Main Street Station's renovated interior (Photo courtesy MSS Facebook page)
The party was almost 40 years in the making. The first-ever event to be held in the rehabilitated 40,000-square-foot second floor of the Main Street Station train shed was the sold-out 25th Annual Richmond Heart Ball last Saturday, which raised funds for research and prevention of heart disease.
On the station and celebrities: Here’s a blast from the past that made the Facebook circuit after Mary Tyler Moore’s death. She, with Robert Preston and Sam Waterston, made a 1985 television movie here, “Finnegan, Begin Again.” When you go down to the clip, move to the 33:28 mark, where Moore and co-star Preston amble up East Main, in a long shot of 1985 Shockoe that is closed up like a hurt face. Prominent is the fire-damaged Main Street Station. A few seconds later as they dash across the street, the ruined shell of the train shed comes into view. Despite the building's appearance, the arduous process of returning Main Street Station to life had already started.
A decade after trains had stopped running to the station, and within two weeks of renovations getting underway by the SWA firm, on Oct. 7, 1983, a six-alarm fire ate the massive terra cotta roof and, without intervention by interested parties in a street-side conference with firefighters, the iconic clock tower would've been knocked down.
SWA replaced the roof with the help of the firm that installed it in 1901, the Ludowici Celadon Roofing Tile company, which completed repairs by October 1985.
This activity didn't pull downtown Richmond back from a decline that seemed to have the energy of a black hole. The regional retail colossi of Thalhimers and Miller & Rhoads still operated, though in their last decade. Sixth Street Festival Marketplace got approved and built with the assumption of the continued operation of both stores. The mall opened with considerable fanfare in 1985. This is relevant because of the attempt to turn Main Street Station into a retail center.
The SWA undertaking included the repair, enclosure and installment of floors in the train shed. The building’s foundations were reinforced, and around the foundation’s perimeter was constructed a 1,485-foot-long, 1-foot-thick and about 16-foot-high floodwall. That structure got put to the test by high water during the mall’s scheduled opening week in November 1985, delaying the original date a week and holding off completion of the east side parking lot.
What went wrong was just about everything. The original plan for an upscale discount outlet mall fizzled, and no significant signage informed the estimated 80,000 motorists whizzing by on I-95 about what they were missing in the grand old building. Following another flood, lawsuits and store closings, the death-in-life experiment ended in January 1988. The state of Virginia purchased the building in April 1989 for $7.9 million and set aside $3.6 million for renovation and moving costs. Workers for the state department of health moved in — and promptly fell ill.
Then came Viktoria Badger, the City of Richmond’s principal transportation planner, who in 1991 applied for the first federal grant to renovate the station and bring it back as an operating transportation hub. The multiphase project went through four governors, five mayors, two Virginia Department of Transportation directors and a division secession. The effort stalled at one point with the state’s reluctance to sell the building to the city.
Jeannie Welliver, the present project manager for the city’s Department of Community and Economic Development, underscores the significance of the train shed completion: “This has truly been a 40-year project,” she says. “The Heart Ball is first event ever in the Train Shed, since 1901.”
The transformation of the second floor of the shed came out of a 2009 study that concluded that the space wasn’t needed to service trains. “Today's trains are much longer, and it’s not an origination or departure point. Every architectural decision in the world done in the shed was to support higher speed rail and the train station itself,” Welliver adds.
A "multimodal" vision has guided the Main Street Station project since Badger started the process. Now, there is a Megabus catch-and-release, there'll be two stops of the Bus Rapid Transit "Pulse" line serving the station, in addition to nearby GRTC bus service and, soon to come, a shuttle to Staples Mill Station to accompany the four Amtrak trains that presently pull in there, charger stanchions for electric vehicles that come off I-95. And a path through the station connects to the Virginia Capital Trail. Around June, a visitor center will open to allow travelers to get their bearings and plan their immediate futures.
Take a look inside, via this 360-degree image, courtesy of the Main Street Station Facebook page.
The four-year-old Church Hill Music Co., a self-described "urban bluegrass" string band with an oeuvre stretching from Prine to Prince, played for the opening, cocktail reception and silent auction part of the station's first big event. Lead singer Kelly Fitzgerald says enthusiastically, “I remember when I was I kid how they tried to turn [Main Street Station into] shops. So [we were] happy to be there to open the place.”
The Church Hill Music Company (Photo courtesy the band)
The Heart Ball was the first, and more events are on the way. The Visual Arts Center of Richmond recently announced the move of its 53-year-old contemporary craft show, Craft + Design, to the newly renovated train shed at Main Street Station. This year’s show will take place Nov. 17-19, 2017, and double its featured artists to about 120. Come 4:30 p.m., Tuesday, April 25, you can amble around as part of the Downtown Development Forum and the Greater Richmond Association for Commercial Real Estate. There's no fee, just reserve a space here.
This train don't carry no strangers.
