Guest Commentary: Developers of Shockoe Bottom should keep it tight

Properties that would be used for a slavery memorial park, as viewed from the train shed platform, are currently parking lots. (BizSense file)

It’s been nearly a generation, but momentum is finally building to establish a national slavery museum in Shockoe Bottom near the Main Street Station. The centerpieces will be the Lumpkin’s Jail archaeological site and the African Burial Ground, both located hard against the northbound lanes of Interstate 95. The memorial park will honor the 300,000 enslaved individuals who passed through some 50 slave markets in the Bottom during the mid-19th century.

The Commonwealth of Virginia has ponied up, and Mayor Levar Stoney and the City Council are on board with establishing a foundation to oversee fundraising. In addition to promised state and municipal seed money, some $200 million-$220 million is still needed for the project. The timing may finally be right to hit the “go” button, as people await a fresh historical narrative for Richmond after the recent dismantling of icons of the “Lost Cause.”

And eyes are on Shockoe Bottom, perhaps the most evocative part of town, as it awaits this long-awaited cultural and economic endeavor. True, the neighborhood has its gems — Main Street Station, the Capital Trail, the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, Tobacco Row, and the recently-restored Masons Hall. But the valley lacks an emotional and historical heart.

For the envisioned multi-acre memorial park to tell its story most effectively, however, dozens of Shockoe Bottom’s adjoining blocks, streets and sidewalks must be developed in an architecturally-respectful way that captures the sad fact that this was once a bustling neighborhood that housed one of our nation’s largest slave trading centers from the early 1800s to the Civil War in the 1860s.

In modern times, Shockoe Bottom has been largely defined by Interstate 95, North 21st Street, the river, and Venable Street. Until recently, for almost 300 years, its centerpiece was a farmer’s market at the crossroads in Richmond of the Tidewater agrarian flatlands and the elevated Piedmont. For the past 20 years, the city’s former Slave Trail Commission laid the groundwork for establishing a memorial and museum in the Bottom on the site of the Lumpkins Slave Jail, infamously called “the Devil’s Half Acre.” The commission envisioned an attraction that could deliver a message and experience similar to black history and slavery museums in half a dozen other American cities from Charleston to Cincinnati. For Shockoe Slip, one architectural team has already proposed a shimmering, glass-clad pyramid-like pavilion (think the Crystal Cathedral near Los Angeles). Other planners have envisioned a more cerebral commemorative approach that would encompass not just the “Devil’s Half Acre” site, but the nearby sprawling African Burial Ground.

Regardless of specific interpretive approaches to the memorial, one of the biggest challenges will be to develop and transform the desolate contiguous blocks that stretch to the present Exxon station at Broad and North 18th Street. These moribund blocks provide a blank slate upon which a densely-built, mixed-use district can be built. The density should invoke the slave-trading era when the Bottom was a cauldron of activity through which enslaved folks were pushed south en route to the cotton belt. Don’t imagine a Colonial Williamsburg-from-hell-like experience but a mixed-use, contemporary neighborhood that captures the density (claustrophobic even) of a 19th century street. Today, in Manhattan’s lower east side the blocks surrounding the popular Tenement Museum, while nothing if not hip, contain the traffic and congestion (minus the dirt and grime) of the Gilded Age.

How to achieve density in Shockoe Bottom? First, respect the existing historic street grid and rehabilitate every precious building still standing: Let’s forget about demolishing the century-old (or older) Loving’s warehouse at East Grace and Ambler streets for a parking garage; this is insane. For the Bottom to work as an economically and architecturally robust host of the memorial it must be rebuilt cheek-to-jowl with human-scaled structures. Off-street parking is essential but a garage would be better wedged into the cityscape farther up the valley near Venable Street.

Second, the size of the necessary in-fill buildings should generally reflect the 25-foot width of the traditional building lots. Structures should be no taller than four or five floors, respecting the existing old and new scale of the historic Bottom.

Third, the 50 sites where trading of enslaved people actually occurred must be identified clearly. Explanatory panels or markers can be set in sidewalks with narratives. In Germany, most towns and cities mark the places (often with metal plaques in sidewalks) from which thousands of individuals were removed by Nazis. It is a simple gesture, but unspeakably evocative.

Finally, giving savvy architectural form and meaning to Shockoe Bottom’s distressing ill-kempt sea of surface parking lots is key to creating a setting for the slavery museum. Development will take vision and sharp oversight, but it can be done. Sixty years ago, Philadelphia’s Society Hill neighborhood near Independence Hall was a tattered district of filling stations and flop houses. It was rejuvenated by being restored and rebuilt with historically-inspired, as well as strikingly contemporary structures. If the western blocks of Shockoe Bottom can be rebuilt in concert with the memorial’s development, a quilt will result. Every stitch, color and image will form the handsome whole. Let the entire built neighborhood play a role, architecturally and curatorially, in telling this epic Richmond — and American — story.