients proposed to place the church at the apex of the civic order, in the center of the eastern end of Broad Street on the bluff above Shockoe Creek.

Richmond’s urban form continued to be enriched by a classical understanding of the form and meaning of the city well into the twentieth century, resulting in one the most successful amalgams of public and private architecture. We intend to continue to explore the civic architecture around us in greater depth and to bring the study into later periods as we go along. Please see the essays collected in the panel to the right for a deeper analysis of the city’s building types.   

Where is Council Chamber Hill?

In the late Spring, Urbanismo joined Renaissance Richmond in a tour of the neighborhood once known as Council Chamber Hill. Our search was for the site of Clifton, the long-vanished house with links to architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Having completed an impressive archival search, Richmond Renaissance blogger Jessica Bankston, a student at V.C.U., had engaged our attendance at her search for the house on the ground. Jessica took the photographs attached to this essay, since Urbanismo forgot their camera.

Detail from James Madison, A Map of Virginia 1818 (orig. 1807) [Virginia Historcal Society]. The Council Chamber House is 

seen just to the right of the fold, standing nearly alone at the top of the steep slopes of Council Chamber Hill. 

Council Chamber Hill was a unusually dense neighborhood occupying a small spur protruding from Shockoe Hill and the steeply falling ground around it just east of Capitol Square. It commanded a dramatic view of the Shockoe Valley and of the James River. The hill was usually included in lists of "the seven hills of Richmond" and figured darkly in the accounts of some of the city's most colorful history.

Here, courtesy of a signboard in Capitol Square, is a map of Council Chamber Hill today, an area occupied by high-rise state office buildings and parking lots.

Today it is mostly a parking lot that is banked above the broad barrenness of the relocated Fourteenth Street and surrounded by aging office towers. We assumed that it would be hard to find anything in the deserted asphalt behind the labyrinthine bulk of the State Highway Department headquarters. We underestimated the resistance of the urban fabric to utter oblivion. This neighborhood, still extant when Mary Wingfield Scott wrote in the 1940s, was largely obliterated in the expansion of state office facilities at mid-century. Council Chamber Hill is little remembered today, but it was once best known for its demi-monde character, as Richmond's "Red Light District" in the post Civil War years.

Looking west along Ross St. showing the dip or ravine between Council Chamber and Shockoe Hill, up which Governor Street runs. The region east of the Governor's Mansion was a haven for bawdy houses, gambling dens, and houses of prostitution during the years before 1870, when a reformers disrupted their activities. Arabella Yarrington Worsham met her future husband, railroad tycoon Colis P. Huntington, at Johnny Worsham's gambling establishment on Fourteenth Street on Council Chamber Hill. According to Mary Wingfield Scott, Worsham later operated a faro bank in an Antebellum house that stood on the lot to the right. It was replaced by the Richmond Press Building seen on the right in the photograph above on the corner of Governor and Ross streets. Arabella Worsham's dramatic rise in fortune has been recently documented at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts by the reassembly of the remarkable Aesthetic bedroom from her house in New York City.

Our walk began on Ross Street (now called Grace). Ross Street is a tributary of today's Governor Street, the "county road" that in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries connected the original town east of Shockoe Creek with the new platted area on the hill. The county road is the curving route dashed in to the north of the "Public Square" and eat of Twelfth Street. The land atop Council Chamber Hill was apparently acquired from the Byrd family before the newer section of town was platted. It is seen as the blank section at the upper center of the detail from 1809 map attributed to Richard Young seen above, with Governor Street (called County Road on the plat) to the west and Shockoe Creek, which ran west of Seventeenth Street on the plat, to the east. Thus it was not at first laid out in streets, although its steep geography would have stymied development for a long time had it been laid out as a continuation of the overall grid.

Col. John Mayo, builder of the eponymous bridge over the James, lived in a brick house built as the interim seat of the Governor's Council and executive offices and which gave its name to the hill. Mayo is said to have kept a close eye on the condition of his ramshackle bridge by the use of a spyglass from his house on the hill. The view above may be similar to his, if it can be imagined without the modern buildings. The view below crosses his house site, looking along Old Fourteenth Street toward Broad Street.

As the nineteenth century progressed and property values increased, John Mayo felt called to develop much of the site. This he did by creating a series of narrow lots on tiers of streets and alleys that stepped down the hill to the east and south. These can be seen on the detail from the map of 1817 by Richard Young shown above. The undeveloped portion of the hill containing the Mayo House is marked J. Mayo. The original bed of Shockoe Creek is the curving stream to the right, Ross Street is to the left, and Monumental Church can be seen in the upper left corner. Fourteenth Street was later extended up the hill to Broad Street [through the site marked J. Mayo on the map] and was flanked by Mayo Street on the east. Jessica Bankston has explored the likelihood that the watercolor illustration for one of Latrobe's most elegant villas was intended for the Mayo family on Council Chamber Hill, as she has documented on her blog. In a useful map on her website she was able to determine the modern location of Clifton by applying a section of the 1876 F. W. Beers Map to an aerial photo of the area today. Her map indicates how dense Council Chamber Hill had become by the late nineteenth century.

 

Here we found the only remaining (relatively modern) building from the neighborhood and the foundation of a successor building that stood on the site of Clifton, an often remembered building that Jessica believes was based on the plans for the unbuilt Mayo villa. The photo shows us standing in amazement on the nearly obliterated southeast corner of the intersection of Fourteenth and Cypress Alley. A fragment of the granite curbing of Fourteenth Street emerges from the asphalt in the foreground.

Old Fourteenth Street was itself as much the result of a radical reshaping of the topography as the new Fourteenth Street down the hill. The two views, above and below, show nearly the same spot today and in the 1860s. The house known as Clifton stood originally at the head of a steeply sloping lot running down the south slope of Council Chamber Hill. When Fourteenth Street was extended up the hill, it was necessary to cut into the slope to lessen the grade, and Clifton was left standing high above the street.

This illustration of Clifton during the war years is from In War Time, by E. G. Booth, Philadelphia, 1885.

Here is the reshaped lower slope of the hill, originally terraced by the Mayos into lots and alleys. Mayo Street ran near the sidewalk visible on the opposite side of the new, straightened, four-lane Fourteenth Street. The neighborhood continued down the slope beyond the new thoroughfare.

The final image with which our tour closes looks south along Fourteenth, completely reconfigured in the mid-twentieth century. The Exchange Hotel, Richmond's most architecturally sophisticated hotel in the Antebellum era, once stood on the immediate foreground in the photo facing toward the camera. It stood on the north edge of what is now the modern extension of Bank Street.

The Jefferson Hotel: Urban Scale Ecole

 

Jefferson Hotel, American Architect and Building News, April, 1893.

Urbanismo has taken a bit of a break this summer to regroup and refresh our carefully calibrated sensibilities. We thought we would begin anew with an essay on one of our favorite elements of the urban scale in our provincial capital: the justly celebrated Jefferson Hotel.

The Jefferson Hotel, completed in 1895, outscaled in comfort and extent all that the New South metropolis of Richmond could require. It also played a significant national role in the development of the hotel building type. The Jefferson represents an ambitious effort on the part of civic leaders to affirm and promote a enhanced social and civic role for the hotel in the American city by providing an uncharacteristic richness of form and symbolic content. In spite of a disastrous fire and many renovations, much of the hotel’s fabric and even some of original furnishings remain intact. Thanks to its patron and exceptional French-trained architects, the hotel is a uniquely consistent manifestation of French academic architectural theories in the American context.

 

Jefferson Hotel Palm Court as rebuilt after the fire of 1901.

Lewis Ginter

The Jefferson Hotel was built for well-informed Richmond taste-maker Lewis Ginter (1824-1897), a wealthy tobacco manufacturer who played the role of civic philanthropist and patron of the arts. In later life he used his vast wealth to achieve personal and civic goals in harmony with the aesthetic movement known as the American Renaissance. By 1892 Ginter had taken up a plan to build a new hotel in the West End, determined to act as a benefactor to his burgeoning adopted city. The project’s extraordinary scale, complex plan, and high cost suggest that Ginter clearly intended to provide Richmond with an urban amenity similar to those in the American North and the capitals and resorts of Europe with which he was familiar.

The rectangular site selected by Lewis Ginter for the hotel occupied approximately one-half of a square or block west of downtown Richmond, between Franklin and Main streets, in what had been the city's most fashionable residential neighborhood for many years. The pressure of postwar industry and commerce in the city’s old center sparked new construction in the old residential areas. Franklin Street, which intersected with Capitol Square, had developed as a major axis of power as the city expanded to the west.

The lot might have suggested the massive block-like palazzo format utilized in most urban hotels of the period, but the architects took an alternate approach. The accepted proposal, as published in 1893, shows a strangely bifurcated building, with a three-story north front on West Franklin Street and a six-story section to the south facing West Main Street occupying about two-thirds of the site. This awkward juxtapositioning of facade elements, sometimes noted in the work of Carrère and Hastings, was derived from the emphasis placed on the plan in their French academic education and the subservience of facade to plan in their design philosophy.

The hotel exterior as built varied from the architects’ original proposal chiefly in the addition of two high campaniles which functioned as clock towers. The textures of the wall surfaces expressed each floor's position in the building's exterior hierarchy. Upper walls of closely laid, cream-colored brick rose above a brick ground floor incorporating banded rustication. The hotel rested on a low basement of rock-faced granite blocks sunk, on the north, into deep areaways. The walls were richly detailed with ornamental molded terra cotta window surrounds, arcades, cornices, and string courses.

The Franklin Street facade, seen above, stood back from the street and deliberately corresponded in height to the adjacent, three-story Archer Anderson House (enlarged in 1880 and since demolished) and other large Italianate-villa-style houses located along the street. A pair of towers flanked the main entry, topped with belvederes based on those at the Villa Medici. Lower wings with deep, bracketed eaves flanked the central portion of the north facade and behind these rose the tall, twin, domed campaniles that were visible across the city. A triple-arched loggia supported on paired, colored marble columns was located just above the vaulted entry porch. The campaniles served to unite the two sections more effectively and called attention to the building's civic role.

      

On the south front of the hotel (here seen immediately after the fire of 1901 destroyed the upper stories) Carrère and Hastings stacked terra cotta palazzo motifs. A plainly detailed ground floor, containing a smoking room, grill, billiard room, and other men's amenities, supported a long, nine-bay piano nobile, housing the dining room. The architects treated the dining room level like that of the garden front of Versailles, with an applied order (Corinthian here, rather than Ionic) clasping a window arcade. Here the order affirmed, in keeping with classical principles of decorum, that the hotel's functions culminated in and focused on a festive ritual of dining. 

The Palm Court, or Pompeiian Court (seen to the right), provided with very French paired columns, each crowned with archeologically correct versions of the Pompeiian Ionic capital, functioned as an enclosed atrium or winter garden providing light to the interior of the Franklin Street section. It centered on a statue of Jefferson surrounded by beds of grass, paths, and fountains. The Franklin Street section was intended to serve families and female guests. A monumental vaulted staircase led down to the austere Rotunda Lobby in the Main Street end of the hotel, which was treated, not as a rotunda, but as an enclosed Renaissance courtyard with the deliberate imposition of cast iron girders and columns.
 

The Rotunda was a full story lower than the Palm Court and, like it, was brightly illuminated by a glass ceiling by day and electric arc lights by night. It served as the club-like center for the masculine lower level of the hotel, frequented by business travelers.In this remarkable space (lost in the fire of 1901 that destroyed the south end of the hotel, and rebuilt soon after in a very different manner) Carèrre and Hastings quoted directly from the sculpture court of the Palais des Etudes at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The court, a central part of the school where Carèrre and Hastings had studied, was begun by François Debret in 1820, completed by Félix Duban in 1839, and enclosed by him with a glass roof in 1867. The architects imitated and elaborated the slender iron colonnettes that were added in front of the walls to support the gabled glass roof at the École. Contemporary writers noted the dramatic vista from the Rotunda to the Palm Court.

The Grand Salon, today the Dining Room of the hotel’s Lemaire Restaurant, embodied the most complete example in Richmond of what was called the "modern French style," accurately described in contemporary accounts as Louis XVI, based on the “Grand Salon” in Bordeaux’s Hôtel de la Préfecture transformed into an exercise in Beaux-Arts planning. The tripartite Dining Room, lined with gilded oak, at the opposite end of the hotel displayed contrasting features abstracted by the architects from the opulent forms associated with Napoleon III, such as the Reception Room at the Parisian Hôtel Continental and its prototypes at Versailles and the Paris Opéra.
            
The École des Beaux-Arts traditionally advocated the use of sculptural and painted decoration articulating or reinforcing the symbolic content of the building. Through its decorative program the Jefferson Hotel took on the character of a major public building. The works of art in the Jefferson, some of which were collected or commissioned by Lewis Ginter, conveyed the theme of civic virtue or by their presence proclaimed the hotel's role as a civilizing institution. The most important large-scale sculptural element in the hotel remains the figure of Thomas Jefferson by Richmond native Edward V. Valentine. By its position in the center of the Palm Court it emulated and rivaled Houdon's statue of Washington in the Rotunda of the Virginia Capitol.

                

Charles Garnier, Concert Hall of the Casino, Monte Carlo, 1878-80

Unexpectedly, the most direct inspiration for the front would seem to have been the Casino at Monte Carlo by Garnier (1878-79), seen to the left. The Casino served as the social center for daily promenades, gaming, dancing, and concerts at the popular resort city.  The Monte Carlo Casino, like Garnier’s Opéra, in its richness of decoration, pride of place, and exuberance of form, emulated or actually displaced traditional local civic and religious monuments. The casino as a building type might be taken as an appropriate model for a social center for a post-Civil War American city. Each building answered the unprecedented need of a newly mobile bourgeois society for an appropriately splendid public setting. 

It is questionable whether either building actually functioned as a civic institution. Instead, they were commercial enterprises that borrowed the scale and monumental treatment, as codified by the École, of such an institution. One very obvious way in which the Jefferson Hotel differed from a fully public building was in its relative exclusivity and focus on entertainment. Like a club, and unlike the Virginia Capitol, standards of dress and the possession of ready money were prerequisites for entry and enjoyment. 

Floor Plan, The Brickbuilder 1903.

Taken as a whole, in both plan and elevation, the hotel shows a more thoroughly French architectural character than most other American buildings of its period. Like Garnier, Carrère and Hastings effectively distilled and transformed Beaux-Arts planning principles dating from the eighteenth century. The École consistently based architectural design in the plan and its exterior expression. The intersecting circulatory rectangles so characteristic of Prix de Rome plans throughout the century and ultimately expressed in the design of Garnier's Opéra were condensed in their application at the Jefferson. The architects unified the remarkably articulate plan of the hotel, in which circulation worked on multiple functional and symbolic layers, by a regular repetition of interlocking elements and a cage-like grid of piers, columns, and beams, organized in tripartite groupings.

The building also displays how the eclecticism of Charles Garnier and his teacher Duban profoundly influenced the work of students at the École in the later years of the nineteenth century. This can clearly be seen at work at the Jefferson Hotel, with its references to both Garnier and Duban, its compositional and decorative bravado, its scenographic central processional route, and its civic pretensions.

There were, however, several ways in which the hotel displayed the commercial side of its character. Civic buildings in Richmond, as in Paris, usually occupy positions at the urban scale. The Capitol, Market Hall, City Hall, and many churches were placed either in axial locations or as self-contained elements in the streetscape. In Richmond as in Paris, commercial structures like hotels occupied conventional lots in the overall grid plan. The symmetrical and monumental aspects of the deeply modeled Franklin Street facade, appropriate for a free-standing civic monument, were diminished by their position on the side of Franklin Street. Although the loggias and campaniles formed a picturesque skyline and dominated the view over the rooftops along the street, the design would have been better served by an axial approach or forecourt. The uninflected south front better suits the hotel’s streetside location and commercial function.
The Jefferson Hotel represents an early effort of a firm of American Renaissance architects to develop a coherent form of architectural expression appropriate for the American city and an attempt to overlay the commercial aspect of modern urban life with the classical order increasingly visible in European cities. In spite of the effort to correspond to neighboring cornice heights on its Franklin Street front, the hotel loomed on the skyline of Richmond with an uncharacteristic bulk and unheard-of European ornamental splendor. No attempt was made to recall regional building traditions. With the advent of the Jefferson the former Confederate capital turned its back on its antebellum past. 
In the controlled sense of movement, the scenographic interpenetration of space, and the theatrical use of the disparate themes of Pompeiian antiquity, French kingly magnificence, and Mediterranean splendor, the hotel embodied many late-nineteenth-century French themes. The scale of the project envisioned by Ginter and the handling of volume and decor by Carrère and Hastings at the Jefferson made them precocious American heirs of the tradition of Garnier.