Houses, Multiplexes, and the Making of Richmond’s Distinctive Neighborhoods

In America, the norm for a home is a house, preferably free-standing in a leafy yard. Houses become homes when people live in them, nurture them, plant around them, and modify them, and they become parts of places in distinctive neighborhoods.

We enjoy visiting these neighborhoods and the city and region they characterize. The houses, all different from one another, form a unity that fit together along attractive streets and blocks. We see the houses, and seldom notice that many are multi-family buildings. The older neighborhoods beyond colonial era scrambled streets or grids usually postdate the Civil War. The buildings, whether single family or multiple family dwellings or businesses, likely share their side walls or have only inches of separation, with stubby plans or dumbbell rear extensions toward alleys. The occasional post-World War II newcomer seldom fits in.

The next expansions, in the early streetcar suburbs, use similar styles for larger house on larger lots with less neighborhood coherence, but they too seem to belong. But not the post 1945 suburb. They are alien districts with rows and rows of ranchburgers or McMansions sprawling behind arterials lined with commercial buildings and parking. They seem out of place or no place in particular, but they proliferate because they sell, they sell because they are built, and they are built because they satisfy the zoning and financing. No one visits them for treats for the eyes.

But movements are afoot to recapture the building of neighborhoods worth visiting. In many cities zoning and building codes are being rethought, and professionals are becoming adept in designing them. To be successful, this reformed urbanism must promote an architectural character appropriate for the city or region they will join. This obvious necessity is foreign to architects trained to be modernists and missing from the tool kit of many builders whose models are in current debased suburbanism. (1) To implement this program requires doing what  earlier builders did: look closely at local older models in attractive neighborhoods that hold a variety of residences and their residents’ workplaces, amenities, schools, churches, and public transportation—in short, the neighborhoods that were places that people built as homes and where others now live and are enjoyable to visit. They were built piece-by-piece and accumulated to become places with for people of diverse incomes, tastes, and interests. Richmond Virginia’s neighborhoods with multifamily residences among the single family houses provide examples.

Only a few buildings from the revolutionary period remain extant. The city planted in  a grid on Church Hill in 1737 grew westward. Thomas Jefferson enlarged a site for his Capitol, residences followed, and they were replaced when it became the commercial center. Farther west neighborhoods were built up between the Civil War and the Great Depression, and shanks’ mare sufficed until the nation’s first successful streetcar company began operating in Richmond in 1888. Within a decade its initial 12 mile line had reached 82 miles. New suburban areas with larger lots were laid out, and the lines’ owners built attractive parks with extensive grounds to attract riders who rode it for going shopping or working, whether “down town” or in larger, now distant homes served by cooks, maids, nannies, or yardmen left behind in the old wards. 

A 1904 boycott by African-American riders protested the company’s policy of having conductors enforce Jim Crow seating with segregation encoded in a 1906 law requiring cars be segregated. It remained in effect until 1949 when streetcars disappeared. A 1910 ordinance assured residential segregation by forbidding residence or ownership on any block by people of different races. Before the Civil War Richmond had the largest population of free Blacks, and after it the African-American neighborhoods were the South’s most prosperous, but racial covenants excluded Blacks from the new suburbs. In 1917 the Supreme Court banned the covenants, but 1920s monocultural zoning and economic repression took on the job. In the Jim Crow wards in  1938, a third of the 43,000 housing units lacked indoor toilets, half had only cold water, and 2,635 had no water. Government housing programs and then interstate highway construction razed whole blocks. The city’s transformation began in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act, and now former Jim Crow wards have joined other neighborhoods as valued parts of urbanism in a city with nearly equal numbers of Blacks and whites.

In the meantime the neighborhoods left behind by the city’s march westward were rejuvenated and gentrified through preservation efforts launched in 1957. Richmond’s neighborhoods now again display an architectural character distinctive of Richmond. Houses predominate, and so too multiplexes. The city’s oldest surviving multi family residence, The Carrington Row, was built in 1818 on Church Hill by Otis Mason, a Boston builder, for three brothers. (2) It has two stories above a basement dug into the hillside, a brick and stucco façade with pilasters and abbreviated cornice, and a pitched roof with dormers. Only the central entrance is original; it pot-Civil War canopies on the others updated the building after it had held its own among other homes of the elite, such as the 1844 Stewart-Lee House (3) built by a tobacco merchant immigrant from Scotland surviving near the Capitol because Robert E. Lee lived there briefly after Appomattox.

Styles shifted after the Civil War, with multifamily buildings keeping up appearances by adapting the styles of their betters, as we see at the common porch for a minimal double house (4) and a more capacious nearby multi-unit building where a corner site allowed a deeper, larger configuration (5).

Beyond the capitol district the narrow lots and alleys whose distorted grid gives it the name The Fan, holds tightly clustered houses and some multifamily building, all with fronts presenting a remarkable catalogue of the era’s house styles. The Fan was given the westward extension in 1888 of the renowned Monument Avenue where, in a large traffic circle in 1890, an equestrian statue of Robet E. Lee was unveiled before a large, enthusiastic crowd. The boulevard’s pair of broad streets paved asphalt blocks flanked a the median that received other monuments to the Lost Cause; after 2020 the street’s five Confederates and others elsewhere in the city were removed. The boulevard’s large lots welcomed the mansions of the city’s elite, with the first major multiunit building pushed to the side in 1904 on the street leading into Lee Circle. Six stories of classicizing in red brick with bay windows, it was designed by the German born Carl Ruehrmund who with his family would be active in the city’s architecture and development.

Monument Avenue’s link to The Fan was a block east of Lee Circle, and in 1907 it was given the equestrian statue of J. E. B. Stuart in Stuart Circle. Later and far enough away from Monument Avenue proper, the nine story Stuart Court Apartments was built in 1924-25 with 60 luxury units within its pale Classical detailing, designed by William L. Bottomley, a favored architect of the elite. He cranked its plan to fit the monument’s setting as had Charles M. Robinson, another favored local architect, with a semicircular plan for a six story hospital (now apartments) across the circle in 1913.

Similar large intrusions in this area came after a large site a block south and west of Stuart Circle was vacated in 1914 and The Fan’s West Grace street was extended through it. It quickly received a few houses and several apartment buildings disguised as houses, all classicizing and inferior to their neighbors. Among them only the Boatwright (6) at 1140 approaches Monument Avenue quality: Three stories with a two story columnar portico tucked between gable ends with balconies on the upper level, its proximity to the expanded campus of  Virginia Commonwealth University has had it reconfigured with 16 rental units.

The high architectural quality of Monument Avenue’s houses affected the design quality of buildings on adjacent streets. Consider the 1913 corner lot duplex at 2701 West Grace (7) where a pair of front doors distinguish it from its neighboring a single family house. Conspicuous apartment buildings  were built in the 1920s on Monument Avenue’s farther blocks. Amng apartment buildings, The Rixey Court by Bascom Rowlett from 1924-25 (8) stands out with a three story beige and vaguely Hispanic design. Its three large apartments are beyond an entry court while the side street extension holds six smaller units. Farther west, the Stratford Court from 1917 and its twin from 1918, the Kenilworth (9), designed by Albert Huntt, emulated the avenue’s pretense. Each is three stories with a decorated entrance framed by paired, two story Corinthian columns holding balconies. Similar columned balconies provided escapes from summer heat in that pre A-C era, an amenity that large houses provided in side porches or backyard patios.

From Church Hill, through The Fan, and on into the streetcar suburbs people made their homes in houses and ancillary buildings in neighborhoods that were built as distinctively Richmond places. Even the large and small houses and occasional multiplexes do so, and so do some of the newer affluent areas. But popping up on available urban parcels and in so-called “communities” in former rural areas the houses hardly differ from what is being built in Peoria, Denver, or Fresno and anywhere else than the place called Richmond.