Norman H. Pollock
The hallmark of American urban life from its beginning has been change. European visitors noticed the hustle and progressive qualities of American town dwellers from the first days of the republic, and restless citizens constantly built new residential neighborhoods only to abandon them to commerce, to industrial expansion, or to the slums needed to house foreign and rural immigrants. This process was enhanced dramatically at the end of the century by the electric streetcar, which made it possible for the middle classes to live in a suburban environment while at the same time working and shopping in the central business district and partaking of the city's cultural life.
Norfolk, like other American cities in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, saw its growing middle class dispersing into, what Sam Bass Warner, Jr., has called its "streetcar suburbs." 1 Ghent, Brambleton, Chesterfield Heights, Ballentine Place, Lafayette Residence Park, Villa Heights, Park Place, Riverview, Colonial Place, Larchmont, Lambert's Point, West Ghent, and Atlantic City stretched in an arc around the business district on the Elizabeth River waterfront. All were linked to the center by streetcar and looked northward and eastward to farm and beach. Although each had qualities that differentiated it from the others--Brambleton and Lambert's Point, for instance, were a social world apart from Ghent or Larchmont--all had certain features in common. Each was the product of speculative free
enterprise capitalism; each aspired to an air of social distinction, or at least of solid middle-class respectability; each depended for basic services on the utilities and public institutions of Norfolk; and each planned its street layout so as to provide at least the appearance of a leafy and serene suburban atmosphere within the framework of the American grid plan, which maximized both the number of lots and potential profits that could be derived from a piece of land.
The explosive growth of Norfolk's automobile-oriented suburbia during and after World War II pushed the rings of population growth far beyond the streetcar commuter's limits. The suburbs of 1890-1920 were left marooned on the edge of a decaying central city, subject to the blight of aging wooden houses and to the social and racial changes of urban America in the l950s and l960s.
As if to complete the effects of the growth of a new suburbia, the bulldozers of urban renewal stirred the winds of change to hurricane force in Norfolk's streetcar suburbs. So swift was the decline of two of them--Atlantic City and the eastern section of Ghent--that they are today only a memory, while Lambert's Point has already lost its northern edge to expanding Old Dominion University. Park Place and Brambleton went from middle-class respectability to black ghetto, but a patina of the same age has cloaked Larchmont and West Ghent in upper-middle-class tranquillity.
This essay is an investigation of the history of one of these streetcar suburbs--Colonial Place. Begun like the others as a speculative land-development scheme, Colonial Place in the mid-1970s has weathered the storms of social change and maintained its desirability as a residence, not only for the kind of middle-class professionals for whom it was originally planned, but also for upwardly mobile black families. Alone among Norfolk's streetcar suburbs that have had to cope with social and racial change, Colonial Place has achieved a diversity of income and occupational groups without serious physical deterioration. The factors that shaped and guided the development of Colonial Place, the qualities that it developed as it matured, and the forces that determined its response to the crisis of the late 1960s are the subject of this study, which will attempt to answer the following questions: (1) What factors determined its physical form
and what kinds of housing were built in the various periods of its development? (2) What have been the changes in the social composition of the community over the seventy years of its existence? (3) How have decisions taken by the founding corporation, the residents of the neighborhood, and officials of the city of Norfolk contributed to the process of adaptation to social presumptions very different from those current at the time of its founding?
The suburban expansion of American cities at the end of the nineteenth century followed a familiar pattern beginning with the incorporation of a land-development company, which then acquired a piece of open land on the growing edge of the city. Having plotted lots and streets, usually in the gridiron form that was the "natural tool of the speculator," the company opened the first few streets and threw the new suburb open to buyers.2 The actual building of houses on the lots was up to the buyers. The land-development company could exercise control over the type of house built, and consequently over the social composition of the finished neighborhood, only by deed restrictions dealing with such matters as race, set-back requirements, the minimum cost of the house that could be constructed, and the size of the site required for building.
Individual buyers of lots in the new subdivision, then, could hire a contractor to build a house to their own or their architect's specifications, either paying cash or securing a mortgage on the house and lot. This method of building, costly and beyond the capacity of many of those who sought to live in the new suburbs, was supplemented by another participant in the building process--the speculative builder. Possessing enough capital to buy several lots in the new subdivision, such a builder could put up a house conforming to the minimum deed restrictions, hold it for sale or rent it while he found a buyer, and then sell it to someone who could arrange his own financing. Such houses came in a few stock patterns, variants on a local or
regional theme. Thus in piecemeal fashion, subject to a variety of outside forces and guided by no municipal supervision or land-use planning, the new suburb took shape. Within a few years of its founding, it had either succeeded or failed financially and socially. The results of this haphazard process, dependent on so many variables--the charm or lack of it in the basic plan, the skill or luck of the speculators in gauging the state of the economy at the moment when the lots were offered for sale, the availability of mortgage money, and the demand for houses of the kind envisioned by the developers--left an impress with a life expectancy of sixty to a hundred years on the physical environment of the city.3
Colonial Place was just this sort of suburb, but its name seems to have been a happy second thought. The company that became the Colonial Place Corporation was chartered by the Norfolk Corporation Court on March 28, 1903 as the "Sterling Place Company."4 The company was capitalized at not less than $400,000 and not more than $600,000, divided into one-dollar shares, and was empowered to hold real estate of not more than 300 acres or more than the value of $600,000. In May of 1903 the company bought for $150,000, from the heirs of Peter March, a farm of 166 acres north of Park Place on a marshy peninsula in Tanner's Creek.5 During the next few years the company spent its energies and its capital in the basic layout of its property. While the land was very flat, needing fill more than grading, it was also only a few feet above mean high tide, and the few sluggish streams that rose in Park Place and Kensington flowed through marshes to Tanner's Creek, the banks of which
(4) City of Norfolk, Charter Book 8, p. 85.
(5) City of Norfolk, Deed Book 138a (May 8, 1903), p. 172.
were marshy and waterlogged.6 The company, therefore, was obliged to embank the whole outer edge of the peninsula, an undertaking that must seriously have strained its resources. While this work may have seriously compromised the financial soundness of the enterprise, modern residents can only regard it as the soundest planning decision made. The waterfront Mayflower Road, an esplanade in the grand manner, both defines the perimeter of the neighborhood and provides an important amenity to its residents.
The street plan adopted in 1904 had an equally decisive influence on the future of Colonial Place. To the south of the March property lay three subdivisions, with deadeningly ordinary grid plans--Park Place, Virginia Place, and Kensington. Their east-west streets bore numbers and ran parallel to Pocahontas Avenue (later West 38th Street), a through street connecting Lambert's Point with the extension of Church Street later named Granby Street. The company naturally laid out its property in a grid, but it both detached itself from the unimaginative suburbs to the south and redeemed the future Colonial Place from the deadliness of the grid by making two variations. The north-south streets were angled to follow the axis of the center of the peninsula, the high ground where Newport Avenue now runs, and the basic grid was broken by laying out two squares where Delaware Avenue crossed the two secondary north-south streets and two circles on Newport Avenue at Carolina and Rhode Island avenues. The latter circle also conveniently solved the problem of turning the streetcars around at the northern end of their run from downtown Norfolk. By creating these squares and circles, and by turning the axes of the north-south streets, the company sacrificed the equivalent of three blocks of lots and created some oddly shaped lots where three of the lateral avenues had to meet Pocahontas Avenue at very sharp angles. This decision also decreed that
in the far future the four blocks of company property lying south of 38th Street would cease to be Colonial Place except on the long-forgotten plats.7 However, the creation of a ground plan that enhanced the charm of Colonial Place and clearly distinguished it from Park Place to the south more than compensated for the loss of salable lots.
The company's determination to distinguish its property from the region to the south was also manifested in the naming of its streets. Although physically joined to Virginia Place and Kensington by the continuation of Colonial, Granard, and Grafton avenues northward into Sterling Place, the company had in mind a unified theme, probably suggested by the contemporaneous planning for the Jamestown Exposition. Colonial Avenue, originating in Ghent, struck the keynote. The avenues parallel to it were renamed to honor the captains of the ships that brought the colonists to Jamestown--Christopher Newport and Bartholomew Gosnold. Jamestown and Yorktown were commemorated in the names of the Newport Avenue circles, and the cross streets were named for the original thirteen colonies from north to south.
By the end of 1906 all the preliminary operations of launching the new suburb were complete, the company had begun the sale of its lots, and the first few houses had begun to rise in the fields north of 35th Street. During the year of the exposition it evidently occurred to someone in the company that Sterling Place inadequately expressed the colonial motif, and it was decided to change the community's name. The company was reorganized in April 1908 as the Colonial Place Corporation and began the arduous and expensive task of building a suburb.8 Its subsequent growth took place in six phases, the most recent of which has just ended.
The first period of development began in 1906 with the building of the first house by the president of the Sterling Place Corporation, George W. Dillard. Dillard was an entrepreneur who seemed to be involved in a number of development schemes in early twentieth-century Norfolk, but he apparently did not find his own suburb very agreeable; he lived there only a year or two and then returned to Ghent, leaving other members of the Board of Directors to uphold the corporation's presence in Colonial Place. Dillard's house was a long, narrow, substantial brick house of the style repeated over and over in East Ghent and Park Place, though it was not copied much in Colonial Place, where the lots were somewhat wider.9 Changes in Norfolk's domestic architecture were at that time reflecting changes in middle-class family size and, possibly, the availability of servants. The size of houses in the older suburbs like Ghent or Park Place differed markedly from that of most of those to be built in the new suburbs like Colonial Place and Larchmont. In Colonial Place builders generally abandoned the variations of the Norfolk townhouse characteristic of the older areas and rang the changes on the conventions of early twentieth-century building styles familiar all over the country. Popular in the first decades of the century were houses of the English cottage type,10 the modified shingle type,11 the Italian villa,12 or, echoing the national trend, the American period house. Early examples of these were the Dutch colonial,13 the Queen Anne revival,14 and the center-hall Southern country house.15
(11) 418 and 422 Pocahontas Avenue, 1906, built by two brothers who were contractors.
(12) 4504 Gosnold Avenue, 1910.
(13) 4415 Newport Avenue, 1908, the home of the treasurer of the corporation.
(14) 536 New York Avenue, 1907.
(15) 4107 Gosnold Avenue, 1908.
During the first few years development was very slow, and it is unlikely that the Colonial Place Corporation could have found its investment very profitable.16 Norfolk's building boom of 1907-08 gave way to a slump in 1909-10, and although by 1911 the corporation could claim 980 buyers, the number of houses built could be counted on two hands.17 There were economic reasons for the slow pace of development. Inside lots cost only $600, but no house could be built on fewer than two lots, and the corporation permitted buyers three years to pay for lots at ten dollars a month. Furthermore, Colonial Place had stiff competition. In the spring of 1911 the corporation went all out to attract buyers with full-page advertisements in the Sunday Virginian-Pilot. The nine houses pictured made a brave show, but they were not just "some Colonial Place houses"--they were virtually all of them.18 And while the advertisement might describe it as "Norfolk's High Class Residential Section," Larchmont could also claim high status. Larchmont's claim to be "Norfolk's Only High Class Suburb" rested on its set-back requirement (fifteen feet as compared to ten in Colonial Place) and on the requirement that all plans had to be reviewed by the Board of Directors of the Larchmont Company.19 In the contest for the "high-class" home seeker, Larchmont won; and for those willing to settle for less, there was a wide range of choice in l9ll--Winona, Ballentine Place, and Lenox in Norfolk County, and Park Place and Villa Heights as well as Riverview in the city.
Confronted with this competition, and desperate to get the suburb on its feet, the Colonial Place Corporation dropped out of the race. By 1912 the requirement that no house could be built on less than two lots had been
(18) Virginian-Pilot, Apr. 2, 1911, p. 35.
abandoned. This timely change ensured the success of Colonial Place, but it meant that its houses would be primarily of a modest three- or four-bedroom type, with few pretensions to either style or beauty. It also meant that socially its residents would be a mixture of middle-income people, with relatively few professionals or really well-to-do upper-middle-class families, and a substantial number of skilled workers and managerial or sales-level white-collar workers. Within a decade the pattern had become clear, and the original builders of large houses had mostly departed for West Ghent or Larchmont.20
The second period of growth in Colonial Place was dominated by the speculative builder and lasted until the end of the boom induced by the First World War. Having given up its pretensions to upper-class status, Colonial Place could now develop as the home of the respectable and hard-working central- and lower-middle class. During the first years of this period the pattern was norma1ly the building of one or two houses, which, when sold, provided the capital for the next one or two. One of these speculative builders was Charles C. Fitch, who built a number of substantial and attractive houses in the years 1912-18. In 1912 he built three houses in the 500 block of Virginia Avenue and two in the 3700 block of Colonial Avenue. After selling these he built three more in the 500 block of West 38th Street. In 1914 he built three more, and by 1918 an additional five, all costing between $3700 and $5500, most of them on a single corner lot (thirty-five-foot frontage) or on one and a half inside lots (thirty-seven-and-a-half-foot frontage). Not more than two had the same exterior appearance or floor plan, and all have borne the passing years well. Another speculator of this period, S. L. McGonigle, contributed one of the most distinguished blocks of Colonial Place, the 500 block of Pennsylvania Avenue; during 1915-17 he built thirteen subtle variations of the same brick house. 21
(21) Other examples can be seen at 503 West 38th Street and 514 New Jersey Avenue.
By 1917 the impact of the war and Norfolk's new status as a naval base was being felt, and speculative activity was going forward everywhere east of Gosnold Avenue and south of Massachusetts Avenue. When this boom ended in 1922, the stereotyped small, two-story frame house had been built by the hundreds to house the naval officers, owners of small businesses, skilled workers, insurance men, real estate salesmen, and supervisory personnel in the ship chandlering, railway, and warehousing enterprises that had boomed along with the war.22 The rise in the number of young families overcrowded Monroe School in Park Place, and a new school, J.E.B. Stuart School, was opened in September 1920 on land between Virginia and Carolina avenues. By the early 1920s the physical and social character of Colonial Place was firmly established, and apart from the western and northern waterfront blocks, most streets exhibited rows of trim, porch-fronted houses, with curbside saplings and newly planted lawns in place of the open fields of 1912.
Between 1922 and the onset of the depression eight years later, a third period of development essentially completed Colonial Place's physical growth and confirmed its social status. The feverish pace of expansion had ended, and building returned to the prewar pattern of the construction of one house by an owner or the building of two houses by a speculator. A few houses on Mayflower Road facing north toward the Lafayette River (formerly Tanner's Creek) were built in the colonial manner, and Gosnold Avenue began to be built up with the substantial houses that the early promoters had hoped would characterize the whole neighborhood. Residents who still aspired to social eminence in the 1920s could point with pride to the elite character of these two streets. But the new feature of expansion at this stage, one that pointed in a different direction from the development on Gosnold Avenue, was the appearance of a number of duplex apartments and the building of a few larger
apartment houses. The four- or six-flat apartment house was a ubiquitous convention of urban housing in the United States after 1900, and many had been built in Ghent and Park Place before and during the war. A few had appeared in 1917 on 36th and 37th streets, and now after 1921 six were built in central Colonial Place.23 Initially their tenants were similar to the owners and tenants of single-family houses, but when in the 1950s and 1960s the walk-up flat lost its appeal for middle-class families, the presence of such apartments in any numbers became a destabilizing factor. In Colonial Place apartment houses were too few in number to affect the community's overall character.
By the early 1930s Colonial Place was a mature community, though no longer, strictly speaking, a streetcar suburb; in 1926 the Colonial Place trolley line had been changed to a bus route. With the revival of prosperity in the late 1930s and then during the postwar boom, Colonial Place entered its fifth and next-to-last period of development. Building during this period followed the earlier pattern: nearly all of it was of the single-family three- or four-bedroomed house. Some of the houses, on Gosnold Avenue and overlooking the river on Mayflower Road, were imposing ones in the colonial style. Although the term "colonial" is flexible enough to describe almost anything, one can see its 1940 varieties along Gosnold Avenue24 and Mayflower Road, as well as the smaller, less expensive versions on side streets.25 After the war the fashion for the "contemporary" or ranch house, and the Tidewater suburban convention of brick sheathing left distinctive marks. Now all but the last few empty lots in Colonial Place were built upon, and blocks that had once been open fields were filled with substantial houses attractive to Norfolk's middle class.26
(24) 4715, 4815, 4816, and 5009 Gosnold Avenue, among others.
Unlike Park Place, the social character of which had been transformed by the subdivision of the big, old houses during the war, Colonial Place had retained throughout the stages of its development the same mixed physical and social characteristics. The subdivision of older houses into apartments had begun, but not significantly, compared to Park Place, and the slow process of building had maintained the flow into the neighborhood of middle-class business and professional people. This movement continued well past the point at which it might have ceased had the pace and character of the World War I speculative building of cheap houses on narrow lots been continued.
By the mid-l950s only a few lots remained undeveloped, and Colonial Place was ready for the final period of building. With a few exceptions these lots were scattered here and there among the already built-up blocks. In most cases the land had been bypassed because it was marshy or had been bought for speculation and not released previously. All of these lots now awaited the final period of speculative building which was of two quite different kinds. One was the building of Norfolk's second high-rise apartment house, Lafayette Towers, overlooking the river on the eastern side of Colonial Place in 1962. This building is so utterly different from all other kinds of housing in the area, and its residents so detached from the community, that it cannot be said to be of Colonial Place, even though it is in it.27 Nevertheless the number of apartments and the income level and voting habits of the tenants, counted as they are in the 28th census tract and the 15th precinct, tend to distort statistical studies of Colonial Place.
The second kind of new construction came after the entry of blacks into Colonial Place in 1967. This new construction could have been expected to be two-unit or four-unit rental apartments if a 1969 zoning change had not excluded multifamily dwellings.28 The new houses were small and cheaply built, containing
such modern amenities as electric heat, wall-to-wall carpeting, and a full array of kitchen gadgets They were designed to sell at a high price to upwardly mobile black families who desired and could afford a new house, but were unwilling to seek it in suburbia.29 Although not overtly advertised for blacks, the price and general attributes of the new houses would discourage white buyers for whom a wider selection of comparable houses at the same price is readily available. This final period of new construction in Colonial Place is a kind of coda to the rest, and when it is finished, the suburban vision of the Sterling Place Company in 1903 will have been belatedly realized.
In the l950s Colonial Place was a mature neighborhood, but it was no longer suburban. Under the impact of rearmament and Cold War tensions, Norfolk continued to expand, and new development at Ward's Corner, at Bayview, and along Little Creek Road, as well as along Military Highway and Virginia Beach Boulevard established a new suburban frontier. The decaying central core of Norfolk's business district was now surrounded by a ring of aging neighborhoods, the future of which was at best uncertain. And as the wrecking crews of urban renewal began the process of destruction and rebuilding that transformed the face of inner Norfolk, waves of change were generated that broke with shattering force on the old streetcar suburbs. The strongest current in the wave of change was the racial element. Norfolk's black population had risen from 45,893 in 1940 to 78,806 in 1960, and new areas were required to house the larger population that was concentrated in the ghetto areas on the edge of the business district. Since it was the black neighborhoods that were cleared for roads, hospitals, civic buildings, and public housing, their residents had to seek new houses in established neighborhoods on the white fringes. First Brambleton and Atlantic City, then Villa Heights and Berkley, and after 1960 East Ghent and Park Place made the racial transition in the familiar pattern.
While the pattern of neighborhood racial transition is commonly regarded as deriving from natural law, in reality this phenomenon is the consequence of quite human actions and failures to act. It is a complex of the need for housing on the part of blacks and of resistance to this need on the part of whites, of economic benefits accruing to certain commercial institutions that take part in the process of turnover, and of the failure of government leadership on all levels. Perhaps one of the most vital elements is neighborhood leadership. Few neighborhoods in the midst of racial transition can find enough unity or leadership to question views held for a century and to challenge the profit-seeking that is regarded as the right of those who benefit from it.
Colonial Place in the 1960s suffered the same problems as any other aging neighborhood in the streetcar commuting belt that sought to remain attractive to young, middle-income families irrespective of race. Having received its essential imprint before 1920, it was too old in the l960s to sparkle with modernity, yet at the same time it was too young to have the quaint charm associated with the tall townhouses, brick sidewalks, and cobblestones of the nineteenth-century city. Its houses, square and roomy but of no identifiable style (in comparison with the new houses of suburbia), seemed tacky and cramped, if not obsolete. The lack of off-street parking, the ills any aging wooden house is apt to display, and the lack of social distinction for people to whom this is important all tended to discourage young families of means.
The schools, especially the secondary schools, presented another obstacle. By the 1960s the intake areas of Maury High School and Blair Junior High School, the schools that served Colonial Place, included substantial numbers of black children, many of them poor, at a time when most other schools in the northern and eastern areas of Norfolk were all, or nearly all, white. Stuart Elementary School remained all white (up to the 1966-67 school year), but families were likely to move from Colonial Place when their children finished seventh grade to avoid substantially integrated Blair. Thus Colonial Place had not only relatively less attractive housing than new suburbs, and perhaps the beginnings of physical deterioration, but also the special burden that the
children of the neighborhood had to cope with school integration just at the moment when residents were becoming aware that black entry into the neighborhood was a possibility. In these circumstances a timely move to a new house in a "better neighborhood" could relieve uneasiness about the children's education and about the possibility of upheaval in the neighborhood, while at the same tine it might improve the family's social position.
In 1960 neighboring Park Place began the transition from black to white, a process that was virtually completed by mid-1966. The approach of blacks toward Colonial Place made some residents uneasy, but stirred others to action. In 1965 a civic league was formed, embracing the area north of 35th Street from Colley Avenue east to the Lafayette River at City Park. The purpose of the Colonial Place-Riverview Civic League was to rally the community and prevent sales to blacks, thus preserving the status quo. Like other citizens who have organized for the sane purpose elsewhere, the residents of Colonial Place found their Canute-like enterprise doomed to failure. Real estate interests had ordained that the area was marked out for black settlement, and they were already engaged in drying up the white demand by warning white home buyers that the neighborhood was a bad investment, that it was endangered by black invasion, and that, because of schools and other factors, it was unsuitable for white occupancy.30 After it was demonstrated that the houses could not be sold to whites, blacks could buy, and the real estate agents could assist in the orderly withdrawal of the white population. Customarily the withdrawal was spurred on by a barrage of mail and telephone solicitations and personal door-to-door visits, all of which urged white residents to leave at once, "while you still can"--before real estate values collapsed, while buyer demand was high, and before they were left alone in an all-black neighborhood. This had been the pattern in East Ghent, in Park Place, and after the late spring of 1966 on 36th and 37th streets. It could be expected that the same pattern would be repeated in Colonial Place all the way up to the Lafayette River.
The movement of blacks into the areas between 35th and 38th streets had two visible effects during 1966-67. Stuart School now became substantially integrated, and the 35th Street shopping area fell into a steep decline as shopkeepers followed their white clientele out of the neighborhood.31 By the summer of 1967 the first blacks had bought houses on the north side of 38th Street and on Georgia Avenue.
The long feared-arrival of black residents could have been expected to be followed by the departure of the white population. This process did in fact begin, but much more slowly than it had below 38th Street, partly because the black demand was slackening. For the first time black home buyers had a number of choices--Chesterfield Heights, Campostella Heights, East Ghent, and the Colley-Hampton corridor were all in various stages of transition, so that Colonial Place was not the only open neighborhood. In addition, a substantial number of Colonial Place residents, who had not been psychologically prepared for flight by a palpable physical decline of the neighborhood, showed a disposition to remain and see how things went. Perhaps most important of all was a phenomenon that clearly set Colonial Place apart from previously changing neighborhoods--the white demand failed to dry up.
During the period of the entry of the first black families, new white families continued to move into Colonial Place, attracted by the large houses selling at reasonable prices, the convenience of the area, and its proximity to rapidly expanding Old Dominion College. In the crucial year 1967-68, when Colonial Place listings began to appear in the black-oriented Section 89 of Norfolk newspapers' realty advertisements,32 several realty salespeople, notably two from Goodman-Segar-Hogan, continued to bring white buyers to look at Colonial Place houses, as did some of the new residents who were connected
with Old Dominion College. By the spring of 1968 Colonial Place had the nucleus of a group of people who saw the alternatives as either a stable racially integrated neighborhood or a black ghetto neighborhood, but not the continued all-white neighborhood that most residents wanted and that the civic league still proclaimed as its goal. This stabilization group, which will henceforth be called "the group," was composed of new white and black residents who shared a desire to live in Colonial Place as an integrated community and who believed that the character of the neighborhood made stabilization practicable there and then.
To this group the refusal of the civic league leadership to acknowledge the peril from the real estate firms, and its insistence on featuring irrelevancies at its meetings, was maddening. The 1967-68 year was consumed in bitter arguments about the shape of the future and denunciations of integration as a communist or an NAACP plot. The year ended with an amendment to the bylaws redrawing the boundary of Colonial Place at 38th Street in order to exclude most of the black residents. The civic league, like the neighborhood, seemed doomed; notices of meetings could not be sent out, nor were meetings advertised, for fear that black residents might come. When the nominating committee met to consider the 1968-69 slate of officers, none of the old segregationist leadership would agree to serve. The man who ultimately accepted this thankless task was a transition figure-a tax lawyer of a few years' residence who was attached to neither the old leadership nor the group. A native of Richmond, he had the right accent for the old guard, yet was flexible enough to be a good leader for the new residents. During his tenure of office, Colonial Place turned the corner.
At the first meeting in the fall of 1968, after a spirited debate about the future of the neighborhood, a motion was made to create a stabilization committee, and it was the group that then received official status and drafted a plan to give Colonial Place a new direction. The committee's recommendations fell broadly into two categories: to pronounce the civic league inclusive of both races, publicly stating the goal of integration as the alternative to total change or white supremacy; and to attack the real neighborhood problems--physical deterioration, the attitude of so many real estate salesmen, the
difficulties of a heavily integrated school, and a host of ordinary community matters.33 When these recommendations were presented in November, there was a storm of indignation: a way of life was being challenged by a group of "outsiders."34 The session had to be adjourned until a specially called meeting held at Knox Church in December, but by then enough residents had been persuaded that all the group's recommendations were accepted except for the rolling back of the civic league boundary to 35th Street. The group now had to carry the battle to the real estate firms while they endured the sniping and sapping operations of their segregationist opponents, who blamed the group for the disasters that they thought had occurred.
To overcome the problem of community fragmentation and lack of cohesiveness, the stabilization committee sought out one person in every block to be block captain--the eyes and ears of the league. These block captains notified residents of meetings and kept track of the activities of real estate salespeople. From the beginning both blacks and whites were recruited as block captains, and from April 1969 on, they had a newsletter to carry around. This little paper, typed and edited by residents and printed, photocopied, or mimeographed at a variety of places, helped to unite the neighborhood and to publicize what the league was doing to stabilize and improve it. The paper was also useful in squelching the rumors that inevitably fly around an integrating neighborhood.
The Civil Rights Act of 1968 gave the stabilization committee a lever with which to oppose the real estate companies' attempts to stimulate panic selling. Reports of solicitation, and of "steering"--showing to blacks only segregated or transitional neighborhoods and warning whites away--were forwarded to the attorney in charge of the Housing Section of the Department of Justice. There, two dynamic young attorneys left over from the Johnson administration
interested themselves in the affairs of Colonial Place. Reports of questionable real estate activities from both the neighborhood and from Tidewater Fair Housing, Inc., which was very active in opening up the suburbs, focused federal attention briefly but effectively on Colonial Place. The announcement on television and radio in July 1969 that the FBI was about to launch an investigation of real estate practices in the neighborhood had an electrifying effect upon unscrupulous brokers. They stopped their panic peddling and then complained bitterly that the civic league was unfair in giving them such bad publicity.
After 1969, despite some isolated examples of panic solicitation, the real estate firms of Tidewater began to relent. The presidents of the Norfolk Board of Realtors during 1969, 1970, and 1971 were receptive to requests not to use mail or telephone solicitations in Colonial Place, and the league worked hard to reeducate real estate salespeople to see the community as one in which both races could live. Personal calls, the maintenance of a well-publicized list of cooperating realtors, and the use of a brochure assembled and circulated by a civic league committee in 1970 gradually overcame realtors' resistance and convinced some important firms to alter their attitudes and practices. Nonetheless, a continuing problem has been the advice given to white families that Colonial Place is not a good investment or that it will be black in five years, a time frame still heard in 1974, though less frequently than in 1967. When the civic league began holding its annual open house in May 1972 to show both "restored" houses and those for sale, many real estate salespeople, including some who were previously hostile, responded with enthusiasm and took clients to the event without regard to race.
It was found that the best defense against uncooperative realty firms was the glare of publicity. In the spring of 1969 Norfolk's biracial Citizen's Advisory Committee held a hearing in Colonial Place to listen to complaints against real estate firms. Letters of complaint filed with both the Realty Board and the Department of Justice were effective in some cases. However, persuasion was also effective. The cooperation of some realtors and of the
Norfolk Board of Realtors, particularly during the presidency of William J. Jonak, Jr., in 1971, was invaluable. Also working in favor of the stabilization effort was the pressure exerted by the United States Navy during the critical years 1968 through 1970 in opening up the suburbs to black navy personnel. The walls of suburban segregation crumbled for black people at just the right time for Colonial Place, and this did much to dispel the idea of a suburban sanctuary to which whites could flee as they had before 1968.
Another challenge for the stabilization committee was the public school situation. By 1968 the racial ratio at Stuart was a matter of concern if Colonial Place were to remain desirable for white families with young children. Between 1966 and 1968 Stuart had undergone substantial change, not only from the movement into the attendance zone of large numbers of black children, but also because of the peculiarity of Norfolk's freedom-of-choice desegregation order, which permitted white children to choose to go to all-white Larchmont School while permitting black children to transfer from all-black Smallwood and Madison schools. Integration at Stuart, first of students and then in 1966 of faculty, had proceeded smoothly under the wise and compassionate leadership of the principal, D. C. Beery. But at Christmas 1968, Mr. Beery suddenly died. At this point the School Board, aware of the critical importance of Stuart, appointed Jack Thomas principal. Mr. Thomas had a gift for inspiring his teachers with esprit de corps and for dealing firmly but kindly with the children. Under his direction, and with teachers' aides, additional library books, and special teachers and programs, Stuart developed into something of a model school. Even as its racial proportion reached 72 percent black and 28 percent white at the end of the 1969-70 school year, what might have been a liability was a great asset in selling the community to new residents.
In 1970 the Norfolk School Board was ordered by the Federal Court to achieve a greater degree of school integration by clustering schools in groups and transporting students within the cluster. Stuart, now regarded as a black school, was paired with two predominantly white schools just across the Lafayette River to the north. Primary grade children were bused out of Colonial Place
and fifth and sixth graders were bused into Stuart. While furious protests came from Norfolk's white neighborhoods, integrated Colonial Place saw the busing as a useful means of educating all its children in schools that reflected the citywide school racial balance. At the same time, busing relieved Maury and Blair, which were over their desegregation woes anyway, of the overcrowding that had plagued them for years.
While the civic league was working to convert real estate firms, striving to help Stuart, and publicizing its stabilization effort, it also worked with the city to maintain the level of municipal services in a neighborhood no longer solely white and middle class. The league formed committees to relay neighborhood complaints about sanitation and housing code enforcement to city agencies. At the same time it explored the means of updating and improving services such as street lighting and maintenance of public open spaces and of coping with problems like traffic and incipient blight.
The first foray into neighborhood improvement came at a most opportune time and from an unexpected source. During the spring of 1969, when all these efforts were being launched, a Riverview high school teacher began a petition movement requesting the city council to change the zoning of Colonial Place and Riverview from multifamily to single-family. This movement struck an immediate response in residents new and old. The act of carrying petitions around brought people together. When the civic league presented the petitions to city council, the delegation was biracial, projecting an image, unusual in 1969, of black and white neighbors pursuing a single goal of community improvement. Ultimately Colonial Place and Riverview were rezoned R-IIa, the single-family zoning applicable to the lot sizes of the area. This action was the subject of an approving editorial in the Virginian-Pilot, which noted that changing times had provided an alternative to flight and racial turnover: ". . . now that the residents [of Colonial Place and Riverview] have chosen accommodation over segregation, and City Council has acceded to their request for stricter zoning, the prospects for stability should be strong indeed."35
Rezoning had come just in time. Demolition of East Ghent began late in the same year, and the rehousing of families displaced from there and from the educational center renewal area in Brambleton put heavy pressure on Colonial Place. Many realty salesmen could not seem to think of any other place for the displaced families to go, and during 1970 and 1971 more black than white families bought houses in Colonial Place. During this period the brochure was used effectively to recruit white families.
Less successful, and in fact disastrous, was the billboard episode of July 1970. Billboard advertisements were prepared bearing an emblem of interlocking white and black circles and the statement, "Our community did it, so can our city, state and nation." Unfortunately, three of the four billboards were set up not in the suburban locations intended, but in the ghetto areas on Granby Street, Colonial Avenue, and Brambleton Avenue. Worse yet, they appeared during a period of great public excitement just after a new desegregation plan had been released by the School Board. The ensuing furor among the Riverview members of the civic league resulted in a backlash of irrational animosity that the president of the civic league had to face alone, as the other members of the group were away. Riverview, which was not yet integrated, showed strong indications of wanting to leave the joint enterprise at this point, but in the fall the breach was healed and a united community faced the next phase in the conservation effort.
The January 1971 meeting of the civic league featured a panel discussion entitled "Norfolk's Neighborhoods in the 1970's," in which the main participant was Roy B. Martin, mayor of Norfolk.36 The mayor and other representatives
of city agencies had been asked for two purposes: to find out what their thoughts were about the future of Colonial Place and what the city would be doing to assist it; and to bring home to them the determination of the community to retain its biracial and middle-income character. Along with the usual platitudes uttered on such occasions was a significant statement by the mayor to the effect that the city had been watching with interest what had been going on in Colonial Place and had wondered why the city's assistance had not been requested. He went on to suggest that the civic league might explore the possibility of having Colonial Place declared a conservation district, similar to that of Ghent. The Ghent Conservation District had reversed deterioration there and spearheaded the revitalization of the area.
In response, a letter was sent asking city council to investigate the possibility of naming Colonial Place a conservation district. City council referred this request to the City Planning Commission, which held a hearing at the end of February 1971 and recommended that the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority undertake a detailed investigation to determine what would be the best approach to the preservation of Colonial Place. This investigation was approved by city council on March 9, 1971, and Colonial Place-Riverview began a two-and-a-half year sojourn in the bureaucratic wilderness. The result, for those with the patience to wait, was the establishment of the Colonial Place-Riverview Conservation District in October 1973. Given the well-known propensity of NRHA for clearance schemes, some residents required much reassurance that this project was to emphasize conservation by rehabilitation rather than by bulldozer. Community needs and desires were made known to the city by the creation of a neighborhood coalition, an organization separate from the civic league. At the same time the coalition had the task of interpreting NRHA to the neighborhood and explaining the glacial pace of their activity.
The "General Development Plan for Colonial Place-Riverview," which emerged in July 1972, provided the basis for the conservation district approved by city council in the summer of 1973. By the autumn of 1973 the conservation
district and its adjuncts, the certificate-of-occupancy program and the housing code inspectors, using a code written by a neighborhood committee and approved by city council to apply only to the conservation district, were in business. These programs were all funded initially by Model Cities' money, and after 1974 by revenue-sharing funds. A major objective, one unforeseen in 1968, had been achieved.
Meanwhile, as the bureaucratic process went on, the civic league continued its activities and added new ones. Community Christmas caroling had been started in 1968 and continued each year. In 1972 the annual open house was inaugurated to bring prospective purchasers together with cooperating realtors and sellers to view the houses for sale. This event, well reported in the newspapers and on television, was very successful in conveying to realtors a positive image of Colonial Place as attractive to buyers of both races. The open house was repeated in 1973 and 1974 with equally good effect. By the opening of 1974 the civic league could look back on three years of substantial progress toward the goal of stabilization. Whereas in 1970 the racial ratio of sales was 60 percent-40 percent black to white, in 1973 it was 69 percent-31 percent white to black. During this same period house prices advanced at a rate of over 11 percent per year.37 This change reflected renewed confidence in the future of Colonial Place not only on the part of home buyers, but more particularly on the part of real estate firms and sales agents.
In 1974 seven years had passed since integration began. Under the impact of this social transformation the residents of Colonial Place found the resources to adapt to a challenge that the men who planned the community seventy years before could never have envisioned. Their plans for a "high-class" suburb helped to make possible a new vision that Colonial Place in its eighth decade will provide a home for people of diverse racial, economic, and social characteristics, maintaining in maturity the physical and environmental attractions of the streetcar suburb of a half century ago.
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