Exploring Richmond's grassy knolls

By Clay Dye and John Sarvay. Photos by Michelle R. Harris and Jim Johns.

What are the necessary parts of a successful urban environment?

Buildings? Sure. Streets and sidewalks? You bet. What about open space? Yes, plazas, small parks and gardens are just as important to the life of a city as buildings, streets and 24-hour diners.

What, then, makes a good park? And for that matter, where can you find a good park in Richmond?

City planner William Whyte has spent a good portion of his life studying street life, particularly in New York City. Whyte has found what we all know at heart—when it comes to open space, most people don’t want to “get away from it all.” People will cram themselves into the smallest space if it meets the right criteria: lots of sun, plenty of seating and accessibility from the street. Whyte also found that people don’t want to walk more than three blocks to find such vistas.

Creating useful open space in a city is a little more complex than plopping a stark skyscraper in the middle of a city block, planting a few trees around the edges and paving over the rest. Open spaces need as much discipline as buildings to fit well into the urban scheme, and each space attracts its own unique audience, says Whyte.

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We’ve selected two areas of the city to focus on: Downtown and the Fan. They both attract high concentrations of people during various parts of the day, yet visitors are attracted to their urban parks for different reasons.
Downtown, the main attraction tends to be the ability of workers and tourists to escape into the park for lunch or a short break from work or endless exhibits. In the Fan, there are a wider variety of reasons to visit—children, couples, pets, friends and the modern hunter-gatherer all use the Fan parks.

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The area around the Medical College of Virginia campus surprises visitors. After tooling around Downtown no one expects to see vigorous street life. But that’s just what the hospital complex and three adjacent museums create. No sleepy Richmond here.

The area bustles throughout the day, although there is virtually no retail business in the area to ease the traffic flow and attract foot traffic. Three private gardens do their part to pull in passers-by and workers seeking respite and a breath of fresh air. The gardens are successful urban spaces because they don’t fully remove the visitor from the urban setting. They simply relax the setting.

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A small garden tucked along the 12th Street side of Sanger Hall stands a good six feet above the sidewalk, but a wide flight of stairs attracts pedestrians. Young doctors, maintenance workers and students gather at the top of the stairs and along the rail to watch the streetlife below. Their presence beckons passers-by to join them. A row of young oak trees create an airy barrier along the rail. More trees along the back of the garden softens Sanger’s ugly white and blue walls.

A popular lunch spot with students and visitors, the garden is busy all day long, weather permitting. Most of all, this garden shouts: Yes, Richmond is a city after all!

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A leisurely lunch in this part of town can be found in the garden at the Valentine Museum. Catered lunch was introduced to the garden because of constant requests by visitors for a place to eat, Valentine officials say. It quickly became the destination for area workers. Food vendors along Marshall Street provide for a variety of appetites.

A large square, the garden is enclosed by a high stucco wall along the street and alley, and by the museum on the other two sides. Bricked over, the garden is filled with shrubbery and has ample seating. The ambiance reeks with a heady blend of Southern history and modern yuppies.

Giant southern magnolias visibly screen out the cityscape along 11th Street, but not the city sounds. Traffic, particularly ambulances, punctuate the garden respite, connecting the place to the city.

The garden on the grounds of the Museum of the Confederacy along 12th Street near Clay Street provides a similar historical enclosure. Not as private as the Valentine space, this garden is separated from the street by an old iron fence, visibly drawing people in. Unfortunately, the 12th Street gate is open only during lunch from Wednesday through Saturday, and yes, they sell food, too. Museum director Robin Reed says he would like to leave the gate open all the time, but when foot traffic picks up in the garden, so does the amount of trash. Ah, city life.

But, closed gates don’t mean closed gardens. When the gate is closed, enter the garden from Clay Street.

Slightly sunken and usually shaded, the garden is a great refuge from the southern sun in summer, but MCV’s towering Main Hospital blocks out all sunlight after noon in winter.

The garden’s greatest asset is the “So, this is the real South” flavor created by the view of the White House’s portico, which walls off the garden’s north face. If you’re lucky, a visit to this garden will include some fool dressed up like a Confederate soldier pretending the war never ended. For kicks, tell him you are the great-great-grandson of General Sherman.

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The lay of the land changes as you move from Downtown into the Fan, where visible parks are offset by rows of houses, not GRTC bus racing zones.

The Fan boasts five urban parks maintained by the city: Asbury Park, bounded by Park, Stuart and Lombardy; the Meadow Street Triangle at Park, Hanover and Meadow; a nameless park behind 2116 Main Street; Scuffletown Park between the 400 block of Stafford and Strawberry streets; and Paradise Park between the 100 block of Allen and Vine streets.

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The two parks that follow the rules—the ones laid out by those well-schooled urban planners—are inviting by day. Asbury Park and the Meadow Street Triangle attract children, young professionals and their bounding canines, and the wandering hunter-gatherers in search of aluminum cans.

The Fan District Association was instrumental in installing schoolbus yellow playground equipment in Asbury Park, a lovely complement to the low brick wall that wraps around the triangle of sand, grass and trees. The brick wall is great for fencing in small children—usually escorted by nannies—but makes casual access questionable.

The wall makes you feel as if Asbury Park is off-limits to a scan of the morning paper or an evening bottle of Red Bull. Still, it seems the perfect resting spot for starry-eyed romantics to sit and swing at night. Blech.

The Meadow Street Triangle with its lone soldier from the First Virginia Regiment standing guard against invasion from the east is more downscale, more inviting.

A small fenced-in area along Meadow Street invites the occasional parent-child combo or book reader, but often boasts napping, bearded men. The rest of the park, grassy and lined by bushes, is a magnet for frisbee addicts and law-breaking pet owners who unleash their pups for stick-chasing and bowel-releasing. Watch where you place that picnic lunch.

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The three other Fan parks are hidden within the city blocks and are very 70s. Large geometric blocks tumble at awkward angles, like some Electric Company fantasy gone wild.

The strangest, and incidentally grungiest, is the nameless park, which boasts a magnificent, giant, red turtle for children to climb. We’ll call it Turtle Park. The turtle and a bizarre, twisting, multi-trunked tree on the northeast corner of the sandbox are the highlights of Turtle Park. The downside includes very poor lighting and Supercans full to overflowing with smelly urban garbage. It’s a hidden gem, but the smell says, “Welcome to the city. Maintenance is optional.”

Scuffletown Park, recently in the news as the site of a heat-related death, is a favorite haunt of teens in search of someplace to drink a beer or two. The park itself is fairly well segmented into a playground—where the graffiti-minded kids loiter—and a plaza surrounded by a curved wall/bench—where the sleepers curl by night. Scuffletown gets too much direct sun by day, but the plaza is bathed in the brilliant pink-orange glow of streetlights by night. Its proximity to Price’s Market is an added bonus.

Finally, there is Paradise Park. Paradise Park would be the perfect location for a caterer to set up. If it were only located near a retail or business zone.

As it is, Paradise is the best petite urban park design stumbled across in Richmond in spite of its lack of easy access. Bricked pathways and large arching trees invite you into the park itself, while low walls and oblong, geometric shapes invite climbing and playful relaxation. It’s free of brush and relatively free of trash. When we visited, the sandbox was even raked clean. During the day, it’s bright and airy, the perfect spot for a picnic lunch, a morning cup of coffee or an afternoon nap. At night, it’s a pleasant spot for a group of friends to goof off.

When you visit the Fan parks, remember that city ordinance. City parks close at midnight from May through September, and at 11 p.m. in the winter. And no boozing allowed. Get busted and go directly to jail. Or get away, and come back when the cops leave.

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These nine urban parks are examples of how the city, and private citizens, have managed to transform small corners of the urban landscape into friendly, community space. Unfortunately, some of the parks are also examples of how easily that community space can decay—through litter, poor lighting or inadequate maintenance. Still, their variety—and the variety of their patrons—allows Richmonders to relax for a minute and enjoy the fact that sometimes urban planners can do things right.

So grab a friend, grab some lunch or grab a book. And head for the park!