The front of Navy Hill Barber Shop at 404 E. Duval St. around 1965 (Photo courtesy Edith Shelton Collection, The Valentine)
The Navy Hill neighborhood took its name from a plan that never came to fruition. What had been a thriving neighborhood into the early 20th century was eventually ripped down and paved over by highways and city expansion that wiped away the community’s vestiges.
Now its name is associated with a massive $1.5 billion project that promises to revive underused properties. Richmond City Council is expected to take up soon a slate of ordinances that would clear the way for the massive undertaking that would alter downtown Richmond.
The plan’s centerpiece is a publicly funded 17,500-seat arena and the renovation of the Blues Armory. Also on the list is a new GRTC transit center and an assortment of mixed-use buildings to include at least 280 affordable housing units. Its backers essentially say the city can’t afford not to take this step because the project will galvanize economic development and generate vast amounts of new revenue. Detractors, meanwhile, say that the city can’t afford to divert three decades’ worth of growth in real estate tax funds from an 80-block district to repay arena construction bonds.
My Flashback column took up the history of Navy Hill in 1998 in anticipation of the 2000 move of the Children’s Museum of Richmond from a building that once served as the gymnasium for the vanished Navy Hill School.
I met lifelong resident Robnette Moore, who grew up in Navy Hill from the 1920s on. She knew practically every story and stick of the place. A sycamore tree near the Children’s Museum, Moore explained, stood in what was once the yard of John Booker. “Mr. Booker worked at Harper’s Hardware,” Moore recalled then, “when it was over by the Sixth Street Market.” That place shouldn’t be confused with the failed 1980s 6th Street Marketplace; instead, it was what that structure replaced: an actual outdoor/indoor marketplace that sold produce and live chickens in bags with holes for their beaks. A colorful spray of flower sellers clustered under the gallery arches of the Blues Armory.
Moore, who died in 2010, possessed a mental roster of Navy Hill families well known in business and community history: Gilpin, Christmas, Cephas, Fountain, Swan, Mitchell, Circus, Banyon, Bell.
What had been a thriving neighborhood into the early 20th century was eventually ripped down and paved over.
Rob Curry, a former resident, advocated for the name of Navy Hill Drive to give recognition. In 1993, he was also successful in having a commemorative stone placed near what was then the Children’s Museum that reads, “Love and memories never die as days roll on and years pass by. Deep in our hearts, memories are kept of the ones we loved and shall never forget.”
The subsequent disruptions that sheared off Navy Hill eventually displaced the stone. Construction shoved it atop a stormwater cover behind a parking deck at Navy Hill Drive and East Duval Street.
The situation moved historian Selden Richardson to notify Richmond Times-Dispatch columnist Michael Paul Williams, who wrote about the commemorative stone in 2011. His piece sparked the interest of former Navy Hill resident, photographer and educator Earle Taylor and retired Richmond Police Chief Willie C. Jones, who worked to relocate the stone with the assistance of Bob Skunda, then president and chief executive officer of the Virginia BioTechnology Research Park, and David Herring, then of the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods.
The stone came to rest on a bed of brown pebbles beneath a historical marker pertaining to Navy Hill installed by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources near the corner of Fourth and Jackson streets.
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Former Navy Hill resident Earle P. Taylor photographed the destruction of his family home in 1965. (Photo courtesy The Valentine)
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Children leave Navy Hill School on North Sixth Street on Sept. 16, 1965; the school closed abruptly to accommodate highway construction and other projects. (Photo courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch Collection, The Valentine)
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Construction of the Richmond Coliseum is seen from the front of a house in the 400 block of East Clay Street on Jan. 27, 1970. (Photo courtesy Richmond Times-Dispatch Collection, The Valentine)
Taylor’s family had lived in the 1000 block of North Seventh Street until bulldozers pulled up to demolish the house. He captured this dramatic moment in a photo now at The Valentine.
Navy Hill became part of the Richmond lexicon of neighborhoods in 1816. Developers John G. Gamble, John Goddin, Peter Ralston and John Barfoot sought to create what today would be called “a planned community.” They chose a theme for the plan, with a hook that they believed would attract buyers: the recent War of 1812. The centerpiece was to be a victory column from which would radiate streets named for U.S. Navy commodores and captains.
But the boom economy of the time went bust, and Navy Hill didn’t arise as planned. The Navy Hill name stuck, though. Its tracts remained a sparse satellite of the present Jackson Ward, separated from the city by two significant deep ravines. Footbridges and carriage paths provided rudimentary means of linking Navy Hill to the outside.
People came anyway, and by the mid-19th century prior to the Civil War, Navy Hill spread roughly north of Leigh Street between Third and 10th streets. The demarcations vary per era and individual recollection. The northern boundary is indeterminate, but at least to Duval and Preston streets and perhaps to the Shockoe Hill Cemetery.
During the 1850s, German immigrants made their homes in the growing Navy Hill, and the community became knit into the city’s fabric with the 1888 advent of the electric streetcar. A line eventually ran up Fifth Street toward Highland Park. The shifts of population along race and class in the early 20th century made Navy Hill a majority black community.
A historical marker and commemorative stone recognize the former Navy Hill neighborhood. (Photo by Jay Paul)
A central focus became the Navy Hill School — a symbol of social advancement through education. A brick building constructed in 1892 and containing 16 well-ventilated classrooms, it was attended by generations of Navy Hill children. Robnette Moore received her early lessons in those rooms. “We had great teachers,” she emphasized.
The Navy Hill School closed without advance notice to teachers, parents or students on Sept. 16, 1965. The neighborhood was eaten up by highway construction and various projects, including the now shuttered Richmond Coliseum. The former streets and backyard gardens were supplanted by the Virginia BioTechnology Research Park in the early ’90s.
The Children’s Museum moved into what remained of the Navy Hill School in 1981. Cooperatively with The Valentine and the Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia, the legacy of Navy Hill underwent preservation through oral histories, ephemera and reunions.
In 1998, Robnette Moore, who received her early lessons in those rooms, told of the delightfully named Mr. Folly. On Fridays, youngsters were allowed to visit his house to listen to his piano playing and dance to the music. “But we stayed only an hour,” she fondly remarked. “We always knew when it was time to come home.”
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