Scott’s Addition’s Miracle Growth

The misdirection is the talk of the neighborhood.

At Summit and Clay streets in Scott’s Addition, a vehicle — perhaps a work truck lumbering through the streets — inadvertently spun around a signpost, pointing the street names in opposite directions.

The confoundment of Uber drivers and visiting friends and family, whose GPS instructions say one thing while their eyes see another, is related in coffee shops and bars by residents, often with a weary chuckle. Such is life in the Addition, a place that not long ago few people knew by name, and now, where many want to go, if they can find their way.

Scott’s Addition is tucked in the elbow of West Broad Street and Boulevard North, a 20-square-block and 152-acre collection of historically recognized factory and warehouse buildings mingling with older row houses and food and entertainment venues. For years, it lay in obscure dormancy, a cheap and gritty place accommodating lingering light industry and starving artists.

In September the Richmond Planning Commission approved a plan to rezone the Addition and the Boulevard North corridor for mixed-use. The plan would allow higher-rise residential buildings, restrictions on surface parking, and street-level commercial space. City Council is scheduled to vote on the plan September 25.

Today's Scott’s Addition has almost 800 apartments with 202 under construction, and more than 450 units proposed. A spur to the rezoning is derived from the anticipated completion of The Pulse Bus Rapid Transit System and expected property renewal along its route from Rocketts Landing to Willow Lawn.

Growing Pains

The area’s sudden growth has outpaced the city’s budgetary cycles and development protocols. Residents point out a variety of idiosyncrasies and annoyances, ranging from police and emergency services lacking unified systems for getting into locked warehouse apartment buildings to a dearth of municipal trash cans, inadequate street lighting and a constant battle against graffiti. Sidewalks end with grassy stretches then pick up again, and handicapped ramps end in gravel, forcing wheelchairs into the street.

Sandi Cauley, a board member of the Scott’s Addition Boulevard Association (SABA), recalls a pair of recent collisions on Moore Street within 45 minutes of each other, both involving cars and work trucks.

In the first instance, a truck struck a car and spun it in the opposite direction. No one was injured, and police promptly responded. A second crash in the same spot was more severe, but resulted in no injuries.

“You play a game of chicken because the signs are too far back and the cars are parked too close to the corner,” says Cauley.

A Community Blossoms

In the beginning, nobody visited.

Five years ago friends told Frazier Fulton, “You live in a zombie land.” On seeing the neighborhood when helping her move, Fulton’s parents insisted, “You are not living here.” Vacant warehouses loomed, tufts of tall weeds shot through sidewalk cracks, and street lights sputtered and went dark. When she walked her dog, she was hemmed in by concrete and brick with no grass to speak of.

 A former denizen of exurban Short Pump and rural Beaverdam in Hanover County, Fulton went through what she describes as a “quarter-life crisis” and wanted a change. The public relations account manager had attended Virginia Commonwealth University as a commuter student.

After choosing to make the big move to town, Fulton first looked at Fan District apartments. They were often in older houses, which she liked, but were not well-maintained, which she didn’t. Plus, coming from a place with three bedrooms, a dishwasher and laundry, she didn’t want to live without those conveniences, “which is very millennial of me,” she acknowledges, laughing.

A friend suggested Fulton look in Scott’s Addition. She toured a building opening on West Clay then undergoing conversion to apartments and signed a lease.

“It’s like living alone but also like living in a frat house for 30-year-olds.” —Frazier Fulton, Scott's Addition resident

The Addition was much quieter then, yet near everything she wanted to be a part of. “But I couldn’t get my friends over to hang out,” she recalls. “They’d say, ‘No, you come over here, to The Fan,’ or wherever.” Street activity and sounds of a burgeoning community increased. While two “gentlemen’s” clubs have made their homes here for years, Isley Brewing Company arrived, followed by Ardent Craft Ales; the Richmond Triangle Players theater company reclaimed a former radiator shop; Lamplighter coffee opened a roastery; and Bow Tie Movieland at Boulevard Square lit up 17 screens.

Now people not only want to visit Scott’s Addition, they want to live here.

Attendance at meetings of SABA, a group of neighborhood businesspeople and residents, has blossomed to as many as 100. The Addition is represented on Richmond City Council by Kim Gray. She became acquainted with the neighborhood through her work in family services for Head Start. She also had her car serviced in the area.

Today, SABA meetings are downright uplifting for her. “The energy in the room is inspiring,” Gray says. “They’re supportive of each other, even if they don’t always agree. … These are doers, they’re active and engaged.”

SABA’s name itself reflects change: The neighborhood expanded across Boulevard with the addition of Movieland, En Su Boca taqueria, an Aldi grocery store, a Starbucks and Growlers to Go. A high-end bowling alley is soon to follow.

Nearby, Serabi Development and the Rebkee Co. spent $24 million to create 178 apartments in the former Interbake Foods building, now known as the Cookie Factory Lofts. The repurposing assisted in bridging Scott’s Addition proper to an amorphous, semi-industrial section east of the Boulevard’s median.

What's in a name? The Addition’s namesake, Gen. Winfield Scott, is a Dinwiddie County native who inherited the land from his father-in-law, Col. John Mayo, but never lived there. He was charged with leading the infamous “Trail of Tears” expedition in 1838 and devised the Union's strategy in the Civil War.

A decade ago, Scott’s Addition was a mix of light industrial businesses, warehouses and former shipping and receiving centers. There were three separate rows of houses, several small apartment buildings and a few stand-alone homes, most dating from around the 1930s and requiring some renovation.

You hauled your rugs to the Addition for cleaning at Mercer’s, got the car fixed in one of several garages and enjoyed marvelous milkshakes at the Curles Neck Dairy Bar (still serving frozen delights as The Dairy Bar restaurant on Roseneath Road).

Now, Frazier Fulton calls it home. She participates in community cleanups and biweekly group dinners in her building. “Everything is just three or four blocks away,” she says.

The sense of neighborliness appeals to Fulton. She volunteers for Comfort Zone Camps, a weekend getaway for children who have experienced severe trauma, and when she returns home, emotionally drained, she can find a meal and a bottle of wine steps from her door. If she works late, she can ask a friend to walk her dog.

She didn’t expect to stay this long in Scott’s Addition. “I don’t think people understand until they experience it,” she says. “It’s like living alone but also like living in a frat house for 30-year-olds.”

What the Aughts Brought

A 2005 historic designation urged by the Addition’s business association encouraged a variety of property overhaulers, some of whom were more opportunistic than others. A state historic tax credit program holds real estate taxes in abeyance for five years on a portion of eligible rehabilitation expenses. The tax credits allow application for federal funds, too, and encourage projects that builders might otherwise avoid.

At this time, the Addition was zoned light industrial, which didn’t allow for the conversion of warehouses into apartments. This required a special-use permit.

Rodney Poole, chair of the city’s planning commission, recalls the first special-use permission granted in the neighborhood. In late 2005, Monument Construction wanted to convert 1701 Summit Ave. into 14 condo units.

“I said then, ‘I support this paper, but you need to understand what’s going on here. This is totally going to change Scott’s Addition.’ And in fact, it has.”

Flamboyant developer Justin French amassed some 22 properties. He installed a billboard in the neighborhood that announced “Scott’s Addition,” featuring an emblematic Ed Trask image of a pink sky and silhouetted telephone poles and wires. It was either sunrise or sunset.

In June 2010, a stalled French apartment project at Summit Avenue and Norfolk Street exhibited the first signs of trouble. Contractors weren’t getting paid, and the backing Markel Corporation chose to cut off funding.

French’s ongoing flimflam became caught up in the unfolding national economic downturn. Lawsuits against the developer stemmed from his forging invoices and overinflating the cost  for rehabilitation work on his properties, which would increase historic tax credits. His renown imploded into infamy.

In May 2011, French was sentenced to 16 years in federal prison for fleecing the federal and state governments and 110 investors out of $11.2 million.

Post-French, and a fire sale of his holdings, the Addition grew into one of Richmond’s busiest commercial and entertainment districts. Apartments blossomed in old warehouses, but few condos, restaurants and creative small businesses. Now, Boulevard North is the site of enormous, traffic-snarling St. Patrick’s Day and Halloween celebrations. In 2016, the Addition proper hosted both the first Current Art Fair and 1708 Gallery’s InLight.

As Buskey Cider entrepreneur Will Correll observes, “Five years ago you were sad if you owned a building here and there wasn’t an active business in it. Now, you’re trying not to lease it.”

Getting to the Highpoint

Nadia Anderson, founder of Virginia Grace, a two-year-old event-planning company, lived in the same South Richmond zip code most of her life. Until this spring, she resided in Stratford Hills, a wooded community near the James River, where deer in her backyard greeted her in the mornings.

She gave up this idyll for an experiment in city entrepreneurialism. She’s renting out her house and in the fall  will move her company into the Highpoint Collective and Gallery, a hive for creatives with programmable event space. The gallery occupies a streamlined 1939 Louis Ballou structure with rounded corners and glass brick that first served as offices for Curles Neck Dairy and later was a sales and service center for Zenith electronics.

Months back, Anderson knew Scott’s Addition only as a warehouse district. Then at a New Year’s Eve party she met SABA board member Sandi Cauley, a former television producer turned entrepreneur who had realized her dream of creating a dance and fitness studio. Attending classes there provided Anderson an entree to the neighborhood.

She discussed the Highpoint with one of its co-founders, David Morrison. He, taxidermist Robert Olson and jeweler Claire Accardo wanted a way out of the rising Addition rents,

a place where they could offer a work environment for a variety of makers, from chefs to sculptors. They acquired the building on Broad, and this, to Anderson — who was looking for a place to buy — came as the answer for growing Virginia Grace.

A former full-time CPA, Anderson started a catering company with a friend as a stress release from work a few years ago. Baking custom cakes appealed to her, as did styling the food service tables.

Customers began asking about venues, photographers and disc jockeys. “I’m super-organized and meticulous about things,” she explains, “and what I discovered is that I prefer working the logistics of the event instead of focusing on just one part. … I was glad to be a part of something I was in control of. I wondered, then, what if I manned the whole ship?”

Anderson sailed right into Scott’s Addition, where she can walk out of her apartment and see the Highpoint. She has noticed one characteristic of living in the Addition as an African-American woman engaged in her own business:

“I feel like there are not that many people of color here right now.”

At various meetings in the neighborhood, she may be one of few women and perhaps the only black person at the table. “This may just be the state of Richmond entrepreneurship,” she says, “which is thriving. I don’t know what percentage of new business owners are women, or African-American.”

According to statistical information prepared for SABA, in 2010 just 280 people lived in the Addition, more than half of them white. By this year, around 1,000 dwell there. About 30 percent are black and almost 6 percent Hispanic.

In her short time in Scott’s Addition, Anderson has become quite attached to her new neighborhood. Being at the center of activity is what she wanted. “At least two days a week I don’t even get in my car,” and she expects to drive even less frequently as the Highpoint takes off. “I’m meeting people and making connections, and this is all good for what I need.”

‘I Pinch Myself’

Charles Norris, a salesman for a commercial heating and air conditioning firm, waited 11 months for the opportunity to move into his choice apartment in the Cookie Factory Lofts. He wanted the wide patio with an expansive view toward the Children’s Museum of Richmond and the Bon Secours Washington Redskins Training Center.

Norris chuckles, recounting a time when the museum switched out an exhibit and replica dinosaurs were hauled out for a weeklong process of restoration, “so we watched them washing and painting the stegosaurus.”

He says he enjoys the stylized apartments fitted into previously industrial spaces, where not every unit is the same — or, in some cases, even in exact plumb, though with excellent plumbing — and each boasts the scars and scratches of a previous life.

The floors vary in color, and portions of hardwood show through. Gashes remain from where, perhaps, a forklift went awry, and a door bearing abstract traces of years of paint layers retains a slash of graffiti from the days when the building was the Flying Dutchman of Boulevard North.

The building’s upstairs gym looks out on the back of the FFV cookie company logo and the water tank adorned with the work of artist Mickael Broth, although artistic considerations in the building’s public lounges are oddly unoriginal.

Other aesthetic characteristics are large mushroom columns, walls using cut sections of stone as tile and huge windows. Not every Addition apartment that slid into a decades-old factory is so fortunate; some don’t have bedroom windows or are illuminated only by skylights.

“To have this much space in a Richmond apartment, it’s unbelievable. ... Sometimes, I pinch myself because I can’t believe I live here.” —Charles Norris, Scott's Addition resident

Norris is emblematic of another trend in the neighborhood: the middle-aged empty nester. A native of Stuart Avenue, his life and family took him to Hanover and Chesterfield counties. Now he’s back in town. He likes being his apartment’s first occupant.

His neighbors on one side are waitresses in their mid-20s; down the hall are three Flying Squirrels baseball players; nearby is a couple in their early 30s; and a few floors away lives an 80-year-old German woman — her family fled the Nazis — who teaches her native language. At Christmas, an upstairs neighbor puts cookies on a hall table to share. And Lily, a pretty white cat, patrols the patios in search of affection and treats.

Norris parks his car on Friday and often doesn’t get in it again until Monday. An ardent fan of the Richmond Kickers soccer team and college basketball, he walks from here to City Stadium and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Siegel Center. He takes in the twilight from his terrace. “To have this much space in a Richmond apartment, it’s unbelievable,” he says. “Sometimes, I pinch myself because I can’t believe I live here.”

Business in the Back

On Rockbridge Street, until now a back road of the Addition, new things are happening. The blocky Symbol Mattress Factory has been demolished, and in its place has risen a three-story mixed-use project by Addition-based Spy Rock Real Estate group and Washington, D.C.’s Holladay Corp.

Now housing Dominion Payroll, it is the first entirely new building of its kind in the Addition in decades. Other tenants include Brenner Pass restaurant and Jackson & James clothiers.

In recent weeks, Dominion moved from a jumbled, overcrowded East Main Street office it occupied for eight years into the new structure. The company’s wide-open offices include a bow-fronted community room that offers a panoramic view of the skylights, cupolas and domes of the Addition, and even the back of the under-construction Institute of Contemporary Art at VCU.

Dominion is decorating the office with the work of Richmond artists, furnishings from LaDiff and the Addition’s Surface Architectural Supplies. The firm even offers bikes for employees to borrow — brought in from Carytown Bicycles.

Another Spy Rock project, Symbol’s residential component, proceeds nearby with 202 apartments. From where Dominion Digital Marketing Specialist Andy Liguori sits, he’s watched prefab walls on trucks fly by amid the frenetic activity of construction.

Marketing Director Brad Crouch says working in Scott’s Addition is being at the beginning of something. And there’s no energy quite like that. “Bands used to say, ‘We’re from Athens, Georgia,’ and everybody understood what that meant; it was cool. Now, we say, ‘We’re in Scott’s Addition,’ and people sit up.”