Tag Archives: Neo-Gothic

Pump House Park

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Architect: Wilfred E. Cutshaw
Date: 1882
Address: 1708 Pump House Dr

Tucked away along the Three-Mile Locks of the Kanawha Canal, a weighty Neo-Gothic structure rises over the water, a symbol of utility, conviviality and mystery. Massive gabled slate roofs look out across the river from their overgrown land, neglected but not forgotten.

The great city engineer Wilfred Emory Cutshaw, whose hand is seen in so many Richmond works, employs the same granite in the Pump House as he used for the original City Hall, in part to handle the pressure of the moving water inside the structure. Thin, tall windows with pointed arches allow light to penetrate the heavy building’s mass, into grand spaces within. It was Cutshaw’s unique vision that intended for the public utilities building to be a desired and popular social hall as well was something truly unique, a convergence of function and location.

A boat that started at Seventh Street carried the city’s high society up the river’s gentle rapids to the pump house, where they would dance and fraternize on the upper level open-air dance hall, located above the equipment room, and a catwalk that looks over the machinery below. The open-air hall is more than a beautiful spatial moment of architecture, a blurring of outside/inside; the entirety of the experience, set in the wilderness-environment beyond, must have been one of the most original and exciting ones in Richmond’s history.

The glory of the building didn’t last, however, with population migration beyond the city’s limits at the turn of the century causing the abandonment of the Pump House in 1924, with the machinery sold as scrap metal. The building nearly dodged demolition in the 1950s, became a popular spot for vandals in the 1980s, and fell into disrepair. The isolation and grandeur of an abandoned building as such given the Pump House a reputation as one of Richmond’s spookier spots, with locals ‘ghost hunting’ across the grounds. However, the importance of this historic and impressive structure has made its way back into the public’s conscience in recent decades. Preservation efforts look to possibly reuse the building as offices for the James River Park System, where other rehabilitation plans include installing a coffee shop and bookstore.

The Pump House Park separated from Byrd Park in the mid 1980s, and contains a trail to Washington’s Arch, constructed in 1791 to signify the start of the Kanawha Canal, the first canal in the country.

M.F.A

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.

University of Richmond

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Westhampton Lake as seen from the Student Commons

Architect: Cram and Ferguson, architect; Carneal and Johnston, associate architect; Warren Manning Associates, landscape architect.
Date: 1914
Address: 28 Westhampton Way 

Many Richmond commercial and residential areas developed westward after the installation of electric streetcars in 1888. The University of Richmond, which was located near the intersection of today’s Lombardy and Grace streets, established a sprawling, 200-acre suburban campus at the terminus of the Westhampton trolley line. The move allowed for the introduction of a women’s campus as well as expansive new sports facilities. The Boston architecture firm of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson attempted to establish a cloister-like environment in the Gothic Revival style. This approach had already garnered the firm praise for its designs at the United States Military Academy at West Point and at Princeton University. For the Richmond campus, however, due to budget restrictions, the firm substituted brick and cast concrete where it would have preferred to use stone. Cram completed eight initial buildings including Ryland Hall, the refectory, the stadium, Jeter and Richmond dormitories, North Court (the woman’s Westhampton College), the power plant and Millhiser Gymnasium. With World War I occurring soon after the campus was completed, however, construction was halted for a number of years and the Cram firm never returned.

Over the ensuing decades, planners and architects strayed from Cram’s vision of a cloister-like monastery in the wooded countryside: Instead they created a more picturesque setting with Westhampton Lake as the centerpiece. However, with the exception of a brief flirtation from the 1960s to ‘80s with modernism and post-modernism, in the 1990s the university resumed building, (almost slavishly) in the collegiate Gothic mode. The best of the most recent buildings include Weinstein Hall (which houses the political science department) by SMBW.

E.S.

Old City Hall

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Architect: Elijah Myers
Dates: 1886 – 1894
Address: 1001 East Broad St

Occupying an entire city block on Broad St between 10th and 11th streets, Old City Hall stands powerfully with one side to the historic capitol grounds, and the other side catty-corner its functional replacement. Impossible to miss, a proud juxtaposition to the radically different styles and technologies around it, Old City Hall exists as a gem of craft and preservation, a true architectural indulgence.

In 1883, Elijah Myers, the architect responsible for the capital designs of Michigan, Colorado and Texas, won a national competition for a redesign of Richmond’s original city hall, which was a product of Robert Mills in 1814 and rested on the eastern side of the current day lot. Although the building was finished in 1894, only eight years after breaking ground, the final budget figure of $1.3 million more than quadrupled the original estimate, an unheard of amount of money for the time. However the construction process itself was one of the most positive results to come of the building for Richmond. “Petersburg” granite, mined from along the James River, was hauled up Broad St in what was one of the last appearances of railroads in Richmond. The castle-like exterior was then constructed with the hands of several local craftsmen. The general labor work, as well as skilled technical positions such as carving stone and casting iron, were largely carried out by Richmond natives.

Four uniquely designed towers stand at the four corners of the building, with a clock placed on the tallest northwest tower. Although the gravity of the thick exterior stone conveys an impenetrable quality, the center of the building reveals a large interior skylit court, surrounded by an arcaded gallery of ornately adorned Corinthian capital columns and pointed arches. A warm (restored) polychrome scheme glows brightly with natural light, a connecting bridge overhead. Most fixtures found inside are original, a rare condition for similar buildings of the time.

Threats of demolition in 1915 and 1970 were both met with major preservation efforts and success, and the building remains as a premiere example of Gothic Revival in Richmond, both a wonderful period piece and a lasting iconic image for the city. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1969, and is currently used for state offices.

M.F.A.
Sources:
nps.gov. (n.d.). Old city hall. Retrieved from http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/richmond/OldCityHall.html