Cycling North Side

by Charles McGuigan 09.2000

It is a loose itinerary that will take me from one neighborhood to the next, from the city to Henrico County and out through the rural reaches of Hanover. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. It’s an Odyssey of 75 miles without purpose, except for the sheer pleasure of looking, and moving on self-propelled wheels.

Early morning light filters through the late summer foliage of the trees east on Greycourt Avenue as I hoist the bike up on my shoulder, fist gripped around the top tube and descend the porch stairs. It is cool and dewy and the world is alive with crickets, one chorus fading into another. The sky is perfectly blue, a welcome relief from this summer of interminable clouds and rain. In the west is a moon that looks as though it were cut from filmy white paper and plastered on the blue of the sky. It seems almost translucent, a ghostly presence of the solid moon from the night before. There is a sweetness in the air and a  little bit of a chill.

The leaves of the dogwood in front of my house are burnished copper and the small clusters of berries are already turning red. Fall seems to be seeping its way into the tree through the roots and the crickets are aware of the change of season.

Richmond’s First Burbs

The first leg of the trip is through Bellevue and Ginter Park. I notice cats under the rocker panels of the cars parked along Avondale. They are lying down low, still and watchful, facing the center of the street. As I approach the intersection of Monticello, a thick orange tabby darts into the center of the street and captures a grackle or starling with its claws I start noticing all the birds as I make my way up Monticello toward Bellevue Avenue. The birds are feasting on insects that crawl on the asphalt and the cats lie in wait under the cars, waiting to pounce on the birds. I’m witnessing a few links in the food chain.

I ride up toward Westbrook and then come back down Fauquier where the houses are on large well-treed lots. They’re mainly brick with slate roofs, Colonial in style. On the other side of Bellevue Avenue, the houses lining Fauquier change. They are on smaller lots and the houses reflect an earlier era of Arts and Crafts style. It is a profound pleasure to bike this area, noticing the homes, each one different in someway. It is not like the newer cookie cutter neighborhoods in the counties. People in Bellevue and Ginter Park also use many different color exterior paints, further adding to the diversity. It is worthwhile to bike up and down every street, including those one block long streets of Chevy Chase, Mount Vernon and Clinton. Each house is a gem.

It’s also a good idea to bike through the alleys. You get a chance to look in the backyards and see what landscaping has been done. And in the alleys you frequently find things  of interest that people are tossing out. This morning I find two old glass-fronted kitchen cabinets, perfectly intact with the old brass hardware. I’ll come back for them tomorrow.

Ginter Park boasts much larger homes, grander in style, situated on much larger lots. Along Seminary and some of the streets parallel to it--Hawthorne and Noble--there are massive trees planted by the curbs on either side, and the crowns of the trees meet over the street, forming an elevated canopy. From a distance it looks as if you’re entering a massive cathedral with high, vaulted ceilings.

I ride through Union Theological Seminary’s campus, Gothic brick and brownstone structures that call to mind the old Smithsonian Institution building in Washington. The green, enclosed by the chapel and library, is pleasant and still. Not a soul around. That’s one of things about leaving early for a bike ride. It is as if you are the sole inhabitant of the world.

Eden in Rosedale

After cruising through Sherwood Park, I ride into Rosedale and stop by the little house tucked away on a large landscaped lot at the corner of Teakwood and Laburnum. It is a simple board-and-batten house, painted lichen green, with two fanciful birdhouses in the front year--one painted white and dark green and resembling a country church, the other painted pink and shaped like the Cathedral at Chartres. Unlike other lots in this neighborhood of brick ranchers, this lot is fairly large, more than one and a half acres. Over the past twenty years it has been lovingly landscaped by its inhabitants, mother and daughter, Marion Clarke and Marion Renaldo. There are fiery red hibiscus and eight foot tall azaleas, crape myrtles over sixteen feet. Umbrella pines, smoke trees, apple trees, dogwoods, hydrangeas, ornamental grasses, a huge lilac and a gigantic wisteria that wraps its tendrils around the iron pipes that cover the carport.

I wend my way back through the grounds of Imperial Plaza and then enter Bryan Park. I dismount and carry the bike around the thick steel gate that bars entrance at the terminus of Bellevue Avenue. The woods are dense and the park seems terribly neglected. Save for the Azalea Gardens which are tended by Friends of Bryan Park, the vast majority of the park is uncared for. There are large piles of limbs and other leafy debris that weren’t picked up by city work crews. The road is cracked and pitted. It seems the City of Richmond might funnel more funds for this park which is almost 300 acres and certainly one of the finest green spaces in this urban area.

“The Castle In Bryan Parkway”

As I cross the concrete bridge over Young’s Pond, a number of river cooters slide off a half-submerged log and slip under the surface. Four Canada geese honk and take to the air.

Bryan Parkway subdivision is built on a series of small hills, so it has the rolling quality of Piedmont Virginia. Most of the houses here are two-story brick Colonials, but there’s one house at 2417 Essex that is utterly unique. It is made of brown stone, with carved limestone sills and other ornamental work and trim. It has four gables across the front elevation and the windows and door all have curved arches. I ask a woman in a brown suit who’s getting into her car if she knows anything about the house. It’s early yet and I’m guessing the people at 2417 are still sleeping.

“You mean the castle?” the woman says.

I nod.

“I’m  not really sure, but I think the stone was imported from the World’s Fair.”

“Which one, what year?”

The woman shrugs.

This house, certainly one of the most unique in Henrico, is not listed in that county’s updated guide to architecture, and I’ve always wanted to ask Henrico Historian Chris Gregson why this is so. It seems a natural for the book.

Construction Is Destruction

At Dumbarton I take a right and continue west of Lakeside until I come to the small road that runs behind Jefferson Garden, the shortcut to the Ukrop’s at Brook Run Shopping Center. Some developer or other is clear cutting all the timber on this only spot of truly high ground in the area. They are also clearing the beautiful wildflowers and vines that grow in a vast meadow on the other side of the road in what appear to be a wetland area. The plans call for 180 apartments, the last I heard, so this final remnant of natural beauty is going to be destroyed. Instead of construction, they ought to call it destruction.

This once-heavily forested hill has great personal value to me and my four and a half year old daughter, Catherine Rose. About two years ago we got into the habit of going to Ukrop’s for breakfast before I dropped her off at Westminster-Canterbury. She’d eat her eggs and drink her milk and eat fruit some mornings. We’d just sit and talk. One morning when she was being particularly resistant to going to school. I asked her if she wanted to go through the mountains. She smiled and instead of driving up Route 1, I took the shortcut back. That area almost looks like it belongs sixty miles east of here, and for Catherine Rose it has become the mountains.

“Daddy,” she will say, “let’s go to the mountains.” And that’s the route we take on her way to school. Now, I’m not sure what I’ll tell her. The mountains are gone and there will be apartments where the big trees once stood.

A Frog Pond And Rebel Flags

I head back toward the residential community called Lakeside which is bounded by Dumbarton, Hilliard, the railroad tracks and Lakeside Avenue. It is a charming, almost village-like community that was built in the 1930s and 1940s. A lot of homeowners there have done a lot to renovate their homes. There are beautiful private gardens. Unfortunately, some of the homes are owned by landlords who don’t seem to care about their properties, much less the Lakeside community. It is an interesting amalgam of people. Young couples and older widows live side by side. And there is a large grouping of rednecks and white trash who seem to do everything they can to destroy the beauty of the area. Why park your car in your driveway or along the street when you can park it on your front lawn? And today, you can see more rebel flags on Lakeside than you would have seen in 1863 throughout the Commonwealth.

In the 2500 block of Irisdale, if you hit it right, either early in the morning or late at night, you’ll hear a serenade of frogs. The frogs live in the side yard of the home owned by Bess Berguin. She moved here with her husband, John, deceased five years ago, in 1945. The couple had two girls and John constructed a concrete pond for them to swim in. “Virtually every kid in the neighborhood played there,” Bess remembers. “And it was an all day thing. So I finally had to send them home at noon and let them come back at two.” We sit on her screened-in back porch, overlooking her garden.

When the girls grew up, John converted the small pool into a fish pond. At one time about thirty goldfish occupied the pond and then gradually the frogs started coming. Several years back the noise of the frogs bothered some neighbors so  much the couple had to remove a number of the frogs. “We dipped up twenty-six frogs one night,” she tells me. “This was mating season and we trained a flashlight on them and then dipped them up.” They took the frogs over to  Bryan Park and released them in the pond there. When they returned to their home on Irisdale and cut the engine, they could hear it, the chorus of frogs from the backyard. They had only made a dent in the amphibian population of Berguin’s Pond.

Just a couple blocks west of Bess Berguin’s house is an unbelievable eyesore of a structure. It takes up practically the entire lot, doesn’t seem to conform to any county building codes It appears to be made, in part, of T-111 siding and window sashes. A truck sits in the front yard. It must drive the neighbors nuts, but apparently the county hasn’t been able to do anything about it, even with their Community Maintenance Program, which was designed to take care of such problem properties. The county should definitely be called on this one.

I ride out Woodrow toward Hilliard, where there’s a nice enclave of true Arts and Crafts cottages, tucked well off the street on large lots. It is a quiet area, a village unto itself.

From Hilliard I pick up Galaxie and head over to  Gibraltar and then to Hermitage Road. It is a nice long straightaway up to Oakview, just shy of the railroad tracks. One side of Oakview is dominated by light industrial, including Greendale Railing. On the other side of the road is a drainage ditch that supports a wide variety of native plants, including Ironweed, Joe Pye Weed, a wild coreopsis, small pink, rose-like flowers, and a host of others. It seems drainage ditches are a perfect environment for some species. On the other side of Parham, I ride through an area cordoned off with a ten foot high chain link fence. Once the home of Rentokil, a company that for many years creosoted timbers for the railroad, the industrial area was a Superfund Cleanup Site, and toxic compounds that would have inevitably leached into the ground water have been contained.

The Bairds Of Laurel

Just across the railroad tracks, west on Hungary Road, I pull into the gravel drive, past a wrought iron gate, into the yard of the large home there that once served as the administration building for the Laurel Industrial School. The rear of the house and some of the outbuildings are made of stucco. For forty years now Mildred and Owen Baird have called the place home.

The house sits on a few acres, and there are lush gardens in the back, where Owen and his wife grow a number of perennials they sell each year. There are also a series of outbuildings, a couple of them made up almost entirely of window sashes. They are great, airy buildings that house antiques and other collectibles You’ll always find something here, and the proprietor and his wife are two of the sweetest people you’ll ever meet.

I pull the line on the old school bell and the clapper hits metal and lets out a deep throated toll. Mildred appears at the back door for a moment and calls for Owen. She retires into the house and Owen joins me in one of the two chairs under a tree in the backyard. 

Owen went to work for Henrico County Schools in 1954 as supervisor for the Central Office. At that time three people ran that entire office--Owen, along with the superintendent and his assistant. Owen eventually retired as principal at Holladay Elementary School, where he was always a hit with the kids and teachers.

He smiles broadly, remembering his years with the kids in Henrico. He’s wearing a tightly woven straw hat, that he pushed back on his brow. “I just loved the kids,” he says. “No kid ever talked back to me, and no kid ever wrote a bad word on the walls at Holladay.”

He is a man of infinite curiosity and possesses a true love of life. During World War II he served in the Army in the jungle of New Guinea. It was a hard time and he was there in those tropical jungles for almost three years. “The nearest girls were eight thousand miles away,” he tells me.

Owen Baird and his wife have always traveled extensively, going to Europe three to four times a year. Owen has visited Israel nine times. “I’d go back there tomorrow,” he tells me.

For the past couple years the Bairds haven’t done that much travelling. Mildred, an eighteen year survivor of cancer, had a serious relapse. But Owen has managed to get away for short trips here in Virginia. Two weeks ago he climbed Hawkbill Mountain in Skyline Drive at Big Meadow. Last year he climbed Old Rag. I look through some of the antiques and examine his potted perennials. The pink summer phlox are still in full bloom and the Autumn Joy is flowering. “Come back soon,” Owen says as I ride past the wrought iron gate and head out Hungary Road.

I meander back through Tall Timbers and Bretton Woods, then head out to Mountain Road for a quick ride through old Glen Allen and then up Old Washington Highway past the Cultural Arts Center and on to Greenwood Road at Hunton. From there I take a detour through Meadow Farm and the RF&P Park. I run into Ricky Atkins, labor foreman for turf management for the county’s recreation and parks. He tells me that one county employee almost singlehandedly takes care of the playing fields at the RF&P Park. “That man gets upset if you do something here that he doesn’t know about,” says Atkins. He looks at the fields which are trim as a newly cropped head of hair. “Dedication does it,” he says.

Development Encroaching On Winfrey

I pedal out to Old Greenwood Road. It is like a small village here with a handful of 19th century clapboards, beautifully maintained, on lots filled with shade trees. Up Winfrey to the end at Chickahominy, there are more homes scattered across this last remnant of Virginia countryside in Central Henrico, just a stone’s throw from Magnolia Ridge and Virginia Center Commons.

I stop at a classic cottage, white with barn red shutters. The Corsons, Sue Ellen and Bill, sit on the front porch with Buttons and Bows, canine sisters of a Pomeranian and Shiatzu mixture.

Bill has lived here for 36 years and he tells me how the floorboards in the house are of heart pine, continuous boards that run from the front to the back. They like their solitude back here and are now concerned because of the distant rumble of possible development of the Winfrey Road area near the Chickahominy River. An area developer has his eyes set on close to one hundred acres.

“It’ll ruin everything,” says Sue Ellen. “I just wish they’d leave us along back here.”

There may be a bright spot. One of the owners of a portion of the land that developers want to purchase, claims that there is probably an Indian burial ground in the area and that might cancel plans for development. “All I know is we like what we have and we don’t want it to change,” says Bill.

I ride back to Greenwood and cut through Longdale, a little neighborhood that grew up along the old Richmond Ashland Railway. The tracks actually ran down the median strip on Longdale Boulevard. In place of the tracks are power lines.

From there I head out Mountain across Staples Mill to Springfield and then out Nuckols Road through the heart of Innsbrook. Gigantic steel, brick, glass office buildings thrust into the landscape. It is on par with Reston in sterile, soulless Northern Virginia. One thing they did do was create ponds and lakes. I spot a great blue heron as it takes to the air from the pond at Nuckols and Cox.

Living In A Country Club

And then it’s out to Pouncy Tract Road and Wyndham, which is a true edge city. On the left-hand side of Pouncy Tract there is more construction going on, condominiums and office parks, a middle and high school.

The residential section of Wyndham has a pleasant feel to it. There is a five-mile bike and jogging trail that weaves its way through the entire community, past the clubhouse and through the golf course and all along the quiet cul-de-sacs. All along the bike trail there are plantings of something like wax myrtle which sweeten the air like bay leaves. A woman riding a bike in front of me named Susan has her small son strapped into a safety seat on the back of the bike..

“It’s like living in a country club,” she says. “I swim everyday. I take tennis lessons.” The nearby Texaco which serves gourmet meals and coffee is a great magnet for Windham residents. “It’s the happening place in Wyndham,” says Susan.

She and her husband are from New Jersey. “Everybody in Wyndham is from someplace else,” she says, as she turns down the cul-de-sac where her home is.

Leaving Wyndham I head north and cross over the Goochland line briefly and then enter Hanover County, riding down Ashland Road. On the other side of Hylas, just past Route 33, there are great open fields of soybean and swatches of forests that form vast green tunnels over the road. This is a good long stretch of about 14 miles.

On The Pleasures Of Biking

It is uninterrupted solitude, punctuated by flareups of goldenrod growing by the roadside, yellow and bright as the noonday sun. Riding a bike on a long road of winds and bends, hills and hollows, the air perfumed with honeysuckle and bitter with the fabric of the world changing at the rate at which you pedal, is one of the great sensations of life. You are alone with your thoughts, misgivings of past deeds. It is like being in a confessional of long ago for a stiff examination of the conscience. And it is utter joy. To be truly happy, a human being needs visual and aural stimulation, physical exertion, the light of the sun, fresh air and sweat streaming down the small of the back. For me, at any rate, these things combined create a feeling of well-being, satisfaction. Something must happen with the neurochemicals, because you feel invulnerable, capable of flight, as young and untainted as a newborn, and you feel as if you could continue riding forever, circumnavigating the globe.

About a week ago, I had spoken with the manager of Rowlett’s over on Staple Mill Road. He had told me the importance of being properly fitted for a bike and had said that a decent road bike starts at about $600.

The bike I ride this very moment is a companion of two years, and in that time we’re covered more than ten thousand miles. It was a yard sale find up on Westminster Avenue for 50 bucks. New inner tubes and tires, lubrication, adjustment of seat and brakes, was all it took to make the bike road worthy. Low maintenance, no gimmickry.

On The New Gilded Age

Fifteen hundred dollars for a bike always seemed a little nuts to me. It’s finally a fairly simple machine. Too much money and too little sense, a carryover from those strange Reagan years when greed and grabbiness and spending beyond one’s limits became the great national past-time. And now we live in these equally strange Clinton years that have evolved into a new Gilded Age that make the last one look like a stroll down Skid Row. It’s crazy, it’s too much. A dependable bike and a helmet are all you need. Keep it simple, it’s a lot more fun that way.

Consider the venerable art of fishing. People spend hundreds, even thousands of dollars on reels and rods and assorted accoutrement, not to mention boats All you really need is a hook, line, sinker and bait. That’s it. The very best fishing I ever did was with an eccentric waterman name George Earley in Oyster on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. We took out his old 20 foot Sea King, a ragtag boat older than me with a smoking Evinrude outboard. He knew the places to fish out in the middle of the bay that runs behind the barrier island there. All day long we fished with simple trot lines and in it all I landed an 18 pound blue, pulled it in hand over hand, wrestling it into the cooler. We grilled that fish over charcoal later that night on a point of land, shaped like a hook, that’s linked to Oyster by means of a road made of old clam and scallop shells that crosses the salt marsh.

Think about it. If Santiago in The Old Man and The Sea had been fishing with some deluxe Penn or Simano reel off a 38-foot Hatteras, the story would have been more boring than it is. Had Ahad been skipper on a modern Japanese whaler outfitted with harpoons powered by rockets, that story would have fallen flat. No long boats, no harpooners like Queequeg.

A Brief History Of Bikes

Bikes, of course, were probably invented by engineers of one sort or other. About two hundred years ago the first vehicle like a bicycle, a thing called a velocipede, was created in Europe. It was a simple machine with a front wheel and a back wheel made of iron and wood. The trick was to balance on it and propel yourself forward with the tips of your toes.

The French went to town with the invention. The Michaux brothers came up with the first foot pedal that operated the front wheel, much like today’s tricycle for kids Chains and sprockets came later. By 1875 bicycles were becoming more lightweight. One wheel weighed between 30 and 50 pounds, substantially less than the 100 pound wheel on an antique velocipede. From there on the bicycle went through many permutations. One of those cultural icons burnt into the memory of Americans was that strange two-wheeled bike, the front wheel of which looked as if it were pumped up on steroids. It was called the Columbia bicycle, manufactured in Boston. And that peculiar inventive spirit that thrived in America in the early 1900s had its effect on bicycles. One bicycle had skis and could be driven through snow, another had skates and could be propelled along on ice. Bicycles with paddle wheels were attached to boats so you could pedal across a lake. And then somebody got the idea of making small bicycles that you could put on your feet, some of which were gasoline-powered. This invention led to the development of the roller skate. Engines were later added to bicycles and by the time World War I rolled around, many Europeans and Americans began manufacturing what we now call motorcycles. All these inventions sprung from the bicycle, a simple machine.

To Ashland And Beyond

I take a left on Center Street and head into the town of Ashland. The business community here is thriving. Nice shops and restaurants, a new library. It seems unfortunate that members of Town Council finally caved in and may allow WalMart to put up one of its boxes just down the street, but the businesses here undoubtedly will survive and thrive.

Ashland is a good town for biking down shaded lanes at an easy clip. Like Ginter Park and Bellevue in Richmond, the homes in Ashland are architectural treasures which have been beautifully preserved.

I ride east on Route 54 to Mt. Hermon Road and swing south. This is a lovely country road that hugs the contours of the land. It runs parallel to a creek for a time and then moves on to higher ground. Farmland here is abundant. Cattle graze on an open field littered with bales of hay.

Sliding Hill Road leads me to the Hanover Airport and I stop for a water break and watch as a small plane lands on the field, reflecting on the Wright Brothers, two bicycle shop owners who conquered the air.

Many of the communities in this section of Hanover look the same. The land is cleared of trees and in some cases leveled and then the houses are built.

Putty-colored vinyl is what my brother Chris calls them. These houses in the new developments are sheathed with vinyl siding in white, beige, darker beige, cream (a variation of beige), or, very pale yellow. The designers, or architects, if you can call them that, must all be aesthetically challenged. There’s no order to the architecture, no harmony. Unrelated elements thrust together in a cacophony of style. Let’s put in a little portico here, some dental work there, perhaps a Victorian turret, some ginger bread work over the side porch, and let’s not forget those palladium windows, as many as we can get in. Windows seem to be a rare commodity among the builders. One window per side, if you’re lucky, and the back elevation of the house consists of one sliding glass door and one window lost in a monochromatic field of lapstrake vinyl siding.

New developments and expansions of existing developments are apparent everywhere. It seems to me that the Board of Supervisors might want to require developers to use all the wood cleared from a given parcel for building materials. Either that, or preserve the trees. Trees, after all, make a home site, not just a box erected on a slab of red clay.

King’s Charter retains the contours of the land and has a settled feel to it. It is laid out well and the houses tend to sit on fairly large, treed lots. Plus, there’s substantial green space and ponds for recreation.

I head out toward Route 1, pass Virginia Center Commons and make my way over to Chamberlayne Farms and Chickahominy Bluffs. These neighborhoods are quiet and the tree growth is old and the landscaping established. I pedal over to Three Lakes Park, visit the nature center there and watch turtles in the lake from the deck built over the water. Kids and their parents are playing on swings and seesaws. It is early evening as I head back to Bellevue. With all the detours and side trips, I’ve logged just over 75miles today and I’d gladly do it again tomorrow. There is no other way to really get the feel of your neighborhood or city, your county or state, than a good long, bike ride through it and in it.