Access Provided by UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS, LONDON at 02/10/13 8:11PM GMT

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 Summary, September
15, 1989. Lucky Strike powerhouse and factory at right, Edgeworth Tobacco Factor y at left. (Virginia Department
of Historic Resources Archives)

132

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:00:03

PS

PAGE 132

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 ambitiously recycled existing buildings and infrastructure to new urban uses. 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. 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, ofces, 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 massive three- to six-story brick industrial buildings. Here, in the 1940s, manufacturers produced 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 gradual 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 lled the air for centuries. Gone were the legions
of tobacco workers, male and female, black and white, who at times had constituted over
25 percent of Richmonds workforce. Gone was the cacophony of production machinery.
Gone was a signicant sector of Richmonds economy and heritage. Then, over a period of

BLUESTONE

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:00:03

PS

133

TOBACCO ROW

PAGE 133

twenty-ve years starting in the early 1980s, developers spent over $125 million putting
719 residential apartments and over 155,000 square feet of ofce 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 denition, also pushes buildings away from
their historic function and often away from their historic signicance; 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, ofces, and retail businesses lled
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 signicant
series 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 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 reections 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.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 redevelopment 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 proled 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 improvements and millions more in ten- to fteen-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 nancing. 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 eld sites. The Tax Reform Act of 1976 and the Economic Recovery Act of 1981 provided the cornerstones of public efforts, granting signicant tax credits for substantial redevelopment of properties listed on the National Register

134

CHANGE OVER TIME

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:00:04

PS

PAGE 134

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-Dispatch magazine proled 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 building
facades while drastically altering the nature of architectural and historical space. Cigarette
production generally took place on wide-open oors, lled with tobacco, machines, and

BLUESTONE

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:00:21

PS

135

TOBACCO ROW

PAGE 135

workers (Fig. 2). The open oors stretched from exterior walls facing streets to exterior
walls facing alleys or courtyards. The conversion of such buildings into residential apartments 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 formerly open oors (Fig. 3). Thus, a strategy of preserving heritage through adaptive reuse,
of recycling buildings, quickly undercuts essential elements of place; the function, machinery, 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 lling partitioned oors 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 for
dozens 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)

136

CHANGE OVER TIME

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:00:31

PS

PAGE 136

vested the tobacco plants on regional plantations; they also provided the labor for manufacturing 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 lled 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 ingenuity
of the redevelopment, for all the salutary urban, environmental, and economic benets of
nding new uses for old buildings in existing neighborhoods, using extant infrastructure,
it is at times difcult 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)

BLUESTONE

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:00:45

PS

137

TOBACCO ROW

PAGE 137

Figure 5. Sanborn Fire Insurance Company Map, 1905, showing tobacco worker housing on the site later
occupied by the American Tobacco Company, Lucky Strike factor y. (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 architecturally distinguished historic structures on Tobacco Row. He worried that the less attractive 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 entire
Commonwealth of Virginia. Indeed, support for this project is statewide. . . . I cannot
overstate the tremendous economic, historic and symbolic value of the Tobacco Row proj-

138

CHANGE OVER TIME

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:01:01

PS

PAGE 138

ect. The economic benets seemed clear enough. The project, according to Warner, promised 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 hundreds 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 nancing 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 nancing 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
nd 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 promotional 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 Leader greeted 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 Leader editorialized,

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

The interior production space of these buildings was often remodeled beyond easy recognition. 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 reected about the long painful process of Richmonds
deindustrialization. Interestingly, rather than preserving the rooms occupied by production workers, Forest City meticulously restored the original Lucky Strike plants executive
boardroom 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

BLUESTONE

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:01:01

PS

139

TOBACCO ROW

PAGE 139

ought to explore more precisely what the historical and heritage values are that hover over
such projects.
It is difcult, but not impossible, to interpret the heritage of Tobacco Row as primarily about architecture, unrelated to tobacco workers, cigarette production and consumption, 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
nancing 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 historian James A. D. Cox published an article in Arts in Virginia titled Six Buildings Worth
Keeping. Cox pointed out the growing historical interest in aspects of American architecture 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 elements 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 interesting in themselves but they nonetheless contributed to the charm of this area and provided 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 typied 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 identied 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 ve 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 subtly emphasized by the use of narrower windows. . . . Now owned by Philip Morris Incorporated, 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 oor 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 architectural 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

140

CHANGE OVER TIME

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:01:02

PS

PAGE 140

Figure 6. Philip Morris tobacco factory, Richmond, Virginia (c. 1885); looking east along East Cary Street,
2011. (Daniel Bluestone)

historic preservation ofce, 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 rehabilitation standards usually directs attention toward building exteriors and away from interior 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 particular 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 the
Department 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

BLUESTONE

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:01:15

PS

141

TOBACCO ROW

PAGE 141

repointing, waterproong, 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 nancing 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 Ofcer, pointing to Tobacco Row as the biggest historic renovation
project in the county. He wondered if,
we shouldnt and couldnt benet as an agency by becoming involved with the developers on this project such as: (1) Technical assistance; (2) Advisors in some other
capacity; (3) Give serious consideration to having the agency relocate the entire
agency ofces 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 properties; (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 impersonal 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 dening 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 production
oors 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

142

CHANGE OVER TIME

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:01:16

PS

PAGE 142

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
ve-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 lled 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 oodplain of the
James River, and as the Tobacco Row buildings were constructed during the latenineteenth 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 industry
in 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 re 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 unied 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 workingclass 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 afuent 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 topography. This historical pattern was signicantly disrupted and altered as an integral part of
the adaptive reuse of Tobacco Row. For all the interest among preservationists in historic

BLUESTONE

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:01:16

PS

143

TOBACCO ROW

PAGE 143

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 connections 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 lowlands 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 Row
reported, 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 buildings can be oriented to the Kanawha Canal and the James River and eventually take advantage 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
ne-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 functions and workers that historically characterized Tobacco Row. The developers who presided 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 abandoned 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 adaptive 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 ood 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 interest 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 identied with adaptive reuse on Tobacco

144

CHANGE OVER TIME

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:01:17

PS

PAGE 144

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
Depar tment of Historic Resources Archives)

Row, lived. A lawyer turned visionary developer and revitalization guru, Abeloff purchased his house at 5 North 29th Street in 1974.24 The house faced Libby Hill Park, adjacent to the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Memorial. Tobacco Row buildings lled 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 atlands 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 insular Tobacco Row. Rather, they sought redevelopment that would ll Tobacco Row with
afuent 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 unied and more uniformly prosperous domestic and commercial world. This vision had nothing to do with the historic character of the area and everything to do with late-twentieth-century visions of Richmond and its pressing urban
problems.

BLUESTONE

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:01:47

PS

145

TOBACCO ROW

PAGE 145

Adaptive reuse along Tobacco Row had a very long gestation period, moving along in
ts 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 neighborhood 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 difculty 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
unied ownership, Tobacco Row Associates would have an excellent opportunity to implement 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 adaptive 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 rst purchase
of property intended for adaptive reuse to the actual accommodation of the rst residential tenants. William Abeloff was the general partner, and he entered a limited partnership
with ve investors, who constituted Tobacco Row Associates. The ve 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 nding people who are interested in joining and then making
feasible nancial arrangements to suit their needs. In 1981 Abeloff purchased the rst
piece 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

146

CHANGE OVER TIME

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:01:48

PS

PAGE 146

buildings, with 1.3 million square feet of largely vacant space. In an effort to raise additional 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 rehabilitating historic structures. In Abeloffs view the entire project relied upon the tax credits; he
declared, Properties like these are difcult 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 and
Associates of St. Louis, hoping to take advantage of McCormacks fteen 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 rst 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 apartments. They were open to renters in early 1991.
As people began moving into the Cameron and Kinney buildings, a McCormack
employee conded 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 difcult
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 neighborhood, 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 Cameron 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 buildings 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 other
buildings along Tobacco Row. In 2006, Forest City had also developed the ve-story Edgeworth Building with 166,000 square feet of ofce space, and the Hirschler Fleischer law

BLUESTONE

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:01:48

PS

147

TOBACCO ROW

PAGE 147

rm 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 downtown, 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 is
unique. They are all different. You will have exposed brick. You will have wood beam
ceilings. You will have oors 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 Yorker essay, 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 difcult 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, industry
has been scrubbed clean out of these industrial sites. There may be photographs and
maps in the lobby, or a steam engine ywheel in the parking lot, or even an engine from

148

CHANGE OVER TIME

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:01:49

PS

PAGE 148

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 signicance and whether it was worth the effort.
Hays questioning of adaptive reuse and Trillins conicting impressions and ambivalence
concerning such projects ow from the very nature of adaptive reuse. The process seeks
new uses for old buildings and places; the ensuing transformation often signicantly compromises 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 compromise the preservationists, historians, or citizens enthusiasm for projects like Richmonds Tobacco Row. Indeed, the growing advocacy of preservation as an environmental
ethic focused on preserving embodied energy, recycling buildings and landscapes, stemming sprawl, and reutilizing existing infrastructure help place Tobacco Row and similar
projects at the core of some of the most signicant 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 threeday 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 problems that attend to adaptive reuse of industrial areas in the context of pervasive deindustrialization. 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 ofce, laboratory,
retail, and restaurant space. Inside the Journal there was also an account of the rehabilitation 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 nutrients 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 byproducts often found at other industrial sites. In this sense, reuse of tobacco plants and
warehouses was relatively straightforward, especially in comparison with many other abandoned manufacturing landscapes.
The impressive environmental and economic benets of adaptive reuse in the industrial 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 question of what we make of buildings that produced 100 billion cigarettes annually and constituted an essential part of Richmonds economy and its social and cultural history. In 1991,
Tobacco Row opened its rst apartments in the adaptively reused Cameron and Kinney
buildings. It also hosted a major historical exhibition that provided a rigorous and engaging 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

BLUESTONE

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:01:50

PS

149

TOBACCO ROW

PAGE 149

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), declaring its association with the project a natural marriage of community, business and public
interests.38 Abeloff insisted that the nationally signicant 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
ve years of research, the exhibition encompassed major themes including Industrial
Labor and the Transformation of Work, A New Urban Working Class, and Workingmans Democracy: Labor Activism in the Late 1800s. The exhibition also included three
popular living-history performances by actors from the Studio Theatre of Richmond. The
performances captured the work experience of a rst-generation working-class IrishAmerican bartender named John Francis OGrady, a rst-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 the
rst 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

150

CHANGE OVER TIME

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:02:06

PS

PAGE 150

Richmonds industrial heritage. Indeed, the exhibition forthrightly grappled with narratives 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 lled 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 Richmond was 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; and In Bondage and Freedom: Antebellum Black
Life in Richmond, Virginia helped align Richmond history with cutting edge scholarship in
the academy. Panels of academic historians advised on the exhibitions. The $275,000 that
NEH provided in support for Working People brought the total of NEH grants to the Valentine in the previous 11 months to $1,245,000. In its application to the NEH for support
of Working People, the Valentine insisted that the proposed exhibition was
the rst synthesis of recent scholarly research and the rst effort to communicate
to a broad audience the nature of work and the lives of working people in
Richmond. . . . in the past twenty-ve 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 celebration 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-

BLUESTONE

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:02:06

PS

151

TOBACCO ROW

PAGE 151

peake & Ohio Railroad. One of the things these activities did was to reveal the richness of
the connections between Tobacco Row and the broader citybriey 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 redevelopment. People who advocate a timid framing of happy history in deference to the imperatives 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 discussions of slavery are central to visits to Williamsburg, Monticello, and Mount Vernon. Wellpresented narratives related to the full range of human experience seemingly attract people and their time and dollars to storied sites and landscapes.
The Working People of Richmond exhibition closed on December 7, 1991. Two decades
later, with thousands more daily visits by people living, working, shopping, and visiting
Tobacco Row than in the 1990s, nothing even close to the scope and ambition of The
Working People of Richmond exhibit 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 nal 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 Richmond exhibition,
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 signicant 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 of The Working People of Richmond project. 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 heritage 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

152

CHANGE OVER TIME

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:02:07

PS

PAGE 152

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 ows from adaptive
reuse.42 In this way preservationists could deliver simultaneously on an agenda of environmentalism, 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 Journal 25 (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. See Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910, Richmond, Virginia, Enumeration District 127, Sheet
9 B.
11. Senator John Warner, 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 Virginia 15 (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, Memorandum, 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, Richmond, Virginia.
22. Sam Bass Warner, The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1968).

BLUESTONE

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:02:07

PS

153

TOBACCO ROW

PAGE 153

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 Revitalization 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 the Keeping 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 News 16 (January 2007): 113; Daniel Bluestone, Sustainability, 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.

154

CHANGE OVER TIME

................. 18307$

$CH4

09-27-12 13:02:08

PS

PAGE 154