Never Mind Jim Duncan – Let’s See What the Kiosk Says: Richmond’s Long-Vanished Source for Weather Forecasting.

It’s getting hot in the Shockoe Examiner offices on the top floor of the Prestwould Apartments, high above Monroe Park. A staff member tilts his head toward our giant Kenmore window air conditioner, hoping to hear the compressor spin up and provide one more season of musty, barely cool air from the hulking 1970s machine. Satisfied that there is something coming out, he wipes his forehead, hoists a canvas bag, and pours out a huge mound of letters and emails from our numerous admiring and engaged readers and begins sorting them on his desk.

An undated postcard view of the Hotel Richmond with Richmond’s official weather kiosk in the foreground.

Another member of the staff is idly paging through Richmond postcards and stops at a view of the Hotel Richmond and the north-west part of Capitol Square. “Huh,” he says, “what’s this thing? It looks like a Victorian version of R2D2.” Indeed, in the foreground of the picture is a small structure decorated with Classical motifs, facing the Washington statuary group and located where the 1929 Zero Milestone is today. Tantalized, the Shockoe Examiner staff member called down to the Composing Room, twelve floors below, and told them to stop work on the latest edition of the Examiner. We held the presses until we could take a look at the United States Weather Bureau’s network of what were termed “weather kiosks” and the long-vanished example that once stood in Richmond.

A photo of the kiosk installed in Washington showing the instruments behind glass that recorded weather conditions.

In the early 1900s, the United States Weather Bureau was frustrated with the dissemination of information regarding the weather, which often had to be transmitted by telegraph to newspapers and other outlets. Accordingly, Dr. Charles F. Marvin of that agency designed a “weather kiosk,” to be installed in prominent sites in major American cities, and Richmond’s was located in Capitol Square. The structure was made of cast iron and had panels on each side containing not only the latest forecasts and information from other weather stations but also instruments so Richmonders could see current rainfall counts, the temperature, and humidity.

The former United States Weather Bureau building in Chimborazo Park.

In 1909, the Weather Bureau (a division of the Department of Agriculture), built a headquarters in the center of Chimborazo Park, which provided information and the forecasts which were posted at the weather kiosk in Capitol Square. The building was used until 1953 and was deeded back to the City of Richmond the following year. In 1957 the former Weather Bureau building was given to the National Park Service and today serves as a regional headquarters for the Richmond Battlefield Parks system and a museum to interpret Civil War-era medical history.

A photo from the collection of the Library of Congress shows people crowding around the Washington, D.C weather kiosk in the heat of the summer of 1923.

At first, the weather kiosk was well regarded and depended on for a correct reading of conditions in Richmond and began being referred to as simply “the Kiosk,” in the same way we might quote a weather app today. On September 7, 1910, a Richmond newspaper ran the headline, “Kiosk Goes to 104 Degrees,” describing how “In the kiosk at Capitol Square at 3 P.M. the needle which zigzags its way across the street upon which it records with purple ink the varying temperature, ascended almost perpendicularly until it finally reached 104 degrees.” Soon, however, it became apparent that the position of the Kiosk, with its south-facing exposure in the heat of downtown Richmond and its cast iron construction, influenced its readings.

Richmond Times-Dispatch, June 6, 1912

The credibility of the kiosk was already in doubt by mid-summer 1912, when a Richmond newspaper flatly called the kiosk a malicious liar. “Observer Kiosk, in the language of a candidate for the presidency, is a plain liar of the garden variety. With the official diploma of the United States Weather Bureau to back up his claims, he has been practicing his nefarious claims upon innocent wayfarers in Capitol Square, with the bold abandon of one who grafts under the protective wings of the American eagle.”

On a brutally hot August day in 1912, the thermometer at the Chimborazo headquarters read 93 degrees in the shade, while the Richmond Times-Dispatch glumly headlined, “As Usual, the Kiosk Was Off,” and “Wayfarers through Capitol Square fled in dismay from the official register in the kiosk, which at 3:30 o’clock yesterday afternoon stood a fraction above the 100 mark.” In the brutal summer of 1914, “…the local branch of the Weather Bureau reporting 96 degrees, while the kiosk in the Capitol Square registered 104 degrees, which comes closer to the actual heat felt by the sweltering thousands.”

A detail from the postcard view, showing the Richmond weather kiosk.

By 1928, Richmonders had enough of their discredited weather kiosk. On December 12 it was reported that “The famous old weather bureau kiosk today was going the way of several other landmarks in Capitol square…It has not been used for several years except as an occasional bulletin board… The kiosk has never added anything to the beauty of Capitol square, being a very ugly little anachronism among the beautiful old statues and shrubby.” The newspaper admitted that many Richmonders remembered it kindly as a place they could get the weather news, but the instruments were removed from it some years before and now it only offered charts showing various cloud formations. “Today, only a large pile of ancient weather report cards, the accumulated junk of a generation, marked the resting place of the landmark.”

The largely-symbolic Zero Milestone, from which all distances to Richmond are supposed to be measured, stands today where the Weather Bureau kiosk was located in Capitol Square.

The kiosk was reported as having been removed “to Fulton,” but research has failed to uncover its final disposition and it has probably joined tons of interesting Richmond iron and stonework in the fill that smoothed the city’s valleys and hills.  By 1929, the obliteration of the memory of the kiosk was complete when it was reported that “The foundation was dug in Capitol Square today for a zero milestone to be erected by the State Highway Department on the site recently occupied by the kiosk of the United States Weather Bureau.”

 

The sole surviving Weather Bureau kiosk, installed in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1912. Google Earth

The weather kiosk, once a popular and important part of urban life in the early 1900s, was undone by inaccurate information but even more so by radio that brought accurate and timely weather forecasts into everyone’s home. The kiosk in Knoxville, Tennessee was the last one still standing and was sold by the city in 1933. It was decommissioned and spent the next seventy years in nearby Greenwood Cemetery until it was restored and returned to its original location in downtown Knoxville. It remains there today as a quaint artifact of an earlier kind of information age. Unfortunately, the final fate of Richmond’s much-maligned weather kiosk, once a well-known gathering place and part of the landscape of our Capitol Square, remains a mystery.

- Selden 

July 8, 1972: The 1873 Ninth Street Bridge closes forever and the Shockoe Examiner is there.

Today, there isn’t even a trace remaining of a bridge across the James River in Richmond, despite it having been a vital part of the city’s infrastructure for one hundred years. The massive pylons on the river floor that once held tons of metalwork in the air are gone, and the thousands of feet of the famously creaky wooden roadway have vanished. In its place, the gracefully arched but otherwise soulless 1972 Manchester Bridge carries multiple lanes of traffic, making a once-dramatic journey between Downtown Richmond and Manchester completely unremarkable. The Ninth Street Bridge closed fifty-three years ago, but nevertheless a correspondent for the Shockoe Examiner was there to record the moment in Richmond history.

On its final day of service, a last few cars make their way across what was universally known as the Ninth Street Bridge. Note the streetcar tracks are still in place in the wooden bridge deck and are covered with steel plates.

The same scene today.

The birth of what was originally called “ the James River Bridge” at Ninth Street was a cause for celebration in Richmond and Manchester, the smaller town on the south side of the river. The cornerstone of the bridge was laid on the Manchester side of the river on May 23, 1871 with all appropriate ceremony and Masonic ritual. An enormous parade celebrated the day, too, which was so large it had to form up on Broad Street before it wound its way through town and crossed over Mayo’s Bridge, the only other pedestrian crossing. After the procession arrived at the site, Judge B. R. Welford gave a long and florid speech, filled with visions of booming commerce flowing across the new bridge and punctuated with classical lore and references to the glories of the Civil War.

Manchester was a separate entity from Richmond and the town on the south side of the James declared itself an entirely independent city in 1874. Indicative of the separation between the two that the river imposed, Richmond newspapers had correspondents assigned to Manchester who reported events there as though from a foreign country. On a bitterly cold January afternoon in 1873 the Manchester reporter for the Richmond Dispatch bundled up and walked down to the site of the new bridge. He regarded the river, the unfinished structure, and in the distance the tall buildings of downtown Richmond. “If no unlooked for events occurs in less than three months,” he later wrote hopefully, “free communication may be expected with the metropolis, predictions to the contrary notwithstanding.”

Richmond’s Free Bridge as seen from the north bank of the James River, ca. 1900.

 

By June 1873, even though the approaches to the new bridge were incomplete and no guardrails were in place to keep them out of the river, impatient residents of both sides of the James crossed what became known as the “Free Bridge” on foot and in light carriages to experience the new bridge for themselves. “The railing will also be put in position in a short time, and when lighted up, and the railway is built, the traffic both for business and pleasure will be immense,” reported the Richmond Dispatch. “As it is, the promenade and the view are both delightful.” The next year, when the span was fully opened, the Richmond Dispatch again praised the bridge: “…the Free Bridge is the noblest public work of this locality that has been accomplished by city means…No man not hopelessly prejudiced can cross that bridge without feeling the pleasure that it affords – its commanding view, its facility of intercourse between the two sides of the noble river which is alike our source of delight and our source of life.”

In May 1889, a powerful religious revival swept the African American churches of Richmond. More than two hundred people were baptized in the shallow water below the north end of the Free Bridge, including a hundred new members of the Rev. John Jasper’s Sixth Mount Zion Church in Jackson Ward. Thousands of people gathered on the bridge deck to watch the ceremony, to the point the Mayor was called and advised the bridge couldn’t accommodate the crowd because of the condition of the structure. Mayor Ellyson rushed to the riverside, gathered all the policemen he could, blocked the bridge and gradually cleared the crowd from it, perhaps preventing a disaster that would have made the death toll from the famous collapse of a floor in the Capitol in 1870 that killed sixty people look tiny in comparison.

The Free Bridge is left of the railroad trestle in this undated postcard view of the industrialized James River valley, with Manchester in the distance.

 

The fact the new bridge had no toll was critical for commerce across the James and many heavy wagons thundered back and forth across the wooden deck of the Free Bridge. Through the years, though, only small appropriations were made to keep it in repair. During some intervals when the condition of the structure began to look particularly dire, it was closed to all but foot traffic. 

 

A 1972 photo of the bridge, showing the rough wood construction of the bridge deck and walkways.

Decades rolled by and the Free Bridge limped along, occasionally closed for repair or barricaded as unsafe but always patched up and returned to use. New interest in the strength of the Free Bridge was generated in 1911 with the purchase of Mayo’s Bridge by the City of Richmond.  The immediate demolition of Mayo’s and construction of its replacement left the Free Bridge and the Boulevard Bridge (the “Nickel Bridge”) for some months the only way to cross the river except for railroad trestles.

August, 1969: a National Guardsman stands on the 1873 Ninth Street Bridge and watches the flooded James River, which reached a record height that summer during Hurricane Camille. In the distance, a loaded coal train has been parked on the 1916 Atlantic Coast Line Railroad trestle in an effort to help hold it in place in the rushing water. The railroad bridge was demolished the following year.

By the 1960s, Richmond (having consolidated with Manchester in 1910) finally decided to replace what was now known simply as the “Ninth Street Bridge.” Terming the bridge, “old, inadequate, and restricted,” the Richmond Times-Dispatch reminded readers that the structure was already forty years old when its replacement was first proposed in 1913. Bridge design had vastly changed by then and the old structure, with its wooden deck and sidewalks and spindly cast iron railing must have looked quaint, even by the standards of the early 1900s. By the 1960s, thumping across the uneven wooden deck of the Ninth Street Bridge was a constant reminder to Richmonders that the structure had far outlived its lifespan.

 

Richmond Times-Dispatch, July 14, 1969.

A new bridge was designed, financed, and constructed and given the official name of the “Manchester Bridge.” The celebration of its opening July 8, 1972 was probably similar to the one that had inaugurated the earlier bridge ninety-nine years before. There was a procession, a ribbon cutting, a Dixieland band, an honor guard, and twenty-three speakers on a stage at the northern end. The dignitaries squinted into the glare from the pristine white concrete surface at a crowd of a hundred people. A motorcade formed up, pretty girls (one wearing a sash that proclaimed her “Miss At Long Last”) waved from the back of convertibles. Henry Gonner, a fixture at every Richmond parade or opening, happily honked the horn on his Model T Ford as he led the parade one last pass over the old bridge, literally in the shadow of its enormous concrete successor.

Henry Gonner (1913-2004) was the Director of the Central Richmond Association and a consummate Richmond booster, arranging events, parties, and celebrations that called attention to Richmond as a dynamic and thriving city. It was inevitable that Henry would be at the opening of the new bridge at the wheel of his 1913 Model T, dressed in his usual duster and goggles and as always grinning and waving. The new Manchester Bridge was just the kind of development Henry loved to see in Richmond: big, modern, and progressive.

 

Henry Gonner leads the last motorcade across the 1873 bridge on July 8, 1972.

Below the new Manchester Bridge, the last few cars made their way along the old wooden deck which had seen troop transports and military convoys, screaming fire engines and wagons groaning with bricks. The bridge had carried horses and carriages, mules pulling freight, automobiles and trucks and streetcars. It felt the footfall of thousands of weary feet, commuting back and forth to work in the factories that lined the river. And now it was all coming to an end.

At the appointed time, cones set in the roadway on the approaches shifted traffic to the new bridge, and personnel from the City dragged “BRIDGE CLOSED” signs into the street. The Ninth Street Bridge, having transported Richmonders since Ulysses S. Grant was President, finally fell silent. A century of service had come to an end.

- Selden