The recent item in the news about about how on East Grace Street across from the old Loew's moving picture palace cum Carpenter Theatre (now part of Dominion Arts Center) is a planned residential commercial tower. This intelligence stirred associations in this writer of history, both long past and pre-Great Recession.
Back in about 2007, a New York development firm got into its head to build something called Centennial Towers on East Main Street between Fifth and Sixth streets. This didn’t happen, as this 2010 Richmond Bizsense piece explains.
The original $175 million concept with 20,000 square feet per floor envisioned 25 stories including high-end, street-level retail; a couple of floors of office space; a boutique hotel of 66 to 100 rooms; and 150 to 200 condo units at the aerie level. The design team considered the Richmond streetscape, and the renderings looked a bit like 201-205 W. Broad St., the former J. B. Mosby Dry Goods Store (1916, architects Starrett & Van Vleck, Carneal & Johnston) — today’s Quirk Hotel, on which site had been the former Murphy Hotel (1911, architect John Keevan Peebles). Mismanagement by the state, then using it for offices, caused the building to become unsound and led in 2007 to its embarrassing dismantling for a General Assembly parking lot.
But I never understood why the name “Centennial Towers,” with absolutely nothing to do with the location or the considerable history of that block, which included the estate of Moldavia, the home of David and Mary Randolph. Mrs. Randolph was known as “Queen Molly,” whose domestic expertise and hospitality and a book of practical advices made her a celebrity.
Then came Joseph Gallego, the great flour merchant who lived there in 1811 when the lives of his wife, Mary, and their ward, Sally Conyers, were claimed by the Richmond Theater Fire. John and Frances Allan lived at Moldavia with their ward, the teenaged Edgar Allan Poe. The house became a school for a while, but by 1898, the old place stood in the way of the central business district.
I wrote about this appropriation by Centennial Tower at the time — in a blog post lost in the Internet ether — and argued that the designers should make acknowledgements about the land on which the massive structure was to stand. Maybe naming its dining facilities for Queen Molly and its luxury penthouses for Moldavia or its esteemed residents.
The forces of history and economics engineered otherwise.
All of which brings to mind the Grace Street tower plan. And what once stood there, which included the Lyons-Stanard House — with its own connection to Poe’s boyhood — and that enjoyed continued life as the Westmoreland Club. For a blog post, I assembled images that show how that residential block underwent sacrifice to the ruthless demands of the automobile.
Thus a mansion house became a parking deck that became a parking deck with commerce on its street level that in turn gave way to a parking lot.
Speaking of parking, there is a structure in the way. The Art Deco parking deck at 107 N. Sixth St., built in 1927 and designed by Merrill Clifford Lee, Horace L. Smith, Jameson L Van der Voort, architects.
Richmond architectural historian Robert Winthrop notes in his assessment of downtown’s cityscape, “Certainly the most notable parking deck in downtown,” and its design includes “clever ornament derived from automobiles. Each bay is crowned with a wheel and tire, and the major pylons are terminated by eagles bearing radiators.”
A peculiar design element for the building was double-helix ramp, considered advanced for the time, but in later years caused frustrating backups.
The firm “explored parking garage design in conjunction with the Auto Ramp Corporation,” writes architectural historian Shannon McDonald. “They designed the double helix (screw) ramp design that could be entered from each level to go up and down. It had a grade of 13 percent and was located in the back of the building, allowing the front facades to remain part of the existing streetscape in a very civic typical beaux-arts fashion; a modern version of this ramp design is now called an express ramp speeding up the process even further.”
Architectural writer David Brussat on his blog observes, “two towers emblazoned with winged automobiles and a cornice of sculpted wheels. Between its piers are mullions that suggest office windows."
Although you can easily tell it is a parking deck, it does not boast of its parking deck-ness, and that is its strength. But perhaps I give it too much credit. In 1927, the ugliness we take for granted (and not just in parking decks) was not mandatory. Trying to fit even a garage into the urban fabric was not yet verboten. By 1947, those halcyon days were gone.
And don’t we know it.
The developers, who are largely from here, are sensitive at least to that notable facade and seek to incorporate it into the design, as this Style Weekly article details.
If nothing else, amid all that gleaming glass and metal, perhaps in the lobbies we’ll get some recognition of the Stanards and Lyons, of Poe and the others whose memories imbue the site.
