In the background is First Baptist Church of South Richmond, founded in 1821 by a group of free blacks on Decatur Street.
Update: On Sept. 5, the Virginia Department of Historic Resources announced that a board meeting to consider historic district status for the Blackwell neighborhood has been postponed from Sept. 20 to Oct. 10 at 1 p.m., at New Life Deliverance Tabernacle, 900 Decatur St. DHR Director Julie Langan says the agency delayed the meeting after learning that a third-party mail service that was contracted to distribute notification letters to property owners about the September meeting failed to process a large portion of the mailing list. In addition, Langan says, the National Park Service advised DHR officials that Blackwell would be a stronger candidate for inclusion in the National Register of Historic Places as a standalone district rather than an expansion of the Manchester Commercial and Residential Historic District. A public meeting to discuss the district will be held Sept. 27, 6 p.m., at New Life Deliverance Tabernacle.
Tia Redd opens the Hull Street Library’s copy of the 1996 Hope VI redevelopment plan for Blackwell and turns to the map of broken promises. She and a friend recently discovered the document that held such potential.
Although Redd grew up on North Avenue in Richmond’s North Side, she remembers stories that her grandmother used to tell of Blackwell’s rich history — of black-owned businesses and parades down Hull Street, of a local police station and banks that contributed to the thriving, self-sustaining community. Redd wanted her children to grow up there, in a neighborhood where you could walk to schools and parks, and know your neighbors like her grandmother once did.
She saw the beauty of Blackwell.
And despite the unraveling of the Hope VI plan that was supposed to replace public housing with 261 mixed-income apartments, single-family homes and a community center, Redd moved there to fulfill her desire to raise her children in this close-knit setting. She qualified as a first-time home buyer through a Better Housing Coalition program and purchased a new two-story house on 12th Street in 2011 — one of 40 the nonprofit constructed through 2014 as part of Hope VI.
“They gave me a map of the houses that were going to be built,” she says, “and mine was the second one.”
Soon came another big plan for Blackwell, but its scope remained unknown to the community until May of this year.
In 2015, Michael and Laura Hild began buying properties along Hull Street and in the Blackwell neighborhood. Their plans, well documented in the press, included three breweries, a specialty food market, a food hall with multiple vendors, a doughnut/cocktail bar and market-rate apartments. They also acquired six properties on Maury and Stockton streets from the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority in the fall of 2017 for a total of $167,000.
Blackwell residents were aware of the Hilds’ retail plans, but what came as a big surprise was the couple’s initiation of a historic district expansion that would supplant the name Blackwell, making it part of the Manchester Residential and Commercial Historic District, and would enable them and other property owners to qualify for federal and state rehabilitation tax credits, which, in essence, reduces development costs. Across Hull Street, in the original Manchester Residential and Commercial Historic District, 52 projects with a total investment amount of $31.8 million investment have been done since 2002.
Many developers say that small residential projects are simply not worth the cost and trouble of applying for tax credits, which typically involve hiring consultants and attorneys. Kelvin Hanson, who developed Hull Street’s Old Manchester Plaza apartments and the adjacent space for Croaker’s Spot restaurant, estimates that for even a small project, fees would amount to $10,000 to $15,000, “out of reach for the folks in Blackwell.”
Michael Hild wrote about the historic district expansion proposal on his Dogtown Dish blog in April, but he and his team had been working on the project for more than a year. Neighbors say that the Hilds did not meet with the Blackwell Civic Association about the proposed Manchester district expansion before the application was sent to the state in March, and the vote on the expansion was to take place in June — almost a fait accompli.
A phone call set off alarms and questions within the neighborhood and those nearby:
Why weren’t we consulted? What would a historic district expansion mean for my house? For our neighborhood? Would it raise my real estate taxes even more? Will I be able to afford to stay in my house? What would it mean for rents? And why wasn’t the Blackwell name being used?
Amy Wentz received that call from a friend who was concerned about a letter detailing the proposed expansion and an upcoming May 21 public hearing. Wentz, who lives in the 8th District, listened to her friend’s concerns and attended the 4:45 p.m. meeting on her behalf. So did Ernest Moore, who has lived his entire life on Blackwell’s Boston Avenue but knew nothing of the Hilds’ plan.
“You’re supposed to come and say ‘I’m a new neighbor here’ ... how are you going preserve our history without a conversation? Whose history are you creating?” Moore says. “To ignore us says to us that you’re not even concerned about our history and for us to have to interrupt a process that you’ve been working on for a year and a half speaks volumes of your character. It looks suspect.”
It’s “just good manners” to involve the community, Moore insists.
Tia Redd outside her home, which was built by the Better Housing Coalition as part of the Hope VI redevelopment plan
Atop Mount Olivet
A history buff and former member of the Slave Trail Commission, 75-year-old Charles Vaughan gives a driving tour through Blackwell and adjacent Manchester, sharing histories hidden within the landscape.
“They don’t make cars like this anymore, baby,” he says smiling, leaning back in his 1990 Lincoln, left hand on the wheel, his right pointing to an empty lot at Commerce and Porter, the original site of Emily Winfree’s white cottage, gifted to her by her former master along with 100 acres. We circle the block to Perry and Seventh, where an early First Baptist Church of Manchester, founded by free blacks in 1821, once stood. The church moved to Decatur and 15th streets in 1892, where it still stands as First Baptist Church of South Richmond.
Winfree attended First Baptist, led in 1872 by the Rev. Anthony Binga Jr., who also was the first African-American teacher hired by Beverly Augustus Hancock, the public school superintendent of Manchester — then an independent city.
Tasked with opening Manchester’s first combined elementary and secondary school for African-Americans, Binga hired three teachers for Maury School, including James Heyward Blackwell. In 1888, after writing much of the school’s curriculum, Blackwell succeeded Binga as the principal.
James Heyward Blackwell Sr., pioneering educator and the community’s namesake (Photo courtesy University of Virginia Special Collections)
In 1910, when Richmond annexed Manchester, the capital city’s racist policies robbed Blackwell of his principalship. No black person could be the principal of a public school, even one attended by black children. Blackwell stayed on as a teacher until he retired in 1922. (The school was renamed Dunbar in 1915.) He also formed a building and loan association, an insurance company and real estate business before passing away at age 67 in 1931.
Vaughan is silent as we drive up the hill within the city-owned Mount Olivet Cemetery. He’s visited so often that the groundskeepers know him by name and wave as they drive by. “I know these people like I know my folks,” Vaughan says.
At the top of the hill, weeds swallow headstones of Binga and Winfree in the section originally designated for black burials. Around us, the newer parts of the cemetery are perfectly manicured, but this place is untouched. Somberly, he surveys the hill and says, “Black people got the best view.”
‘South Citians’
Up another hill on Boston Avenue, Ernest Moore’s mother, Flossie, sits on a couch facing the wide windows of the home her father built. Owner of J.L. Samuels & Son Contracting, her father, Joseph Levoid Samuels, born in 1910, was among the many black business owners who lived and worshiped in the neighborhood. He even constructed the church on 16th street, the Reconciliation Church of God in Christ, where he also preached.
Single-family housing along 12th Street built under Hope VI
“Living in the area with it all being black, there was a lot of entrepreneurship,” Flossie Moore recalls, proudly looking across the street at an almost identical house that her father also built. She remembers three beauticians who set up salons in their homes, a dentist on Forest Hill Avenue, and many brick masons, carpenters and electricians. She remembers the 30-cent burgers from Burger Chef, across the street from a grocery store on Jefferson between Maury and Everett streets.
Blackwell was a bustling, self-contained world of “South Citians,” says 90-year-old Eddie “Dick” Radden.
Inspired by pastors at First Baptist of Manchester and other neighborhood churches who encouraged congregants to own property and to employ a black workforce, residents “thrived and they made money and they made sure that they employed their own and they paid them well during that time,” Moore says.
But as Blackwell thrived, segregationist policies still choked access to the rest of Richmond.
“There were very few places in South Richmond that a black man could go in,” recalls Vaughan, “and that was until the ’60s.” Raised on the city’s North Side, he rode to Armstrong High School on a city bus, on which he had to sit behind a white line. “When Manchester was annexed to the city,” he says, “it brought the same prejudice.”
Flossie Moore recalls women in their finest dresses and white gloves shopping hand in hand with young girls wearing white lace socks and patent leather shoes in Woolworth’s and Grants along Hull Street. “There was some fighting for us to sit in those stores,” she says proudly, “but eventually it happened.” She attended many NAACP meetings that focused on desegregation strategy inside Church Hill’s Coole Lane bowling alley. “I was there … fighting for us to go to those stores,” she recalls. “Thalhimers would let us in, but we had to go to the basement.”
Flossie Moore’s father owned more property in Blackwell on which he wanted to build apartments in the 1960s. “He had the plans done and everything to build apartments. So with him being a pastor as well, he wanted to house some of his people, but guess what happened? [The neighborhood] went against him. Their own people, and they wouldn’t let him build them. And he said ‘Fine,’ and you know what came? RRHA. The projects.”
Another pastor, William Ransome at First Baptist of South Richmond, also railed against the arrival of subsidized public housing in the neighborhood, preaching the value of ownership, despite the redlining of South Richmond that had been ongoing since the 1940s.
From left: Preston Page, Marc Wagner and Eddie “Dick” Radden meet at the Hull Street Library
Despair and Hope
In 1970, public housing came to Blackwell, with the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority building 440 units. More middle-class flight to the suburbs occurred, and after public school integration, children of Blackwell residents were moving away, finding schooling and jobs outside of the neighborhood; older Blackwell homeowners were passing away, and many of their homes were no longer owner-occupied. Downtown and Hull Street shopping was replaced by plazas and malls, and by the 1980s, the neighbors were seeing drug dealing on the streets. The height of violence came in 1994, when 70 of the city’s 158 homicides occurred in South Richmond.
A new page was turned for Blackwell in the late 1990s, when the RRHA received a $27 million Hope VI grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to replace the 440 public housing units with 261 mixed-income apartments in Blackwell and 325 in Swansboro and Fulton, plus 208 single-family homes. The city also pledged $10 million to the project, which was supposed to produce a total of 801 residences. The plan called for half of the 4,000 public housing residents to stay in Blackwell.
Charles Vaughan is one of the keepers of Blackwell's history.
Construction began in 1998, but momentum stalled after leadership changes at HUD and RRHA, as well as a two-year delay in receiving the federal $27 million grant, according to a 2015 study of Richmond’s public housing history by Amy L. Howard and Thad Williamson. A proposed 150-unit apartment building with 30 low-income residences was canceled, and other developments were scaled back or killed. The 1999 opening of the new Blackwell school recharged the program, but only briefly.
Ultimately, the 440 public housing units were replaced with only 75 in Blackwell. A few of the displaced families returned to the neighborhood, but more than half drifted to other impoverished communities, including Hillside Court and Gilpin Court, according to a 2007 study by Lallen T. Johnson-Hart. About 37 percent of Blackwell’s public housing residents used vouchers to move to other neighborhoods with more job and educational opportunities, and 85 households did not receive any assistance from the housing authority, according to newspaper reports. “The promises were either overstated or lies ... And there was little follow-through and massive amounts of displacement took place, and people have been scattered and no one knows what happened to them,” Sheila Cowley, then-president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, told the Richmond Times-Dispatch in 2008.
The Tipping Point
Dr. James H. Blackwell Jr.’s home that was at 211 E. 18th St. (Photo courtesy Historic Richmond)
While crime in Blackwell is down today, the 1911 home of the neighborhood namesake’s son, Dr. James H. Blackwell Jr., at 211 E. 18th St. was recently demolished, after suffering from years of neglect. It had been labeled an endangered property by the Historic Richmond Foundation.
And some residents still struggle.
Standards of Learning test scores at Blackwell Elementary School are below the state average, and 99.7 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, the school system’s poverty indicator. According to a 2017 study of Richmond’s market values by the Reinvestment Fund, the average household income in Blackwell in 2015 was between $30,493 and $42,086. A monthly first Thursday feeding program, which serves some Blackwell residents, takes place in the basement of Broomfield Christian Methodist Episcopal Church on Jefferson Davis Highway.
A graduate of Huguenot High School and Army veteran, Wentz, who lives in the nearby 8th District, has assisted with that feeding program for years, and was on the lookout for a home to purchase in the neighborhood.
Tia Redd told Wentz about the historic Blackwell house last year, and Wentz often drove by the property, imagining sitting on the porch one day. She began researching the house, but when she and Redd went back to look at it earlier this year, it was gone.
Also doing historical research in the neighborhood, but on a much grander scale, were Michael and Laura Hild. The Hilds invested significant time and money on their nomination to expand the Manchester historic district to Blackwell and Swansboro, paying a reported $75,000 for Chesterfield County-based historic property consultants Dutton + Associates to compile and write the nomination package they sent to the state’s Department of Historic Resources in March.
(Michael Hild turned down five interview requests for this story.)
The DHR’s Board of Historic Resources and State Review Board, which meet quarterly to consider nominated historic sites, set the matter for a vote on their June docket and sent out notices May 1 to Blackwell property owners, notifying them of a public meeting on May 21. Some letters made it, and others didn’t, residents say. Out of approximately 625 properties in the proposed expansion, about 280 are owned by people who live outside the district, including over 40 RRHA properties, DHR officials say.
After going to the lightly attended public hearing May 21 at the Richmond Public Library’s main branch, Wentz, a marketing and public relations consultant for black-owned businesses, went door to door, asking homeowners whether they had received the hearing notice. People on entire blocks on the eastern side of the district said they had not.
“The nomination form wasn’t even available at the time of the public hearing,” Wentz says.
Even City Council members Reva Trammell and Ellen Robertson, whose districts include part of proposed expansion area, said they didn’t know about the nomination until right before the public hearing, which was held on a Monday afternoon. Mark Olinger, the city’s director of planning and development review, said he had not heard a thing about the historic district proposal until June 12, nine days before the state vote was to take place.
A few days before the scheduled June 21 vote, Julie Langan, the state director of historic resources, announced it would be postponed until Sept. 20, requiring that the notification and public hearing process start over again in July and August. (Langan says her office will do more in the future to inform residents of nominated districts, including notifying City Council members.)
Two days after Langan informed Michael Hild of the delay, he sent a reply email to her, copying several other officials, including Mayor Levar Stoney, DHR historian Marc Wagner, Olinger and City Council members Agelasto, Robertson and Trammell.
Hild informed them that he and his wife, along with their bank investors, would have “to send stop-work notices to the affected contractors” on their projects — an investment he said would “well exceed” $250 million, including Laura Hild’s equity contribution of approximately $50 million, and $200 million from their bank partners — adding that the “vast majority” of the contractors are small, minority- and women-owned firms, and that these projects are the sole source of work for many of them.
State and federal tax credits deriving from the historic designations “were supposed to finance a large swath of these projects as an offset to Laura/my federal/state tax bills, with the resulting dollars being invested into these projects and all the jobs that come with it,” Hild wrote.“There is no guarantee we will have the income in future years to proceed with these projects and use the credits as planned. These tax dollars that would have gone into South Richmond redevelopment are likely lost forever.”
Since the June 17 email, Langan says she has not heard from the Hilds.
Preston Page, a young man who lives in Blackwell, is now working for the Department of Historic Resources as a community outreach representative. In early July, he and Wagner told the Blackwell neighbors and other interested parties — among them Flossie and Ernest Moore, and Wentz — that they planned to knock on doors in the proposed expansion area to answer questions about the nomination process, which the state planned to continue with or without the Hilds. State officials also shared that the Blackwell name will be used to identify the proposed expansion area.
“We aren't completely in opposition, but it feels like a surprise attack.” —Kristin Thompson, a homeowner adjacent to the proposed expansion area
Langan says it was “naivete” on the part of the Hilds to not expect some pushback from the neighborhood, and Wentz says she thought that the email’s inclusion of the mayor and council members was meant to pressure Langan into changing the date back to the June meeting.
Blackwell residents insist that they just want to be in the loop — especially as other developers are making offers to purchase their homes. A shift is happening, regardless of the neighborhood’s designation, both neighbors and officials acknowledge.
“We aren’t completely in opposition,” says Kristin Thompson, a homeowner adjacent to the proposed expansion area, but it felt like “a surprise attack.”
The Blackwell Community Center and Pool at 300 E. 15th is home of summer camps, Easter egg hunts and dances.
Tia Redd, who serves as the Blackwell Elementary PTA president, would like to see the Hope VI plan dusted off and mined for ideas. “I think it would be an excellent starting point, and it’s in black and white already.”
The state and the developers won’t be the ones to deal with the aftermath if promises in Blackwell aren’t kept again, Councilwoman Ellen Robertson says. “We are the ones who will have to deal with the after-effects. They’re going to be calling Reva. They’re going to be calling me.”
Instead of backing away from investing in Blackwell, Wentz says she would prefer that the Hilds meet with more neighbors.
“I do have a problem with developers coming in and creating their community.” —Ernest Moore, lifetime Blackwell resident
“Every time, it’s somebody coming in saying, ‘This is what’s the best for y’all,’ ” Wentz says. “ ‘Church Hill developer sits down with the community.’ That’s the headline that would have made everyone happy.”
Lifetime resident Ernest Moore gets the last word.
“I don’t have a problem with developers coming in. I do have a problem with developers coming in and creating their community and acting as if the residents here don’t exist,’’ he says. “We should be proud of the Blackwell name, because even if we went through a decline, when we come back full force and move forward, that says that we can stand the test of time.”
