From left: Viola Baskerville, Dr. Leonard Edloe, Sa’ad Al-Emin and Gary Flowers, who have worked to preserve the Richmond Community Hospital building, discuss a lawsuit filed by Al-Emin on Oct. 22, 2024, against plans to build apartments on the North Side site.
Plans to build apartments in Richmond’s North Side now include the full preservation of Richmond Community Hospital, which served the city’s Black community for nearly 50 years.
The announcement came Oct. 22, the same day that a lawsuit was filed against Virginia Union University, which had acquired the building after the medical facilities were moved to Church Hill in 1980. In February 2024, VUU announced a $40 million deal to build market-rate housing on university-owned land, including the site of the hospital, which has since fallen into disrepair. According to a VUU statement, the deal is part of a $500 million, 10-year plan to update the campus. The plans included preserving only a part of the hospital and incorporating it into the apartment buildings.
In his lawsuit, former City Councilmember Sa'ad El-Amin claims that IRS rules prevent the sale or disposal of the hospital, a 501(c)(3)-designated property, by the similarly tax-exempt private and historically Black university. He asks the Richmond Circuit Court for an injunction “to preserve and protect” the building and block VUU’s apartment plans. It also names VUU President Hakim Lucas and Board of Trustees Chairman W. Franklyn Richardson as defendants.
At the end of a press conference about the lawsuit, organizers learned that the university was revising its concept for the new construction and intends to “fully preserve” the hospital. In the announcement, VUU says the project now has about 15% fewer apartments, which also means there will be less parking, and includes a public wellness center and new green spaces that will “honor the legacy” of the hospital. The university adds that its Center for African American History and Culture “is collecting commemorations and oral histories of the building and its legacy.” Viola Baskerville, a leader of the Save Community Hospital group, said she was encouraged by the news but needed to fully review the changes.
Per VUU, "The revised design fully preserves the both the historic Richmond Community Hospital building and its legacy. The Virginia Union development will preserve the entire historic structure and seek to honor Black medical professionals—permanently preserving the hospital’s legacy after decades of being abandoned."
The hospital served the city’s Black community for nearly 50 years, from 1932 to 1980. Its roots, however, date back to 1902, when Black doctors Miles Berkley Jones and Sarah Garland Boyd Jones — the first woman to pass the Virginia medical board exam — founded the Medical and Chirurgical Society at their home and office in Jackson Ward. They opened a 25-bed hospital and nursing school in 1903 and, although Sarah died in 1905, Miles led the years-long fundraising effort for the Sarah G. Jones Memorial Hospital, Medical College and Training School, which was built in 1932. After 1945, it was known as Richmond Community Hospital.
It later briefly served as student housing; since then, the former hospital has stood unused, even though another university building was rehabilitated through a combination of grants and state historic tax credits. Preservation Virginia earmarked the building as one of the state’s most endangered. Many emphasized RCH’s connection to the nearby Frederick Douglass Court, a middle-class, primarily Black neighborhood where both VUU professors and RCH physicians and nurses lived.
During an Aug. 9 public meeting at VUU, the developer’s representatives, VUU officials and concerned citizens engaged in often heated discussion. Projections of the proposed mixed-use building showed the RCH building cut in half and essentially reduced to its facade. Baskerville said at the press conference that “there was no response to our Aug. 8 letter” to Lucas, Richardson and Tawan Davis, CEO of the Steinbridge Group, which has pledged $40 million to the project al, who is the CEO of the Development Corporation. Baskerville added that letter gave them “sensible community input on ways in which the building could be rehabbed and restored.”
Richmond Community Hospital preservation supporters learned that Virginia Union University would keep the building whole in new apartment plans issued as they were discussing a lawsuit against the project on Oct. 22.
“This building was built during the Depression when people were jumping out of windows, but Black folks were pulling together their pennies, nickels and dimes, like Maggie Walker said, to have something like this built,” Dr. Leonard Edloe said at the October press conference. “And as one who was born here, when I finished pharmacy school, when they didn't have a pharmacist, I would leave my own pharmacy and come over here and help, because it was something important. This was all we had; this was the only place we could go with respect and dignity as human beings.”
