What is it about the West End?

Drive past the statue of Jeb Stuart and head west on Monument Avenue. You’ll quickly notice block after block of the finest brick mansions, nearly all built after the Civil War. Keep going, cross into Henrico County, and you’ll continue to notice substantial homes — most of them not mansions, but still very nice. When you come to the end of Monument, jog over to Patterson Avenue and continue west. You could head all the way to the mountains on this road, but we’re more interested in your immediate surroundings. You’re in the “near West End”. . .or is it the “far West End”? The term’s definition has expanded over the decades, along with the city.

It seems everyone wants to live in the West End. All right, not everyone. Church Hill has prospered in recent years, as the New York Times pointed out not long ago. And I have a number of friends who love Ginter Park and the North Side. But if you look at the subdivisions oozing across the landscape, they’re mostly to the west of downtown. Development to the east of Richmond is much less common; the region’s population is overwhelmingly tilted to the west.

Curiously, anyone who’s been to London has probably noticed the same phenomenon — the finest, most sought-after neighborhoods of Kensington, Knightsbridge, etc., are to the west. Appropriately, our namesake, Richmond-upon-Thames, is now itself a western suburb of London. (Remember the song “East End Boys and West End Girls?” Yes, I’m dating myself here.) Any number of other cities would produce the same observation.

Why is this? No, this isn’t another case of Virginia mimicking its English heritage. Rather, as in so many other things, we are creatures of our environment, and the prevailing wind in Richmond blows west to east. You probably don’t think about this much today, but it mattered a great deal in early Richmond, when the urban core was full of mills, tobacco plants, breweries and the like, producing smoke and odors that wealthier families preferred to avoid. Thus, many of them built houses to the west, or upwind.

As those mills and factories closed or moved out of the city in later years, the original motive for western expansion dwindled in importance, but the pattern was established. The West End was the place to live. The phenomenon has only reinforced itself, to the point that you can now meet people who live around Charlottesville and commute daily to jobs in Richmond. Short Pump, once a rural outpost no one would ever remotely consider part of Richmond, is a major residential and commercial hub, firmly part of the metro area.

This western expansion has had long-term, far-reaching consequences for the city.  Most significantly, it has driven growth in a somewhat unnatural direction. The term “Golden Crescent” describes the arc-shaped growth corridor that is pinned at one end by the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., region, passes through Richmond, and is anchored in Hampton Roads. Interstates 95 and 64 form its spine, and commerce, traffic, population and services flow along the corridor. But it would make far more sense if growth expanded outward from Richmond toward Fredericksburg and Williamsburg instead of toward Charlottesville. Imagine the difference if you could substitute “Ashland” for “Short Pump.”

That bulge to the west also has complicated Richmond’s relations with its surrounding suburbs and tended to drive attention and resources away from the region’s core. The protracted struggle over a new baseball stadium, for instance, probably would have been resolved long ago if more people lived north and east of downtown.

Over the long haul, I think we’ll see more balance. Fredericksburg and Williamsburg are slowly expanding in our direction, and there are signs of renewal downtown. But it’s funny to think how Richmond would be altered today if the wind just blew in a different direction.

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Speaking of immigrants

With all the discussion of immigration, I’m reminded of a family story that I found to be even more intriguing than it first sounded. (This is not about Richmond, by the way, unless it counts because I live here.)

Rough riders headline 11 21 14

I had always heard from my mom of her step-grandfather, Hugh McGuire. Though he wasn’t a blood relation, he was the only grandfather she ever knew; both of hers died before she was born (under circumstances that are stories in themselves). She knew he was a Spanish-American War veteran, and she had heard him speak of helping build the subways in New York City when he was young. That was about it.

As I started digging, it turned out Hugh led quite a life. He came from Ireland when he was just 17, in 1877. He bounced around New York for a while and worked on the elevated trains that ultimately became part of the subway lines.

Then he headed west at some point in the late 1800s and ended up in Idaho. It’s not clear what kind of work he was doing, but he had definitely learned to ride a horse. We know that because in 1898, after Theodore Roosevelt and William Randolph Hearst brewed up their “splendid little war” with Spain, recruiters for the Rough Riders came looking for volunteers among the Western cowboys.

McGuire signed up in May 1898 and was accepted into “the other Rough Riders,” a regiment of experienced horsemen raised in Wyoming and led by Jay L. Torrey, a Wyoming rancher. In organizing the regiment, Torrey became, of course, “Col. Torrey.” The regiment headed for Florida, where they were to embark for Cuba.

Then, on the afternoon of June 26, their train collided with another near Tupelo, Mississippi. Four of “Torrey’s Rough Riders” were killed immediately along with a train porter, and Torrey himself was injured. The story of the wreck made page 2 of the New York Times.

Apparently Hugh McGuire was unhurt. The train wreck, however, short-circuited McGuire’s Army career, along with that of all those in the 2nd U.S. Volunteer Cavalry. While they were held up for several days in Mississippi, Theodore Roosevelt was getting his Rough Riders to Cuba first. The 2nd Cavalry made it as far as Jacksonville, Florida, where disease broke out in camp. The war in Cuba was essentially over in weeks, and McGuire and his fellow soldiers never saw combat. He was discharged with the rest in the fall of 1898.

That is not the end of the story. I will point out that much of my family comes from Corinth, Mississippi, which is about 50 miles from Tupelo. But I’ll leave the rest of it for another day.

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Backstory

I come from a line of restless people. That’s not unusual in America, but it took a little while for me to figure it out.

My family is from the United Kingdom – mostly English, some Scots, some Irish. We arrived in the first century or so after Jamestown’s founding, and we didn’t stop for long anywhere. We mostly landed in Virginia and Maryland, then moved on to the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Mississippi; our sons and daughters pushed on to Arkansas, Texas, and New Mexico. If you plot their path on a map, it looks like a long, horizontal, backwards S. And that’s all before the Civil War. Since then, we’ve continued to spread out, and it would be extremely difficult to map now.

All the states I’ve mentioned are Southern. There are Northern Whartons (yep, that business school) and Southern Whartons, and I don’t think they connect much, not that I’ve seen. I am a Southerner, descended from farmers and railroad men. There’s some baggage which comes with that; I’ll get back to that another time. (How many Virginians does it take to change a lightbulb? Three – one to change the bulb, and two to talk about how fine the old bulb was.)

But for now I want to return to that matter of restlessness.

First, it’s an ugly fact that when these settlers moved, more often than not they were moving onto land recently taken from Native Americans. The Cherokee, Creek and Choctaw peoples, among others, all were steadily forced from their lands across the South, sometimes by violence, sometimes by treaties signed under pressure, often simply by the inexorable push of European settlers looking for new land. That dawned on me slowly as I looked into my family history. We forget that, long before the wars fought with Native Americans over Western lands, there were people living coast to coast on this continent (for a good read on the subject, try “The First Frontier” by Scott Weidensaul). I don’t believe I still bear responsibility, as a descendant of those who did the evicting – but I do want to acknowledge it.

The funny thing about those restless settlers is that I feel as if there’s something in the blood. When I look at my own parents, and the family I’ve made, for that matter, I see the same urge, to leave home, push on, find somewhere new. It’s not so much frontiers anymore, it’s just a willingness to go, to find a place to make your own. I don’t know why that is, but it’s there.

And yet – look at me. I came back to Virginia, without ever realizing I was completing a circle.

 

 

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First thoughts. . .

So, let’s start where Richmond started, with the river.

It’s reasonably common knowledge that Richmond’s location was first staked out by the earliest Englishmen coming upriver from Jamestown. In the opening lines of Virginius Dabney’s “Richmond: The Story of a City” he describes Captain Christopher Newport and his men planting a wooden cross at the Falls, “near the heart of today’s downtown.” They were looking for gold, Dabney says. Probably so, since most English explorers of the time, jealous of Spain’s windfall in South America, were hoping to find a new source of the stuff.

Instead of gold, they had found granite. Richmond’s location is due to a geologic formation called the “fall line” — a point at which the hard rock of the mountainous regions gives way to the softer stuff of the coastal plains. Simon Winchester, in his excellent book “The Men Who United the States,” points out that this line, snaking up the East Coast, defined where many cities were founded.

“Hints of the origins can still be spotted, though,” Winchester writes. “Invariably there will be a bridge in each city, spanning the river that brought the first boatmen here hundreds of years before. Cast your eyes over the parapets, and the stream below will quite probably be running through the bridge fast and furious. This is where the first sailors stopped, and the speed and temper of the river are the reason why.”

Baltimore, Washington, Wilmington, Fredericksburg, Philadelphia, even Montreal, all owe their locations to this barrier encountered by the earliest explorers.

In Richmond, the James River runs fast through a granite riverbed, easily observed from Belle Isle, that contains the only Class III and IV rapids within a city limits in the U.S. You can see where granite was historically mined in the abandoned quarries of Belle Isle, and this perenially useful stone is still drawn from the ground within a short distance of Captain Newport’s first stop in 1607.

That’s how it started, and why. Let’s see where it goes. . .

 

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