Though few have the emotional impact of a romance gone awry on a cell-phone call, this one packs a certain punch. Two men, hereafter noted as Champeen and Defending, discuss the merits of boxing. We begin with the bout already in progress.
Champeen: Boxing is as good an exercise as I can think of.
Defending: That’s right.
Champeen: I mean, just for stamina.
Defending: Oh, yes. It’s different, now, you know. When I was younger, I took it up. I had something to prove.
Champeen: Now it’s more something you do.
Defending: It’s to stay in shape.
Champeen: To get in shape.
Defending: [Laughing] Yes, it is, yes, it is. Maintaining shape.
Champeen: Once you get there.
Defending: You want to maintain it.
Champeen: Means working at that. You know, in boxing, you’re out there, and it’s three minutes, and you’ve got your arm up and it starts feeling like lead.
Champeen: Like lead.
Defending: You’re not so much thinking about hitting or getting hit but when is that bell gonna ring.
Champeen: [Laughing] That’s right, that’s right.
Defending: But I got back into it. Back in the day, I got interested for self-defense. But real boxing is more than that; it’s not just what you know or from the street, but it’s discipline.
Champeen: Discipline, exactly. It’s just great training. You try … man, you try just hitting the bag for a minute.
Defending: Man, I know.
Champeen: A minute! [Laughs.]
Defending: You think, 'How difficult or tough this can this be?'
Champeen: You're thinking that.
Defending: At first.
Champeen: Right, right. At first. [Laughs.] But then — but then you’re punching that bag for a solid minute.
Defending: It’s a workout, is what it really is.
Champeen: Oh, it’s a workout. Good for your upper body, but your lower body — you get that six-pack.
Defending: Yes.
Champeen: But my brother’s boy, he’s been doing martial arts since he was around 9.
Defending: Yes, that’s good, too.
My wife, Amie, and I arrived home in good order via Greyhound. It was in the dawn hour as we pulled our wheeled bags along the occasionally bumpy sidewalks of Boulevard.
North Boulevard has undergone some considerable changes in these past decades. At the outset of the 20th century, the site of the Greyhound terminal was a factory specifically designed to construct Kline automobiles. James A. Kline of York, Pa., was recruited by the Richmond Chamber of Commerce in 1911 to bring his automotive firm here. They didn’t know it, but the company was already bankrupt.
Still, that didn’t prevent the construction of a factory on a 15-acre site, with a columned, pedimented office building at the head of a massive, U-shaped building, into which a railroad spur ran. Raw materials could get shipped in, and cars could get shipped out. Kline was supposed to make 2,000 cars a year and employ a thousand men, as the city trade pages boasted.
But there was this small problem of the burgeoning Ford Motor Company buying up other automotive-parts suppliers. The hands-on, small-time Kline couldn’t compete. The company moved out of the plant in 1918, ostensibly to cede to war-supplies manufacturing, but in fact, there wasn’t any need for such a vast factory. Kline continued desultory operations at Seventh and Cary streets until 1923, by which time it had produced just 2,500 cars, sedans, limousines and even racers. One of — perhaps the only remaining — passenger model is at the Virginia Historical Society.
The abandoned factory building became the W.G. Cosby Truck Transfer building, which is how I knew it as a kid, until Greyhound built its terminal there.
The State Fair of Virginia grounds was across from the former Kline factory, as was a muddy racetrack for cars. James Kline became a race official and head of the Richmond division of AAA.
As we walked home, I was interested to see the activity of that hour. Several joggers, getting in their fitness quotient early. Dog walkers. A guy perched on his balcony enjoying a smoke. One man, walking somewhat erratically, glanced up and seemed surprised to see us, bundled up in our trench coats and marching with deliberate speed, pulling our bags behind.
I enjoy watching the city come awake; the lights wink off as the sun rises up. Also surprised to hear at least one air conditioner running. My guess is that, in that residence, it never shuts off.
After a weekend in New York, I was struck by how quiet Richmond sounds in comparison, particularly this early in the day. The wheels of our carts were at some points the loudest sound next to the morning birds.
We ran along past the glowing new edition of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. I observed the Monday trash trucks beginning their rounds. A city bus at the outset of its day, barreling along Ellwood. The click-clock of office heels on the concrete signaling the beginning of someone’s commute.
I am struck these days by the historic Boulevard’s general pleasing appearance in comparison to memories of some 20-plus years ago when, in another life, I went to school nearby, lived briefly at the corner of Cary and the Boulevard, and delivered pizzas into unlit, foul-smelling apartment buildings. Most of them seem to have gotten cleaned up. While not the five- and six-story brownstownes of Fifth Avenue, or glamorous Manhattan apartments, Boulevard makes a good accounting for itself in the bleary eyes of a native returned home.
A colleague remarked to me how, when crossing by foot across Broad to the office, an impatient motorist trying to get out of the Pleasants parking lot whipped around another car and zoomed through the intersection with little regard for my compatriot's life or limb.
As I noted in a posting some time ago, I’m a flaneur. I observe the city from a sidewalk perspective. And one of the nasty reminders that not everybody else sees the sense in this mode of experience is how motorists act around pedestrians.
Each day I cross the Boulevard on my ambles, and if I choose the west-to-east migration pattern at Cary Street, my anxiety rises. It’s a corner long in infamy; when I rented there in the mid-1980s, we were always hearing smashes and crashes and the inevitable spray of cracked glass crunched underfoot. I don’t know why this corner is a cosmic vortex of violence, except to say that people — when behind the wheel — are often impatient jerks, as exhibited by our pal Goofy.
There are even nifty new signs that count down the time the pedestrian has to get across, along with a bright white pedestrian figure that shows anybody who can see that, yes, it’s the pedestrian’s turn.
Carytown has its offenders, too, especially for drivers coming out of Cary Court Shopping Center. Or those emerging from the McDonald’s drive-through. Some of them seem oblivious to, “Hey, I’m walkin’ here!”
Or, as they say in New York City: Don’t block the box!
I’m amazed by how careless drivers can be; I really try to practice conscientiousness about Total Pedestrian Awareness on the rare occasions when I’m behind the wheel. And that includes bicyclists, too, whom I’ve noted in greater numbers in the past few years.
So, Richmond, before you put the pedal down, look around.
First, the splashy Feb. 24 announcement in the press of mixed-used, retail and residence development planned for the former Alcoa/Reynolds factory on 6 acres between South 10th Street and Virginia Avenue along restored sections of the Haxall and Kanawha Canals.
The firms to undertake this work, beginning late this year, are The WVS Cos. and Fountainhead Development. Fountainhead has driven much of the Above Commerce Road renewal in Manchester, while WVS is the primary designer of Rocketts Landing.
The Times-Dispatch addressed how this represents the fulfillment of the 1994 partnership between the city and several businesses to facilitate development along the new canal walk and floodwall.
But the concept goes back even further, as I noted with the recent passing of city-planning official A. Howe Todd. Then, the ambitious vision was to revive the canal from the Great Turning Basin west to Maymont Park, though it runs to Tuckahoe Plantation in Goochland County and beyond. That concept resurfaces now and again.
Through Todd’s good offices, and those of Reynolds Metals execs Paul A. Murphy and Dale Wiley and Marcellus Wright & Partners, two of the Tidewater Connector locks were preserved, and the factory was built in a park setting to accommodate their presence. Five other locks were destroyed in 1974 by the ham-fisted construction of a Downtown Expressway exit ramp that swoops motorists to the entrance of the Tidewater Connector Park.
When the Faison company began constructing the James Center in 1983, canal enthusiasts urged the incorporation of the Great Turning Basin. The basin was about three blocks long, a block wide and up to 50 feet deep. From 1800 to 1880, it was a bustling terminus for river shipping, of materials and passengers.
This amazing engineering feat was designed to route river traffic around the rocky falls of the James River. It connected deep-water ships to the Great Ship Lock to the east, and the western course of the James River Kanawha Canal.
Faison slowed down construction and even assisted the excavation that relinquished from the muck several heretofore-unseen bateaux and packet boats. They altogether mapped 63 sunken boats, including two iron-hulled packets, a Civil War-era rowboat, six canal freighters and 48 batteaux. The complete story is told in a booklet, The James River Batteaux Festival Trail, by W.E. Trout III, written for the Virginia Canals and Navigations Society.
The bones of a number of sunken vessels yet await proper display.
For whatever reason, the developers of 1983-1985 didn’t understand the sheer coolness of creating a hotel and office group with a big water amenity. The what-could-have-been is memorialized in the plaza with lock stones and in art on the floors and walls of the James Center buildings.
This typified Richmond’s unfortunate perspective on urban planning. The city administration was panicked into improving the deteriorating city center, struggling to keep it from dying rather than fighting to keep it alive. Which reminds me.
This Sunday, the Times-Dispatch ran a piece about the bedraggled Richmond Coliseum.
This follows a December 2009 story about the same issue, upon which I commented at length.
The problem with demolishing the Coliseum is that, well, there’s not enough money around either to rip it down or to build another one. And a replacement probably wouldn’t get off the drawing boards for years, at least not as a regional project. As Henrico County Manager Virgil R. Hazelett was quoted as saying in Sunday's article, "There will be conversations about regional partnerships, but that's just not on the agenda right now," he said, "and it won't be for several years." This opens the way for corporate naming, and, well, that's the trend.
Then there’s at least one commenter online, with a Glen Allen address, who offers “The Solution.” This entails forming an impartial regional board to move the question forward, and a surcharge on tickets purchased for travelers departing or arriving at Richmond International airport.
This, of course, would be a “tax.”
Good luck with that.
The Washington Post’s Weekend supplement placed the Virginia Historical Society in its Escapes section today. I got a little tight in the stomach when I discovered the article, since the last time this happened, travel writer Rebecca J. Ritzel presented a dispiriting picture of the dormant blocks around CenterStage.
In that article, Ritzel was famously advised by the Hilton staff not to walk the seven blocks from the hotel to experience what I call Gallery and Restaurants Row. She was advised to take a cab. I suppose this was to protect her from panhandling or getting proseltyzed to by bullhorn
But back to our point. This time out, Washington Post writer Sue Kovach Shuman extols the VHS’ collection as “a gift of artifacts and oddities.”
As, um, I did, though not quite as eloquently, in the “Objects of Memory” portion of December’s “75 Things Every Richmonder Should Do.” I also gave it a shout out in the 2010 Sourcebook. But I digress.
Shuman gets to use the phrase “Consummate Ass” and “Bad Habit” in what is not even a story related to politics or drugs. (For the record, so did I.)
She rightly assessed that there’s too much in the VHS to see in just one visit. Her language transmitted a genuine good time, and that was encouraging to read. But Shuman also seemed inexpicably puzzled that the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is closed until May 1. Doesn't she read my blog?
And she also “tried a number of eateries, looking for authentic Virginia cuisine such as peanut soup, but no luck.” What? Not even at Bandito’s Burrito Lounge, Arianna’s or Caliente, which she dutifully listed in her “If You Go” sidebar. Hmm. Has peanut-allergy-itis struck this traditional dish from menus?
How times have changed. I think back to my days spent delivering nutritional discs out of a Pizza Hut in what is now Bandito’s (a former service station), when that part of town was known as “The Devil’s Triangle.”
Shuman ended up with some gingerbread made from a receipt by George Washington’s mother. But she might’ve wanted, just for interest, to pick up a copy of Molly Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife.
