The Shockoe ExaminerBlogging the History of Richmond, Virginia: Grace Place

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Grace Place - Demolished.

Selden Richardson submitted this image of the demolition of the 1890s-era building that housed Grace Place. Does anyone know the year this building was demolished?

3 comments:

Vintage Richmond said...: My memory is hazy on this, but I'm going to guess 2003?

I didn't even know it was being torn down, I just drove by one day and it was gone. Sad.; January 20, 2011 at 9:37 PM
Jeff said...: Well, I have a photo from 2006, and I know it was gone by mid 2007, because I have a photo of them tearing down it's neighbors and I know it was gone when that happened. I remember always wondering what kind of person lived in this house, with its overgrown shrubs and iron fence.; January 28, 2011 at 12:03 AM
Shockoe Examiner Staff - see bottom of blog entry for the specific author. said...: Thanks Jeff. Great (sad really) images.

- Ray; January 28, 2011 at 12:53 PM

Contributors:

Ray Bonis:

Ray worked at VCU Libraries' James Branch Cabell Library from 1989 until 2021. He is the co-author of Virginia Commonwealth University (2006) and Greetings from Richmond (2009) - an architectural history of the city.

Selden Richardson:

Architectural historian and author of Built By Blacks: African American Architecture and Neighborhoods in Richmond, Virginia (2006), The Tri-State Gang in Richmond: Murder and Robbery in the Great Depression. (2012), and Richmond Murder & Mayhem (2023)

On History:

"The dead were and are not. Their place knows them no more and is ours today...The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone, like ghosts at cockcrow."
-- G. M. Trevelyan (1876-1962) from his "Autobiography of an Historian," An Autobiography and Other Essays (1949).

Key Dates in Richmond History
(more to follow)

1737 – William Mayo laid out the original street plan for the town of Richmond on land provided by William Byrd II.

1742 – Chartered as a town

1780 – Virginia’s state capital moved from Williamsburg to Richmond.

1782 – Incorporated as a city.

1788 - Virginia State Capitol building completed.

1860-1865 – Serves as capital of the Confederate States of America.

1910 - Manchester, the city located just south of the James, is consolidated with Richmond.

1949 - Oliver Hill (1907-2007) elected to City Council, first African American since Reconstruction.

1968 - Virginia Commonwealth University created by the merger of the Medical College of Virginia and Richmond Professional Institute.

1977 - Henry Marsh elected as first African American mayor of Richmond.

2009 – Shockoe Examiner founded.