Didn’t help that Ritzel’s hotel room presented a vista of a darkened stretch of Grace Street, where the fancy façades of long-closed boutiques intransigently remain empty. That is, aside from Tom Robinson’s “Vacant Spaces = Artful Places” project.
“The Carpenter Theatre's exterior may be nondescript beige brick, but the inside resembles a Moorish castle,” Ms Ritzel writes, making me wonder where she went in to the former Loew’s movie palace. The Grace Street side is one of the most exuberant streetscapes in Richmond; that blunt brick Broad Street wall facing the vacant lot is the legacy of an over-drawn planning process, and I mean over-drawn in more ways than one.
But this really got me:
“We set out for dinner one night bound for a restaurant and art gallery west of the Hilton. The hotel staff advised us not to walk, but we thought, how bad could seven blocks in Richmond be? Soon we saw that most businesses along this stretch of Broad Street were vacant, save for a few pawnshops. A passing pedestrian advised us to turn around and take a taxi. We did.”
Now wait a minute. Can I tell you how many times I’ve walked this stretch of Broad, day and night, and never felt this kind of nervousness that the Hilton staff transmitted — bad form — to Ritzel? So OK. I’m a 6-foot-tall, fedora-wearing guy, but still.
“Farther down the desolate street we found pockets of night life, including an opening at the 1708 Gallery …”
This one got my blood up. A whole series of galleries and restaurants are dismissed.
Nonetheless, I hope this and the New York Times articles got zipped around City Hall. While we hem and haw about how to create a downtown arts district, national media is coming down here and showing the world that we’ve got a case of the slows, as Lincoln said of McClellan. Staunton — Stahnton! — managed to get this done already.
Look, I’m not expecting this to occur overnight, or even within a year, however, how is it that after almost a decade of First Fridays, an official arts district was somehow never accomplished? Is Richmond not big enough, or does the city not possess the proper discipline, wherewithal and will to do more than one project at a time?
A couple more items of note:
• Constant readers may have read my plea for the continuation of the Carytown New Year’s Eve celebration. Concerned Citizen Mark Tompkins, an associate at Snipes Properties, has opened a Facebook group to galavanize support. Some entrepreneur or group that can plunk down $100,000 is the basic answer. That, and collaboration with the city.
• A rare printed copy of the Declaration of Independence goes on view for a few hours on Saturday at the Virginia Historical Society. Just 24 of these 200 broadsides, or posters, are known to exist. These went up in town squares and/or were read aloud. Go and see what all the “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” fuss is about.
