The Daniel Call House before demolition began and after (Photos via Google Maps and by Chris Gruszkos via Facebook)
The story of the Daniel Call House begins with its 1794 construction at the present Broad and Ninth streets, followed by getting uprooted, moved and made over. During the Call’s 230 years, the house provided a home for families and classrooms for assorted disciplines; it was converted into a mortuary in the 1930s and later a fashionable men’s clothing store. These characteristics demonstrate the varied and intriguing life of an antique building allowed to endure.
But that’s all over now.
The Call, as this is written, is going down to wreckage and out of history.
A rally objecting to the demolition has been planned by preservationists for 1 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 7, at 217 W. Grace St. They also hope to raise awareness regarding the fate of other older structures in downtown Richmond.
In-progress demolition at the Daniel Call House (Photo courtesy Jennie Dotts)
I don’t like to think of myself as naive. The Call’s recent stretch of neglect made me wonder when passing by the place on my way to an arts or cultural occasion: The fact that the Call somehow avoided a marker in this plaque-and-memorial kind of town seemed odd, but in the back of my mind, I stupidly thought, “Well, why? Who’d possess the temerity and outright gall to tear down the Daniel Call House?”
I wondered why no creative entity couldn’t or wouldn’t embrace the Call and provide a renewed purpose, perhaps as an inn or restaurant with a touch of the 18th century, holding up its end though surrounded by looming apartment towers. There’d be praise for such imaginative consideration of this unique survivor.
But this time, unlike in the Call’s storied past, no intervention is forthcoming.
The tide of time has left the house isolated and vulnerable amid acreage now either high-priced or overpriced, depending on who you are and what you want to do with the taxable property. As a wise man once told me, as soon as land becomes real estate, all bets are off.
Fact is, the only way to keep any structure safe from conversion into kindling or otherwise forced removal is by the shield of a conservation easement or placement in an Old and Historic District.
The distinction is important, because not even designation as a National Historic Landmark keeps the wrecking ball at bay forever. While “highly significant,” as a 2014 Virginia Department of Historic Resources document puts it, the NHL “designation does not guarantee [a property’s] preservation in perpetuity. An NHL designation is honorary and does not automatically impose regulations to protect the property or restrict owners’ usage of the property.” Further, with various state and local historic considerations, “Significance is unique to the particular property, and is not based solely on the property’s age.”
Plaques can come off as easily as they go on.
An interior view of the demolition (Photo courtesy Jennie Dotts)
Applying for the upgrade to “Old and Historic” is a decision for a community to make. The regulatory overlay involves owners meeting state and local historic rehabilitation guidelines. For example, Scott’s Addition successfully became a “historic district,” but this doesn’t prevent owners of century-old worker’s cottages or buildings from selling to developers.
But, to date in the city, 16 neighborhoods have considered, applied for and received the “Old and Historic” designation. The first, in 1957, was St. John’s Church, later expanded, today embracing 21st to 32nd streets and Broad to Franklin streets.
Basically, it’s not enough for a place to be old, or even historic, but whether the stakeholders agree to seek statutory protection.
The Call underwent significant changes and alterations during its journey through time and space, unlike the 18th-century Adam Craig House, which remains intact in its original Shockoe location though fitted with modern amenities.
Whatever arises on the Call’s site is unlikely to last more than two centuries.
Any city goes through cycles, and some cycles are better than others. Much of what is today Richmond’s central business district featured an assortment of residences and family businesses. That changed after 1900.
The advent of structural steel made possible many of downtown’s remaining early high-rise offices, a number of them by first-rate architects. The westward expansion of the central business district came about because it was hemmed in, bordered on the south by the then-industrialized riverfront and by racially motivated regulation — white-owned companies couldn’t set up shop north of Broad Street. Likewise, Black commerce couldn’t move south and therefore prospered in the gerrymandered Jackson Ward.
The introduction of the motorized vehicle to the narrow city streets required ways for them to move around. Their presence caused further destruction of the cityscape for wide swaths of surface parking.
Until the 1929 Wall Street crash, and then resuming with vehemence borne of post-World War II prosperity, Richmond’s old neighborhoods suffered considerable losses.
The city’s late-coming 1946 master plan advocated for misnomered expressways and parkways, which sliced through the city like the “Y” incision of an autopsy.
The world’s first practical citywide electric powered streetcar system overcame the city’s ridges and ravines and grew the region through transit-directed development. This didn’t occur without racial segregation and labor disputes. After operating for 61 years by either private firms or the utility and finally orphaned, the late-1940s city administration, lacking either vision or concern, allowed for the system’s dismantling and the burning of the cars in a Wagnerian pyre. Nobody marched with placards protesting “S.O.S.: Save Our Streetcars.” Instead, Richmonders dressed in their best to take a last ride.
The big city mansions of Franklin and Grace and the numbered streets toward Gamble’s Hill were left behind by their owners as the chambered nautilus abandons its shell. Some of the houses that cost the equivalent of millions to build also required that amount to keep up, and the expense — and the lure of contemporary architecture and systems — often consigned the city houses to their doom. (Gamble’s Hill itself went to the Ethyl Corporation, now NewMarket, and nothing remains of its wrought-iron porches.)
Preservation groups arose and notably prevented the destruction of numerous buildings large and small and, alongside feisty neighborhood associations, saved entire parts of town.
The tide has gone out again, however, marooning several older structures, residential and otherwise, in precarious circumstances.
Those houses on the market and seeking stewards include the lone surviving remnant of Richmond’s late-18th-century maritime community, the John Woodward House (circa 1784); the Crozet House (1814); One West Main (1841), the home of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Ellen Glasgow and in the early 1970s an experimental public school Humanities Center; the Barret House (1844); and the grand survivor of the Coalter-Cabell House (1847), recently vacated by the Virginia Education Association.
Then there are places such as the sanctuary building of Second Baptist Church, now stranded like a ship in a Sargasso Sea not of grasping weeds but asphalt; the Pocahontas Building; and the deco ziggurat of the former Medical College of Virginia’s West Hospital, part of the present-day Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center.
We’ve gotten to this moment due to a variety of complicated circumstances. Among them are the influx of new residents into Richmond’s largely built-out 60 square miles causing rising property values and often curious assessments making the land worth more than what’s on it, rezoning that puts in jeopardy older structures, and the 2021 cancellation of a residential renovation tax credit for qualifying houses considered by the city as either too complicated to keep track of or too easy for abuse (the commercial credit fortunately remains). These are in addition to a generational shift of those who undertook often physically and fiscally demanding preservation projects. Younger people who may even possess the passion to rescue older buildings can’t afford these efforts. Conversions into professional spaces are neither as attractive or sustainable as prior to the pandemic.
In conversation about this current situation, one preservationist told me there are some who view the recent removals of the Lost Cause-aggrandizing statuary as proof that few understand history (or, at least, their version), and so there’s no point to trying to rescue anything anymore. “Let it all come down” is the thinking, “and that’ll show them.”
This attitude is not only sanctimonious and fatalistic, but these qualities have passed through the city and any number of regional residents — and not only those seeking to save big famous buildings — as a virus that occludes reason. What is at stake is Richmond’s ... Richmondness. Is the city to become a polyvinyl facsimile, not even of itself, but of some computer-generated design concept that morphs the city into, as novelist Tom Robbins once described a nearby locality, “a suburb without an urb.”
Wil Glasco, CEO of Preservation Virginia, responded to a query, explaining how the organization is “making the case that historic preservation is part of the affordable housing solution. We’re working with localities and developers to ensure adaptive reuse is the first option with historic buildings instead of demolition. After all, there’s no better form of recycling than recycling an existing building, and these structures are what make communities in Virginia unique. Bulldozing a historic site without plans for its future is an incredible waste of resources, and a loss of local culture.”
Let, then, the Call’s demolition constitute a call to awaken in the city administration and residents a regard for the buildings taken for granted, that don’t exist everywhere else, and that pride of place should inspire their saving for the benefit of all.
