RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) — On a crisp February morning, three generations of architects met on 2nd Street in Richmond’s Jackson Ward and reflected on the neighborhood’s Black architectural history.
Burt Pinnock, principal and chairman of the board at Baskervill — a design firm founded in the city in 1897 — was shocked to see Lawrence Williams, who owns his own firm, for the first time in a while.
Both met with Sonny Joy-Hogg, Pinnock’s mentee at Baskervill, in a moment that seemed to be both a reunion and a gathering of the minds.
The group met in front of the Taylor Mansion, which was designed by one of Virginia’s first two Black professionally licensed architects and built by a nearly all-Black workforce.
The somewhat spontaneous meeting grew as Ron Stallings — owner of the Speakeasy Grill, the Hippodrome Theater and other businesses across Jackson Ward — popped out of the family’s restaurant.
By Stalling’s side at the meeting was his daughter and business partner, plus his mom on her way to her car. All, invested in one way or another, in the restoration of history in the neighborhood.
“Each generation builds on the previous generation,” Williams said. “Even Stallings just commented that his father that I worked with, he recognizes that it was his father that made the difference.”
The difference Williams spoke of concerns the revitalization of Jackson Ward, especially 2nd Street. His collaboration with others decades ago planted the seeds for the effort.
“We begged them that they needed to do something on 2nd Street,” Williams said about the push and pull with city politicians and advocates to get something off the ground. “That wave has finally kicked in and so we’ve made a good progress.”
The history of the area amplified the importance of doing something and doing it fast, before the already deteriorating and oft-neglected buildings passed the point of no return.
“People nicknamed it historically the Wall Street of Jackson Ward,” Pinnock said. “It’s where, you know, the activity was, the merchants were, the wealth was represented, the businesses.”
One potent example of that wealth is the very mansion in front of which they gathered — the W. L. Taylor Mansion, built by the architect John Lankford, a Tuskegee University graduate who was lauded as the dean of Black architecture.
Lankford’s earliest work was concentrated in both Washington D.C. and Richmond. He built the Taylor Mansion located in Jackson Ward and the now-demolished Society Aid building just a few blocks away.
The Taylor mansion was completed in 1907. The 20-room home was believed at the time to be one of the largest residences ever built for an African-American family.
The Society Aid Building was a celebrated piece of architecture, known for being the first building in America designed and built by an entirely Black workforce.
Today, many of today’s Black architects in Richmond are steadfast in restoring the historic buildings that remain and thinking about new buildings in the context of historic use in the neighborhood.
