They came in an abundance of multiplicities and ethnicities to wander up and down Broad during the June afternoon, their plates full of food, enjoying the way they could walk in the street with a beverage without fear of violating open-container laws. They could take their time, wander along the sidewalks, and sit and observe the colorful panoply of event-goers threading around the stalls amid the late-19th- and early 20th-century commercial architecture. There was music, and face-painting, and much to feel good about, and then — poof! — back to traffic and horn-blowing for the morning.
The problem with Broad Street, and downtown in general, is that there’s no place to appreciate the view. During 2009's InLight, I enjoyed the "beer garden" held in what would normally be an aesthetic abomination — a surface parking lot across from the Carpenter Theatre.
I witnessed ghost hands seeming to go in and out of the windows of the old C&P building and watched video projections on screens and walls and thought: "Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if we had someplace to sit and stand that wasn’t asphalt and fold-out chairs?"
Never mind that this site at Sixth and Grace had once been the Westmoreland Club. That grand old building was torn down to make way for a parking deck/retail corner, then the deck itself was demolished. Nothing of architectural equivalence was apparently even considered to replace the long-gone mansion-turned-private-men's-club.
Gertude Stein remarked dismissively of her native Oakland, Calif., that there was no “there there.” Then in 1988, sculptor Roslyn Mazzilli created a “There” in the middle of town.
On the Facebook last night, I caught an intriguing observation by Eric Schindler Gallery operator Kirsten Gray. Beneath an image of Bernini's lovely Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi she mused, “Wouldn't it be nice to have fountains across Richmond like Rome?
"Perhaps start with a huge one in the bare lot before CenterStage on Broad so there is something the public at large could enjoy," Gray continued. "A piazza with a fountain on Grace would be elegant.”
Doug Dobey (this publication’s art director in the mid-1990s) concurred, adding that the CenterStage side of Grace Street, adorned with wonderful mid-20th-century shops, now dormant, could go pedestrian-only from the Capitol Bell Tower to about Foushee.
"It was so hot during Broad Appétit," Gray told me this morning. "And I thought of this fountain because I was in Rome in August, around 1992. I was in Italy two years in a row, and the thing all these cities had in common was a piazza where people of all kinds gathered."
She adds that this fountain and others nearby were intended to revitalize that part of Rome. That is, literally return life to the streets and corners. This didn't involve building mid-city malls or windswept plazas with no art or public attraction.
"What I liked about Italy is that you could sit with your friends by a fountain, and buy a beer or a piece of watermelon from a vendor — and not big nasty beer trucks." Gray said. "Whatever your income bracket was, you could hang out, and it was all centered around grand stairs or fountains. It's so civilized and romantic. People want to set up cafés and vending stands around fountains."
If you wonder why you see people gather on the grass by the Lee Monument, it's because this is a natural aspect to city living. People enjoy gathering in public squares. Or, for example, New York's formerly run-down and now much loved Bryant Park.
None of us are urban planners, but this all sounded familiar. I cracked open back issues of this magazine from 2002 to 2003, and, yes, in black and white, in an April 2002 Downtown Guide, yours truly wrote, “The G.C. Murphy department store on Broad, one block west of Miller & Rhoads is slated for demolition so a new city park can be built there.” The drifting hulk of a store possessed an emblematic Moderne marquee and presence. But, of course, the park never got approved, and today … it’s surface parking.
I remember way back then, seeing renderings that put a public space near the proposed (and much-changed) performing-arts center. I spoke with people about this plaza concept then, andthere was some concern in certain quarters about a downtown public space attracting homeless people, and how would you “control” or “supervise” that kind of place?
Otherwise reasonable intelligent people say and think these sentiments, and yet, they’ll pay beaucoup money to travel to distant cities and sit in their plazas and marvel at them and somehow never consider that it could happen here, too.
Sometimes these concepts need artists, not project planners, to see how there could be a there here.
Markus Bernet photo/Wikimedia Commons
