Alleys: Roads Less Traveled, Part 1

by Charles McGuigan 05.2023

Having grown up in Northern Virginia’s sprawling suburbia, alleys were something new to me. I had experienced them to some degree in Philadelphia where my grandparents lived, but my explorations there were merely cursory. So when I first arrived in Richmond to attend VCU I became immediately enamored of these extraordinary byways that traversed every neighborhood in the city. I came to know them as well as I did all the streets in the city, and would more often than not map my routes along them when I traveled by foot or by bike.

That first year I lived in a dorm at 806 West Franklin Street, a Victorian era building that had once served as a YMCA, and beneath many layers of paint I could trace grout lines on the wall next to my bed and imagined that the room had once been a large shower stall. I had one window in that room, but it was massive, almost floor to ceiling, and the ceilings were twelve feet high. Many nights, sleepless and melancholic and morose as any other freshman, I would open the window, climb out on the ledge and slide down to a wooden fire escape that two floors below opened onto the alley between Franklin and Grace Streets. My spirits would lift instantly as I began exploring the alleys of the Fan, and by the end of the year, late at night or very early in the morning, I would wander the alleys as far afield as Church Hill, and witness wonder after wonder that so many had never seen before.

For a brief period I lived on Church Hill in a slave’s quarters at the corner of 29th and Franklin Streets, overlooking Sugar Bottom. From the alley, which was right outside the gate of my courtyard, I could travel late at night on foot to a nearby shot house in the English basement of a three-story house near the Confederate Soldier and Sailors Monument (removed) on Libby Terrace. They served Friday and Saturdays from midnight till six in the morning. Some nights, after a few drinks, I would wander through the maze of alleys until the sun rose.

It was on one of those sojourns that I stumbled upon St. John’s Mews, that block-long alley between 23rd and 24th Streets. It was a full-moon night in the early autumn, and the leaves had just begun to change and there was a faint chill in the air. As soon as I entered the alley from 24th Street, my breathing stopped for a full minute, and my eyes roved along the extraordinary brickwork and the fanciful cast and wrought iron. Years late I would sit on a cast iron bench there with a woman I loved most deeply.

Many nights I would wander the city alone, and could make my way from Church Hill all the way over to the Fan down different alleys without ever walking along a street, except for a few blocks in downtown Richmond.

Mainly though, I lived in the Fan, and there I lived extensively. Not long ago I did a count of the places I inhabited. Over the course of almost 20 years I had 35 different addresses in the Fan and Museum Districts from apartments to efficiencies to single rooms in Suitcase Alley, that odd strip along the 1600 and 1800 blocks of West Grace Street. When I left a rental space—sometimes only after a month—I traveled light. I took only my books, my albums, my stereo, my file cabinets, artwork, box springs and mattress, and my clothing. Everything else I left behind—desks, chests of drawers, tables, chairs. Because within a week or two of scavenging I could easily refurnish an apartment. It was as simple as that.

Alley shopping became a favorite pastime, and from the detritus behind the grand homes of the Fan I would discover remarkable finds from signed oil paintings to first edition books. And there were also completely serviceable items like gas and charcoal grills. All free.

When I waited tables at Matt’s British Pub, which was just around the corner from the Tobacco Company down on 12th Street, toward the end of each night shift, my fellow servers and I, as we broke down the waiter’s station on the second floor, would often pause at the one window there and stare down into the alley below which was strewn with dumpsters and trash cans, many of which spilled their guts of garbage onto the cobblestone alley that ran behind the restaurants on Shockoe Slip. We would watch well after midnight, and gradually the rats would come out, just several at first, but thirty minutes later there were hundreds of them and they moved across the alley like a relentless incoming tide that devoured everything in its path. Within the hour the alley had been scrubbed clean of refuse, and the rats simply vanished.

There is much more to tell about the alleys of Richmond, and how the alleys of the Fan differ from those of my home village for the past 25 years—Bellevue. And the pocket parks, and the botanical gardens that neighborhood folks created on raised beds over concrete and gravel, and brick and cobblestone.

But now I turn it over to several people who have given their detailed impressions on our system of alleys.

DAVID BENDER

The first one comes from David Bender, who many of you know as chief cook and bottlewasher, and sole proprietor of Sheppard Street Tavern. This Bellevue resident also hosts Alley Chairs of Richmond on social media.

“This all started a couple of years ago, shortly after the first Bellevue Porchella. One of my neighbors made a NextDoor post about an abandoned office chair in their front yard. I offered to retrieve it, and recognized it as one I had been passing in the alley for the past couple of weeks. Anyway, I tossed it in the back of my truck, and drove over to a friend’s house around the corner, where I left it in their front yard, as payback for them messing with my Ring doorbell camera. Soon after this, whenever I came across a chair that someone was throwing out, I’d haul it off to my friend’s front yard. After a while, this started becoming too much work, so I would just snap a pic on my handy dandy iPhone 11, and text it over.

“Eventually, instead of texting my friends, I started posting these pictures of random alley chairs on Facebook with the heading Bellevue Alley Chairs. As I work in the Museum District, and spend a good bit of time in the Fan, as well, it was only a matter of time before I would stumble across chairs in these neighborhoods, too. Therefore, Bellevue Alley Chairs morphed into Alley Chairs of Richmond. People actually started “liking” my posts! Who knew? After a few suggestions that I should publish a coffee table book, I did kind of the internet version of that: I started an Instagram page.

“Not all of the chairs are actually in the alley, as I consider abandoned sidewalk chairs fair game. Also, some of the alley chairs are not abandoned, either. Apparently there are more folks like me who enjoy quality alley time, and find respite sitting amongst the weeds and detritus. I’ve come across chairs that I would most definitely have taken home, if only I had the space. I’ve had other chairs that ended up being reclaimed, and now live a happy, post-alley life in someone else’s yard. My mechanic regularly sends me pics of random alley chairs, as does one of my bar regulars. Several of these have ended up on my Facebook page, and are now also featured on alleychairsofrichmond.

“Our alleys are great. They are walkable, fairly well-lit, safe, and ever so interesting. I urge all of you out there to occasionally get out of the streets, get off the sidewalks, and take a leisurely stroll through the alleys that run behind your house instead. And if you happen to come across a discarded chair, snap a pic and send it my way.”

LIZ SCARPINO

Liz Scarpino, another Bellevue resident, wrote eloquently about the alleys, and this is just a smattering of what she had to say.

“I’ve been walking the alleyways of Richmond for about 40 years now, ever since leaving the alley-less ‘burbs to attend VCU. From day one, the city’s back alleys drew me in, as if into a novel or movie, an album cover or painting, to the cobblestoned cusp of adulthood and independence. They delivered me to enticing places of creativity and discovery — places like artists’ studios and galleries, band practice spaces, secret shot houses and after hours clubs. They led me everywhere from garage sales to house parties, both of which inevitably spilled out onto the gritty rear cloisters, often culminating around a makeshift fire or some other urban mischief.

“Over the years, I’ve had ample opportunity to mull over certain sociological trends about our material culture, and what generations of Richmonders value. Walking certainly facilitates observing and thinking, and walking my dog in the alleyways, no matter the weather or temperature or location, was always so therapeutic and revealing. There seems to be a sort of natural cycle to alley life — something akin to biological or liturgical seasons, even with some of the same basic ethics and ‘ground rules’ as it were. First commandment: don’t take anything if you have even the slightest question of it being thrown out. If there’s any grey area to that effect, leave it or wait and see if it’s still there after a few days. Or ask. Second, leave children’s items for the kids. Kids are alley shoppers too, and we olds need to encourage sharing among the next gen! Third, if you must dig to extract an item from a pile, remove the cool thing you want, then leave the pile in as good or better order than it was when you came upon it. Do unto others....

“On these warm Spring weekends, those piles will be full of cuttings and prunings and old hose reels and all things yardwork and garden-related. After The Pollening, the artifacts of Marie Kondo clearouts will appear: knick-knacks, utensils, craft supplies, old tools and grills, half-dead plants, outgrown toys, perfectly wearable clothing, and always ironing boards, boxes of books, and old windows. (Pro tip: Christmas wrap, artificial trees and holiday décor will be available year-round, as folks don’t seem to believe that it happens every year.) Back in the day, I found working class neighborhoods to be particularly bountiful — perhaps because there are more renters, or because the houses are smaller and cannot contain and store so much ‘stuff’.

“And while these days I need not one more thing, I still relish a cool alley find, if only for someone else, and because it has not been barfed up and shipped in absurdly excessive cardboard/styrofoam packaging by some amazon ‘fulfillment’ center. (If ever there was a more dystopian euphemism, I’d like to hear it.) The optimum scenario: your kid has just signed the lease on her first real apartment, and she needs the basics. You serendipitously stumble upon a retro lamp, with no grey area about it: it has a note taped to it — ‘Works great! Bulb does too! Please take me home!’ No venmo, internet, or credit card needed — just a good old-fashioned pay-it-forward hyperlocal act of generosity. Win-win.

And so you scoop it up, utter a thank you in case the giver can hear, and think to yourself, ‘...so shines a good deed in a weary world.’”

Next month we will feature Part 2 of this story. We’ll hear more from Liz, and something from artist Rob Ullman, the man who created the illustration at the opening of this story. And we will also hear from the Maestro of Alleys—Richard Bland, an artist who lives in a former carriage repository on an alley in the Fan. And Richard knows more about Richmond’s histories—great and small—than anyone else I have ever known.

If you have an anecdote or two about alleyways you’d like to share, or a photo of a favorite alley haunt, please send them to charlesmcguigan@gmail.com and we will try to include them in the next issue of NORTH of the JAMES, either in print or on our website.