The Shockoe Examiner Revisits the Booth Home, Then Goes on Holiday

This time of year, when Richmond is at its hottest, the offices of The Shockoe Examiner are deserted.  The sun still shines through the tall, dusty windows that overlook the leafy expanse of Monroe Park. However, the electric fans on the ceiling are still, the inboxes are piled high with comments from our many excited and engaged readers, and the once-busy phones that usually bring a firehose of tips, praise, threats, and derision are silent.  The story of Richmond marches on, but the staff who man these desks in this large, dusty room and who gleefully scrape the bottom of the Richmond history bucket for readers of The Shockoe Examiner are going to take a short holiday.

We have one update to offer: a historic site in Richmond and the birthplace of thousands of Richmonders has been wiped from the city map.  

The Booth Home and Hospital for unwed mothers at 2710 Fifth Avenue has been demolished and in its place is a new owner is constructing “Chestnut Flats,” a group of twelve condominiums priced at more than $400,000 each.  Promotional material for the project describes the design scheme as “This contemporary take on a classic Scandinavian chalet is artfully blended with the saltbox style found in the surrounding neighborhood.”

The ”Chestnut Flats” condominium project under construction on the site of the Booth Home on Fifth Avenue.

Whoever wrote that description clearly never visited Highland Park and their description of rows of neat, New England saltbox houses in the area (let alone how Scandinavian chalets might somehow blend with the existing neighborhood) betrays that lack of knowledge. 

Walking the construction site, bits of bricks from the previous buildings litter the ground and pulverized shards of window glass glitter in the sun like tiny fragments of memory.  William Faulkner wrote of layering myth and memory and geography in his descriptions of the Mississippi landscape his characters populated, and the site of the Booth Home seems, beneath its crust of wannabe Scandinavian chalets, a place where these things might still intersect. 

So much joy, so much anguish, so many tears in the buildings that once were here – you can’t but think all this emotion was not contained in the rooms and halls of the Booth Home but instead must have somehow permeated the very ground.  It is similar to the uneasy feeling produced by a visit to the blank city blocks that were the burying ground and slave jails below Church Hill – only there on that now-quiet and anguished landscape it was human tears and sweat and blood that forever stained the floor of Shockoe Valley.

The Booth Home is gone, but its story can be revisited here at The Shockoe Examiner, and we invite a rereading of the history of this place and your thoughts about the geographic persistence of memory, and joy, and sadness. 

The “Chestnut Flats” are just another, albeit unattractive, layer to the onion that is Richmond's history.  Stay tuned as The Shockoe Examiner peels back more layers, other history, and curious events in the long and storied tale that is Richmond, Virginia.

See you in a few weeks.

Ray and Selden