The Sevilla Hotel

Mordecai B. “Morte” Florsheim (1878-1961) was an innovator, best known for opening the Jefferson Market, termed the first modern grocery store in Richmond in 1915. He also established several dry cleaners and laundries around the city, including the Royal Laundry, hailed as “the first completely electrically driven laundry in America.” Florsheim’s obituary mentions he “…was also active in the real estate field, building the Sevilla Apartments, the first hotel apartment in the city.”

The term ”hotel apartment,” (also termed residential hotels and today known as extended-stay hotels), was a new concept among American hoteliers in the 1920s. The Sevilla was probably intended to complement the famously elegant Jefferson Hotel, only one block away, and serve that same demographic accustomed to a certain measure of luxury. The Sevilla was actually not the first hotel apartment building, nor was it the only one near the Jefferson. The Kilmarnock opened its doors one block east of the Jefferson on West Main Street in 1924, and it promised the same kind of rich appointments as promoted at the Sevilla: “Running ice drinking water is available on every floor, and several [rail] cars of furniture are in the building. Every suite has been completely furnished by the Columbia Furniture Company.” 

 

Richmond Times-Dispatch, February 14, 1926.

 

The Richmond News-Leader reported Florsheim’s new building would open May 1, 1926 and approvingly described the Sevilla. “The new apartments represent an innovation in Richmond apartment house construction and form a most attractive addition to a rapidly developing section of Grace Street.” The furnishings in the Sevilla suites were described as consistent throughout with the “elaborately furnished lobby on the first floor.” The soundproof and fireproof suites had modern appliances, including a refrigerator.” 

 

The Sevilla Hotel as it appears today, with the Towers on Franklin apartment building looming in the background.

 

The 54-room, three-story hotel was built by Davis Brothers, a hugely successful contractor and designer. In the mid-1920s, Davis Brothers, Inc. was building everything from office buildings to factories to churches and dozens of homes in the growing western part of Richmond. In a brochure showing off their residential designs that were handed out at the Home Beautiful show in 1925, Davis Brothers intoned confidently, “The present decade will be known as The Building Era.” It must have seemed like new construction in Richmond would never end.

 

Davis Brothers built from designs of their own creation and were heavily influenced by the Arts and Crafts style. In a 2001 VCU graduate architectural history paper titled, “Davis Brothers, Inc.: Promotors of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Richmond,” Justin Gunther named the 1915 San Francisco Exposition as the first exposure Richmonders had to the Mission style as interpreted through the Arts and Crafts. In 1924, Davis Brothers president J. Lee Davis traveled to Florida to study the “Spanish Type of Home.” Gunther credits J. Lee Davis for bringing Arts and Crafts into Richmond’s residential streetscape and popularizing the Mission style in the city. All over Richmond houses and offices began to appear with white stucco walls and tile roofs in contrast to the relentlessly red brick of Colonial Revival Richmond. 

 

Richmond Times-Dispatch, May 23, 1926.

 

Perhaps the Davis Brothers and their client, Florsheim, felt the market demanded something more eclectic, more memorable than the unremarkable façade of the Kilmarnock Hotel. The Davis Brothers' design for that building was restrained and perhaps reflected the owner’s construction budget, compared with the more exuberant Sevilla. The curvilinear roofline of the Sevilla, interrupted by Spanish-style red roof tiles, contrasting areas of yellow brick emphasizing the gabled sections of the façade and the copper details of stylized decoration must have been an exotic touch on Grace Street. Four large stores were on the ground floor including Morte Florsheim’s own Mozielle Cleaners and Morgan’s Drug Store. 

 

The entrance to the Sevilla was on Jefferson Avenue.  Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 17, 1926.

 

The Sevilla proved to be quite popular and quickly filled with tenants. Davis Brothers continued their dizzying success, and at one point a Richmond newspaper estimated that a tenth of all new construction in Richmond was done by Davis Brothers. The standards of the Sevilla were high from the day it opened, and the hotel is mentioned occasionally in society notes like an account of a card party the Daughters of the American Revolution planned at the Sevilla in 1927. In March of 1929, the hotel was mentioned as the home of Captain R. Q. Merrick, a prominent Federal Prohibition Administrator who was responsible for keeping three states dry. As late as 1930, the Sevilla still sometimes appeared in the Society Page, as when Mr. and Mrs. James Heath gave notice that they “are now established at their apartment at the Sevilla on Grace and Jefferson Streets.”

 

A 1943 postcard of Richmond’s Sevilla Hotel

 

The Stock Market Crash that took place in October 1929 hit Richmond as hard as any city, and among the many losses to Richmond businesses was the collapse of Davis Brothers. The company had many subsidiaries and allied businesses that interlocked with the original construction company: tradesmen, wholesalers, construction, and financing of homes. Defaults on notes issued to finance Davis Brothers houses poured in. As Gunther described it, “Davis Brothers and its collateral corporations crumbled due to the Depression.” The president, J. Lee Davis, sold his mansion that his company built outside Richmond called “Willowbrook” and moved into one of his apartment buildings.

 

One of the stripped store spaces on the first floor of the former Sevilla Hotel. The once-swank interior of the entire hotel probably has been gutted in the same manner.

 

The same arc can be sensed in the decline of the Sevilla. The monied traveler or businessman whom the apartment hotel was designed for was disappearing from the highways and train stations of America. By April 1931, the Sevilla was advertising for two of its first-floor stores available for rent. The next year the hotel auctioned off the office furniture left behind in one of the hotel’s commercial spaces once occupied by the Old Dominion Tile and Marble Company. It was the Depression, and many Richmond commercial tenants locked their doors on a Friday afternoon and never came back.

Mrs. E. C. Garrett, the wife of the manager of the Sevilla tried to keep up appearances, hosting meetings of the Richmond Women Writers Club and the Woman’s Auxiliary of the American Legion in 1934, but it wasn’t like the old days when the Sevilla was new and luxurious. In February of 1935, a drunken tenant assaulted Manager Garrett, knocking out four of his teeth. By the following October, it was impossible to conceal the downward trajectory as the debts on the Sevilla were in default and the hotel was sold at auction. The Sevilla shouldered on through the late 1930s, resolutely advertising rooms and apartments and occasionally running ads in the Richmond newspapers that spoke of the hotel’s former grandeur.

 

Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 8, 1937.

 

The hotel was probably buoyed by high occupancy during World War II due to a housing shortage as Federal workers, military, and contractors all poured into Richmond during the war years. By the 1950s, traffic was being drawn from downtown Richmond and into the tourist courts and motels that lined Route 1, culminating in the opening of the interstate highway (then known as the Richmond-Petersburg Turnpike) through the city. The Sevilla had been left behind, and its once illustrious place among the Society columns sank to crime reports of tenants being found dead in their rooms or the armed robbery of the night clerk.

 

The Sevilla was owned by Grace Hotel Apartments until 1967, when it was sold to the Midtown Hotel Apartments, Inc., who advertised the Sevilla as “completely renovated” in 1968, offering “Special rates, business and elderly.” The Sevilla appeared several times in the lists of properties with delinquent taxes in the early 1970s and was sold for $365,000 in 1974. Only eight people still lived in the building when the new owner, Dr. Theophilos Kepreos, announced the old hotel would be converted into a home for elderly adults and the building “into something the city can be proud of.” The Sevilla, Kepreos said, would have the exterior washed, its sign removed, trim painted and the interior renovated. It became the Grace–Jefferson home for Alzheimer’s Disease patients, offering trained caregivers around the clock.

 

The Jefferson Street entrance once led to the richly appointed lobby of the Sevilla Hotel. Richmond Times-Dispatch, June 6, 1980.

 

 

The Jefferson Street entrance as it appears today.

 

The Davis Brothers’ fireproof and soundproof hotel appears to have been well-built, retaining its value through periods of both flush times and near-abandonment. According to City records, the building sold in June of 1997 for $2.1 million, then again in January of 2022 for $3.2 million. The 2022 buyer is a company called “Tiffanie’s Manor for Young Adults,” which despite its name, is an assisted care home for the elderly. The Sevilla may be destined for yet another renovation, although there seems to be no activity in the building today.

 

 

Richmond’s first apartment hotel at 4 West Main Street, The Kilmarnock, shown in its later years when it was known as Travelers Hotel.

 

The loss of the illuminated sign on the corner of the building meant the end of the name, “Sevilla,” but the Davis Brothers’ hotel withstood conversion to a nursing home. In contrast, Sevilla’s contemporary, the Kilmarnock, had a more vivid slide into decline. Despite its location beside the Jefferson, the Kilmarnock was fated to draw the shady, the disreputable, and the criminal to stay in its rooms. The building eventually became the Milner Hotel and in its final form, the Earle Hotel. While the Sevilla will apparently enter its second century of usefulness to Richmond, the owners of the Jefferson Hotel purchased the Earle Hotel which had become a four-story flophouse, and tore it down in 1989. The site is now a parking lot for the Jefferson.

  

-Selden