Meet Me Under the Clock

That's the clock from Richmond's venerable old department store, Miller & Rhoads. "Under the clock" was a favorite meeting place for Richmonders when they were having a busy shopping day downtown. The clock hangs in the Valentine Museum now that the store is no longer in business.

When I first moved to Richmond in the late 70's, M&R's flagship store downtown was a fine experience. You could have lunch in their tearoom, and watch models parade down the runway in M&R's latest offerings. You could have anything you bought delivered to your home at no extra cost if you didn't feel like lugging your purchased items around the store. Morris remembers a perfume fountain at one store entrance, where ladies could dip their hands as they passed by. Doesn't that sound more refined than those aggravating perfume girls who wait to pounce on you with a blast of fragrance?


The Valentine is Richmond's local history museum, and Morris & I went there in September for a Gay Richmond History Bus Tour. Before we set out on the little gay bus, we toured the museum exhibits. I snapped a couple of photos of the old retail signs that the Valentine has saved from the wrecking ball.

Thalhimers was the city's other upscale department store, Miller & Rhoads' arch-rival, and now there's an empty lot where the downtown department store stood. You can take a gander at it below; that's all that's left of Thalhimer's - a flat, empty plot - with the new Federal Court Building in the distance.


Miller & Rhoads, at least most of it, has been "adaptively re-used" as expensive condominium & hotel space. Morris & I, ever nosey, went to see the condominiums in early October. They were overpriced, in my opinion, but it's nice to see the downtown area being revitalized by people moving back into the district.


The next picture was taken from one of the condominium's terraces, looking down onto the roof of the Berry-Burk store. Berry-Burk, another retail establishment from the past, was a quality men's store where I used to buy clothes. Now you can live there. A lot of the empty Richmond business buildings have been converted to residential spaces.

The Sidewalk Cafe is one of my favorite places for casual meals, with its Miss Sidewalk mural on the side of the building. They are known for reasonably priced food and ample serving sizes. A few years ago when I worked a couple of blocks from the restaurant, I went in for lunch one day - not really terribly hungry, I ordered a hummus appetizer. I swear it was served on a hubcap. The platter was huge, and there was more food than four people could have handled. Their fried calamari is another personal favorite, but I've never been disappointed with anything I've tried on the menu.


Alamo BBQ is on Union Hill, and I love this wee building. I guess it used to be a filling station. Award winning barbeque. Outdoor dining or carry-out only. The patio area features a few tables attended by flies the size of bumblebees, and they attack your food in predatory packs, like wolves. They give you time to get settled at the table with your food while they develop their strategy, and then one diverts your attention while the rest of the pack swarms your sandwiches & sides. Good luck. You'll need it.


It would be a shame to post so close to Halloween without photographs of people dressed like idiots, so I'll include a couple of shots from Sadie's last party. Here we have Sheldon & Robespierre; Sheldon wearing his traditional fool's cap, and Robespierre dressed like the prince he believes himself to be. Sheldon recently celebrated 16 years of sobriety, and Robespierre marked his fifth year. The hats were on loan from the Planet Bill Collection, and both gentlemen were very gracious about wearing them...for much longer than anyone really wanted them to. Aren't they cuter than speckled pups under a mushroom?


And here's little Romeo, celebrating his real live birthday, which happened to fall on the same day as Sadie's party. Romeo was not a good sport about his Planet Bill Birthday Cake Hat, which he snatched off his head as soon as the picture was taken. Perhaps he was afraid that his bespoke haberdasher would see this compromising photograph.


Now we come to four photographs of an apartment building in the Wilton section of Richmond. This exclusive neighborhood, nestled between Cary Street Road to the north and the James River to the south, is characterized by steep hills, mature trees, deep ravines, and expensive single-family homes. Houses in this section are mostly traditionally designed, with an emphasis on Federal, Georgian, and Colonial styles.

Seeing a 10-unit apartment building in the International style at the juncture of Tempsford & Kennondale Lanes was both jarring and exhilarating. It's fantastic! George Hoppe must have felt the same way when he saw the 1931 Exhibit of the International Style at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

George Hoppe returned to Richmond after spending several years in New York, and was one of the first to design & construct buildings in this new modern style in a city with a strong traditional aesthetic. I'm sure the neighbors blanched with disgust and had to pour themselves a double bourbon when they looked at "that eyesore across the street."


From the Virginia Department of Historic Resources records:
George Hoppe’s building at 101 Tempsford Lane as well as the single family dwelling he constructed next door are two rare early examples of the International Style of architecture in the City of Richmond.
The style developed in 1925 in Europe, particularly in Germany after WW1 as a departure from the previous architectural styles which were heavily influenced by history, ornamentation and architectural details. This new, modern style wanted to design buildings that were “Machines for living”, and were stripped of unnecessary details and focused on the function, materials and mass of a building. Famous architects such as Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Gropius are noted for immigrating to America and introducing these modern, radical architectural ideas.


Hoppe’s buildings are particularly significant examples of this style due to their early construction dates, late 1930s and early 1940s. The well known Rice House, an International Style dwelling designed by Austrian architect, Richard Neutra, was built 30 years later, just down the banks of the James River from 101 Tempsford Lane.


The asymmetrical building form, unornamented exterior walls, flush exterior steel windows, flat roofs and lack of detail are all characteristics found in Hoppe’s modernist buildings, which also respond to their unique terrains. Functionalism is a theme throughout Hoppe’s 101 Tempsford Lane. The stepping terraces, steel vestibules, glass block, and steel windows are all a nod to the idea of a building working as a machine. [note: Hoppe even installed a radiant heat system in this building]

The building is undergoing restoration, and I was able to enter a couple of units. I couldn't resist taking a picture of this mid-century bathroom sink. It is almost identical to the bathroom sink from my childhood, with its slender chrome legs and attached towel bars.

Boo, Y'all.

You know what's weird? It just occurred to me that I have no clear memories of the Halloween costumes I wore as a child. I can recall trick-or-treating, and sitting on the living room floor in a sugar-induced stupor surrounded by candy. I remember walking through the neighborhood streets on crisp, dark nights with Jimmy - the boy who lived behind us - our dads following a half-block back, keeping an eye on us. I can even recollect how my plastic Halloween masks felt uncomfortably bumpy & hard, as if they were trying to reshape my face. I just can't remember any of my costumes.

Well, not until I got older. Suzanne had a costume party one time when we were in high school, and I decided to go as a baby. My mother crafted some sort of giant diaper for me out of God knows what, and I carried a rattle. For some reason, I guess because I was half-naked, I decided that I needed a second costume from which I could emerge as a crying baby.

This "travel costume" was a spur of the moment idea, and I blame the outcome on the haste of the execution and the chilly night. It was too cold to ride around in a diaper, so I thought it would be brilliant to arrive in a - well, it just sounds ludicrous now that I think about it.

My mom was very indulgent about letting me select the color of my room, even when I was too young for such weighty responsibility, so when I chose a rancid mustard-gold paint in 4th grade, she cheerfully painted the walls and then told me I would have to live with it. By 7th grade, I was redecorating my room with two white walls & two malachite green walls, black curtains on the white wall & white curtains on the green wall, and black & white shag carpet. A black vinyl swivel chair and an orange beanbag chair provided a venue for conversations with friends and listening to my Jesus Christ Superstar album. After a few years, the beanbag either needed new beans, or -

I decided it would be a lark to show up at Suzanne's door as a beanbag chair. Of course, I needed help. I couldn't drive over there like that. I also needed help getting the beans out of the vinyl beanbag. The beans were really little styrofoam pellets, and my dad produced a spare outdoor trashcan so we could empty out the beanbag. Boy, those little pellets took on a life of their own when they were released from that chair cover. They did not want to settle down in that trashcan, and they flew about & stuck to everything. They also seemed to expand in the cool night air. My dad had to get a second trashcan to hold all of the styrofoam balls, and even then they seemed to spill over the edges like living lava.

I guess it was static electricity that made these little pellets so perky & pesky. Try as we might, we could not get the bag completely cleared of them, but it was time to go to the party so my friends zipped me up in the beanbag, hoisted me into the hatchback of my car, and off we went. The beanbag was really hot inside.

I rolled into the party, someone unzipped the bag, and a cranky baby coated with styrofoam balls wrestled his way out of the chair cover, like an infant turtle struggling free of its leathery egg shell. I'll bet Suzanne's mother was still finding styrofoam pellets when she was moving to a new home several years later.

Sadly, I didn't learn my lesson from this experience. A couple of years later while home on break from college, one of my dorm mates (also home in nearby Norfolk) had a costume party, and I went as a mummy. At the time, it seemed like a good idea to put on a complete set of long underwear and wrap myself in toilet paper. By the end of the evening, all of the toilet paper had fallen off in perforated squares, and I was simply a young man wearing nothing but long underwear in public.