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TOBACCO ROW

Heritage, Environment, and Adaptive Reuse in Richmond, Virginia

DANIEL BLUESTONE

University of Virginia

Figure 1. Tobacco Row, aerial perspective from cover of Tobacco Row Associates,Executive Summar y,September

15, 1989. Lucky Strike powerhouse and factory at right, Edgeworth Tobacco Factory at left. (Virginia Department

of Historic Resources Archives)

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This essay focuses on the adaptive reuse of tobacco warehouses and factories along Tobacco Row in Richmond,

Virginia, between 1980 and 2005. This work encompassed an impressive environmental strategy that ambi-

tiously recycled existing buildings and infrastructure to new urban uses. Even while promoting salutary environ-

mental and conservation goals, adaptive reuse, by definition, also pushes buildings away from their historic

function and often away from their historic significance; buildings are adapted to new uses for which they were

not built. This essay will explore the tendency of the adaptive reuse process to preserve the historic building

even as it obscures the buildings early history. In Richmond and throughout the United States, local, state, and

federal guidelines for preservation and rehabilitation generally give primacy to building exteriors over interior

plan, urban context, industrial technology, and the spaces of labor. In treating building facades as the primary

locus of historical meaning, historic preservationists often efface the very history that they are charged with

protecting. In considering the effectiveness of adaptive reuse, it is important to weigh more than simply what

happens to building exteriors. We need to consider the extent to which these projects encourage a capacity for

critical reflections on the histories associated with particular places. It is also vital to assess the relationship

between those histories, our understanding of the world around us today, and our own agency as citizens.

On Richmond, Virginias, east side, late-twentieth-century adaptive reuse changed

Tobacco Row from a neighborhood of abandoned former cigarette and cigar factories to a

vibrant mixed-use neighborhood of residential apartments, offices, restaurants, and retail

shops. The transition has proved to be nothing short of breathtaking. In the 1940s, fully

one-third of the cigarettes produced in the United States came out of Tobacco Rows mas-

sive three- to six-story brick industrial buildings. Here, in the 1940s, manufacturers pro-

duced over 100 billion cigarettes annually, making Richmond the largest cigarette-making

locality in the United Statesthe natural capital of an industry that had grown with

bewildering rapidity.1 Then, regional industrial consolidation, declines in U.S. cigarette

consumption, and changes in transportation and production technologies led to the grad-

ual abandonment of Tobacco Row. P. Lorillard left Richmond in 1962. Consolidated Cigar

moved out in 1969. Liggett & Myers closed its Allen & Ginter plant in 1970. Philip Morris

moved to the Richmond suburbs in 1974. When the American Tobacco Company closed

its Lucky Strike plant in 1981, Richmond cigarette production ended. Seven years later, as

American Tobacco closed a pipe tobacco plant, all tobacco production in Richmond ceased.2

Gone was the smell of tobacco that had filled the air for centuries. Gone were the legions

of tobacco workers, male and female, black and white, who at times had constituted over25 percent of Richmonds workforce. Gone was the cacophony of production machinery.

Gone was a significant sector of Richmonds economy and heritage. Then, over a period of

B L U E S T O N E T O B A C C O R O W 1 3 3

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1 3 4 C H A N G E O V E R T I M E

twenty-five years starting in the early 1980s, developers spent over $125 million putting

719 residential apartments and over 155,000 square feet of office and commercial space

into Tobacco Rows substantial stock of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century

tobacco buildings. They transformed Richmonds east side (Fig. 1).

Adaptive reuse on Tobacco Row encompassed an impressive environmental strategy

that ambitiously recycled existing buildings and infrastructure to new uses, sustainably

located adjacent to Richmonds downtown. Even while promoting salutary environmental

and conservation goals, adaptive reuse, by definition, also pushes buildings away from

their historic function and often away from their historic significance; buildings are

adapted to new uses for which they were not built. On Tobacco Row, none of the buildings

were rehabilitated for tobacco production. Residences, offices, and retail businesses filled

spaces originally built for the processing of tobacco. This essay will explore the tendency

of adaptive reuse to preserve the historic building even as it obscures the buildings early

history. It is important to explore how reuse on Tobacco Row has, and has not, fostered

historical understanding. Unfortunately, these buildings that bear witness to a significantseries of historical narratives are relatively mute. They do not speak for themselves. Yet,

in Richmond and throughout the United States, local, state, and federal guidelines for

preservation and rehabilitation generally give primacy to building exteriors over interior

plan, urban context, industrial technology, and the spaces of labor. In treating building

facades as the primary locus of historical meaning, historic preservationists administering

tax credit and public preservation grant programs often efface the very history that they

are charged with protecting. In considering the effectiveness of adaptive reuse, it is impor-

tant to weigh more than simply what happens to building exteriors. We need to consider

the extent to which these projects encourage a capacity for critical reflections on the his-

tories associated with particular places. It is also vital to assess the relationship between

those histories, our understanding of the world around us today, and our own agency as

citizens.3

For Richmond civic and business leaders who had seen the citys population decline

by over 20 percent to 197,790 residents between 1970 and 2000, Tobacco Row redevelop-

ment provided an important sense of urban possibility, of movement toward a brighter

future, reassuringly rooted in buildings that represented past prosperity. The Richmond

Times-Dispatch profiled early plans under the headline: Tobacco Row Raises Hopes for

Downtown.4 Direct and indirect public investments promoted Tobacco Row adaptation.

Public support included the City of Richmonds millions of dollars of streetscape improve-

ments and millions more in ten- to fifteen-year property tax abatements on redeveloped

buildings, plus tens of millions of dollars of federal historic preservation investment tax

credits, historic facade easement credits, and federal tax-exempt bond financing. These

public investments aimed to encourage developers to turn their attention to adapting

existing buildings and neighborhoods rather than simply building new developments on

outlying suburban tracts and green field sites. The Tax Reform Act of 1976 and the Eco-nomic Recovery Act of 1981 provided the cornerstones of public efforts, granting signifi-

cant tax credits for substantial redevelopment of properties listed on the National Register

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Figure 2. Cigarette workers and packaging machines, American Tobacco Company, Lucky Strike factor y,

Richmond, Virginia, c. 1935. (From Roy C. Flannagan, The Story of Lucky Strike, 1938.)

of Historic Places.5 The federal tax credits promoted historic preservation as a public good,

comparable to public education. Interest in economic development along Tobacco Row also

provided a powerful boost to heritage conservation in Richmond. Moreover, it seemed to

be the right thing to do in terms of the environment. David Levey, the executive vice

president of Forest City, a leading Tobacco Row developer, insisted that, We were Green

before Green was the thing to be.6 Adaptive reuse created an entirely new urban role

and identity for Tobacco Row. In 2003 the Richmond Times-Dispatchmagazine profiled the

development calling it, Upscale, upstream, downtown: . . . Where the action is, Tobacco

Row lures hipsters and hopesters.7

Adaptive reuse of tobacco factories in Richmond has preserved exterior buildingfacades while drastically altering the nature of architectural and historical space. Cigarette

production generally took place on wide-open floors, filled with tobacco, machines, and


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workers (Fig. 2). The open floors stretched from exterior walls facing streets to exterior

walls facing alleys or courtyards. The conversion of such buildings into residential apart-

ments often involved the introduction of a system of double-loaded corridors, setting up

a pattern of separate apartments facing either the streets or the alleys or courtyards.

Apartment conversion also has involved placing partitions, lots of partitions, into for-

merly open floors (Fig. 3). Thus, a strategy of preserving heritage through adaptive reuse,

of recycling buildings, quickly undercuts essential elements of place; the function, machin-

ery, workers, and even the nature of architectural space often recede from view in many

adaptive reuse projects. Along Tobacco Row, adaptation has created usable residential and

commercial space even as it has partitioned residents and visitors from key aspects of the

history being preserved by both private and public investments.

Few people looking at Forest Citys River Loft apartments that occupy the American

Tobacco Companys Lucky Strike plant could articulate a clear connection between the

recent domestic spaces filling partitioned floors and the earlier manufacture of cigarettes.

The six-story brick plant with its reinforced concrete structure, the adjacent powerhouse,

and the soaring smokestack emblazoned with the words Lucky Strike are among the

most architecturally distinguished structures on Tobacco Row (Fig. 4). In 1929, Joseph

Emery Sirrine of Greenville, South Carolina, one of the leading mill architects in the South,

designed the Lucky Strike plant for the American Tobacco Company. Built with a capacity

for producing 100 million cigarettes a day, the new plant and the adjacent leaf department

employed over 1,600 workers.8 Despite the seeming novelty of Forest Citys introduction

of residences into the Lucky Strike factory, a strong historical link did exist on the site

between domestic space and cigarette production. The site actually provided housing fordozens of tobacco workers. Before the Civil War, tobacco and cigarette manufacture in

Richmond relied in large part on a workforce of slaves; slaves planted, tended, and har-

Figure 3. Lucky Strike factory, second floor partitions put in place for residential adaptive reuse of open

floor cigarette production space, 2001. (Jon Wallenmeyer, architect, Forest City)

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vested the tobacco plants on regional plantations; they also provided the labor for manu-

facturing tobacco in urban factories.9 Indeed, the Hardgrove Company, a predecessor of

the American Tobacco Company on the Lucky Strike site, relied on a slave workforce that

resided on the same block as the factory. Their modest two-story slave quarters continued

to provide accommodations for tobacco workers into the twentieth century. In fact, they

provided an architectural model for additional tobacco worker housing built on the site at

the turn of the twentieth century (Fig. 5). These houses were filled with African-American

tobacco workers who lived on the site and worked in the adjacent buildings as stemmers,

cutters, leafers, jobbers, and laborers.10 The last of these houses, which had formed part

of a vital mixed-use, live-work community, were demolished by the American Tobacco

Company to provide space for the new Lucky Strike plant in 1929. When Forest City set

out seventy years later to adapt the vacant plant for apartments, these earlier residential

uses stood well beyond the reach of historical memory or understanding.

Adaptive reuse on Tobacco Row has caused substantial changes to historical and

architectural space and overlooked narratives embedded on the site. For all the ingenuityof the redevelopment, for all the salutary urban, environmental, and economic benefits of

finding new uses for old buildings in existing neighborhoods, using extant infrastructure,

it is at times difficult to know what to make of the historical and heritage aspects of

Tobacco Row. What does one make of a place where workers, and machines, and capital

produced 100 billion cigarettes a year? What does one make of the human, mechanical,

and architectural ingenuity harnessed in the manufacture of a product that delivered plea-

Figure 4. American Tobacco Company Lucky Strike powerhouse and factory, Richmond, Virginia

(192930), Joseph Emery Sirrine, architect; looking west along East Cary Street, 2010. (Daniel Bluestone)


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Figure 5. Sanborn Fire Insurance Company Map, 1905, showing tobacco worker housing on the site later

occupied by the American Tobacco Company, Lucky Strike factory. (Library of Congress)

sure and comfort, reduced stress, and at the same time promoted the intense cravings of

addiction while seriously deteriorating the health of many smokers?

In June 1986 Virginia Senator John Warner pointed to Richmonds Tobacco Row

heritage and history in encouraging his colleagues in the United States Senate not to let

the proposed Tax Reform Act of 1986 derail the efforts to adaptively reuse the architec-

turally distinguished historic structures on Tobacco Row. He worried that the less attrac-

tive tax credits proposed in the bill for rehabilitating historic structures listed on the

National Register of Historic Places would undermine the years of planning that had gone

into Tobacco Row redevelopment. Senator Warner declared: This project has historic as

well as economic consequences not only for our capital city of Richmond, but for the entireCommonwealth of Virginia. Indeed, support for this project is statewide. . . . I cannot

overstate the tremendous economic, historic and symbolic value of the Tobacco Row proj-

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ect. The economic benefits seemed clear enough. The project, according to Warner, prom-

ised to impressively expand the great progress in inner city redevelopment in Richmond.

It was assumed that redevelopment would provide jobs for 2,500 people as well as hun-

dreds of construction jobs over a period of six to eight years. Even though Senator Warner

was much less precise about the historic consequences, or historic import, of the project,

he successfully prevailed upon his Senate colleagues to provide $100 million in tax-exempt

facility bonds for Tobacco Row. The bonds lowered the developers cost of financing and

made up for the less generous rehabilitation tax credits in the Tax Reform Act of 1986.11

Given the history of residence by slaves and working-class tobacco workers on the Lucky

Strike site and throughout Tobacco Row, it was notable that the customary congressional

insistence that developers provide some affordable housing units in exchange for tax

exempt financing was absent from the Tobacco Row provisions of the Tax Reform Act.

People of modest means, people with incomes comparable to tobacco workers, would not

find units that they could afford to rent on Tobacco Row.

There were other points of slippage between the economic vision of adaptive reuse

on Tobacco Row and historical realities. Besides an occasional photograph hanging in the

residential lobby of the adapted tobacco plants or images in rental brochures or promo-

tional videos, tobacco workers in Richmond were largely omitted from the vision of history

being energetically adapted and preserved on Tobacco Row. In 1929, when the American

Tobacco Company announced its plans for its Lucky Strike plant, the editorialists at the

Richmond News Leadergreeted the news with reservations. This is because tobacco workers

were largely female, were often minority, and received very modest compensation for their

work. Under a headline, More Than A Cigarette Center, the News Leadereditorialized,

Richmond assuredly will welcome the new factory of the American Tobacco Company

that is to raise the combined daily output of the Richmond plants above that of any

city in the United States. . . . Richmond has other industrial ideals. . . . Richmond

wants the work the tobacco factories give young women, but Richmond wants still

more the industries that will pay wages on which men can decently support their

families. The basis for the citys well being is not the cigarette factory, but the indus-

try that employs skilled labor at high wages. No city has ever yet grown great onwages that leave little after the landlord and the grocer are paid.12

The interior production space of these buildings was often remodeled beyond easy recogni-

tion. It is unlikely that Senator Warner had the history of low-wage work in mind when

he pointed to the historic and symbolic value of Tobacco Row; nor did he seem at all

engaged in what these buildings reflected about the long painful process of Richmonds

deindustrialization. Interestingly, rather than preserving the rooms occupied by produc-

tion workers, Forest City meticulously restored the original Lucky Strike plants executiveboardroom as an event space for apartment residents. In this context, where the trajectory

of adaptive reuse tends to distance us from history even as we preserve buildings, we


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ought to explore more precisely what the historical and heritage values are that hover over

such projects.

It is difficult, but not impossible, to interpret the heritage of Tobacco Row as primar-

ily about architecture, unrelated to tobacco workers, cigarette production and consump-

tion, or to Richmonds broader economic and social history. It is possible to approach the

buildings and blocks narrowly as having to do primarily with the building arts. In seeking

financing to support the adaptation of Tobacco Row, Senator Warner insisted that the

area was notable for its distinguished historic structures.13 Indeed, some of the early calls

for adaptive reuse along Tobacco Row, even before tobacco production had fully abandoned

the area, focused primarily on urban and architectural form. In 1974 architectural histo-

rian James A. D. Cox published an article in Arts in Virginiatitled Six Buildings Worth

Keeping. Cox pointed out the growing historical interest in aspects of American architec-

ture that stood beyond the eighteenth century and beyond monuments of the civic and

residential landscape. Pointing to Richmonds industrial and commercial buildings, Cox

argued that there was an increasing awareness of, and respect for, the architectural ele-ments which go to make up the character of our towns and cities, . . . as contributing

factors to an overall pattern of building . . . as foils to other buildings or [as] add[ing] to

a group either from their mass or their color. In Coxs candid assessment many of the

warehouses and tobacco buildings on Richmonds east side were not particularly interest-

ing in themselves but they nonetheless contributed to the charm of this area and pro-

vided a completely attractive backdrop for the bustle of activity that was coming with

adaptive reuseconversion into spaces which can have some viable function in our time

and society. Cox surveyed the area and saw it primarily as an accomplishment of the

building arts, Industrial buildings, buildings for commerce, utilitarian, functional, yes

but where else is the exuberant spirit of this epoch [18801910] better typified than in

these majestic warehouses?14

When James A. D. Cox advocated the importance of Richmonds vernacular industrial

and commercial architecture, among the structures he identified as worth keeping were

the two stately blocks on East Cary between 23rd and 24th Streets, built in the 1880s

in the heart of Tobacco Row. They were five and six stories high, built of red brick, with

iron and wood structural systems that supported, in some places, 16-foot ceiling heights

(Fig. 6). Emphasizing his aesthetic interests and his advocacy of adaptive reuse, Cox

declared, The fenestration is simple without inducing monotony and the corners are sub-

tly emphasized by the use of narrower windows. . . . Now owned by Philip Morris Incorpo-

rated, these make excellent open storage space for Turkish leaf, but who could put them

to use if the tobacco industry moved out?15 Forest City later put 171 apartments into

these particular buildings and remodeled the ground floor of one for a restaurant. That

took care of the adaptive reuse issuethe stately buildings are still there with all their

simplicity and careful composition very much intact.

Coxs somewhat narrow engagement with the building arts and the formal architec-tural and urban dimensions of Tobacco Row, viewed primarily from the exterior, persisted

into the era of adaptive reuse. The Virginia Department of Historic Resources, the states

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Figure 6. Philip Morris tobacco factor y, Richmond, Virginia (c. 1885); looking east along East Cary Street,

2011. (Daniel Bluestone)

historic preservation office, has encouraged the adaptive reuse of the buildings. It has

consistently privileged building exteriors and narratives of the building arts as it has

wielded its regulatory role to designate historic buildings, certify tax credit rehabilitation

plans, and review new construction on land with conservation easements. The U.S.

Department of the Interiors Secretary of the Interiors Standards for Rehabilitation has

guided the departments work. The standards do make an effort to preserve the historic

character of buildings, both inside and out: The historic character of the property shall

be retained and preserved. The removal of historic materials or alteration of features and

spaces that characterize property shall be avoided. However, standards are applied in a

reasonable manner, taking into consideration economic and technical feasibility.16 When

dealing with adaptive reuse of abandoned buildings the reasonable application of rehabil-

itation standards usually directs attention toward building exteriors and away from inte-

rior spaces that require adaptation to make them economically viable. Following the

Standards for Rehabilitation, the Department of Historic Resources staff became deeply

involved in preserving the architectural character and integrity of the buildings, with par-

ticular attention given to building exteriors. The Department received deeds of easement

for several building facades along Tobacco Row. The developers and owners received tax

credits for the donations and agreed in return to never demolish the buildings covered by

the easements and to only alter, restore, renovate, or extend buildings in ways that theDepartment of Historic Resources deemed, in the language of the easement deed, to be

in keeping with the historic character of the Easement Property. Cleaning, masonry


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repointing, waterproofing, and painting that varied the appearance of the building would

all require approval of the department. At the same time it was clearly stated that nothing

in the easement deed would be construed to limit or control the owners redevelopment

plans for the interior.17 The staff worked with the developers on the Lucky Strike Building

in an effort to ensure that masonry patches represented the closest match for the color,

texture, and size that [could be] found.18 Department enthusiasm for the project proved

so great that in 1989 when Tobacco Row lined up major financing to move ahead with the

adaptive reuse of the buildings, Charles H. Fincham, Jr., a staff member of the Department

of Historic Resources, wrote to the Departments head, Hugh C. Miller, the Virginia State

Historic Preservation Officer, pointing to Tobacco Row as the biggest historic renovation

project in the county. He wondered if,

we shouldnt and couldnt benefit as an agency by becoming involved with the devel-

opers on this project such as: (1) Technical assistance; (2) Advisors in some other

capacity; (3) Give serious consideration to having the agency relocate the entireagency offices in the area as a spearhead supporter of the development and as an

example of the joint efforts of the public and state in utilization of historic proper-

ties; (4) Provide assistance in protecting the integrity of the historic sites through

other means.19

In the end the Department of Historic Resources did not move to Tobacco Row.

However, it worked energetically to preserve the character of building exteriors. The

Department also accepted easements on vacant property along Tobacco Row hoping to

regulate new development so as to ensure that new construction will be compatible with

the historic character of the area. When the staff reviewed plans for a new CVS Pharmacy

on Main Street along Tobacco Row, it expressed concern over the forbidding and imper-

sonal character of a blank wall in the design and asked for several revisions that would

show greater thought to the aesthetics of parts of the building, particularly those that

aligned with the historic tourist route between Williamsburg and Richmond, which ran

through Tobacco Row.20 In 2004 Kathleen S. Kilpatrick, Director of the Department of

Historic Resources, warned that a baseball stadium, proposed for a site near Tobacco Row,

would alter the defining characteristics of the designated historic district adversely in an

overwhelming way.21 At its heart, design review for both new and historic buildings

assumed that exterior facades, as opposed to interior spaces or other aspects of history,

required and deserved a high level of curatorial stewardship and protection.

Department of Historic Resources design reviews of new construction on vacant

Tobacco Row easement parcels aimed to protect the urban character and context beyond

the architectural character of individual historic buildings. Nevertheless, at the level of the

neighborhood, adaptive reuse along Tobacco Row profoundly changed the urban form in

a manner comparable to the interior partitioning of formerly open tobacco productionfloors for apartment conversions. To understand the scale of the urban adaptation along

Tobacco Row, it is important to take measure of formative elements in the making of the

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neighborhoodthe river, the rail, the row, and the hill. The row of Tobacco Row stands

along the north side of East Cary Street. Here, from 21st Street and East Cary, with the

five-story Edgeworth Tobacco Factory, built in 1921, through the Lucky Strike plant at

26th and East Cary, there is a continuous wall of three- to six-story buildings built as

tobacco factories. The factories were generally built to the lot line and filled the entire

East Cary block front from corner to corner. The presence of this row is notable in the

broader Richmond cityscape because it constitutes a built and highly visible edge in this

section of the city. Unlike the row on the north side of East Cary Street, the south side of

the street has historically lacked substantial building. It stands in the floodplain of the

James River, and as the Tobacco Row buildings were constructed during the late-

nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the block of land between the south edge of

Cary Street and the James River was occupied primarily by the tracks and train yard of

the Southern Railway, an elevated train trestle of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, and

the James River and Kanawha Canal. The convergence of transportation routes along the

James River, the canal, and the railroads had all helped concentrate the tobacco industryin this area. The site gave easy access for the receipt and handling of hogsheads containing

one thousand pounds of tobacco. For tobacco production, the north side of Cary Street

insured natural light for plant interiors and minimized exposure to fire hazards along

Tobacco Row.

The solid character of the row along East Cary did not extend even to the opposite

side of these same blocks, fronting East Main Street. There the solid wall of the row gave

way to smaller buildings, less unified development, and a quite different architectural and

urban character. Along East Main Street, at the back of Tobacco Row, there were some

lower tobacco warehouses and plants but also numerous row houses, primarily two and

three stories, and lines of two-story hybrid commercial buildings with stores on the

ground story and modest apartments above. These residences were only slightly more

substantial than the slave quarters and tobacco worker housing that had stood on part of

the Lucky Strike site. These residences on East Main and on the numbered side streets

along Tobacco Row housed many tobacco workers and other working-class residents in a

fairly dense pattern of crazy-quilt urbanism typical of what historian Sam Bass Warner

has characterized as the walking city.22 On the north side of East Main Street, the next

two blocksaway from the Riverclimbed steeply uphill to East Franklin and East Grace

Streets. Buildings along the East Franklin Street and East Grace Street bluff overlooked

the James River valley and the riverside collection of industrial buildings and working-

class housing. The topographic detachment of East Franklin and East Grace from the

factories and working-class residences on the blocks below encouraged a pattern of more

architecturally ambitious housing along those streets, occupied by more affluent residents.

Nevertheless, the blocks at the top of the hill served as the residences for many of the

proprietors of the lowland tobacco factories. As the hilltop area developed, it enjoyed a

complex measure of interconnection across the lines of both economic class and topogra-phy. This historical pattern was significantly disrupted and altered as an integral part of

the adaptive reuse of Tobacco Row. For all the interest among preservationists in historic


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urban character, adaptive reuse entailed a radical departure from historic neighborhood

patterns.

As planners and developers focused on reusing the row of Tobacco Row, they aimed

to eliminate the more complex and messy urban character of the areathe contrasting

north and south sides of the Tobacco Row blocks and the dynamic distinctions and connec-

tions between the neighborhoods lowlands and uplands. In the early 1980s, planners with

Virginia Commonwealth Universitys Richmond Revitalization program admired the solid

visual plane of Tobacco Row and its commanding image from the James River, from

Manchester on the south side of the river and from the elevated Interstate highway, just

west of Tobacco Row. But as the planners surveyed an urban landscape that had been

spiraling downward into poverty and abandonment, the historic connections between low-

lands and uplands and between Tobacco Row and adjacent blocks and neighborhoods

seemed more troubling than historically engaging. For them the hill to the north seemed

useful not for its historical connections across class and topography, but for its potential

as a barrier; in 1983 the Virginia Commonwealth University plan for Tobacco Rowreported, The residential scale of this district is further enhanced by the hill on the

north which forms an enclosure. This sense of enclosed, internal orientation creates the

perception of living space insulated from surrounding land uses and fosters a sense of

personal security and has a neighborhood image. Residential units developed in the build-

ings can be oriented to the Kanawha Canal and the James River and eventually take advan-

tage of future recreation along the riverfront. As this sense of insulation, internal

orientation, and a singular image for an adapted Tobacco Row began to coalesce, many

buildings and forms outside of that image disappeared from Tobacco Row. The complex

fine-grained urbanism along East Main Street represented just such a case. It had some of

the oldest buildings in the district, buildings with integral links to the production func-

tions and workers that historically characterized Tobacco Row. The developers who pre-

sided over Tobacco Row redevelopment received Department of Historic Resources

approval for demolitions of residential, commercial, and industrial buildings along East

Main Street that were considered contributing structures to the Tobacco Row district, but

were deemed by the developers engineers to be structurally unsound or unsuitable for

rehabilitation on any economically viable basis (Fig. 7).23 Sweeping deteriorated or aban-

doned smaller structures off of Tobacco Row blocks profoundly changed the historic grain

of the streetscape and the character of the neighborhood while perhaps boosting the adap-

tive reuse possibilities for the larger tobacco building. Developers also altered the character

of the riverside blocks south of Cary Street by introducing hundreds of parking spaces on

parking decks elevated above the flood plain along the area formerly occupied by railroad

tracks and sidings.

The extent of the insularity of Tobacco Row development along the lowlands should

not be overstated. In important ways the impetus for adaptive reuse came from the inter-

est and efforts of residents living on Church Hill and Libby Hill, just above Tobacco Row,in the area where the Tobacco Row proprietors had historically resided. Indeed, this was

precisely where William Abeloff, the person most identified with adaptive reuse on Tobacco

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Figure 7. Nineteenth-century residential, commercial, and industrial buildings on the 2400 block of East

Main Street, Richmond, Virginia, before demolition as part of Tobacco Row redevelopment, 1990. (Virginia

Department of Historic Resources Archives)

Row, lived. A lawyer turned visionary developer and revitalization guru, Abeloff pur-

chased his house at 5 North 29th Street in 1974.24 The house faced Libby Hill Park, adja-

cent to the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Memorial. Tobacco Row buildings filled the

vista from Abeloffs house. Abeloff and his neighbors on Libby Hill and Church Hill and

Richmond preservationists were making private investments and marshaling public and

institutional resources to preserve the areas rich residential architecture. The area enjoyed

sweeping views out over the James River, views that improved as industrial activity in

the flatlands declined. Nevertheless, residents were concerned that vacant factories and

warehouses and deteriorating housing on the east side of Richmond might reverse the

recent preservation gains along the substantial blocks just uphill from Tobacco Row. In a

sense, the Church Hill and Libby Hill residents and preservationists did not want an insu-

lar Tobacco Row. Rather, they sought redevelopment that would fill Tobacco Row with

affluent residents who shared their interest in historic buildings and downtown living.

This would, of course, dramatically alter and adapt the historical patternsubstituting

the complex and diverse topographic, social, and economic links between the upland and

lowland blocks for a more unified and more uniformly prosperous domestic and commer-

cial world. This vision had nothing to do with the historic character of the area and every-thing to do with late-twentieth-century visions of Richmond and its pressing urban

problems.


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Adaptive reuse along Tobacco Row had a very long gestation period, moving along in

fits and starts. Developers felt that they really could not simply start with one building

and hope that the redevelopment would catch on and inspire the next developer to take

on the next building. They did not believe that they could successfully adapt the neighbor-

hood as it had been built, one building at a time. They were convinced that no one could

succeed, nor would they begin redevelopment, unless the parts were in place to ensure

that the entire neighborhood would be adapted. Tobacco Row looked to compete with

suburban residences. The Tobacco Row developers aimed to offer housing with

all of the amenities of the suburban development, yet surpassing them by taking

advantage of the sites unique qualities. Tobacco Row offers the charm of living in

an historic building within a well-planned community. Exciting views of the James

River are possible from many of the units. The suburbs cannot compare with the

advantages of living in close proximity to downtown and its businesses, cultural

events, shopping areas, recreational facilities and restaurants.25

In order to deliver on the notion of a community, a single developer seemingly could not

just start with one building in a landscape characterized by vacancy, blight, and notable

deterioration. Believing in the difficulty of such an approach, in 1981 William Abeloff

assembled an investor group, Tobacco Row Associates, to begin the process of gaining

control of nearly all of the major buildings and surrounding parcels along Tobacco Row.

The Richmond Revitalization Programs planners saw great merit in this approach; it

seemed to aim at the singular vision and a degree of insularity that they believed would

boost the fortunes of the project. They felt that by placing numerous buildings under

unified ownership, Tobacco Row Associates would have an excellent opportunity to imple-

ment a development project that can change the image of this entire section of the city.

An historic neighborhood character can be imposed on this district from the nearby

restored district on Church Hill, providing an extension of the existing residential area

and an incentive for development.26 This plan might have made long-term sense, but it

obviously increased the expense, slowed the process, and increased the complexity of adap-

tive reuse. It also aimed to fundamentally alter both current and historic urban patterns

in the interest of the adaptive reuse of historic buildings.

It took a decade, from 1981 to 1991, for Tobacco Row to move from the first purchase

of property intended for adaptive reuse to the actual accommodation of the first residen-

tial tenants. William Abeloff was the general partner, and he entered a limited partnership

with five investors, who constituted Tobacco Row Associates. The five owners included S.

Buford Scott, Harry R. Thalhimer, Robert B. Ball, Jr., George T. Ross, and EMM Equity

Associates. Abeloff insisted that, piecing together something like this is a very complex

undertaking. It depends on finding people who are interested in joining and then making

feasible financial arrangements to suit their needs. In 1981 Abeloff purchased the firstpiece of property as part of the Tobacco Row initiative. By 1985 Tobacco Row Associates

had spent about $6.25 million to acquire, maintain, and do preliminary planning for 15

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buildings, with 1.3 million square feet of largely vacant space. In an effort to raise addi-

tional equity for the project, Tobacco Row Associates added about thirty limited partners

in three groups between 1983 and 1985. Changes in the tax law proposed in 1985, and

passed in 1986, cast many of the investors assumptions into doubt as the law drastically

revised downward the existing 25 percent investment tax credits for investors rehabilitat-

ing historic structures. In Abeloffs view the entire project relied upon the tax credits; he

declared, Properties like these are difficult to renovate and then rent . . . without the [tax

credit] incentives. The revenues that you can generate from the buildings are only so much

. . . the costs are out of line in relation to that revenue stream.27 The U.S. Congresss

grant of $100 million in tax-exempt bonds helped make up for the 1986 changes in the

tax treatment of historic rehabilitation. Abeloff and his partners overcame the huge

uncertainty that accompanied the change in the tax law and in 1987 Abeloff insisted the

project would start construction in the spring of 1988Were alive and well and going

to work.28

In 1988 Tobacco Row Associates formed a partnership with McCormack, Baron andAssociates of St. Louis, hoping to take advantage of McCormacks fifteen years of work in

turning around vacant buildings and declining center city neighborhoods. McCormack had

developed and managed six thousand units of housingincluding major projects in St.

Louiss Westminster Place, Clevelands Hough neighborhood, and Kansas Citys Quality

Hill project.29 McCormack supervised the design and construction and the marketing and

leasing of the first Tobacco Row adaptive reuse. The Cameron Building at 24th and East

Cary Streets and the Kinney Building at 25th and East Cary Streets included 259 apart-

ments. They were open to renters in early 1991.

As people began moving into the Cameron and Kinney buildings, a McCormack

employee confided in a reporter, Everyone had a fear that if we built this thing here,

would anyone come?30 Interestingly, the fear about whether people would ever turn to

these warehouses as residences had clearly set Tobacco Row Associates on the difficult

course of trying to get control of buildings throughout the neighborhood before even

beginning redevelopment. It also determined the decision to redevelop the buildings for

rental rather than for purchase. According to Abeloff renting was an easier commitment

than buying.31 So, even as investors tried to create stability and character in the neighbor-

hood, it relied on fairly transient renters to provide the backbone of the new community.

Although, Abeloff declared, Ultimately, we are in favor of ownership, because thats the

real stability of a neighborhood.32 Renters did begin to lease the apartments in the Cam-

eron and Kinney buildings. But these buildings came on the market in the midst of a major

economic recession, which strained and then terminated the working relationship between

Tobacco Row Associates and McCormack Baron. In 2003, the Cameron and Kinney build-

ings ended up in foreclosure. Many of the original Tobacco Row Associates lost their

investments in the project. As the buildings came out of foreclosure, they were purchased

in 2007 by Forest City, which had taken over from McCormack Baron in developing otherbuildings along Tobacco Row. In 2006, Forest City had also developed the five-story Edge-

worth Building with 166,000 square feet of office space, and the Hirschler Fleischer law


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firm as the anchor tenant, occupying over 67,000 square feet. The Larus & Brothers

Tobacco Company had constructed the Edgeworth building in 1921 at 21st and East Cary

Streets.

As the developers sought renters for Tobacco Row apartments, they clearly felt that

people would be attracted to the charm of historic buildingsbuildings with a certain

edgy patina and historic depth, being put to new uses, offering proximity to the down-

town, and great views of the James River. These buildings stood in contrast with what

Abeloff called the drywall boxes of suburban apartment complexes.33 Abeloff declared

that on Tobacco Row theres all kinds of character that is part of these buildings. 34

Twenty years later when Forest Citys David Levey created a promotional video for River

Lofts on Tobacco Row, he echoed Abeloff, taking careful measure of the distinction

between the historic architecture and more typical suburban residential settings. Levey

declared that Forest City had taken advantage of

the wonderful bones that are in each one of these buildings. . . . Each building isunique. They are all different. You will have exposed brick. You will have wood beam

ceilings. You will have floors that are not as even as they should be. But this is all a

part of the charm and the character of living in River Lofts and part of why our

residents like living here and dont like living in other more conventional

apartments. . . . The thing that separates us from everyone else is the buildings

themselves. They are really cool. It is not a place where you come if you are looking

for four white walls. The walls are not all white and they are not all smooth but they

have great character.35

Abeloff and Levey both expressed genuine enthusiasm for the rehabilitating of

Tobacco Rows buildings. They both also felt that a market existed for the unconventional

uses, the adapted uses, of these historic buildings. Their enthusiasm was without any hint

of the reservations crisply articulated by Calvin Trillin in his 1977 New Yorkeressay, U.S.

Journal: Thoughts Brought on By Prolonged Exposure to Exposed Brick. Trillin felt that

when old warehouses and abandoned factories started being scrubbed up into boutiques

with brick-exposing and paint-stripping and beam-uncovering designs, the conversion

process tended to homogenize rather than amplify the historic landscape. In his mind it

made it difficult to see distinctions between places as regionally disparate as Ghirardelli

Square in San Francisco, Pioneer Square in Seattle, Old Town Chicago, Underground

Atlanta, River Quay in Kansas City, Larimer Square in Denver, or Gas Light Square in St.

Louis. People were seemingly seeking out places steeped in a sense of history and deep

connections to diverse roots; however, in Trillins view they often ended up surprisingly

estranged from any real understanding of history or place beyond a history of American

brick. More recently Duncan Hay expressed similar concerns about what is missing in the

adaptive reuse of warehouses and industrial sites. Hay argues, In too many cases, industryhas been scrubbed clean out of these industrial sites. There may be photographs and

maps in the lobby, or a steam engine flywheel in the parking lot, or even an engine from

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the former factory. However, this often amounts to hardware as decoration, and leaves

Hay to conclude that the cost is often a loss of character where we are left wondering

whether weve actually saved anything of significance and whether it was worth the effort.

Hays questioning of adaptive reuse and Trillins conflicting impressions and ambivalence

concerning such projects flow from the very nature of adaptive reuse. The process seeks

new uses for old buildings and places; the ensuing transformation often significantly com-

promises the ability of such places to bear witness to their own place in history. 36

The fuzzy sense of happy history captured in marketing promotional claims of the

charm and character of exposed brick and adaptively reused buildings need not com-

promise the preservationists, historians, or citizens enthusiasm for projects like Rich-

monds Tobacco Row. Indeed, the growing advocacy of preservation as an environmental

ethic focused on preserving embodied energy, recycling buildings and landscapes, stem-

ming sprawl, and reutilizing existing infrastructure help place Tobacco Row and similar

projects at the core of some of the most significant insights guiding historic preservation

today.37 Few people could look at Tobacco Row and not consider it an important urban,economic, and ecological achievement for Richmond, with lessons for the broader historic

preservation movement. Indeed, in November 2010, Industrial Heritage Retooled,a three-

day symposium co-sponsored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the J. M.

Kaplan Fund, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund focused on similar possibilities and prob-

lems that attend to adaptive reuse of industrial areas in the context of pervasive deindus-

trialization. When the National Trusts Forum Journal published selected papers from the

symposium, the cover image showed the Venable Tobacco Company plant in Durham,

North Carolina, that had received a $17.8 million rehabilitation for office, laboratory,

retail, and restaurant space. Inside the Journalthere was also an account of the rehabilita-

tion of one million square feet of space in the vacant American Tobacco Company plant in

Durham. Tobacco had historically wreaked havoc. On the land, it seriously depleted nutri-

ents in the soil. For many smokers, it also depleted their health. Nevertheless, tobacco

production and distribution was relatively clean and did not leave behind the toxic by-

products often found at other industrial sites. In this sense, reuse of tobacco plants and

warehouses was relatively straightforward, especially in comparison with many other aban-

doned manufacturing landscapes.

The impressive environmental and economic benefits of adaptive reuse in the indus-

trial landscape should not lead preservation advocates to abandon their work as stewards

and shapers of historical narrative and community heritage. We need to revisit the ques-

tion of what we make of buildings that produced 100 billion cigarettes annually and consti-

tuted an essential part of Richmonds economy and its social and cultural history. In 1991,

Tobacco Row opened its first apartments in the adaptively reused Cameron and Kinney

buildings. It also hosted a major historical exhibition that provided a rigorous and engag-

ing analysis of Richmond labor history, including the labor of tobacco workers. On June

13, 1991,The Working People of Richmond: Life and Labor in an Industrial City, 18651920,organized by Richmonds Valentine Museum, opened to an enthusiastic crowd of over 850

people at the former Philip Morris plant at 23rd and East Cary Streets. William Abeloff


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Figure 8. The Working People of Richmond: Life and Labor in an Industrial City, 18651920 , Valentine

Museum exhibition, Tobacco Row Installation in Philip Morris Building, 1991. (Courtesy of Gregg Kimball

Collection)

and Tobacco Row Associates donated 8,500 square feet of exhibition space (Fig. 8), declar-

ing its association with the project a natural marriage of community, business and public

interests.38Abeloff insisted that the nationally significant rehabilitation of Tobacco Row

provided an especially suitable venue for an exhibit focusing on the working people and

the tobacco industry.39 The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) provided a

$275,000 grant for the exhibition, which also received a grant from the Mobil Foundation.

Organized by curator and historian Gregg Kimball and technology curator Greg Galer, after

five years of research, the exhibition encompassed major themes including Industrial

Labor and the Transformation of Work, A New Urban Working Class, and Working-

mans Democracy: Labor Activism in the Late 1800s. The exhibition also included three

popular living-history performances by actors from the Studio Theatre of Richmond. Theperformances captured the work experience of a first-generation working-class Irish-

American bartender named John Francis OGrady, a first-generation German-American iron

worker at the Tredegar Iron Works named Henry Carter Osterbind, and an African-American

tobacco stemmer named Georgianna Halsey, whose refrain was I knows my tobacco.40 The

exhibition also highlighted Richmonds nineteenth-century brick-making industry.

The adaptive reuse of Tobacco Row did not inspire the Working People of Richmond

exhibition. The show was originally planned for installation at the former Tredegar Iron

Works foundry. The fact that the 1991 exhibition coincided with the completion of thefirst 259 apartments on Tobacco Row did provide a serious scholarly venue right on

Tobacco Row for probing the history of tobacco manufacture and broader issues related to

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Richmonds industrial heritage. Indeed, the exhibition forthrightly grappled with narra-

tives that the Tobacco Row buildings embodied. The convergence of historic preservation

and historic interpretation were in many ways seamless. Besides the performances of

Georgianna Halsey, the exhibition included a bagging jack machine that filled cotton

tobacco pouches with tobacco. Visitors to the exhibition were invited to punch into the

exhibition using the time clock that had been used by workers to punch into their jobs at

the Lucky Strike factory. The Working People of Richmondwas only one of an entire series

of Valentine Museum exhibitions guided by the dynamic museum director Frank Jewell.

Starting in 1984 Jewell established the Valentine as a venue for reinterpreting Richmond

history by deploying the insights of new scholarship in urban, social, and cultural history.

Exhibitions including Smoke Signals: Cigarettes, Advertising and the American Way of Life,

which ran from April to October 1990; Dressed for Work: Women in the Workforce; Jim

Crow: Racism and Reaction in the New South; andIn Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black

Life in Richmond, Virginiahelped align Richmond history with cutting edge scholarship in

the academy. Panels of academic historians advised on the exhibitions. The $275,000 thatNEH provided in support forWorking Peoplebrought the total of NEH grants to the Valen-

tine in the previous 11 months to $1,245,000. In its application to the NEH for support

ofWorking People, the Valentine insisted that the proposed exhibition was

the first synthesis of recent scholarly research and the first effort to communicate

to a broad audience the nature of work and the lives of working people in

Richmond. . . . in the past twenty-five years the New Urban History and the New

Social History have articulated an entirely new vocabulary of questions. Richmond,

an American city since the 1780s, has only in a few places been touched by the

scholarship of urban and social history. The museum thus adopts urban and social

history as a point of view, believing that the quality of its answers depends on the

quality of its questions. We believe that this fresh and fertile agenda of questions

will give coherence and rigor to our work. . . . Such an approach could easily interpret

the relationship between human beings and artifacts, a primary mission of

museums.41

There is little question that for the new residents of Tobacco Row, or for visitors to

the area, the exhibition could deepen their understanding of, and perhaps strengthen their

attachments to, the artifacts along Tobacco Rowthat is, to the buildings along East

Cary Street. Nor did the engagement with tobacco and working-class history end with the

exhibition itself. The Valentine provided public programs to expand on themes in the

exhibition. It planned a walking tour of Tobacco Row with former tobacco workers. It

provided bus tours of other industrial sites and working-class neighborhoods throughout

the city. The Valentine hosted a screening of the movie Norma Rae, portraying a North

Carolina textile-mill labor activist, and welcomed over 4,200 people to a Labor Day celebra-tion along Tobacco Row, including traditional call and response singing by a group of

African-American workers who had retired from the track maintenance crew of the Chesa-


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peake & Ohio Railroad. One of the things these activities did was to reveal the richness of

the connections between Tobacco Row and the broader citybriefly countering the move

for insularity that was being fostered in key aspects of the Tobacco Row redevelopment.

Indeed, the popularity of the exhibition and its support by Tobacco Row Associates

strongly suggests that a rigorous and critical engagement with tobacco and its history is

not incompatible with the adaptive reuse of buildings or the marketing of historic redevel-

opment. People who advocate a timid framing of happy history in deference to the impera-

tives of the adaptive reuse market need to consider the fact that not far from Richmond

the Vietnam Memorial and the Holocaust Museum stand among the most visited sites in

Washington, D.C., and that to the east, west, and north of Tobacco Row serious discus-

sions of slavery are central to visits to Williamsburg, Monticello, and Mount Vernon. Well-

presented narratives related to the full range of human experience seemingly attract peo-

ple and their time and dollars to storied sites and landscapes.

The Working People of Richmondexhibition closed on December 7, 1991. Two decades

later, with thousands more daily visits by people living, working, shopping, and visitingTobacco Row than in the 1990s, nothing even close to the scope and ambition of The

Working People of Richmondexhibit exists on Tobacco Row. Like so many other adaptive

reuse projects there is little more than a glancing engagement with the history of the

place; beyond a few pictures in rental brochures and videos and the almost fastidious

maintenance of building exteriors and smokestacks and the control of the character of

new architecture, there is virtually no serious engagement with the history, architecture,

or heritage of Tobacco Row. The redevelopment of Tobacco Row did spur the conversion

of adjacent sections of the historic James River and Kanawha Canal into Great Ship Lock

Park, focused on the substantial final canal lock linking the canal and the James River.

The park also included some historical interpretive boards but they did not deal explicitly

with Tobacco Row, which stood adjacent to the park.

When NEH made a grant of $275,000 to The Working People of Richmondexhibition,

it seemed a reasonable expenditure of public dollars that would promote broad public

engagements with history and place. The public expenditures made on Tobacco Row, in

the form of tens of millions of dollars of rehabilitation tax credits, are at some level

guided by the same ideas as the NEH grant; we assume that heritage is important and

that preserving historically and architecturally significant buildings can promote critical

engagements with history in ways that enrich our lives and help us forge more complex

and fruitful links between the past, present, and future. This encouragement of historical

understanding and the forging of links between history and the future was part of the

guiding vision ofThe Working People of Richmondproject. However, the exhibit lasted only

six months, and its important themes and perspectives have not been revisited along

Tobacco Row. It is not too late. The buildings themselves have been preserved. Surely there

is a place in the tens of millions of dollars of tax credits and the investment of over $125

million dollars in redevelopment for a more vital accommodation of the history and heri-tage embedded in the places we adaptively reuse. The federal government and certain

localities have at times sponsored a percent for the arts programs in connection with

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major public building projects. This offers a possible model for adaptive reuse; we should

consider a percent for history that would support the cultivation of critical historical

understanding as a counter to the effacing of history that so often flows from adaptive

reuse.42 In this way preservationists could deliver simultaneously on an agenda of environ-

mentalism, ecology, and urbanism as well as a stronger commitment to critical thinking

possible in adaptive reuse. Preservationists who advocate adaptive reuse owe this to the

past. They also owe this to the future.

References

1. Richmond New Leader,10 October 1929.

2. Jane Webb Smith,Smoke Signals: Cigarettes, Advertising and the American Way of Life; An Exhibition at

the Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia April 5October 9, 1990 (Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 1990), 13.

3. For discussion of citizenship and preservation see Daniel Bluestone, Toxic Memory: Preservation on

EPA Superfund Sites, in Buildings, Landscapes, and Memory: Case Studies in Historic Preservation(New

York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 25669.4. Tobacco Row Raises Hopes for Downtown,Richmond Times-Dispatch, 31 December 1989.

5. Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, Public Law 9734 August 13, 1981, 95 STAT. 172; Duncan Hay,

Preserving Industrial Heritage: Challenges, Options, and Priorities, Forum Journal25 (Spring 2011):

15.

6. Turn Here Films, The River Lofts at Tobacco Row, promotional video production, available on You

Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?vwP_CSmIfKAY&NR1.

7. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 3 April 2003.

8. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 24 May 1930.

9. See Calvin Schermerhorn,Money Over Mastery, Family Over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper

South(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 13463.

10. SeeThirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, Richmond, Virginia,Enumeration District 127, Sheet

9 B.

11. Senator John War ner, Tobacco Row, Richmond, VA,Congressional Record(June 24, 1986): S 8247;

Tax Reform Act of 1986, Public Law, 99514, October 22, 1986, 101 STAT. 2707; see also, Richmond

New Leader, 30 May 1986.

12. Richmond News Leader, 10 October 1929.

13. Senator John Warner, Tobacco Row, Richmond, VA,Congressional Record(June 24, 1986): S 8247.

14. James A. D. Cox, Six Buildings Worth Keeping,Arts in Virginia15 (Fall 1974): 2331.

15. Ibid., 31.

16. United States Department of the Interior, The Secretary of the Interiors Standards for Rehabilitation

(Washington, D.C., 1977, rev, 1990), www.nps.gov/tps/standards/rehabilitation.htm.17. See, for example, Deed of Easement: John Enders Warehouse, 20 North 20th Street, Shockoe Valley

and Tobacco Row Historic District, Richmond, 22 December 1999, Department of Historic Resources

Archives, Richmond, Virginia.

18. John E. Wells to David L. Ferguson, 26 November 1990. Department of Historic Resources Archives,

Richmond, Virginia.

19. Memorandum: Tobacco Row Development, Charles H. Fincham, Jr., to Hugh C. Miller, 28 December

1989.

20. See Calder Loth to Ricardo Pulido, 16 April 2002; Virginia E. McConnell to H. Bryan Mitchell, Memo-

randum, 13 June 1990, Department of Historic Resources Archives, Richmond, Virginia.

21. Kathleen S. Kilpatrick to Tim Davey, 3 June 2004, Department of Historic Resources Archives, Rich-

mond, Virginia.

22. Sam Bass Warner,The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Philadelphia: University

of Pennsylvania Press, 1968).


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23. William H. Abeloff to Virginia E. McConnell, 11 June 1990. Department of Historic Resources

Archives, Richmond, Virginia.

24. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 1 September 2006; see Celebrating the Life of William H. Abeloff, Virginia

House of Delegates, House Joint Resolution No. 5152, Offered September 27, 2006.

25. Tobacco Row Master Plan, 1989.

26. Richmond Revitalization Steering Committee, Virginia Commonwealth University,Tobacco Row Revi-

talization Plan, December 1983, 1718.

27. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 29 September 1985.28. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 9 August 1987.

29. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 25 August 1991.

30. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 13 May 1991.

31. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 29 September 1985.

32. Richmond Times-Dispatch, 9 August 1987.

33. Ibid.

34. Ibid.

35. Turn Here Films, The River Lofts at Tobacco Row, promotional video production, available on You

Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?vwP_CSmIfKAY&NR1.

36. Calvin Trillin, U.S. Journal: Thoughts Brought on by Prolonged Exposure to Exposed Brick,The New

Yorker(16 May 1977): 101105; Duncan Hay, Preserving Industrial Heritage: Challenges, Options,

and Priorities,Forum Journal, 25 (Spring 2011): 1122.

37. This was the focus of theKeeping Memory Green Symposium at the University of Virginia, April, 2011;

see also: Richard Moe, President, National Trust for Historic Preservation, Historic Preservation and

Green Building: Finding Common Ground, Lecture, U.S.G.B.C. Greenbuild Conference, Boston, Mass.,

20 November 2008; Carl Elefante, The Greenest Building Is . . . One That Is Already Built, Forum

Journal 21 (Summer 2007): 2638; Tristan Roberts, Historic Preservation and Green Building: A

Lasting Relationship,Environmental Building News16 (January 2007): 113; Daniel Bluestone, Sus-

tainability, Preservation, and Craft, Inform Magazine(October 2010): 47.

38. Tobacco Row Associates quoted in NEH Interim Report. The Working People of Richmond: Life and

Labor in an Industrial City, Period of July 1, 1991 to December 1991, Submitted August 31, 1991,Valentine Museum Archives.

39. Richmond News Leader, 3 June 1991.

40. Valentine Museum Application to the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Working People

of Richmond: Life and Labor in an Industrial City, 18651920, 6 December 1989, Valentine Museum

Archive; see also, Peter Liebhold, The Working People of Richmond: Life and Labor in an Industrial

City, 18651920, Technology and Culture 33 (July 1992): 56470; Randall M. Miller, The Working

People of Richmond: Life and Labor in an Industrial City, 18651920, Public Historian 14 (Winter

1992): 12023.

41. Valentine Museum Application to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

42. I am indebted to Professor Sheila Crane for this insight and the parallel between percent for art

programs and possible percent for history programs.

Documents

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