2000 Riverside

Architect: Marcellus Wright & Partners
Date: 1965
Address: 2000 Riverside Drive

A modest skyline of mostly apartment buildings is fast changing the silhouette of Manchester.  Half a century ago, however, while this district was in serious decline, in 1965 in the adjacent neighborhood of Springhill, South Richmond received a shot of verticality with completion of River Towers. This 15-story apartment building is at 2000 Riverside Drive near the southern end of the Robert E. Lee Bridge. Its balconies offer unparalleled vistas of both the downtown skyline and the wilds of the James River. And when viewed from points north of the James, the apartment tower remains a welcome brick and concrete slab of modernism rising above the foliage and rocks of the nearby James River Park.

“It is one of my favorite buildings,” says Fred Cox, senior partner of Marcellus Wright Cox Architects, who was on the design team for the project (along with William Moseley, who would go on to establish the Moseley Architects firm), when they worked together at Marcellus Wright & Partners. “We did the River Towers at about the same time we were designing the Monroe Tower and Berkshire apartments downtown on West Franklin Street.” Explains Cox:  “Everybody was trying to urbanize the former suburbs and we all got stirred up to tear down the crazy old buildings downtown.”

“We had a formula [for designing these apartments]. There were just three floors to design—the ground level, the residential floors and the penthouse. It was real simple.” Cox, who graduated from architecture school at the University of Virginia as a fierce modernist, says:  “Le Corbusier was my hero.” A highlight of his budding architectural career was an impromptu personal tour of the iconic Yale School of Art & Architecture by its architect, Paul Rudolph, soon after the building’s completion in the early 1960s.

River Towers was recently refurbished and rebranded “Riverside 2000.” This name change adjusts the long-misleading implication that there is more than one tower here. Cox says that a second structure, originally intended to be sited at a 90 degree angle to the first building in the block to the immediate east, never materialized after one of the developers withdrew from the project (with funding).

“Almost no building comes easily,” says Cox.

E.S.