Tag Archives: downtown

Morson’s Row

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Morson's Row 1


Architect: Albert Lybrock
Date: 1853
Address: 219-223 Governor Street

Morson’s Row is the most handsome assemblage of attached houses in Richmond. These three former dwellings in the Italianate style establish an axial relationship at the eastern end of the pedestrian mall that was once Capitol Street while gently stepping down to reflect the slope of Governor Street. Morson’s Row is grander than other, upscale, mid-19th century dwellings in Richmond– more akin to houses one would find in urban Baltimore or Boston. They were designed as speculative housing by James Marion Morson, a lawyer who practiced in the city and in Goochland County.

Architect Albert Lybrock, born and educated in Germany, came to Richmond in 1852 via New York City, to oversee his design for the United States Customs House which stretched between Main and Bank streets. He would become the most important architect working in Richmond in the prosperous decade prior to the Civil War after landing a number of prestigious commissions here. In addition to his Italianate customs building, his commissions included major interior renovations at the Capitol (1858) and the unique, cast iron Gothic reliquary in Hollywood Cemetery that contains the sarcophagus of James Monroe, the fifth United States president (1859). In the late 1870s Lybrock designed the Miller School in Albemarle County.

While the three townhouses comprising Morson’s Row were built as speculative housing, there was no stinting on detail. Each house is three stories high and rises from an English basement. The most glorious feature of each of the three houses is its curved bow front.  Each of these bays rises to a partial entablature containing crisply defined dentils and a generous cornice supported by handsome brackets. The basement is faced with granite ashlar and the upper exterior surfaces of the façade are brick covered in stucco.

This trio of houses creates an almost musical rhythm as it steps down (or ascends) Governor Street. And the softly-rounded lines of bow fronts are picked up by the curved configuration of the sun porch on the rear of the adjacent Memorial Hospital (now part of the Virginia Department of Highways complex) just up the hill.

Architect Lybrock, himself a slave owner, apparently became an active player in the life of his adopted region including his financial support of a regiment of local Germans in the Confederate army.

Morson’s Row, now owned by the Commonwealth of Virginia and an important part of the Capitol Square district, has long been empty and awaits a new use. Miraculously, its interiors still contain much of their original detailing such as moldings and marble mantels.


E.S.

White House of the Confederacy and Museum

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White House of the Confederacy 6


Architects: Robert Mills, Petticord Associates
Date: 1818, Museum and renovation 1976
Address: 1201 East Clay Street

The Museum of the Confederacy’s main building, completed in 1976, was built to house the institution’s collection of confederate artifacts, the nation’s largest. The institution is the oldest museum in Richmond, founded in 1890, and includes on its grounds the White House of the Confederacy, the home of Jefferson Davis from 1861-1865.

The vast collections were originally kept in the house but in the 1970’s the museum shifted its collection to the new building and restored the White House to its original state. The museum sits on the same block as the historic structure, deep within Richmond’s Court End neighborhood. Together, the buildings and the garden space in between form an intimate and urban museum campus.

The White House of the Confederacy was designed in 1818 as the home of a wealthy Richmond bank executive. Robert Mills, architect of the Washington Monument, designed the building. The newer museum, the work of Petticord Associates, is a sharply modern structure that sits back from the street and takes a “L” shape, forming a square courtyard space between it and the historic center of confederate power.

The Museum of the Confederacy is a worthy piece of architecture in and of itself, but it is the interaction between it and the neighboring White House of the Confederacy, the way in which the modern structure responds to the historic mansion, that makes it one of the most intriguing and thoughtful works of architecture in Richmond. Robert Mills’ design for the home’s exterior is a massive, weighty, and stark piece of neoclassicism in the vein of famous English purist William Kent. The vast, unadorned planes of gray stucco, heavy double-column pairs on the rear porch, and sparse iron detailing give the house a sense of monumentality and simplicity nearing architectural brutalism.

This is picked up and elaborated on by the new museum building. Coffers, cantilevers, and bands of concrete suspended off of the main faces create shadow lines and ceiling details that mirror the massive porch of the historic structure. A nearly symmetrical face with three equally sized bays sits opposite the garden from the White House, foils the building and creates a secluded garden that seems a different world from the bustle of the high rise medical structures of the surrounding neighborhood.

D.OK.

Second Presbyterian Church

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Second Presbyterian Church 6


Architect: Minard LaFever
Date:1845
Address: Nine North Fifth Street

When Presbyterian minister Moses D. Hoge commissioned a church design for his congregation, which was moving westward from Shockoe Hill toward Gamble’s Hill, he made a bold move. He eschewed classicism, which had been the architectural approach of most Richmond churches up to that time, and built a Gothic Revival edifice. Apparently, Hoge believed that the nooks, crannies and the romanticism of Gothic design allowed for sentiment and memories to find comfortable resting places. He selected the prominent New York architect Minard LaFever (1798-1854) as designer. LaFever never visited Richmond for this project but provided Hoge with plans from one of his pattern books (he wrote five).

Probably, in a nod to budget restrictions, brown-hued brick, rather than stone was used as the primary exterior material. Vermont sandstone was used as trim (in a recent exterior renovation, the stone was replaced with a similar material imported from Germany).

The sanctuary’s central front door hits hard along the North Fifth Street sidewalk, but if one looks up, a 100 foot steeple rises majestically. In the era before skyscrapers, it was one of the most imposing silhouettes on Richmond’s skyline.

Upon entering the sanctuary, plaster walls scored to look like stone rise to support a series of wooden arches and a ceiling of wooden planks stained a dark shade of brown. It is a tour de force of the carpenter gothic. Behind the pulpit at the front of the church, an impressive wooden reredos, apparently designed by Hoge, rises 40 feet to frame the lectern.

Today, the Gothic Revival sanctuary is joined via a glass and steel connector to the Virginia Building (1906) at the corner of Fifth and Main streets. Thought to be Richmond’s first high-rise apartment building, the Virginia Building now serves Second Presbyterian as a church house.

E.S.

First National Bank Building

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First National 2


Alfred Bossom
825-827 East Main St
1913

The First National Bank was founded eight days after Lee’s surrender in Appomattox, when all Richmond banks’ charters had been revoked by the Federal Government. It merged with the National Exchange Bank and, after surviving the financial crisis of the 1890s, needed a new office building, for which Alfred Bossom was hired.

Bossom was an English architect responsible for stately banks and hotels across the nation, and was with the firm on Clinton and Russell when asked to design the building. Bossom’s other commissions in the city include the Monroe Terrace Apartments, the Prestwould Apartments, and the Mutual and Virginia Trust Buildings (in collaboration with Carneal and Johnson), adjacent to the First National Bank Building, forming a prominent early 20th Century financial core on Main Street.

Like the much of the rest of Bossom’s work, the First National Bank Building is proud neoclassicism with crisp detailing. The exterior exhibits clearly the three sections attributable to most neoclassicist works, especially taller ones: base, shaft, and capital; a symbolic continuation of the proportions found on the 50 foot tall fluted Corinthian columns at the foot of the bank. Neoclassicism was a common style of banks and other institutions who wanted to evoke the order and authority of great civilizations in history.

The structure can claim to be the first skyscraper in Richmond, and held the title of tallest building until it was surpassed by the Central National Bank Building 17 years later. Since its birth it has undergone a fair amount of change; the larger original cornice was replaced in the 1970s in an effort to modernize the structure’s appearance, and while the building avoided a transformation into condominiums in the 1980s, it was converted into apartments in late 2012. Under Commonwealth Architects, the building underwent a $30 million renovation. The renovation relied on historic tax credits, with key features of the building, like the marble detailing and ceiling vaults in the first floor former bank space, kept intact.

The new life of the building adds much-needed residences to the area, joining the nearby John Marshall as recently converted, high-profile historic apartments. It is encouraging to see the First National Bank Building, so iconic in Richmond’s past, assume an active and important role in the city’s contemporary downtown.

M.F.A.

Stewart-Lee House

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Lee House 1


Norman Stewart
707 East Franklin Street
1844

In the mid 19th Century, Norman Stewart, a rich Scottish tobacco merchant, constructed five free-standing residences, which came to be known as “Stewart’s Row,” one of the finest blocks in Richmond. Featuring side-hall plans and a structure that consumed most of the narrow plots, the rational three story homes that were said to be shaped like shoeboxes added to the impressive resume of Greek Revival in the city. Only one remains today, the Stewart-Lee House.

Norman Stewart’s nephew, who inherited the house, rented it to Robert E. Lee’s son and a group of young Confederate officers. They turned it into a bachelor’s pad of sorts until Robert E Lee’s wife and daughters arrived in 1864 and cleaned the place up. Following his surrender at Appomattox a year later, General Lee joined the rest of his family at the home for a brief two-month period.

Its surroundings are now drastically different. Dwarfed by a fifteen story office building to the west, a shoebox in its own right, the house is contrastingly exposed on the western side by a parking lot. Yet with a Greek-fret patterned cast-iron fence enclosing the front yard and bookends of a small portico and triple decker porch, the Stewart-Lee house serves as an isolated yet complete  transportation to an era past.

The building now serves as offices for the Home Builders Association of Virginia, who led extensive renovations to the house in 2001, a large part of the building’s tremendous preservation. While the context, occupants, and use of the house may have changed, the dignity of the building, with its red brick and dark green shutters, remains just as clear today as it was when General Lee walked up the granite steps.

M.F.A.

Williams Mullen Center

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Architect: HBA Architecture
Dates: 2010
Address: 200 South 10th Street

The Williams Mullen Center is one of the most significant new projects in downtown Richmond in recent years. Occupying a formerly vacant site on the corner of 10th and Canal Streets, the mid-rise tower totals 15 stories. First floor retail grounds the building at the corner providing some dining options to the thousands of office workers in the area. Three levels of parking sit above this, effectively removed from the street. The rest is office space for the noted mid-atlantic law firm.

The building’s exterior does not mar the cityscape, but it does fall somewhere short of beauty. Initial renderings showed a slightly sleeker, more modern approach but some mid-process design changes resulted in a sort of vague, corporate postmodernism. The contrast of the light, precast concrete and highly reflective glass curtain wall was not handled gracefully. Looking at the buildings corner on 10th and Canal Streets makes one wish that the tacked-on precast facade could simply be peeled off.

All the same, new construction has been rare for the past decade in Richmond’s financial district. The Williams Mullen Center should be applauded for injecting a bit of much needed life into this often sterile part of the city. Removing parking from the street was also a key decision, despite the fact that the rest of the block on which it sits is not oriented towards pedestrians. Then again, neither are many of the financial district’s office towers, most of which were built in a time when creating ground floor retail and pedestrian friendly architecture was not a primary concern.

D.OK.

The John Marshall

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John Marshall 1


Architect: Marcellus Wright
Dates: 1929
Address: 101 N. 5th Street

Erected in 1929, the Hotel John Marshall immediately became an establishment in the city. It’s imposing entrances, grand ballrooms, and bombastic skyline signage were icons of Richmond’s then vibrant Grace Street corridor. The area was home to boutiques, restaurants, and department stores that attracted visitors from across the state and beyond. With 443 rooms, multiple retail and restaurant spaces, and massive ballrooms and meeting spaces, it was Richmond’s largest hotel by far.

The building was designed by Marcellus Wright and named for Richmonder and Chief Justice John Marshall (often referred to as the father of our nation’s judicial system). The architect combined elements of neoclassicism, art deco, and Moorish revival detailing into a unique expression. The building follows the standard formula for traditional American skyscrapers; a base and shaft surmounted by an ornate pinnacle. The base is essentially a paired down neo-classic facade in stone as are the ballrooms it contains. The verticality of the shaft section and the minor setback at its end provide the deco element. The Moorish influenced romanticism is applied thickly to the upper story in ornamental form which trickles down to enclose a smaller number of window bays below. The eclectic elements are not totally in harmony, but then neither is the grid of metal and light bulbs set on the roof.

Starting in the 1950‘s, downtown Richmond began to decay and the hotel lost its market. The Hotel John Marshall had once served as home away from home for countless shoppers coming from as far as North Carolina to walk the retail mecca that was East Grace street. As strip malls and shopping plazas depleted Richmond’s retail core the urban fabric itself was being torn by highways. The grand hotel which had once been a center for our city’s society was forced to shut down in 1988 after years of waning financial success.

After years of neglect the building was purchased by Dominion Realty Partners to be repurposed as luxury apartments. A complete interior renovation and stabilization of the facade was done transforming the hotel into a apartment building with 238 units, 2 ballrooms, and 20,000 of retail space. The building opened in late 2011.

D.OK.

The Renaissance

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Architect: Jackson C. Gott
Date: 1888-1893
Address: 101-107 West Broad Street

Conceived by a planning, financing and laboring of over 40 years by the Virginia Masons, the former Masonic Temple is impossible to miss on Broad Street. It is Richmond’s clearest manifestation of Richardsonian Romanesque, an American style characterized by a robust geometry and massing, rounded arches, often recessed entrances and heavy stone exteriors. The National Register of Historic Places goes so far as to claims it is “the finest example in the state” of the style. Ironically, Richardsonian Romanesque was not even the primary style of the architect, Gott, known peripherally for a handful of structures completed in the Baltimore area.

The Masonic Temple was originally mixed-use, housing a ground floor department store, offices above and Masonic meeting rooms on the upper floors. This varied program scheme is reflected in the building’s architecture; larger ground level arched windows let copious amounts of light into the store, as the windows divide and shrink as floors ascend, alluding to the private and compartmentalized functions within. The materiality of the building also changes, from a heavy brown stone at the base to smaller, redder stones at the top, a process called rustication. The staircase stands prominently apart from these levels, expressed in a singular vertical tower. The structural system was also made visible in the building through the three bay system; the partial frame of wood and iron was progressive for the era.

The building was purchased in 1985 by the Richmond Foundation of the Arts, and is now home to the Renaissance Conference Center. The building remins mixed use with a few apartments occupying the upper floors and two retail units in the base. While the interior decoration has strayed from the original conception, the façade remains just as impressive as it was to journalists in 1893, when they hailed it as one of the more impressive pieces of modern architecture in the south. The qualifier of ‘modern’ may have changed in the hundred-plus years since, but its strong presence on Broad Street occupies the corner as well today as it did then. It is quite arguably one of the most beautiful buildings in Richmond, and a great icon for the Broad Street business district.

M.F.A.