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The last house of old Fulton
04/22/2014 6:15 AM by John M
Celeste sent in this pinhole photo of “the last house in Fulton” (700-704 Denny Street), from sometime between 1984 and 1989 or so. The houses were demolished in the late 1980s after a long a long fight by Spencer Armstead to preserve his childhood home.
I remember this! We used to shop at Grubbs grocery store and it was near there.
Zoom in to read 🙂
http://issuu.com/uvaarch/docs/guidebook_05.25.11/60
It would be awesome to see this neighborhood today, and the houses! But the only thing that gets me is this statement…… “after a long a long fight by Spencer Armstead to preserve his childhood home. ” There is multiple gaping holes in the roof. A good start to preserving a home would be to get the open holes in the roof fixed….. Just saying.
It’s my understanding that the city had the property for a while before it was actually torn down.
I remember a house still standing down there in 1987 when my aunt moved to Salem St. I can only remember that it was a lonely house… maybe it was actually these three. I remember they were gone after a while the only older structures I could remember were Grubbs, a one story house on 37th St which stood through the 90s behind the ABC store.
@1. Queen of Church Hill – I shopped there too – and they delivered! Do you think you could figure out where it was? I can’t remember exactly.
I miss Fulton and Grubbs grocery. A STYLE article from a few years back tells a lot: http://www.styleweekly.com/richmond/the-greatest-place-on-earth/Content?oid=1379516
Some of us in Church Hill have a few bricks from the demolition, which was done badly and unnecessarily. Church Hill would have gone the same way if not for a few stalwart women who worked to save it and bring it back from the devastation of white flight and greedy slumlords. Don’t get me started…
Great pic.
To John Murden, you are actually correct about the city having control over the properties you see pictured for probably a year or more, before demolition. By the time these photos were taken, the properties had been ravaged by all kinds of people, seeking something.
As for Jenny, your statement speaks volumes, first you’re misinformed on your comments and about Spencer and his family as property owners. It’s people like you, think like yours, that caused the problem in the first place.
See, there were 3 neighborhoods that could have been torn down by this offer from HUD of free money….The named three, Oregon Hill, Lower Fan, and Fulton…..the fact: 2 of the neighborhoods were white, one was black…no political leanings, one way or the other.
Fulton was self sustaining….3 grocery stores, a pharmacy, 5 & 10 cent store, hardware, movie theater, butcher shops, shoe shop, cleaners, 3 service stations, doctor lived in the neighborhood, catholic church, 3 major baptist churches….ball fields, school….3 dry good stores, factory, High’s Ice Cream store….and countless corner stores, Feed stores, upholstery shop, transmission, restaurants, furniture stores, hardware store, truck repair shop, pool hall, barber shops and more..But we were black….I need not say more…Some just don’t get it !
@9 Keith… let’s call the elephant in the room what it is… Prejudice. As we all unfortunately know, it is still with us today and only brought back to the surface by the horrific recent incidents. But as you also know, blacks were subservient “or else” back in the day when Fulton was in full swing. And it is a travesty because as you said, Fulton was a community in itself.
Yet, overall, what was the condition of these business and residential structures by the 1960s-1970s? Were they occupied? Safe and Salvageable? Funds available to fix them? Owners able to do so?
I figure that for some of the same reasons why Evergreen Cemetery is in the state it is today, there was changes that caused older residents that built and cared about Fulton, to move on such as the Northern Migration of 1915-1920, the Civil Rights Movement and Segregation in the 1950’s which lead to the White Flight, and Jim Crow Laws being abolished. It changed demographics almost overnight (50 years) when talking about historic timelines.
I am sure I may be off target on some of this and if so, please correct me and share your perspective and knowledge.
Eric
In the book “Built By Blacks: African American Architecture and Neighborhoods in Richmond”, it mentions another situation that impacted Fulton which was the 1972 flood. Apparently it displaced at least 50 households along the southern edge and the flood “drained the will of Fulton’s third generation to continue living here”. Dozens of elderly people decided to take a $15,000 relocation grant offered by the city. Plans to rebuild the community never materialized. Par for the course with Richmond.
This aired the other day, another recap of the incredibly sad and disastrous Fulton “urban renewal.”
http://ideastations.org/radio/indelible-roots-historic-fulton-and-urban-renewal