I took a pleasant spring break trip last week, but my love-hate relationship with Richmond came roaring back to life. That gnawing emotion came back when my wife and I traveled to the Low Country of South Carolina and spent a rainy night in charming Charleston. When I left, I asked myself the usual question — why can’t Richmond ever get it together?
I’ve been visiting Charleston off and on since the 1970s and have stayed at a number of hotels. This time it was Elliott House with our own brick entrance just a little North of Broad. Dinner was a cheap, oyster-stuffed happy hour at a local bar and the next morning, we did the usual rounds of the market, some art galleries and the Battery where the elegant homes run vertically to tap every sea breeze and some have special supports to avoid the same kind of damage wrought by an 1886 earthquake.
As we drove off, I kept wondering why Richmond, which has arguably more history and is a bigger deal as a city, comes nowhere close to its Southern cousin as a glamorous tourist destination. True, Richmond doesn’t have the dramatic setting between two wide, tidal rivers or the mild, subtropical climate where the sticky sweet perfume scent of gardenias wafts everywhere.
But Richmond surely has the history from Patrick Henry to the antebellum South to the War. The conflict may have started at Charleston but it was run from Richmond. Architecture is different, with Charleston having more Latin influences but Richmond’s no slouch given Church Hill’s Federalist townhouses, the stately mansions on Monument and the Victorian porches in the Fan, not to mention Jefferson’s magnificent state capitol.
So why does Richmond give me the blahs? Why is its downtown so lackluster? Where are the tourists when its not Race Week at RIR or Folk Festival time? How come Broad Street still looks like Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and Schockoe area has never reached its cobble stoned potential? After all, Richmond is a lot closer to major population centers and, unlike Charleston, is right next to the major north-south interstate.
From what I know of Charleston, which isn’t that much, the city wasn’t all that big a deal until the 1970s. It was pretty much a Navy town with strip joints and lots of earmarks from Mendel Rivers, its military-crazed overseer in Congress.
A lot of what is Charleston today is the brainchild of long time mayor Joseph P. Riley who started unlocking the city’s tourism potential when he arranged for the unusual if not unlikely Spoleto Festival back in the late 1970s. This celebration of the arts modeled after one in an Italian town immediately drew tourists — so many, in fact, that Riley urged city residents to rent out rooms in their homes because there weren’t enough hotels. Thus was born a booming Bed & Breakfast industry.
Charlestonians managed to remake and renovate their town’s various charms. They didn’t want to turn into a tourist trap where nobody lived like Williamsburg or an out-of-control party town like New Orleans. Charleston, despite its small population of about 126,000, remains one of the top five travel spots in the U.S. and from all appearances from our pedestrian tour, it is thriving.
Why can’t Richmond? A lot of reasons, I guess. One is that we just don’t have a Riley who is competent enough and has enough staying power to get things done. Doug Wilder had the potential, but ruined it by perpetual squabbling. The white and black city leadership never can get it together. Despite their lip service, the whites actually moved out to Innsbrook years ago. The Broad Street revival hasn’t happened yet and one wonders if a few new court buildings will be worth driving miles to see on a Friday night. True, First Friday is a hit, but it has limited appeal pretty much to teenagers like my daughters.
The rich African-American culture just steps away in Jackson Ward was ruined back in the 1950s when white leaders dug a superhighway right through the neighborhood, moving thousands of black residents each month in the process. Eugene Trani, the empire builder and outgoing president of VCU who got his usual fawning treatment from the Times-Disgrace Sunday, hasn’t helped matters by throwing up lots of ugly, bland, boring college buildings from Oregon Hill to MCV.
Even Norfolk, once a Navy town hell hole of unspeakable ugliness, has remade its downtown to take advantage of its watery venue, albeit the effort is now showing its age.
So why can’t Richmond be Charleston? I just don’t have a good answer.
Peter Galuszka