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A view of the Scottish Rite Temple from Gaslight Park at dusk in the summer of 1978 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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Jerry Williams (standing, right) and others backstage at “The Farewell to Temple Cabaret,” April 1978 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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The building's demolition in 1979 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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The building's demolition in 1979 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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"Brigadoon" performance at Temple Theater, 1974 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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Working on lighting cues for "Brigadoon," Temple Theater, 1974 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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Mark Brandon (left) and Roger Reaves (right) on the front steps of the Temple Theater, April 1978 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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Temple Theater costume shop, spring 1978 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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Temple Theater costume shop, April 1978 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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Temple Theater costume shop, April 1978 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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Temple Theater, late spring 1978 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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Carl Jackson (left) and Fred Kaufman (right) backstage at "The Farewell to Temple Cabaret,” April 1978 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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Carl Jackson (left) and Fred Kaufman (center) backstage at "The Farewell to Temple Cabaret,” April 1978 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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Temple Theater dressing room, April 1978 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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The set of "Moshe the Madman" at Temple Theater, April 1978 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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The Temple Theater lighting booth was the former organ loft (April 1978). (Photo by Charles Sugg)
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Temple Theater, off stage left at the Farewell Cabaret, April 1978 (Photo by Charles Sugg)
The Gothic-arched, stained-glass church, turned Scottish Rite Temple, turned theater and classroom building for the nascent Richmond Professional Institute, made a BANG!
Taking its name from a comic-book sound effect riffed on in pop art, the weeklong professor- and student-created BANG! Arts Festival brought the immediate contemporary arts to Richmond. The place where BANG! — and many other events — occurred was the former Presbyterian Church of the Covenant (1907), designed in a grand French Gothic Revival style.
Covenant was ensconced amid the streetcar-busy residential western end of Richmond. The church faced Howitzer Park and was across from Grove Avenue Baptist (which Virginia Commonwealth University later transformed into the James W. Black Music Center). Its Richmond architect, John Stewart Barney, specialized in houses of worship, including Grace and Holy Trinity on nearby Laurel Street. Barney later moved to New York City, where his work includes the 1899 French Renaissance Church of the Holy Trinity.
After Convenant’s 1915 consolidation with Grace Street Church, the building — including the organ — was sold for $41,500 to the Libertas Lodge No. 5, of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry.
The Libertas Lodge hired Richmond architect Charles M. Robinson, who designed William Fox Elementary, Thomas Jefferson High School and Laburnum Park, to remodel Covenant between 1918 and 1920 for use as a Scottish Rite Temple.
By the mid-1960s, the feisty Richmond Professional Institute (later VCU) had purchased the building. It housed art classrooms, a theater and a basement cafeteria that seems to have been memorable more for its aesthetics than the cuisine.
The third and last BANG! ran from March 21–25, 1966, and it began on Monday evening with a premiere of the “Variations VI” performance by avant-garde musician and artist John Cage, alongside pianist and composer David Tudor.
Saturday morning prior to the concert, Cage arrived in Richmond, checked into a motel at Belvidere and West Franklin streets, and proceeded to wander around, searching for those who’d hired him for $500. Apparently at random, he walked in to a darkened and decaying Park Avenue house where several professors were previewing short films for festival programming.
He “walked in with a cigarette holder and said, ‘Hello, I’m John Cage. You must be the arts festival people,’ ” the late artist Richard Carlyon recalled during a taped interview for the online journal “Blackbird,” adding, “He was kind of a wizard.” After watching the films with the instructors, Cage requested a guide to the Scottish Rite Temple. “When he saw this hulk of a building, he just beamed,” Carlyon remembered. Cage also immediately picked out a peculiar aspect of the sanctuary’s ambiance, a high, persistent sound from an unidentified source.
Some 11 students worked from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Sunday setting up Cage’s tape recorders, amplifiers, transistor and short-wave radios, photoelectric cells, mixers, microphones and speakers. During the process, a student leaned against the wall, pressing his back into ugly paneling. Cage immediately noticed the sudden absence of “the lovely sound” that had intrigued him. When the student moved, the tone resumed, and Cage set about investigating its source.
He found a crack in the paneling laid over an old air shaft. The vacuum inhaled air. Cage immediately put a contact microphone on it. Technical advisor Tim Anderson asked, “Is that music, Mr. Cage?”
He replied, “There are many people who have the notion that art is an improvement on life, but I find life very interesting. It’s a matter of changing one’s mind.”
On the concert night, when the audience filled the space, what they first heard was the room itself breathing.
Another BANG! event, “Bird Park Lake,” was a multiscreen film and performance event that involved its makers arguing about what to call what they were doing. The sextet — Jon Bowie, Jim Bumgardner, Richard Carlyon, William Livingston, Bernard Martin and Willard Pilchard — delivered what one reviewer described as “disjointed but almost classically unified views. … As they accentuated seams in their screens, they filled in the seams between art and life, between reality and unreality, and, especially, between past, present and future.” In his March 23, 1966, essay, the observer gave the presentation a jaunty alternate title, “The Marx Brothers’ Night at the Space-Time Continuum.”
The writer was Tom Robbins, then a newspaper writer and editor, as well as a student at Richmond Professional Institute, and later a celebrated novelist who penned titles such as “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.”
Artist and new VCU graduate Caryl Burtner worked in the school’s Summer and Evening College in 1979. She recalls of the Temple Cafeteria, “They made kooky cookies there and desserts for us out of Twinkies.” A student favorite was “Taco Night,” and artist Stephen Keene titled a painting after it. Burtner passed by the temple site every day and documented its 1979 demolition. She plucked up a shard of stained glass, not knowing that decades later it would provide mute testimony in her work “Missing Richmond.”
The university, citing poor acoustics and extensive repairs exceeding what a fresh contemporary building would cost, pulled the Scottish Rite Temple to pieces to make way for what ultimately came to be named the William E. Singleton Center for the Performing Arts.
Architectural historian Calder C. Loth in a 2009 Style Weekly feature described the new building as, “That blob on Howitzer Park. … You don’t want to know what was once there. At least there should be the responsibility of replacing what’s lost with something better.”
