« In Which We Were Stuck In The Rain »

The Worst of It

by OWEN ROBERTS

I actually don't remember if Kelly or Taylor had been in the passenger seat at the time. One of them, probably Kelly, would have been in the front with me, the other in the middle seat. We were stuck on a small section of Thompson, right near the highway, between Grace and Monument. The cars stopped moving around three in the afternoon, we were literally about fifty feet away from the intersection. If we had left only a few minutes earlier for my parent's house, we would have missed it.

As it happened, we got home past eight, and the electricity was out, my sister and mother were walking around with candles and getting ready to play boardgames. Then, the rain stopped, and I was able to drive Kelly back home around midnight. A few days later I went back to Connecticut to start my sophomore year in college.

I hadn't wanted to go back to college after that summer. I talked about dropping out, though I didn't somehow screw up the paperwork that would have been required, part of me knew it wasn't actually going to happen. I met Kelly through a friend at the ice cream store, and asked her out a couple of nights later. On our first date we went to Bottom's Up, the pizza place where my friends in high school had gone every Sunday night to see jazz music. On our second date we walked around Church Hill, ending up on the roof of the old VCU art building, from where you could see the whole city, even Dogwood Dell on the South Side.

We sat at the edge of the building, whatever the material was rubbing off black on our hands, silently. On our third date we went to Emilio's, a bar on Meadow, where my old drum teacher's band played every Tuesday night, and I, thinking I was the hippest seventeen-year-old in Richmond, had been allowed in.

Being nineteen and relatively oblivious of the world outside of my friends and my girlfriend and the books I was reading, I had no idea the hurricane (officially a Tropical Storm) was coming. We were racing down Main Street when the rain started.

Shockoe Bottom was the neighborhood hit worst by the flood. It's just below east of downtown Richmond (downtown being where the few big buildings live, the banks and the governor's mansion and the other government buildings), and is the city's oldest neighborhood. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Richmond was the South's biggest source of enslaved Africans, which came into the slave docks, which you can still visit in Shockoe Bottom. There are talks of building a slavery museum in the Bottom.

After importing captured Africans into the US was outlawed in 1807, the function of the slave docks changed. Instead of being a hub for ships coming up the James River, it became a port for slaves to be sold from Virginia to new plantations in the deep south. Following the invention of the cotton gin and the Louisiana Purchase, selling slaves became lucrative business, and Virginian plantation owners began breeding slaves for sale.

Lumpkin's Jail for slaves, recently rediscovered, was just near the Main Street Station. The 17th street farmer's market was once the site of the town whipping post. The VCU parking lot where my parents park their cars everyday was once the town gallows, where the slave rebellion leader Gabriel was executed in 1800.

Direct predecessors of Richmond largest newspaper, The Richmond Times Dispatch, announced auctions and published flyers for runaway slaves. It is estimated that 350,000 Africans were sold in Richmond during the next sixty years, the descendants of whom are now spread all over the country.

The city's plan to build a baseball stadium in Shockoe Bottom (for the purpose of reviving the economy in downtown Richmond - the current stadium is on the North Side, about two miles away) has been opposed from the beginning, because of all the history it would be built on top of. Some people want to turn it into a historic site.

My family moved to Richmond in August of 1993, when I was eight. Soon after moving in, my dad and I went down to Belle Isle, an island in the James River that sits just south of downtown, connected to the city by a long footbridge that hangs from the highway. We walked over to the island to walk around the paths and swim in the rapids. As we approached we saw men in the field where the footbridge connected wearing grey and blue uniforms and shooting guns at one another. We walked past the field, and my dad explained to me the Civil War which of course lead to his explanation of slavery. I was very confused.

Richmond has seen a few destructive floods. The 1870 flood was the worst since the 1771 flood; the Mayo bridge was destroyed, 20 homes were swept away. The Mayo bridge went down again in 1882. The flood in 1985 inspired the building of the flood wall.

It seems like nothing really happened in Shockoe Bottom for a little more than a century, until in 1995 they built the flood wall, to protect the area from the river water rising. After that the area grew quickly, businesses appeared and it became sort of the center for night clubs and fancy restaurants and stuff, at least downtown. Ironically, part of the flood of 2004 was caused by the flood wall keeping Gaston's rain water in the Bottom.

Nine people died in the flood that I experienced. The rain started as we drove down Main Street. Then we turned onto Thompson and saw all the cars were stopped. For hours we sat in the car, the rain getting heavier, waiting for something to happen. The sun set while we were stuck. We could barely see the cars right next to mine. I don't remember what we talked about. The water reached something like fifteen or sixteen feet in Shockoe Bottom. All of the restaurants and stores, anything on the first floor of any building, was destroyed. All of the places I had hung out down there in high school were gone, and wouldn't be rebuilt for a couple of years at least. Because I left a few days later, I didn't see any of the damage.

The flood wall itself is kind of cool. It's massive, and there's a walkway on the top, where people jog. It's a great view of the river and downtown Richmond, as well as the South Side. If you walk the whole way across you end up on Hull Street, which is known as the murder street in Richmond. When I first started driving, at sixteen, I was told that if I ever found myself on Hull Street, to get off of it as soon as possible. On Christmas Eve day my family took a walk across the flood wall and ended up on Hull Street, and walked through a park. It was virtually deserted.

My first two years of college were weird because I still thought of myself as living in Richmond, and I spent as much time there as I could. Then I spent a summer in Brooklyn and Richmond became more and more of a memory. This past Christmas I was home for almost a week and a bunch of my friends from high school were around, and we went out to Bottoms Up for the first time in years.

Needless to say, the vibe was quite different. To our surprise, the Butterbean Quartet was playing that night, and two of the original member, brothers who play drums and trumpet, were there. One of them had a baby and both were much rounder than they had been when we were in high school.

The new design of Bottoms Up made it feel more like a chain pizza place in the West End (it turns out that there is now a West End location) than a cool downtown jazz bar. Smoking in public had finally been banned in Richmond only a few weeks before, so the bar was clean and nice from the host stand to booth we sat in. The pizza tasted pretty much the same.

My friends and I all went to different colleges and live in different cities now. We were all really into jazz in high school, but some of us are less so now. We all developed pretty different tastes while we were in college. Watching Butterbean six years later couldn't have been a more palpable metaphor of our deflated jazz egos.

Cafe Gutenberg was one of the hangouts I went to when I had my first real girlfriend. I was a sophomore in high school. The cafe was modeled after the Parisian cafes of the mid 20th century, with coffee and wine and rare books to peruse. To a fifteen year old it definitely felt like the most intellectual place to be hanging out. In the flood they lost most of their library, hundreds of first editions and otherwise cool books destroyed.

They reopened with a more modest library, and were eventually taken over by new managers who turned the focus to fine dining instead of cafe food. The food is definitely good, but the vibe isn't the same. Their new website doesn't acknowledge the flood or the books.

My favorite place in high school was the 17.5 cafe. It was a bizarre place around the corner from Cafe Gutenberg, with an iron "17.5" logo hanging on the outside, which I thought was really cool. It was a pretty normal hole in the wall coffee shop, but it looked like the kind of thing people would hang out at in an arty movie or something, there was exposed brick and weird furniture and book shelves, and lots of coolsters. It was only open erratically.

They had music there, and a band called The Pers Trio played a bunch of shows. The bass player had gone to our high school, but was at Berklee and would bring his band down for shows. They played aggressive, noisy jazz, and were really good at it, I still listen to their recordings. They would be tucked into the front corner bay window, and there was only room for maybe twenty people to sit and watch them. Sometimes they would have experimental music or weird folk shows on the second floor of the cafe, which was sort of a reading room.

17.5 doesn't exist at all anymore. This is it on Google Maps, it's apparently been replaced by some other coffee shop that went out of business.

Owen Roberts is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Brooklyn. He last wrote in these pages about Eckhart Tolle.

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Comments

[rachel]

Richmond! hooray! the best place!