Category Archives: Richmond story

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.

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. . .