“There have been remarkable people creating remarkable myths in Richmond,” poet and cult personality Lester Blackiston wrote in 1969 of a creative renaissance that had begun a decade earlier, in 1959. “At the very center of the region/province/city is the ‘Fan District,’ and the ‘Fan’ is home to the mythmakers of the last decade — and now, the Fan is daily becoming home to another phenomenon, a remarkable community of numerous individuals whose apparent intentions are to set in motion a pattern of artistic and spiritual consequences. These are the seeds of the garden, and it appears that spring is not far away.”
In 2019, Richmond’s rebellious, do-it-yourself counterculture celebrates its 60th birthday, having inspired beatnik coffeehouses, poets, painters, authors, numerous independent media outlets, a world-class art school and a thriving punk movement.
“Nothing bores me as much as sanity.” —novelist Tom Robbins, in his farewell column for Richmond Professional Institute’s Proscript student newspaper, May 21, 1959
This renaissance started sluggishly in the years after World War II, when the Fan District surrounding Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) and the West Grace Street corridor from Belvidere Street to what is today Arthur Ashe Boulevard began experiencing a population shift west to newer Henrico County neighborhoods, leaving behind mostly marginally employed creators, college students and derelicts. Single-family Fan residences were chopped into apartments and rooming houses, and several buildings began suffering from neglect. Many became group homes for people battling substance abuse and those with intellectual disabilities.
According to Michael Eric Taylor’s 1994 master’s thesis on “The African-American community of Richmond, Virginia: 1950-1956,” this migration caused the city’s white population to drop almost 5% over the decade, making the 1950s the first decade in which Richmond’s total number of residents declined. And while the African American presence in the city grew, with black populations moving into previously all-white neighborhoods on North Side and the East End, blacks shunned the moribund Fan District.
Bored and disaffected in their declining Fan neighborhood, the remaining young residents sought entertainment wherever they could find it. There were no clubs, no real bars — it was illegal to sell liquor by the drink — and no local bands. Nightlife consisted of catching acts such as Frank Sinatra at the Mosque or Johnny Mack at “the South’s grandest ballroom,” Tantilla Gardens at Hamilton and West Broad streets.
An oil painting by William S. Amlong of rooftops along Park Avenue in 1963 (Image courtesy Longwood Center for the Visual Arts)
Young Fan dwellers congregated on Albemarle Street in Oregon Hill to watch the shadows of inmates boxing inside the Virginia State Penitentiary. They explored the wasteland of Belle Isle and roamed Hollywood Cemetery, picnicking beneath a pitted, hollow-eyed statue of Jefferson Davis.
“Each morning, including Sundays, the sun rose with a golf tee in its mouth,” novelist Tom Robbins wrote of drowsy 1950s Richmond summers in his 1976 novel “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.”
“Its rays were reflected, separately but equally, by West End bird baths, South Side beer cans, ghetto razors,” Robbins continued. “Middays, the city felt like the inside of a napalmed watermelon.”
By the second half of the 1950s, the civil rights movement grabbed headlines, but just out of sight, a small group of wide-eyed artists, poets, writers, dissenting radicals and misfit students realized that America — and especially Richmond — didn’t fit their ideals and lifestyles anymore. Like the early Beat writers Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Philip Whalen, these people required an environment in which to synthesize their radical ideas and focus their postwar cynicism toward the 1950s way of life, which promoted without question God and country, family and, most important, conformity. Their response, according to Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman in her 2012 book “Beat Poets,” was an “open flouting of accepted social, sexual, and literary norms; the confrontation of a cold, mechanistic world with unabashed romanticism.”
‘An Electric Atmosphere’
A contributing player in this era of discontent was Richmond Professional Institute, or RPI. Scorned as a most un-Richmond outpost of the College of William & Mary and virtually ignored by its Williamsburg administration, it nonetheless attracted painters and sculptors from the North who were drawn to the magnetic direction of Theresa Pollak at its renowned art school.
Tom Robbins in 1959 as a student at Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University (Photo courtesy VCU Special Collections and Archives)
By the spring of 1959, those RPI artists and writers, coupled with a growing beatnik presence and an intellectual and creative gay underground, coalesced in the birth of Richmond’s counterculture. They became the city’s first avant-garde, and their presence — and antics — inspired 60 years of slam-bang, do-it-yourself creativity that continues today with endeavors such as WRIR radio, the Feels Blind Literary magazine and the Richmond Indie Comic Expo. In 2019, Richmond’s do-it-yourself media landscape and restless counterculture is still bravely driven by people who — against great financial and creative odds — bring audiences independent radio, social media, literature, film, art, music and life commentary distinctly different from the output of mainstream, corporate-owned media outlets.
“We have to admit that RPI … has given birth to people of creative leanings and this in turn has lent itself to the development of a kind of socio-religio-politico-musico-art-oriented colony,” an anonymous writer stated in a January 1960 edition of The Ghost, Richmond’s first dissident independent newsletter. “We now have a whole settlement of artists, writers, poets, musicians and those who lean toward the aesthetic ecstasy in one way or another.”
“RPI was alive!” a student named Adam Strange is quoted by Robbins as saying in his “Walks on the Wild Side” column for the Feb. 12, 1960, issue of RPI student newspaper Proscript. “Furious artistic activity. An electric atmosphere. People were painting and writing and acting, and when they were not creating they were talking about it.”
Unconventional Denizens
Beat coffeehouses — essential to the burgeoning counterculture — afforded those furious artistic types a common place to congregate. In 1958, David Fridley, known as “Shady,” opened the Rhinoceros Coffee House (later named the Pink Rhinoceros) at 524 N. Harrison St., and Robbins was a sporadic reader of his poetry there before he graduated in May 1959.
Shortly after the Rhinoceros, “The Coffeehouse” was opened in Carytown by “Pope” Gregory, an Episcopal priest who was friendly to the emerging Beat movement. They were liquor-free “hep cat” hangouts, with round tables and candles placed in green Portuguese Mateus wine bottles, featuring coffee, tea, poetry and acoustic music inspired by the Kingston Trio, Woody Guthrie and other period folk performers. Both also were predecessors of the Crossroads Coffee House, which operated at Park Place Methodist Church from 1964 until it was destroyed by fire in 1967.
An oil painting of Lester Blackiston by William Kendrick in 1961 (Image courtesy Longwood Center for the Visual Arts)
For a time, the poet Lester Blackiston served as a combustible focal point for this rebellious community.
Back in Richmond after a brief stint as co-owner of the Coffee ’N Confusion Coffeehouse on D.C.’s K Street with legendary beatniks William and Ruth Murray Walker, Blackiston drank prodigious amounts of homemade wine, then prowled the aisles of the Village Restaurant between black-turtlenecked artists and edgy business majors, ranting poetry and sometimes smacking any patrons not paying attention. An art collector, he was recognized by sheer brutish personality as king of the Beats, and he was always surrounded by an assortment of hangers-on.
“Lester lived longer because he was stronger,” Richmond poet and writer Bob Haddow says of Blackiston’s 2007 death. “No career. No pension. No tenure. No health [insurance]. No wonder he was crazy. A real beatnik. But less of a poet. Much less.”
Blackiston could make even a simple poetry reading a death-defying activity. “There was a poetry reading on Hanover and Lombardy — three or four [poets] showed up,” Richmond resident Bill Beville recalled in a 2014 interview. “This guy started ranting in a very aggressive manner, and Lester was offended by the poem or the guy debating him about the poem. Lester pulled a pistol out of a drawer and shot him in the shoulder.” Blackiston wound up serving jail time for a shooting, but later received a gubernatorial pardon.
Eton’s Inn, circa 1966, was a gathering place for unconventional personalities. (Photo from the RPI Cobblestone yearbook courtesy VCU Special Collections and Archives)
The Village and Eton’s Inn, both located in the 800 block of West Grace Street, were gathering places for this confluence of alternative lifestyles and radical attitudes. Eton’s originally opened as a diner in 1947, and by the late 1950s, it had become a safe haven for artists, gays and other personalities considered unconventional at the time.
“Teddy Bears won at a Martian carnival tucked under her mum-encrusted armpits, she skip-dances down mad-cat alleys of the Fan …. beautiful fugitive from a wino’s dream.” —excerpt of “Mary Lou,” a poem Tom Robbins wrote for The Zoo literary magazine
A large circular table at the front frequently seated painters Susan Bush and Ray Herman (nicknamed “Charlie Brown” by Blackiston due to his round head), Faith Butler, Gypsy, Kenny Potts, and others. One of them, Norman Lassiter, later moved to New York City, where he ran a silk-screen operation for Andy Warhol. Another Eton’s regular, Pat Williams, was a model for a character in “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.”
Included in this mix was Cuban-born gay-rights activist Tony Seguro and his partner, gay fiction author Marsh Harris, whom he met at Eton’s. Seguro came to Richmond in 1959, and two years later, he unsuccessfully attempted to form a local chapter of the Mattachine Society, an early gay-rights group. According to a 2016 article in Slate, Seguro told journalist Bob Swisher in the late 1980s that Mattachine did not work in Richmond because a lack of police harassment provided an ironic disincentive for gays to organize.
“Tony Seguro was an early trailblazer in Richmond,” recalls Bill Harrison at Diversity Richmond. “He was an organizer during a time when losing one’s job after coming out was not uncommon. And he was in his 40s and 50s when he was most active.”
“[Eton’s] had a wide range of clientele considering themselves the counterculture,” Richmond artist and historian Richard Bland says. “Areas were designated in the front for straights, and back deeper in the narrow [hall were] set up the gays’ booths, while even further were steps opening to an elevated area with booths for lesbians.”
Robbins was hypnotically attracted to this burgeoning Grace Street counterculture, especially the mysterious street people who roamed among the “square” black suits and flat-top haircuts. At Eton’s, he became close friends with painters William Fletcher Jones, Bill Kendrick and Bill Amlong (known as the three Bills). He wrote that “[Bill Kendrick] and Bill Jones were the classic models ... warriors of the heart in Richmond at a time when Richmond was in a state of cardiac arrest,” according to material published in 2007 by Longwood University’s Center for the Visual Arts. Robbins’ fascination with Richmond’s most marginalized continued throughout his tenure at RPI, and he profiled these unconventional denizens throughout his spring 1959 semester. He described painting student Paul Miller, who lived in an unheated carriage house behind RPI’s Anderson Building, as “tall, gaunt, hungry looking, with intense eyes, Near Eastern moustache and very long black hair, he looks like a holy man who has crossed the hot deserts and walked the back alley of the worlds.”
“The bohemians in Richmond had a deeper sense of humor than the people out here,” Robbins told Richmond magazine in September 2012 of the difference between the characters of 1950s Richmond and his current city of Seattle. “The characters I remember from the Fan District, they were eccentric in a way that transcends the everyday eccentricity that one finds in Seattle. Seattle has a lot of heart, but no soul. Richmond has a lot of soul, but not much heart.”
Despite the rich mingling of personalities and lifestyles, there was almost no African American presence in this counterculture scene, other than a few Virginia Union University students who may have periodically made an appearance. Artist Sir James Thornhill, who was born in 1955 and grew up in Jackson Ward, says that blacks were more likely to have pursued their artistic talents in nearby Monroe Park, “making music and generally enjoying themselves.”
Art is displayed along a sidewalk in the Fan District in 1959. (Photo by Malcolm Carpenter)
Venues for Art
Other businesses in the 800 and 900 blocks of West Grace Street seemed to blossom during this pivotal time just to accommodate the emerging subculture. Meadow Laundry, at the corner of Grace and Harrison Streets, became Richmond’s first street art gallery. For 89 cents, students and locals could wash, dry and fold while viewing paintings by resident artists. Owner Ed Steinberg — himself an accomplished painter — presented a show of his own works there from January through April in 1959, and sidewalk shows and sales were a common happening.
“The art students would rush during the last night before the sale to get a ’genuine oil painting’ done in time to hang on the fence,” says former RPI photographer Malcolm Carpenter. “Notes on them said, ’Don’t touch, paint still wet.’ ” Carpenter added that sometimes three or four students would work assembly-line-style just for the sale, with each doing his or her specialty on a series of canvases — “one would paint a sky and clouds, another trees, and one doing figures.”
“DeKooning, Rothko, Jackson Pollock, etc. were the artist idols of our art teachers [in 1959],” recalls former RPI art student and writer Paul Steucke. “Anything smacking of realism was out.”
Other notable painters who frequently exhibited and sold art outside Meadow Laundry included Rubin Peacock, Art Wimberly and North Carolina native Homer Vernon. According to Carpenter, since no financial aid was available in those days, Vernon earned his out-of-state RPI tuition money by running sugar for moonshiners in the Carolina hills, using a car with a modified suspension so a low-riding rear would not tip off the local sheriff.
“Death is an acquaintance / From long ago / Whose name one can’t quite / Put one’s tongue to.” —Rik Davis, “Death”
The Lee Theater, at 934 W. Grace St., reopened on Christmas Day 1959 as an alternative- and foreign-film venue after closing in 1956 following a 20-year run as a purveyor of “fine art films.”
“[The Lee Theater] was dying from the lack of business,” Steucke recalls of the theater’s resurgence. “[Malcolm Carpenter] and an RPI friend of his wrote a letter to the management and suggested they show famous films made by Orson Welles and others (they provided a list). It saved the theater.” Despite Carpenter’s suggestions, the resurrection was short-lived — by 1962, the Lee was shuttered again. It was revived in 1965 as an adult film and burlesque dancing venue. Now, as the Grace Street Theater, it features performances by VCU’s Department of Dance and Choreography.
Closing Time
By mid-1959, Eton’s seems to have lost much of its bohemian appeal, causing a migration across the road to the Village Restaurant. Originally opened in 1956 by Steve and Stella Dikos, the Village developed that year its unorthodox mixture of leftists, Beats and artists. At a time when much of Richmond was segregated, African Americans were always welcome at the Village, at least to those bold enough to cross society’s color barriers.
In stark contrast to Blackiston’s ferocity was another more low-key beatnik poet, James Patrick “Rik” Davis, who also arrived in town in 1959 after meeting Blackiston at a D.C. bus stop in 1957. A 19-year-old fresh from poetry readings at the Lighthouse Club in Hermosa Beach, California, the lanky, 6-foot-5 Davis brought his gentle West Coast sensibilities to Richmond, falling in with the Grace Street crowd. He wrote poetry out of love, and later — out of financial necessity — he wrote pornography under the name Jack Vast. “Rik read ’On the Road’ and took off, hoping that he would meet the other Beats in bars and flophouses on the West Coast and Manhattan,” Haddow explains. “Rik and I hit it off because we’d both clocked thousands of miles the hard way. All that in the service of literature and poetry.”
James Patrick "Rik" Davis (left) and Lester Blackiston cast fishing lines in the mid-1970s. (Photo by Eddie Peters)
But the bohemian scene wasn’t all sweetness and gentle finger snaps. The Richmond Police Department’s vice squad took acrid notice of this cultural upheaval and went to legally questionable lengths to diminish it. An anonymous motorcycle cop wearing an opaque face shield would sometimes arrive unannounced in the Village and wander the aisle like Blackiston, not ranting poetry, but pointing out beatniks, poets and artists to be ushered outside, where Lt. Joseph Higgins would demand identification and haul them downtown for booking if none was forthcoming. In 1959, a lopsided majority of Richmond’s arrests for drunkenness, drug possession and disturbing the peace occurred in those two blocks of West Grace Street.
Similarly, Richmond’s daily newspapers in 1959 editorially savaged attempts to challenge segregation as well as anything deemed subversive. But in a bizarre decision that loosely bridged the chasm with the city’s counterculture community, Richmond News-Leader editor James J. Kilpatrick, whose racist rhetoric bolstered Virginia’s Massive Resistance to school desegregation, hired Blackiston’s volatile friend, poet Ezra Pound, as a foreign correspondent. It did not go well.
“He has sent me half a dozen things,” Kilpatrick wrote that year to the Foreign Press Club in Rome of Pound’s work, “but unfortunately all of them have defied my skills as a copy editor.”
On July 14, Kilpatrick found one of Pound’s impenetrable essays publishable. “Keynes Brainwashed Electorate with Economic Hogwash” was his first and last editorial, and he was let go within a year.
From 1959 to 1967, the community’s Beat art and poetry talents began overlapping with the expanding civil rights and New Left movements. Richmond’s hippie era unofficially launched in 1966, when Tak and Holly Keck opened a coffeehouse and sandal shop on Laurel Street called The Scarlett Griffin.
“It was bohemian central,” recalls artist Phil Trumbo. Then, in early 1967, Howard Fisher opened a coffeehouse at 802 W. Grace St. called Grant’s Tomb. In October of that same year, a poet named Art Dorow started the Sunflower, Richmond first underground newspaper.
While the Sunflower and these second-generation coffeehouses were created by a newer wave of writers, artists and poets transitioning from Beat philosophy to the more political New Left, it may be argued that Richmond’s original subversive Beat generation, born in 1959, was killed in 1983, when founding father Rik Davis — still writing poetry — was stabbed to death during a still-unsolved robbery of an adult bookstore. His death left subsequent generations to carry on Richmond’s countercultural legacy.
