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Clarence Wyatt Transfer

East Broad Street and Oliver Hill Way
(just off I-95 in downtown Richmond)

As of today, this building is gone.

I took this photograph one year and five days ago. It's not a great photograph, I took it from the Exxon station on the opposite corner of the intersection while Oz was filling up his tank. I never did get around to taking a better one. I figured I had time. After all, the building's been there for over a hundred years.

Hah.

This is the northern end of Shockoe Bottom. This part of town is filled with nineteenth century warehouses and crisscrossed with train tracks and cobblestone streets. This building has (had) a long brick shed extending from its opposite side. You can see a tiny bit of it at the edge of the photograph, especially the part of the roof that is raised and glassed in on the sides to form a skylight that runs down the spine of the shed. The lamentably un-photographed (I thought I had time) shed has train tracks running along one side, and it is (was) pierced on both sides with large doors topped with basket-handle arches and built of darkened wood panels fit diagonally into the frames. I assume that back when that stretch of track was in use, the trains would pull up beside the shed and their goods would be unloaded into the shed to be placed in another train or loaded out the doors in the other side into wagons. The area around the buildings is paved with spallstones and is in use as a parking lot.

The building was still in use. Sometimes you'd see lights on in the shed or the office part.

Then the shed burned down one night last fall, back when I was still using a cane to get around, so no pictures of that either. A demolition crew has been knocking down the shed and wrapping up the bricks (bricks aren't manufactured in that size anymore, so these bricks can be sold to restorationists who are working on similarly aged buildings). Today they started on the office building. I'd been hoping that it might be saved since it was relatively less damaged in the fire.

This reminds me: I'd better photograph West Hospital, only three blocks from here, before the university knocks it down.

391 words | February 13, 2005 08:13 PM | Ghost signs