If you’ve traveled around Richmond, you’ve seen Charlie Ponticello’s work, whether as public art or a stone restoration project.
His “Tableith,” a 20-ton double helix-twisting piece near 901 W. Franklin St., uses 51 inscribed discs to depict Richmond Professional Institute’s evolution into Virginia Commonwealth University, and his stocky, six-foot-tall “Deepwater Sponger” stood near The Boathouse restaurant at Rockett’s Landing for the better part of a decade. The figure portrayed an imagined time when dwindling water resources would require miners to bring the liquid to the surface.
Despite the serious message, “Kids loved him,” Ponticello says. “People were always getting their picture taken with him.” That ended in July 2020 when a wayward motorist toppled the 2,500-pound cast-iron statue. “People who saw it happen said it was like watching somebody drive a totaled car away,” Ponticello recalls. “It was dropping pieces off like a Mr. Potato Head.”
And every time you enter or leave the city by its main roadways, you pass one of the boundary markers Ponticello designed circa 1992 when he was an independent contractor for Seaboard Concrete Products Co. “I was working on about six different projects for them,” Ponticello says. “They had set up my own room in their facility, and it was great.”
As Ponticello remembers it, the city of Richmond contacted the firm about creating ceremonial boundary markers for the major points of the compass. The city planners brought their concept for seven markers, and Ponticello began a monitored design process. “They came in periodically, and I gave presentations until I put forward a model they got excited about,” he says.
Drawing inspiration from neoclassical columns and pediments, such as those of the Virginia State Capitol, Second Baptist Church and other Richmond buildings, Ponticello designed a 12-foot-tall pillar with the words “Richmond City Limit” incised in uppercase letters on the capital. “A giant mold was made and cast,” Ponticello says. “I didn’t produce them, nor did I want to — they’re 3- or 4,000 pounds apiece.”
The now-defunct Empire Monumental Works provided the stone and installed the columns. Six of them still stand, on Midlothian Turnpike, Monument Avenue, Huguenot Road, Richmond Highway, Old Osborne Turnpike and Hermitage Road. The Mechanicsville Turnpike column appears to be missing, perhaps a victim of development in the area.
Stars denote the locations of the pillars that mark the city of Richmond’s borders.
Ponticello began stone carving while still a high school student in New Jersey. The teacher wanted him to carve without using power tools, explaining that he should “feel the materials.” Ponticello followed his art and craft to the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and to VCU, where he earned a master’s in fine arts. By 1994, he was also making pieces from plaster and in steel.
In addition to the pillars and his public art pieces, Ponticello has conducted repairs and restoration for numerous public and private institutions. An early Richmond assignment was the portico of Chesterman Place, an 1876 brownstone built by tobacconist and city treasurer James B. Pace at the corner of Adams and Franklin streets. He restored the carved acanthus leaves and scrolls of the columns’ Corinthian capitals. Ponticello repaired the stonework of the Petersburg public library and columns for the University of Virginia’s Monroe Hall, and he’s worked on the limestone of seven principal buildings at the University of Richmond. He’s soon to recreate the ornamental tiles in the entrance portico of the VCU School of Medicine’s 1846 Egyptian Building.
At present, he’s casting, in a foundry he built, a 700-pound vessel for installation within the College of William & Mary’s “Hearth: Memorial to the Enslaved.” The piece is intended to contain fire during commemorative occasions.
When his work on the “Hearth” vessel is completed, Ponticello says he’ll take on a few other projects, but then he wants to concentrate on his personal art at his East End studio. The ornamental work, he says, “has truly beaten me up. It’s a responsibility, though; I’ve taken care of a lot of good things. But I want to get back into the environmental pieces, like the ‘Spongers.’ ”
