The online form has been up for about two months, so you’ve had time to put it off “until later.” Well, guess what? It’s later. The public process closes on Friday, July 30.
If you are a follower of Richmond’s cultural arts, please go to the form and look over the categories. Make sure to take in the list of prior honorees. I hope that you’ll see in those names people who’ve made commitments both to the community and their art; whatever forms their creativity takes.
As to the process of selection, and some background on both the honors and the woman who inspired them, here’s my summation of the “Pollaks at 12.” See how the honorees are recognized in the publication.
And, in the best most possible polite way, I point out that it is P-O-L-L-A-K, not Pollock or Polack or Pollack.
Thank you.
(In other news, 1708 Gallery’s outgoing executive director Tatjana Beylotte gave the organization a lovely parting gift: a $60,000, two-year grant from the Warhol Foundation to support exhibitions and educational programming.)
Each piece in "Reflecting and Collecting" is a response to art within the permanent collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
The octagonal house in front of Linden Row is a miniature of an earlier concept by Craig Pleasants, program director for the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, an idyll for makers and creators near Amherst, Va. Some years ago, a larger version was home for Pleasants and his wife, Sheila (the VCCA’s artist service director). They lived in the unique cabin for three years. “It’s about 400 square feet and a sleeping loft,” Pleasants says.
The house still stands at the foot of the North Carolina portion of the Appalachian Trail near Tryon, N.C. “We lived there, just the two of us,” he explains. “When we first moved in, no running water but always electricity. First year, we got a well and running water, then added a bathroom on the side in an 8-by-8-foot room. Each side of this octagon is 8 feet long.”
Sheila’s brother wryly dubbed it “The Octagonal Living Unit,” and the name stuck, hence the piece’s title, Octagonal Living Unit 2.0.
The Pleasants later moved to New York City, and the necessities of their growing family transformed the OLU into a vacation house for five people.
A few years ago, Pleasants considered marketing the OLU as a kit. He partnered with Charlottesville architect Alan Scouten. Scouten’s interest then and now was prefabrication using a building material called Thermasteel. The durable material, made of steel and expanded polystyrene, holds up well in extreme conditions. And in the case of the OLU, with its octagonal shape, winds blow around the structure rather than providing a sail-like surface.
Pleasants thought the OLU could serve purposes ranging from a guesthouse to an emergency disaster shelter. Recent earthquake crises in Chile, China and Haiti caused Pleasants to revisit his OLU idea and fit it in the context of the exhibit.
In terms of VMFA inspiration, he chose Robert Gwathmey’s Family Portrait, which presents an African-American family sitting on the front porch of a shotgun house, and the color stripes of Brice Marden’s Meritatio.
This unit, says Pleasants, can be assembled in a few hours, and it benefits from still being quite useful years on, unlike much emergency or transitional housing. For about $50,000, it would be possible to manufacture, crate and ship 10 of these units (complete with roof) to Port-au-Prince. Which is what he’s offering to do with the proceeds if someone purchases the Linden Row model.
But Pleasants isn’t an NGO, or even Sean Penn, so he needs to know that if the OLUs get sent, somebody on the other end would see to their construction. He's made queries but has found it difficult to locate someone on the ground with the infrastructure to utilize the OLUs. According to Plesants, “It’s been six months since the earthquake, and less than 4,000 transitional houses have been provided for 2 million left homeless.”
Welsh, who activated the group to take care of Shockoe Hill and guide visitors around, isn't washing his hands of the place or walking off in a huff. He just needs to get on to the next phase of his life.
He wrote to me, “My plans now are to refocus on property-management work that I do in the West End and rest up. I will be available to assist those volunteers at the cemetery who need access to things that I have or know that would be helpful.
"The cemetery is so important that I will probably always be associated with it some way. But for now, it makes sense for me personally to take a break and see how the future manifests itself. I have found that trusting one’s instincts, mixed with patience, is often the best compass for the journey ahead.”
As I wrote in the piece, the dead do make their demands.
How we treat them reflects on our community. We are duty-bound to serve the living, of course, but allowing the city's cemeteries to deteriorate — especially historic properties that could become tourist attractions — isn’t a good alternative, either. That is, unless Richmond wants its own version of London’s Highgate Cemetery, with its western, older section that's known for dark forest spookiness. Founded in 1839, by 1975 it was abandoned and overgrown. However, in 1981 the nonprofit Friends of Highgate Cemetery took over to initiate a continuing restoration.
On a recent excursion to Boston and Halifax, Nova Scotia, I encountered graveyards of similar vintage that had been similarly adopted by nonprofit groups. They are marked, plaqued and on the tour lines. Seems to me it doesn’t take a huge amount of money but an openness to different priorities.
As Calvin Kroll, whose wife is buried at Shockoe Hill and who expects to be buried there himself, says in the story, corporate or other philanthropic assistance would seem to be a natural, given the effort Welsh and his group put into reviving Shockoe. In a somewhat facetious rhetorical flourish, he asked, “I mean, it only makes sense, right?”
After last week’s post about my trip to RVAlution, I was upon request visited by White, who told me, “Nobody’s proposing to get rid of dancing or outlawing dancing. It’s so exhausting to respond to, frankly, BS. And it’s just not helpful, that people don’t want to acknowledge what is being proposed, but instead want to scare people with a boogeyman.”
Yesterday, an update on the debate appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
In the past few years, there has been an uptick in “nuisance” regulations, running from party patrols to noise ordinances. Whether Richmond deserves these statutes is another debate.
White conveyed his exasperation about wanting to make nightlife safe and attractive over worries about whether trying to prevent misbehavior “is somehow not fair to people causing the problem in the first place.”
As White sees it, there’s a cascading failure of accountability, from the licensing and enforcement regulations running from the state to the city to allowing club owners with repeated past violations to operate establishments. This creates a lax environment where anything can happen, and the regional blowback following a few egregious violations damages Shockoe’s reputation — and doesn't do much for the rest of the city either.
He wanted to clear up some misperceptions and explain what his group is seeking to accomplish with a citywide nightclub ordinance or, to be more precise, a somewhat archaic-sounding “dance hall” ordinance.
“There are no nightclubs in Virginia,” White explained. “Just like there are no bars.”
That is, Virginia’s laws aren’t by name devoted to either bars or nightclubs. First, in Virginia, any public place that distributes alcohol must also serve food — 45 percent of its sales receipts must reflect that, thus making every place by technical definition a “restaurant” (and in some cases, not good ones). The law has also closed the doors of some clubs. Alcohol and other violations ultimately ended the legendary Flood Zone, where Dave Matthews appeared in his salad says, along with the BoDeans, Phish, Nine Inch Nails — and GWAR. There were annual New Year's events and all-ages shows, but fun and sentiment didn't matter when the city closed the 900-capacity venue around 1997. (It's now the Have a Nice Day Café.)
The storied no-frills punk venue Twisters, at 929 W. Grace St., was forced to close in 2001 under the weight of the 45 percent rule. (It's now the more laid-back but nonetheless embattled Strange Matter.) Cafine's, in a former bank building at Fourth and Grace streets, was a sleek, urbane club where Prince danced while in town and where the bi-monthly indie Flicker film festival played to capacity crowds. In 2001, nine men, including the club's co-owner and its chef, were swept up in a ABC- and narcotics-enforcement operation called Operation Ex-Clubs. Cafine's liquor license was revoked, and the trustees of a pension plan that owned the building kicked the club out. The co-owner was aquitted, and the charges against the chef were withdrawn, but by that point, Cafine's, a promising downtown nightspot when there weren't many, ended. It's had various incarnations since.
None of this had anything to do with dancing. And nobody died.
Such establishments are governed by city codes and the Bureau of Alcohol Beverage Control’s “Peace and Good Order” regulations. The state grants licenses to restaurants, which the city doesn’t control. Then — from White’s perspective — the ABC won’t or can’t enforce its own Peace and Good Order rules. Part of this stems from lengthy and public brouhahas with such clubs as The Alley in Newport News, which the ABC sought to close due to incidents of violence. But a Newport News Circuit Court judge ruled that the club didn’t cause the problems.
That affair also took its detour into racial-profiling territory and went political. Some have complained that it’s African-American clubs getting unfair scrutiny, to which White with evident weariness replies, “You know, I’d just prefer that nobody should get shot in or outside a club. Black, white or whatever. Race has no place in this equation. It’s basically about life or death.”
White grew up in Richmond, and before he got married, became a father and moved to Hanover, he was 21 and at liberty. He recalls an 18th Street hole-in-the-wall called Shots that, well, served shots and that was about it. Still, nobody ever got killed there.
Now he’s invested in Shockoe through Main Street Realty, the company whose projects have included Rocketts View apartments at Main and Pear streets, the Lofts at Canal Walk and the current Richmond Cold Storage project.
More people are moving into Shockoe, White says, and they tend to be young, unmarried or without children. “They have disposable income, and they don’t require much in city services,” he says. Further, the historic renovated properties with city real-estate abatements are coming onto the tax rolls. White observes that Richmond’s waited a decade for these properties to begin paying for themselves and is on the verge of losing that investment. “What you’ve got is a cash cow for the city of Richmond, however, it is exceedingly fragile.”
White says that with every spike in violence, some newer Shockoe residents have thought twice about re-upping their leases or sought to get out of them. After news broadcasts, parents of young people living there call up rental offices to ask what kind of neighborhood their kids have moved into, he says.
Shockoe’s received a spate of negative publicity of late, including Club Velvet’s sordid saga, fatal shootings outside the Have a Nice Day Café and other incidents.
These occurrences, and others before, drove demands That Something Be Done — though what that Something may be is the problem. At present, the default solution is parking police cruisers at 18th and Main streets. This doesn't send a good message.
White says that the residents of Main Street Realty’s buildings don’t socialize in Shockoe Bottom. They may go up a few blocks to the Slip or the Hat Factory, but they prefer the Fan and West End. “Late at night, around 18th Street, it’s truly a terrifying place,” he says. Your mileage may vary.
That said, there are means to control the accumulation of unruly crowds that don’t require banning dancing. A few planks of the Shockoe reform platform include curbing nights that allow entry to 18- to 20-year-olds and banning events staged by third-party promoters. “Club owners will look at us after something happens and say, ‘It wasn’t our fault, it was the promoter,’ ” White says.
When I asked White about his view of the fact that it’s now legal for Virginians to pack concealed and licensed handguns in restaurants — providing they don’t drink — he contemplated his response, then simply shook his head and frowned.
The current proposal working its way toward Richmond City Council would:
• Determine that a restaurant is a public dance hall if more than 10 percent of its space is devoted to dancing.
• Require that a dance-hall establishment pay a $100 annual permit and a $300 license-operations tax.
• Deny a permit if the applicant or promoter is guilty of crimes associated with poor and negligent management of public spaces.
A full Council vote is scheduled for Sept. 13.
Though in recent years they've become something of a media sensation, not to mention the cause of concern because trees in which they made their temporary residence were in danger of removal, the martins aren’t new to Richmond, though they are new to some Richmonders.
The magnificent Mr. Samuel Mordecai, for whom I am grateful for having authored Richmond In By-Gone Days in 1856, speaks with affection about the “martens,” as he calls them.
He praises their visits and relates how for some reason in his day they’d not been around much. Mordecai missed them. He speculated that they were hesitant to return because boys throwing rocks at them persuaded the birds that Richmond wasn’t hospitable.
Years earlier, the martens roosted in the elaborate cornice of the house built by shot and pewter manufacturer Moses Austin. Austin and his family got into lead manufacturing prior to the Revolution. They supplied the first roof for the Virginia Capitol — that ended up leaking and required replacement with slate.
Austin went through a few businesses and moved further west until he ended up in San Antonio, then in the Spanish province of Texas. He persuaded the governor to admit settlers, thereby changing U.S. and Mexican history. His son, Stephen, colonized Texas.
Moses Austin, Mordecai recalls, “built the once fine house, now Lisle's corner, formerly Gamble's, on Main and Fourteenth streets, the most imposing structure of its day.” There the martens enjoyed nesting.
From Austin’s roofline, “the young could take wing, the number of old and new broods was so great that their noise drowned all competition. The nuisance could not be abated by any other mode than covering the cornice with canvas, which now disfigures it.”
Denied their previous roost, the martens turned their migratory fly-in to Capitol Square.
The birds gathered there “in general Congress … for about a week or more previous to their Exodus to a warmer climate or to winter quarters,” writes Mordecai. Prior to their departure, “they assembled in myriads, and on the next day they disappeared invisibly and entirely.”
Mordecai rhapsodizes about how the martens’ gathering was far more in order and pleasant than the “unplumbed bipeds” of the state legislature.
He laments, “What has become of the martens? Have they changed their seat of government? It is several years since they assembled in Richmond, and few are to be seen in the city or its vicinity. I hope they will revisit us, for though not musical, they are examples of industry and parental love, and moreover, a colony of them would be more efficient in ridding the trees of insects than all the beltings and washes that have been tried.”
If the martens were encouraged to remain in Capitol Square, Mordecai considered, then” their music would add to the charms of the grounds and their appetites would diminish the number of caterpillars that destroy the foliage.”
At some point, the martins switched their landing to Shockoe. But we’ve had them around since the earliest of Richmond’s by-gone days.
Shockoe’s third annual purple martin “Gone to the Birds” festival is scheduled for July 31, from 6 to 9 p.m
P.S. I'd like to give credit where it's due: Fellow history scribe Brooks Smith alerted me to Mordecai's martin mention a couple years ago and urged me to use the information, which he could've also utilized for one of his on-air or written essay. So thanks, Brooks.
