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Photo courtesy the Foster Collection, Virginia Historical Society
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A rendering shows the proposed Municipal Building, designed by William L. Carneal and James M. A. Johnston (pictured below). Image courtesy the Cook Collection, The Valentine
William L. Carneal (Photo courtesy the Foster Collection, Virginia Historical Society)
James M. A. Johnston (Photo courtesy Dementi Studio, The Valentine)
The architectural rendering (highlighted above) that peeks from behind a knobby banded column (which resembles the plating of a Dalek from “Doctor Who”) and above palm fronds represents a proposed Municipal Building.
The setting in this glass-plate image from late 1914 or early 1915 is the chambers of the Richmond Board of Aldermen in the present Old City Hall, graced by a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette (today at The Valentine). The board may have just voted to proceed with the Municipal Building on the East Broad Street lot of the former Ford’s Hotel between 11th and 12th streets.
The mashup design contained a public library and city auditorium, courts and administrative offices. Behind the 20 vested, chain-watch-wearing and mustached aldermen, making up half of the city’s two-house legislature, the picture on its easel also serves as a window into an alternate Richmond. This is the concept of the prolific William L. Carneal and James M.A. Johnston. They were associate architects for what is now the Quirk Hotel (1916), the Cokesbury building (1921) and St. Joseph’s Villa (1930-1931).
The building’s tower would have soared 315 feet. But while the aldermen voted for the Municipal Building, they stopped short of authorizing $8,500 for the working plans.
Although it was just two decades since the opening of Old City Hall at 1001 E. Broad St., the aldermen and some other officials believed Richmond’s growth made it inadequate. Shortly after the immense Victorian High Gothic structure’s 1894 completion, complaints arose that it didn’t give proper housing to the machinery of city government. The massive central stairwell, cast by Richmond iron founder Asa Snyder, shoved offices along the outer walls and put the courts in the basement.
Designed by Detroit architect Elijah E. Myers, Old City Hall almost didn’t happen because a series of 1880s design competitions didn’t fit the city’s budget. Richmond conducted official business for 20 years in a cramped, one-story building a block west of the site. The pathetic arrangement resulted from the shortsighted demolition of the city’s municipal building of 1813 to 1874, a columned, domed Robert Mills-designed structure that provided a bookend for Mills’ nearby Monumental Church. An 1877 replacement plan failed, and the project gained no traction until 1887. The construction of Old City Hall cost $1.3 million as opposed to the original estimate of $300,000 and took almost seven years.
In 1914, Richmond annexed 13 square miles from Henrico and Chesterfield counties. The population swelled to 145,000. That year, too, Richmond bested Baltimore as the location for the Fifth District Federal Reserve Bank.Meanwhile, Richmond lagged behind other localities that it sought to emulate in its lack of a free public library and a modern civic auditorium. The city in 1901 had said thanks, but no thanks, to steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, who offered a $100,000 gift for a library, because the city didn’t want to spend $10,000 a year for its maintenance.
On July 20, 1914, a joint committee with members of the Board of Aldermen and the city’s other legislative body, the Common Council, approved the issuing of $500,000 worth of bonds for the new Municipal Building. The plan called for a design competition overseen by London-raised and New York City-based architect Alfred C. Bossom. He created the First National Bank Building at 825-827 E. Main St., which opened as the city’s first office tower in 1913, (later a BB&T bank, now apartments).
A dozen of the city’s 20 practicing architects entered. Bossom awarded the Carneal & Johnston firm’s plan the $1,000 first prize. He praised the striking, unmistakable design, which placed the auditorium on the 11th Street end, the library toward 12th Street and the courts above the lobby. He noted how this plan alone took advantage of the site’s natural slope, which was incorporated into the rake of the auditorium floor. The library’s reference section, “to which it is assumed always that only more thoughtful readers will retire,” overlooked Capitol Street, creating a sound barrier from the bustle and streetcar bells of Broad.
Bossom’s enthusiasm for the plan came from the sheer exuberance of the envisioned building, using a mixture of solemn Neoclassical and fanciful Beaux Arts styles. Carneal & Johnston received inspiration from the 335-foot-high Oakland, California, City Hall, constructed from 1911 to 1914. New York architects Palmer & Hornbostel’s “square wedding cake” design features a long rectangular base from which rises a tower capped by an elaborate cupola. In Richmond, that was to be surmounted by the figure of Lady Justice. Built from limestone and granite on a steel structure, the proposed building would have cost $850,000 — adjusted for inflation, that would be almost $30 million today. By contrast, the 276-foot-tall Gateway Plaza office tower that opened downtown in 2015 cost $124 million.
The grumbling soon began from the competing architects about Bossom’s impartiality, the moving of concept sketches from Old City Hall to the Jefferson Hotel, even the sizes of the display cardboard backing.
Then the business community’s support fell apart. On March 15, 1915, the Chamber of Commerce filed a petition with the city to pull the plug on the plan due to its expense and other needs such as schools and streets, and to sell the vacant lot to the state. H. Lee Peters, chair of the Common Council and a vocal supporter of the project, publicly resigned from the Chamber of Commerce. Other objections arose about the mismatched purposes of the proposed building. Newspapers editorialized against the expenditure and inevitable cost overruns. In June, the Common Council tabled the decision of the Board of Aldermen, and continued kicking the can down Broad Street until Sept. 7, 1915, when they spiked the idea.
Richmond didn’t sell the Ford’s Hotel lot, but in 1938 gave the site away for the Library of Virginia and Supreme Court of Appeals, now the Patrick Henry Building.
Architectural photographer and writer John O. Peters, in his history of the Municipal Building attempt, published in the Winter 2000 edition of Virginia Cavalcade, mused that its construction could have spared Richmond from today’s City Hall, “an austere edifice” built in 1971 that speaks “to a city with little vision of its future.” The 1987 John Marshall Courts Building, he wrote, “could just as easily be mistaken for an insurance company headquarters or a medical office building. Neither the City Hall nor the courts building has the distinctive monumental character of a municipal building that was so important to Bossom. They serve no constructive symbolic purpose.”
