Like Google Street View, but for Richmond history

They say “history is all around us.” But with all due respect to them—whoever they are—that’s kind of an empty platitude. Or it was, until MapRVA's released its latest project/resource/game and made it real.

“When you walk around Church Hill, you're like ‘Oh, there's a really old house here, that's kind of neat,’ and you can open Wikipedia, or Google, and slowly transport yourself back in time and get this frame of reference for what your neighborhood was,” said East End resident and MapRVA member Mike O’Brien in a recent Zoom interview with The Lookout. But such granular information about the East End’s cityscape isn’t always readily available,¹ and it’s never been searchable across the neighborhood’s geography. So MapRVA’s O’Brien and Jacob Hall, who previously teamed up to chart the locations of Richmond Police Department’s Flock surveillance devices, created the group’s recently launched Georeference Tool.

Put simply, it’s an interactive multimedia archive that situates historic photos and info sourced from the Library of Congress, the Library of Virginia, The Valentine Museum, and Richmond Public Library in their physical places across the city. Sort of like Google Street View, but for Richmond history, and not for profit or panopticonnery. The tool is live now and free for all to use—no account needed. It’s a really useful way to stumble upon Church Hill’s history in its geographic context. But the real fun comes when you start contextualizing that history yourself.

In addition to a map, the Georeferencing Tool has an interactive portal that allows anybody—possibly you?—to sift through its growing media archive and take a stab at geolocating material to the appropriate place on the map. Hall walked me through the process on our Zoom interview. It’s pretty easy once you get the hang of it:

1. On the Georeferencing Tool’s site, click the green button in the upper lefthand corner that says “Contribute.”

2. The tool will serve you a random historic image from its database, like the Library of Virginia’s 1965 shot of 2800 E. Grace St. you see above.

3. You read the archival information appended to the photo (this one was marked “Easy” because it included the building’s street address), and navigate to the spot on the map where you think it belongs.

4. You drop the marker there, orient the little joystick below the map to approximate the direction you believe the camera was facing, and indicate your degree of precision (“within a few meters,” “a stone’s throw,” or “a block or two.”) You can also add notes if you want.

5. Hit “Submit Georeference,” and the tool will populate your work on the map. Then, it’ll serve you another photo.

The MapRVA team has already done this for about 1,240 historic photos of Richmond, including dozens here in the East End. “I basically just told everybody [in MapRVA], ‘Hey, if you don't mind, can you just go on here and and just start putting some of these in?’” said Hall, who coded the site up over a weekend and is currently running it out of a closet in his downtown Richmond apartment. But with 14,000 total images in the catalog, there’s a long way to go. “That's part of the reason that we're kind of trying to advertise this,” added O’Brien.

Your humble Lookout editor heeded the call, spending some time with the tool earlier this week to add half a dozen markers to the map. It is way, way more engrossing than I expected it to be. I felt a little bit like Trevor Rainbolt, the guy who memorized all of Google Maps and now films viral videos of himself identifying obscure spots all over the planet in seconds. Or maybe a desk-bound, broadband-enabled Indiana Jones, toggling back and forth through Richmond past and present? Regardless, it’s a genuine thrill, and you never know what’s going to flash onto your screen next.

There’s a 1967 photo of the Junior League visiting St. John’s Church. There’s a color slide of the W.H. Grant Tobacco Factory produced sometime in the 1940s. There’s the Luther Libby House’s slave quarters in a relatively recent photo taken in 2003.

Not to brag, but I geolocated all of those myself. Didn’t take me very long, either—the tool makes it easy. You can’t restrict the images you’re served to a specific neighborhood, but you can skip any photos you don’t want to log, so I just kept skipping until I got media that pertained to the East End. You can, too. Despite our neighborhood’s strong claim to being Richmond’s most historic—the city’s name comes from Libby Hill’s view of the James River, which was reminiscent of that of the same from London’s Richmond Hill—it’s still looking pretty thin on the map compared to downtown Richmond. So if you’ve been searching for a more wholesome and productive way to spend your spare time than doomscrolling, consider locating Church Hill’s history all around you. The MapRVA team will be glad you did, and you will, too.

📜 Possum Poetry

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to [email protected]. All submissions anonymous!

🛤️ Commemorating a century since the Church Hill Tunnel collapse

Yesterday evening, city politicians and several dozen interested Richmonders gathered at Jefferson Park to mark the 100th anniversary of the deadly failure of the Church Hill Tunnel. The passageway (which collapsed a century ago yesterday, October 2nd, 1925) ran beneath the neighborhood from N. 19th and E. Marshall Sts. to N. 31st & E. Grace Sts., and contains the remains of at least two workers and a decrepit engine that was under Church Hill at the time of the disaster. The memorial service was hosted by the Church Hill Association and the Friends of Jefferson Park, with a walking tour by Richmond Story House.

There’s been plenty of coverage about this disaster over the years. And public works, too: the state erected a Historical Marker near the tunnel’s sealed N. 18th St. entrance in 2011, and there’s a mural near the Intersection of Doom™️ (N. 18th & E. Broad Sts.) that pays homage to the deceased. Also, the train-shaped playground at Jefferson Park is labeled C&O 231, after the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway engine that was inadvertently interred below. Which honestly feels a little dark for children’s recreation, thematically.

I’m not going to rehash the whole play-by-play of the collapse in detail here, but if you’re in the reading mood, Sarah Vogelsong just published a centennial recap at The Richmonder, and if you’d rather watch a video, I thought the 2021 piece (above) by VPM Hidden History host Brian Bullock, who attended yesterday’s event, was pretty well done.

🧹 Updates on MX-6 zoning and Newbille’s property-tax position

As a small, independent publication, The Lookout has neither a fact-checker² nor a senior editor vetting the copy that hits your inbox. It’s just me. Sometimes I miss important context or get a fact wrong in my coverage. When this happens, I strive to append formal clarifications and corrections as quickly and transparently as possible to the pieces where those discrepancies first appeared. I do that on a rolling basis on The Lookout’s website, but because this is first and foremost a newsletter, many readers probably never see those revisions. So moving forward, I’m going to occasionally highlight recent clarifications/corrections in the newsletter itself. To start:

• Regarding coverage of MX-6 zoning in Union Hill: A rendering circulated by opponents to the upzoning proposal depicts a six-story building looming over houses on the 2200 block of Jefferson Ave. That is not planned construction, but just a vision of what opponents say the proposal could open the door to. Not on the lot in the photo, though: there’s currently a two-story building being built on it. Big thanks to Lookout Eva C. for flagging this detail shortly after I published this column. (Took me a while to append it to the article, but I finally got around to it!) You can review the plans for that building in the Commission of Architectural Review’s database.

• Regarding coverage of Newbille’s property-tax position: An astute tipster emailed to point out that VPM had reported Newbille’s position on the property-tax rate on September 24th. She is in favor of maintaining the $1.20 rate per $100 of assessed value. Still haven’t been able to track down a statement from her, nor has she responded to The Lookout’s multiple requests for one.

I won’t promise to get everything right. But I do promise to do my best, and to move quickly to correct errors and commissions as they occur. If you spot something you think might be an error, get in touch.

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• Shoppin’: The tent sale at Dear Neighbor last week got rained out, so it’s happening tomorrow (10/4) from 11am-5pm. Flyer here (ignore the old date.)

• Hoggin’: Hog on The Hill is returning to Libby Hill Park tomorrow from 12-6pm. Come find your Lookout editor pouring beer from 3pm onward! More info here.

• Bussin’: The Greater Richmond Transit Company is holding community meetings about its proposed north-south Pulse route, and there’s one on Wednesday (10/8) from 6-8pm at Main Street Station. Peep the route plan.

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to [email protected] for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Email it to [email protected] with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.

1  Even less so now that Google has tanked its own search product to force users to interact with its AI slop machine.

2  Unfortunately, even large, corporate publications have mostly done away with the fact-checker role, to the detriment of both journalists and readers. Semi-relatedly, this profile on The New Yorker’s legendary fact-checking department, which is still going strong after nearly a century, was a really fun read. Despite being extremely navel-gaze-y in the most New Yorker way possible.