Photo courtesy Richmond Mural Project/Marc Schmidt
In the summer of 2013, some friends and I were wandering the city and wound up at the intersection of Broad and Allison, looking at David “Meggs” Hooke’s mural on the corner (above). My friend Jody always searched for the murals. I didn’t know until reporting on the All City Art Club years later that the Richmond Mural Project’s website hosted a digital gallery of murals as part of the now-completed goal of having artists from around the world paint 100 murals in the city within five years.
The intersection is close to the Museum District and Scott’s Addition, and a few blocks away from Virginia Commonwealth University’s campus, but to my mind, it was Pleasants Hardware and Lee’s Chicken & Strips that made it a place. I remember going to Lee’s with my mother as a child and seeing her face light up as she ran into old classmates, which somehow always got me free biscuits; as I got older, I felt grown up running into my own former classmates there. Hurricane season bullied my mother and me for about five years straight. We lived on a slight incline, and our house always flooded. I remember climbing into the back of her ’89 Volvo 240 wagon and driving to Pleasants Hardware, where, upon arrival, she remained chillingly silent — no doubt stressed and overwhelmed — and just grabbed what she knew we needed. It was a quiet magic I studied. Years later, the intersection became the last place that I saw my friend Kirk before he died in a car accident. When I spotted him as I headed to Lee’s, he sent me a playful text about how I looked “all serious about that chicken.” It made my day. Now I feel his loss especially intensely there.
When we saw Hooke’s mural on the side of The Pig & Pearl (now Cornerstone Cigar Bar & Restaurant), it had become a new world. Brazilian muralist Joao Lelo’s work appeared on The Empress building (now The Savory Grain). When I spoke with him last spring, he told me that he left Brazil with just a sketch for The Empress. Once he started painting, other business owners solicited his work. “When I go out and paint,” he told me, “normally I like to go places that are not established. Places where they need something from me. I felt that at that time in Richmond.”
All of last year, my friend Blair and I talked about the changes to our community. I was stunned by what had become for us, at one point, truly a state of mourning over the changing city. The initial mention of a Whole Foods terrified me, for some reason. The addition of a mini Walmart near VCU (which closed in July) a few years prior also ushered in a sense of the area not being locally owned. We’d already lost Ukrop’s, we knew that the Richmond Shopping Center in Carytown was going to eventually be razed, and rapid development was threatening the character of the Blackwell neighborhood on South Side. Key parts of this tiny republic that built me — these worlds that exist only for us who were there in those specific moments — were dissipating. I was angry, mostly because I didn’t know what else to be.
When construction of the GRTC Pulse bus line began, the first stop was built at the intersection of Broad and Allison streets. A camera was placed on top of Lee’s Chicken during construction, letting people keep up with the development of Allison East.
Pleasants Hardware, 2015 ( Photo by Tina Eshleman)
As I wrote in Scalawag Magazine in August of last year, Richmond’s muralization began alongside Instagram’s boom. Searching for and posting pictures of murals was as much of an identity-making experience for us as it was an advertisement for the new city that was emerging. Over the years, friends from bigger cities such as Washington, D.C., and Chicago have moved here, citing the art scene as a major reason why. “It changes the vernacular of the city,” Shane Pomajambo, founder of the Richmond Mural Project, told me a few summers ago.
I can’t help but notice that the Pulse was developed along the corridor enhanced by the project’s efforts. (Perhaps that’s in part because the 2013 RVA Street Art Festival, held at the old GRTC bus depot in the Fan District, featured multimedia exhibits about the future of Richmond’s transit network, including hints at a metro rail through the Broad Street corridor.)
“People want to be in a visually interesting place,” says Ross Catrow, executive director of RVA Rapid Transit. “That makes it feel like a place, not a wasteland. Murals make it feel like its own little node.”
Days before the Pulse was awarded the prestigious Bronze Standard award by the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy, Catrow explained to me that while we might not be able to see it yet, the Pulse is a leader in transit because the system has placed stops in already densely populated areas as opposed to putting them in random areas and hoping that businesses and people follow.
Still, improvements like this can come at a cost. Omari Kadaffi, an activist and community organizer, has filed a federal civil rights complaint against GRTC because of route changes that he says have had a disproportionately negative impact on the city’s black residents.
The intersection of Broad and Allison is becoming yet another version of itself. Once an area of manufacturing that included the Putney Shoe Co. and L.H. Jenkins bookbindery (it’s still home to the recently sold C.F. Sauer food company), the commercial stretch is seeing previously vacant buildings come to life with new restaurants and retail shops. The long-empty Putney building, which most recently housed the Virginia Department of Taxation, is getting a facelift to prepare for its next phase. The Pulse stop is bustling with students and downtown workers moving in and out. For my friends and me, the sense of loss lingers as we watch this microcosm of our city change, but that feeling is tempered by curiosity and wonder about what comes next.
Lauren Francis is a writer and producer who is fascinated by Richmond’s history.
