Bellevue: Our Town 

by Charles McGuigan 03.2024

Bellevue has a soul. It has trees. It has architectural integrity. It has animals, and not just dogs and cats and other pets (though we do have plenty of them); but also an abundance of the wild sorts, a plethora of squirrels and rabbits, along with chipmunks, possums, raccoons, foxes, ground hogs, birds of prey and songbirds, snakes and toads and tree frogs, even coyotes.  Plus this: Bellevue has diversity both in terms of the people who inhabit it and the houses they dwell in. And there are no restrictive covenants here. You can paint your house whatever color you choose, and you are not required to have a front yard covered with the godawful mono-culture of a green lawn. Bellevue has sidewalks and a maze of alleys, and though many of the streets are gridded—others meander like their rural cousins. It combines the convenience of the city with the natural beauty of the country. Often called a neighborhood, Bellevue is really more like a town, a small village of 1,200 homes, with two blocks of independently owned businesses that satisfy virtually all the needs of its residents. There is no other enclave like it in Richmond. Or anywhere else.

MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS  AGO, my former wife Joany and I decided to leave the Fan, where we had both lived the majority of our adult lives. It had become increasingly yuppified, with many of its rougher edges sanded smooth, and VCU was chopping down much of the old urban growth of ancient structures and erecting massive, nondescript steel and concrete towers in their place. So frequently, on bikes, we pedaled north and quite accidentally stumbled upon Bellevue, and immediately fell in love with the place. 

We were fortunate to find a classic bungalow built in 1922 that begged for some tender loving care. It was bordering on the ramshackle. Rusted galvanized steel gutters and downspouts, bare wood trim on window frames and sashes, a sagging front porch. And the interior was in even worse shape. It seemed there had been no real improvements since the early 1960s based on the pink and green plastic tiles in both the kitchen and bathroom. But the bones of the house were solid, and the architectural accoutrements, within and without, intact. We purchased it at a comparative song.  

After taking possession of the house, we steamed away five layers of wallpaper from the ceilings and the walls in every single room. And beneath those ancient layers of paper we uncovered walls of plaster on lath that had never been painted. We skim-coated the plaster, sanded the walls and ceilings, primed them, and then painted them with two finish coats. Because we intended to have a child in the near future, we burnt away all of the lead-paint on the trim. We sanded all the floors that turned out to be quartersawn heart pine, sealed them with marine spar varnish; stripped the painted mantlepiece, revealing Honduran mahogany.  For a good three months we lived in the dining room on a mattress surrounded by all of our earthly possessions, save for what was stored in the basement and out in the shed. But when our work was done, we both marveled at what we had accomplished: the house was restored. Shortly after that we tackled the exterior, re-glazing all 19 windows, caulking seams, burning off the lead paint, priming the trim, and so on.

IN THOSE DAYS there were  only two restaurants in Bellevue (today there are nine, along with a juice bar). They were Dot’s Back Inn and Zorba’s, both on MacArthur Avenue, along with a great dive of a bar called Cock and Bull, which later morphed into Shenanigans, both of which offered live music, nightly. On Bellevue Avenue there was a bakery that at times served breakfast and lunch, but you never knew when. 

MacArthur Avenue felt like a ghost town at the time, many of the storefronts on the east side of the street were vacant; one of them was filled with old pinball machines. Rich’s Stitches had a presence, but there were none of the restaurants that now flank that side of street—Stir Crazy, Demi’s Mediterranean Kitchen, Mi Jalisco, and Neighbor—and there was no Once Upon a Vine, though across the street Nutall’s, owned by Eddie Chang, was doing a good and steady business. 

Back in 2004 two new businesses moved onto MacArthur Avenue that fueled a Renaissance of sorts. That year Stir Crazy, in its first incarnation under Jerry Bistline, opened, and then in May of that same year Bob Kocher unveiled Once Upon a Vine, which became an instant success. Bob stocked a vast array of wine and beer, nostalgic candies, and gourmet items, and cigars, and other treats. From the moment Bob opened his shop in Bellevue, he became an integral part of the neighborhood and the Bellevue Merchants Association. On his massive parking lot, he hosted the first Christmas on MacArthur, an annual holiday event that benefits Toys-for-Tots, which continues to this day on the second Saturday of December. And every year Bob hosted an Oktoberfest and an anniversary celebration. 

About three years later, over on Bellevue Avenue, Shanan Chambers breathed new life into a building that had previously housed a business that sort of specialized in antiques, and had been a hardware store in a former life. Shanan, along with her father and a team of contractors, gutted the old building, installed new systems, and after months of wrangling with inept city officials, Northside Grille, which has become the Northside’s premier venue for live music and fine food, was born. The Bellevue strip now includes a wide assortment of businesses, including Classic Touch Cleaning and Studio Art 1229, Nicola Flora, Little House Green Grocery, and Up All Night Bakery. 

Well before Facebook launched Marketplace, residents of Bellevue, whenever they were getting rid of old furnishings and such, would simply line them up neatly along the alleyway behind their home, where other residents could shop to their heart’s content. We furnished much of our house with these alley finds, and have passed along our share of discarded items that have since found new homes elsewhere in Bellevue. 

During the summer of 1999, many of the giant oak trees that made up a sort of urban forest at the northeast corner of Hermitage and Laburnum were felled to make way for a new school called Linwood Holton Elementary. Things there got off to a rocky start, until David Hudson took command of the school, which would become one of the very best elementary schools in the city, public or private. He assembled a remarkable faculty, and was available to parents, night and day. After 13 years as principal at Holton, David took command of Franklin Military Academy, but his legacy lives on under new administrative leadership. 

IN THE EARLY DAYS of the pandemic, when the world as we knew it came to a screeching halt, I would walk for several hours each day throughout the city, but primarily here in Bellevue. It was quiet, almost eerily so. The sounds of man and his machines had come to a standstill. No car engines humming and purring and grunting. And thankfully not one leaf blower polluting the blessed silence. But I could hear bird song in great profusion, and even the sound of the branches of leafless trees making faint scratching noises whenever there was even the slightest breeze. And sitting on my front porch in the late afternoon, I could hear a chipmunk claw earth. I’d never heard either of those sounds before, and the experience bordered on the mystical. 

Several days into the shutdown, I began to see other folks on the street. And one bright, cool afternoon, as I made my way west on Bellevue just off Clinton, I ran into Laura Ann Singh and her young daughter who just so happened to be riding her bike for the first time without training wheels. As always, I had my Sony Handycam, and I asked Laura Ann if she would mind singing a song. Still walking behind her daughter, who was making remarkable progress on two wheels, Laura Ann’s angel voice began to spill forth “Smile,” and the world seemed to change. I filmed her.

At the end of that first month of Covid, the day after Bill Withers died, I happened to be walking down Claremont and saw my friend Charles Arthur. I asked if he’d sing a song in memory of the great man. So with his wife, Sara, and daughter, Josie, and son, Loudon, the Arthurs put on a performance of “Lean on Me” that was the best rendition of that song I have ever heard. Again, I made a video.

Then just a week later, John Prine died. The following day as I was walking up to the Bellevue commercial strip, I ran into singer-songwriter Micah Berry who was sitting on the steps of his front porch with his son and daughter. He had his guitar out, and I mentioned John Prine. He nodded and in a few minutes was playing and singing “Angel from Montgomery.” 

I posted all three videos on social media and the response was overwhelming. People wanted live music back. And that’s exactly what they would get in Bellevue, thanks to Brooke Ullman. 

IN JULY OF THE pandemic year, Brooke watched from her front yard as a family with three kids strolled along the sidewalk across the street. They briefly stopped in front of the home of Haze and Dacey, two local musicians who happened to be playing on their front stoop. 

As Haze played on his upright bass, Dacey improvised a song for the kids. When the family moved on, Brooke crossed the street and told her neighbors how much she enjoyed listening to them play. And then she said this: “Wouldn’t it be cool if we had an outdoor walk-around little music thing.”

“Yeah, it’d be great,” said Dacey. “Will you do it? Will you organize it?”

Brooke did, and with the help of Don Glazer, Rob McAdams and others, Bellevue Porchella was born, a full day of music that rivals the Richmond Folk Festival, and is sponsored by the Bellevue Civic Association. This year’s Porchella will be held from 12:30 pm till 6 pm on April 20. (Along with Porchella and Christmas on MacArthur, Bellevue also hosts other annual events including Plant Swaps, National Night Out on MacArthur, and the Bellevue Garden Walk, which began 34 years ago.)

At that first Porchella, hundreds walked the streets, some for the first time in seven months. They would gather in small clusters—socially distanced and face mask-clad—standing on the sidewalks and along the gutters, spilling into the streets, with eyes smiling and ears cocked toward porches where musicians played and sang. 

After the hammer of the pandemic struck, Bellevue business owners immediately reconfigured how they were going to do business. It was really astonishing to witness, and it happened overnight. This, too, though: Bellevue residents universally supported our locally owned businesses and all of their employees. 

IF THERE WERE a golden rule governing Bellevue, it would be something like this: Exclude no one and accept everyone. And the values here are overwhelmingly progressive. Not in a million years would we ever consider banning books from any library shelves. And along with our public library on Westbrook we have scores of Little Free Libraries. It’s so important to remember that one of our greatest Founding Fathers, Benjamin Franklin, created the very first free library in Philadelphia because he understood that to preserve a democracy you had to nurture a well-educated electorate, otherwise you would run the risk of electing a despot. 

An interesting thing happened at noon on January 20, 2021, a sunny day in the dead of winter, at the exact moment Joe Biden was sworn in as president. Front doors throughout our small town opened, and people spilled out into the streets, yelling and clapping and lighting fireworks. The joy was palpable. About a week later, at Stir Crazy, I was sitting at a table telling a friend from out-of-town about what happened that day. An older man at a table next to us sat with a woman. They were nursing a couple of warm drinks. He overheard our conversation, and then said this: “I’m ninety-two, and I’ve lived in Bellevue my entire life. The only other time something like that happened was on V-E Day. But there were even more people celebrating last week.”

Creativity, in one form or other, abounds in Bellevue. If you swing a dead cat, even a short-tailed one, in any direction, you are likely to brush up against a potter or a painter, a sculptor or an illustrator, a musician or a writer. They are everywhere. Along with teachers and doctors and lawyers and nurses and small business owners and landscapers and social workers and psychologists, and, I suppose, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers.

I WAS LUCKY ENOUGH to raise my kids here, and am thankful every day for that good fortune. I taught them to ride bikes on our streets, and we explored the hidden treasures of Bryan Park where they learned to appreciate nature and to protect it (my daughter is not only a talented artist, but also an environmental scientist fully committed to saving our biosphere from the corporate greed which is threatening all life on this planet).  During a particularly rough period, when the schools had failed to protect my son from bullies, he and I spent every day for several hours in Stir Crazy, where we both worked on our laptops. That went on for more than a year. (Incidentally, Charles now works every Saturday at Stir Crazy, which is owned and operated by Vickie and Tre Hall, who utterly transformed the business when they took over the reins). As my kids grew older and went out on their own, I was never worried about their safety as long as they stayed within the perimeters of our village. There were eyes always trained on them by our neighbors, as my eyes watched after their children.

As my kids and I biked through Bellevue, we’d often stop and dismount to inspect, at close range, the trees we would see, some of which are enormous and among the largest specimens of their kind in the state. There’s a massive willow oak on an alleyway, just off Fauquier, and another one that dominates the entire backyard of a house on Claremont. On Amherst an evergreen of some kind absolutely dwarfs the house it stands in front of, and then there’s the hemlock behemoth on Pope. We would rub our hands on the bark, breathe in the smell of the trees, and hunt for acorns or cones or seeds. The deodar cedar has an unusual cone that eventually, when it becomes brown, looks like a rose, and when it’s fully dried out, if you touch it even lightly, it will explode, casting seeds, like petals, everywhere.

At the base of many trees in Bellevue, you’re apt to find fairy haunts. These fairy trees, which are an ancient Celtic tradition, began popping up in Bellevue years ago, but when the pandemic struck their proliferation was like a housing boom, and kids with their parents and grandparents would often seek them out, sometimes bringing their own offerings to enhance them.

HERE’S WHAT I KNOW about this almost mythic place we call Bellevue: I can walk down any street here, at any time, day or night, winter or summer, and greet almost everyone I meet, not as a neighbor, but as a friend with shared experiences and hopes and desires. And I have come to know the stories of many of these people, have celebrated with them and mourned with them. I don’t know of any other community like it. 

Joan Peaslee, longtime Bellevue resident and real estate agent, said this: “You know your neighbors, and you stop to chat with them. In Bellevue, everybody’s a part of the neighborhood.”

Jo Ann Breaux, another real estate agent and former Bellevue resident, put it this way, “Bellevue is where home is history and community, joined in neighborly goodness.” 

AS WITH EVERY other neighborhood in Richmond’s Northside, Lewis Ginter—former Confederate officer, cigarette manufacturer, industrialist and philanthropist—was the prime mover behind Bellevue.

In the early 1880s, with his life partner John Pope, the tobacco mogul purchased Westbrook plantation which consisted of some 400 acres. By the time Ginter and his partner made the purchase the plantation house was in a state of serious decline. Pope enlarged the existing structure, and created one of the finest examples of Queen Anne architecture in the country. Pope then purchased another hundred acres and began planning the development that eventually became Bellevue. He built the road that would be named after him, which served as an entrance to Westbrook. He lined both Pope and Bellevue avenues with sugar maples, built the stone arch, but died before making any further progress. Ginter was grief-stricken by the loss of his lover, and died the following year. 

Pope’s brother, George, inherited the property. On the original plans drawn up for a community to be called Bellevue Park, Virginia Avenue, which was renamed Princeton Road, was inked in, along with a street that was never constructed—Regetree Avenue. Under George’s direction, development of Bellevue crept along at a snail’s pace: By 1913 only one house had been built, and four lots sold.

Several years later, after George’s death, his sister Margaret inherited the land, and in 1919 she sold it for $100,000 to J. Lee Davis and C.W. Davis. Lee Davis, incidentally, built a home for himself on Hermitage Road. Because of the profusion of willows growing on the banks of Princeton Creek which ran through the property, Lee called his home Willowbrook. Today the house and surrounding land make up the core of The New Community School.

By the time the Davises bought the land from Margaret Pope, a portion of the property had already been fitted with sewer and water lines. About half of the parcels had been sub-divided into good-sized lots, “for a high class suburban development.” 

The brothers Davis were no slackers. They immediately went to work developing one of the first streetcar suburbs in Richmond.

THE AREA BOUNDED by Bellevue, Laburnum, Hermitage and Brook was not part of the original Bellevue. This area contained three separate subdivisions—Brookdale, Monticello Place and Virginia Place.

Not long after we moved in, I had the pleasure of interviewing Oscar and Elizabeth Reynolds who moved into their Stanhope home when it was brand new, almost 70 years before. Of the area to the south of Bellevue Avenue, Oscar said, “We still don’t call that Bellevue.”

When the Reynolds moved into their home all of Northside was still part of Henrico County. “The city didn’t annex it until 1940,” Oscar remembered. “Back then we had a private sewer system and didn’t have the gutters, and there were no sidewalks.”

At that time both of Bellevue’s commercial strips were booming. 

BELLEVUE AVENUE ALONE was home to three grocery stores—Safeway at the Lamont corner, Lukhard’s at the Brook Road corner and a place called Wood’s Store in the middle of the block. Occupying the space where CVS now sits was one of Northside’s mainstays—Willey’s Drugstore, famous for its limeades. 

“I even jerked soda for Willey’s during the Second World War,” Oscar Reynolds told me. “It was a place all the children went to after school. Many kids who grew up here, later worked at the fountain there.”

In the building now occupied by Northside Grille there used to be a variety store. “They had a little bit of everything,” Elizabeth Reynolds told me. “And they sold candy for a penny a piece, but the owner was a crabby old man who didn’t seem to like children and at Halloween the children would soap his windows.”

Before World War II, MacArthur Avenue was called Rappahannock Avenue. There were two movie theaters there. One was The Bellevue, which is currently undergoing a transformation and was where Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine, who at the time lived on Fauquier Avenue, saw their very first film. The other theater was on the site now occupied by Once Upon A Vine. There was also another hardware store, yet another grocery store, as well as a Sinclair Service Station, and a U.S. Post Office. 

“Moving the post office was the worst thing that ever happened to Bellevue,” Elizabeth Reynolds had told me those many years ago. 

ON ABOUT THE TIME I talked with the Reynolds I also spoke with Wayland Rennie, a real estate agent whose name is linked with the Northside; one of its streets actually bears the family name.

“Bellevue has a wonderful texture,” Wayland said. “A wonderful architectural fabric from the Italianate to the Spanish influence with tile roofs, from the Arts and Crafts to the kit-built Sears homes and the American four squares. There’s something for everyone.”

Bellevue was built in protest, if not outright antipathy, to the movement in the late 1800s which saw the construction of vast homes (not unlike the McMansions of today), emblematic of the conspicuous consumption of the Gilded Age. They were more like monuments to the industrialists who owned them than comfortable and manageable homes for their inhabitants.

THE ARTS AND CRAFTS cottages in Bellevue were much more practical, and offered simplicity and comfort over ostentation and grandeur.

“There’s a misconception about these cottages and bungalows you have in Bellevue,” Robert Winthrop, architect and architectural historian, once told me. “People think these cottages and bungalows were second best houses. Not so. In fact, they were very sophisticated homes for people of refinement. It was avant-garde. The aesthetic was to build a charming house nestled in a garden.”

It was a sort of marriage of the indoors with the outdoors, and the interface between the two was not sharp or angular, it was blurred and curved. 

“Back when the area was developed, the idea was to have a garden and to do meticulous landscaping,” Robert said. “The emphasis was on gardening and the introduction of exotic and unusual plants. Bellevue is loaded with them. You see deodar cedars and red leaf Japanese maples.”

And the houses were constructed in a fashion that would complement the landscaping. “That’s one of the reasons you see the large window areas and the great porches and verandas on practically every home in Bellevue,” said Robert. “Merging with the outside was the idea. That’s also why you’ll see the pergolas or arbors and the dooryards and entrance courts. When we talk about these kinds of cottages we’re talking about the same sort of aesthetic and style that Frank Lloyd Wright employed.”

He mentioned some of the features of Bellevue homes that were given sharp focus by their designers. “Note the roofs and the hearths, which are both prominent,” he said. “They were important symbols of the home. You’ll sometimes see the hearth on the front elevation. And the roofs are gently sloping and shallow-pitched, for the most part.”  Robert also noted that many of the houses in Bellevue are built on man-made high ground. “They simply built it up to make the houses look less impressive. Remember, modesty was an admired trait,” he said.

SOME OF THE TRAITS of the houses in Bellevue universally admired by contractors are the quality of workmanship and the materials used in construction. Houses in Bellevue were built about ten to twenty years after most of the homes down in the Fan district were constructed. Bellevue houses are superior in their construction.

Jimmy Nash, a former resident of Bellevue who was both a general contractor and carpenter, had done his share of renovations in both areas of town.

“Starting from the ground up, you have to look at the foundation,” he told me. “Houses in the Fan have the joists sunk directly into a pocket in the foundation where water seeps in and then rots the joist out. That’s why you’ll see sagging floors in Fan houses. But in Bellevue, houses are built with deep foundations on which a wood sill is placed. The joists rest on top of that sill.”

And take a comparative look at the brick work in both the Fan and Bellevue. “Back when they built the Fan they didn’t have Portland cement,” Jimmy said. “The mortar was just sand and limestone and it tends to powder and fall apart after a while. As a matter of fact, you could use a simple claw hammer to disassemble one of those houses.” But that’s not the case in Bellevue, for when this neighborhood was built out Portland cement had become a construction standard. “The mortar in these houses in Bellevue is good and strong,” said Jimmy.

Along with that, all structural members, including studs, and floor and ceiling joists, are 16-inches on center, making for sound and solid construction. In the Fan these members are straddled at different widths. “By having everything standardized you’ve added strength,” Jimmy explained. “You’ve distributed the load more evenly.”

Even the floors in Bellevue homes are of a greater quality than those in Fan houses. In the Fan, floorboards were often nailed directly to joists. “But in Bellevue they would run pine sheathing boards as a sort of sub-layer to the floorboards,” Jimmy said. “And the floors on the first floor were generally made of good quartersawn heart pine or oak.”

Supporting the weight of floors and walls in full basements in Bellevue you often find solid steel I-beams supporting the load. Upended I-beams in turn are employed as columns to support the load of the horizontal members. “You seldom see that in the Fan,” according to Jimmy. 

And the roofs in Bellevue, because of their design, are generally more enduring than those found in the Fan. “In Bellevue they have pitched roofs of various materials instead of the flat tin roofs in the Fan,” this friend of mine said. “Water sits on flat roofs. Peaked roofs shed water. And they’re also stronger because their framing is not straight across but angled upward.”