Colonial Place / Riverview

Detailed History

Civic League: The Early Days by Dr. Norman Pollock

INTRODUCTION

Dr. Norman Pollock, a long time neighbor and Colonial Place resident since 1964, is a professor of history at ODU and has served for some years as neighborhood historian. Norman has a special affinity for Colonial Place: In the early 1970s he extensively researched the neighborhood's development and co-authored a four-chapter treatise entitled The Evolution of an Urban Neighborhood: Colonial Place, Norfolk, Virginia. Since the book has been out-of-print several years, Norman has consented to write, in keeping with the current genre, an historical "mini-series" for the Community News, to be followed by a second series on the history of Riverview.

PART ONE: THE BEGINNING

1-1. Development

Residents of Colonial Place and Riverview, feeling beset by developer-created problems in 1985, can reflect wryly that they owe the neighborhoods' existence to developers and consider that developers were responsible not only for some of the problems but also for our ability to withstand the forces of change and remain attractive, stable neighborhoods, bridging the gap between turn-of-the century streetcar suburbs and the "yuppie" era of the 1980s.

1-2. Sterling Place Company

In 1903 one group of land development speculators, headed by George W. Dillard, saw the potential of the farm which lay on the south bank of Tanner's Creek on a marshy peninsula west of Church Street Road (now Granby Street). Annexation in 1902 had brought this area into the city, which meant that city utilities would be available. And the streetcar to Lambert's Point passed along 35th Street, so a "spur" could be built to serve the new suburb. So the young investors bought the 166-acre farm from the heirs of Peter March in May 1903 for $150,000 and named it "Sterling Place." During the next few years the Sterling Place Company spent its energies and its capital on the basic layout of the property. The land was very flat, needing more fill than grading. It was also only a few feet above mean high tide, and the sluggish streams that rose in Park Place flowed through marshes to Tanner's Creek, the banks of which were marshy and waterlogged. The company, therefore, was obliged to embank the whole outer edge of the peninsula, an undertaking that strained its resources to the point of financial collapse (the Sterling Place Company was forced to raise new funds and ultimately to reorganize in April 1908 under a catchier name, the Colonial Place Corporation). While this work seriously compromised the financial soundness of the enterprise, modern residents can only regard it as the soundest planning decision made. This waterfront esplanade planned for the eastern, northern, and western boundaries was named Mayflower Road and provided water views of Knitting Mill Creek (the knitting mill was on Killam Avenue between 39th and 40th Streets and was torn down in the early 1980s), Tanner's Creek (soon to be named the Lafayette River), and East Haven (the sluggish tidal creek that meandered down the present-day course of Llewellyn Avenue).

1-3. Layout of the Development

To the south, however, the Sterling Place Company had to do something to define its higher-status difference from the unimaginative grid of numbered streets running off Granby Street through Park Place, Virginia Place and Kensington. This was accomplished by re-orienting the north-south streets of Sterling Place to follow the axis of the center of the peninsula where Newport Avenue now runs, each of them turning obliquely between 35th and Pocahontas Avenues (now 38th Street). Thus the irregularly shaped southern end conformed to the Virginia Place grid on 36th and 37th Streets, but north of Pocahontas the streets changed direction slightly and were given new names, discontinuous with those to the south.

1-4. Circles

To further redeem the future of Colonial Place, the basic grid was broken by laying out two circles where Delaware Avenue crossed the two secondary north-south streets and two circles on Newport Avenue at Carolina and Rhode Island Avenues. By creating these 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. But a street layout was gained that saved us from the deadliness of the right-angled grid pattern typical of nearly every American city. This decision also decreed that in the far future four blocks of the company property lying south of 38th Street would cease to be in Colonial Place except on the long-forgotten plats.

PART TWO: DEVELOPMENT CONTINUES

2-1. Streets Renamed

The Sterling Place Company's determination to distinguish its propery from the region to the south was further 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 and therefore remained unchanged. The avenues parallel to it were renamed to honor the captains of the ships that brought the colonists to Jamestown: Granard Avenue became Newport for the captain of the Godspeed, and Grafton Avenue became Gosnold for Bartholomew Gosnold, skipper of the Susan Constant. Jamestown and Yorktown were commemorated in the names of the Newport Avenue circles (the Jamestown Circle is at Newport and Rhode Island Avenues; the Yorktown Circle is at Newport and Carolina Avenues). The east-west streets were named for the original thirteen colonies, from Georgia to New Hampshire, leaving one street in the southwest corner (now Michigan Avenue) with a name from the Lambert's Point plat across Colley Avenue--Gray Street. Residents of this street, in the 1920s requested a state's name, and it became Michigan, as all the other eastern states by then had been assigned.

2-2. Streetcar Line

The northward continuation of the streetcar line from 35th Street (this line was the one which ran out to the Exposition along what is now Hampton Boulevard) had to await the generation of traffic, but Newport Avenue was made wide enough for double tracks--they can be seen under the tarmac after a rain--and the Jamestown Circle conveniently solved the problem of turning the streetcars around at the northern end of their downtown journey. It was some time, however, before the car line came up into Colonial Place--early residents watched for visitors alighting from the streetcars on 35th Street, and children ran down to 35th Street to meet their dads coming home from work.

2-3. Housing Construction Begins

By 1906, with the seawall progressing, a few streets paved and equipped with "granolithic sidewalks" and solid granite curbs, and the installation of sewers, gas and water, the Sterling Place Company (later, in 1908, renamed the Colonial Place Corporation), was ready to fly. Lots were sold and building began that year. To reassure the public, the president of the Company, George W. Dillard, built a house at 4105 Newport Avenue [Photograph of this house] (Mrs. Mary Lou Plumer has the distinction of owning the first house built in Colonial Place). Mr. Dillard was an entrepeneur from North Carolina 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. That same year (1906), two handsome houses were built by the Turpin Brothers building contractors at 418 and 422 Pocahontas Avenue [now 38th Street, and now the Mosenthine residence and the Wiggins residence, respectively]. Colonial Place had begun.

PART THREE: THE VISION

3-1. "Castles in Spain"

The Colonial Place Corporation's vision of its suburb's future might be described as "castles in Spain." The Corporation foresaw a social composition like Ghent's--professionals, government officials, owners of shops and businesses, and upper managers--the "haute bourgeoisie" for which every city was building new suburbs in the decade before 1914.

3-2. The First Five Years

Unluckily, Colonial Place hit the market just as Norfolk's building boom of 1907-1908 gave way to a slump in 1909-1910. Although by 1911 the Corporation could claim 980 buyers, most of them had bought lots for investment, not building (interestingly, many of them lived in small towns in northwestern North Carolina), and the number of houses could be counted on two hands. There were economic reasons for the slow pace of development: inside lots (all 25') cost only $600. The Corporation permitted buyers three years to pay for lots at $10 a month, but no house could be built on fewer than two lots. Corner lots (35') sold for $800; the 110' x 110' sites on Gosnold Avenue were $1000; and lots on Mayflower overlooking the water were $1200. Furthermore, Colonial Place had stiff competition. At least three would-be suburbs competed for the lower end of the middle-class--Park Place (including Kensington, Virginia Place and Old Dominion Place), Villa Heights and Ballentine Place. Upscale buyers, on the other hand, could choose from Larchmont, Riverview, West Ghent and Winona. The Virginian-Pilot of Sunday, 24 April 1911 carried the Corporation's full-page illustrated advertisement which touted Colonial Place as "Norfolk's High Class Residential Section" and invited buyers to come see its paved streets, its granite curbstones and its granolithic sidewalks. The nine houses pictured made a brave showing, but they were not just "some Colonial Place houses"--they were virtually all of them. Simply put, there was not much to show for five years of expenditure and promotion.

3-3. The Game is Up

The Corporation could not know it in 1911, but the game was already up. Larchmont, even though it was more remote from downtown and still in Norfolk County, could make good its claim to be "Norfolk's Only High Class Suburb" in a way that Colonial Place could not. The Larchmont Company provided a 15-foot setback requirement (in contrast to our 10-foot requirement), which made it seem more spacious. But more important, all house plans had to be reviewed by the Larchmont Company's Board of Directors. This meant that Larchmont attracted more buyers who could afford architect-designed houses than did Colonial Place and that they could exclude the "builder specials" which adorn so many of the streets of Park Place and Colonial Place.

3-4. Middle Income Development

Eyeing the market with a view to the competition, and oppressed by the expenses which produced no return on the stockholders' investments, the Colonial Place Corporation dropped out of the race. By 1912 the two-lot requirement had been abandoned for all the streets other than Gosnold and Mayflower, and the way had been opened to provide a good neighborhood for the extensive lower-middle class market. This timely change ensured the success of Colonial Place and probably made the Corporation solvent at last, but it meant that its houses, except for the superior quality houses on Gosnold Avenue and Mayflower Road and a sprinkling elsewhere, would be primarily of a modest three or four bedroom type with few pretensions to either style or beauty. It also meant that a number of streets, especially those near the streetcar line on Newport Avenue in the south end, would have a very urban look as speculators built modest houses on 25' sites or, more commonly, allotted three lots for two houses on 37.5' fronts. Examples of this can be seen on the south sides of the 500 and 600 blocks of Pennsylvania Avenue, the 400 blocks of Virginia and Maryland Avenues, and the 4100 and 4200 blocks of Colonial Avenue. All of this destined that socially Colonial Place would not become a "high class section" but a representative mixture of Norfolk's middle income white population (covenants in every deed forbade the sale of lots or houses to "persons of African descent" during these days of rigid racial segregation), with relatively few professionals or really well-to-do families, and a substantial number of skilled workers and managerial or sales-level white collar workers. By 1920 the pattern had become clear, and most of the original builders of large houses had departed for West Ghent or Larchmont.

3-5. Elite?

This said, however, Colonial Place could still boast, in its early years, of some fairly elite residents--elite, at least, by Norfolk's standards.

PART FOUR: INHABITANTS IN 1915

4-1. Back to 1915

By the year 1915 Colonial Place was taking shape. If we could step back via time machine to November 1915, we could take a look at 85 houses and their inhabitants, and see the extent to which the aspirations of the Colonial Place Corporation had been realized since the founding of "Norfolk's Only High Class Suburb."

4-2. Mayflower Road

Accustomed as we are to the neighborhood's built-up appearance, the first thing we would notice would be the wide dispersal of houses over otherwise empty fields. Only one stood on Mayflower--the interesting house at 4806, built in 1912 by the Henry Thumm family, occupying the high ground overlooking Knitting Mill Creek. Mr Thumm was a partner in Wilson & Thumm, manufacturers of wood and willow ware, located on Water Street in downtown Norfolk.

4-3. Massachusetts Avenue

Mrs. Thumm lived in the house until the time of her death in the latter 1960s. Most of the lots along Mayflower Road remained too wet to develop until the mid-1920s, and those nearest Gosnold Avenue were not built on until the late 1970s. The Thumms' nearest neighbor would have been Miss Lovey Blick's home at 715 Massachusetts Avenue. Miss Blick, who owned a florist business, sold her large house to the Norfolk Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which operated it as an orphanage until it was destroyed by fire circa 1930. Group homes are nothing new to Colonial Place!

4-4. 36, 37, and 38th Streets

The streets further south were the most densely populated in 1915. 36th, 37th and 38th Streets had a sturdy cluster--20 of the 85 total stood on these streets or on adjoining portions of Colonial, Newport and Georgia Avenue. Among the residents were the Turpin Brothers (James and Walter), Colonial Place's pioneer residents of 422 and 418 W. 38th Street. Nearby lived other building contractors: Walter T. Gregory of 528 W. 37th Street maintained offices in the Law Building where the Colonial Place Corporation was situated and where so many early neighborhood residents worked; also Charles C. Fitch of 3904 Newport Avenue headed a firm which was busy at that very time building houses in the 500 block of Pennsylvania Avenue. At 504 Georgia Avenue, overlooking the intersection of 38th and Georgia, lived George T. Wilson, Norfolk's Chief of Police. At 524 W. 36th Street lived William F. Robertson, president of the Hampton Roads Paper Company, whose family seemed to have "colonized" the neighborhood. To the north, at 4300 Colonial Avenue, lived John Robertson, treasurer of the paper corporation, while its secretary, E. Jefferson Robertson, lived at 4411 Colonial, one of the two similar large houses built by the Griffin Brothers in 1913 on either side of Delaware facing East Park.

4-5. Colonial Avenue

Colonial Avenue had nine houses in 1915, whose inhabitants ran the social gamut from the neighborhood's only general practitioner--Dr. William A. Furcron, who had his office in his home at 3711 Colonial--to Lloyd S. Bohannon at 4208, one of Norfolk's liquor barons, whose saloons and political influence, the Charter form of government was adopted in 1918 to reduce or eliminate. The two large houses situated furthest to the north on Colonial Avenue--4709 and 4714--were the homes of Walter D. Nye, a commission merchant on Water Street, and Josiah D. Hank of Hank & Hank, attorneys in the downtown Law Building.

4-6. Newport Avenue

Newport Avenue, meanwhile, boasted 11 houses and a handful of estimable residents. Junius Goodwyn at 3714 was secretary-treasurer of the Guaranty Title & Trust Company. L.M. Baltes, who lived at 4410, owned a lumber company; and Albert S. Rosenkrans, at 5101, owned the Crystal Laundry. Distinguished attorney Richard W. Peatross of Peatross & Savage resided at 4415 (his firm still exists under another name). Colonial Place's other physician, Dr. John W. Manning, resided at 4801 Newport Avenue but maintained offices in the Bank of Commerce Building.

4-7. Gosnold Avenue (1)

Gosnold Avenue, the most prestigious street in 1915 Colonial Place, had only three homes, The house at 3917 had been built in 1907 and had been the home of the kind of family the Colonial Place Corporation would like to have had more of--it was the residence of J.J. Stanfield, owner of Stanfield Dry Goods on south Granby Street. The Stanfields must have swiftly discovered their social mis-step, as by 1914 they had moved to West Ghent. The house, after brief ownership by May Dixon Thacker, a local novelist with a modest national reputation, was then owned by a Naval officer. In 1916 it passed to another family and became the scene of Colonial Place's most celebrated scandal. The new owner, a man insanely jealous of his wife, murdered her during a quarrel then burned the house down (with her in it) in an attempt to cover up the crime. The next day he committed suicide in his father's house in Berkley. The site was cleared and the present house, at 3915 Gosnold, was erected in 1923.

4-8. Gosnold Avenue (2)

At 4107 Gosnold Avenue lived Mrs. Cecilia Taylor, widow of Richard Calvert Taylor, who had been partner in a blacksmith supply business. Members of old and socially prominent Norfolk families, the Taylors had built the house in 1908 whereupon Mr. Taylor died shortly thereafter. Mrs. Taylor continued to live there until the 1930s and provided one of Colonial Place's few brushes with the literary life of the 1920s. She entertained there on several occasions her kinsman, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

4-9. Gosnold Avenue (3)

Facing West Park, at 4504 Gosnold, was a house built by J. Logan Harrison, partner in a mens shop, Louis Drewrey and Company. From there to the river was open ground, though in 1920 a house was built at 4612 Gosnold that would, a few years later, belong to Norfolk's mayor, Warwick Mayo. Futher north, on the corner of Gosnold and Connecticut Avenues, lay the future site of a large house with extensive sleeping porches. Dr. Jesse Strickland's Gosnold Sanitorium, Inc. was erected in 1917 to house patients afflicted with tuberculosis. The existence of this kind of institution in the neighborhood reminds us not only how lack of zoning laws in the early decades of the twentieth century affected the growth of neighborhoods, but how recently a scourge of TB affected the middle classes.

PART FIVE: MORE 1915 INHABITANTS

5-1. Georgia Avenue

The cross streets of 1915 Colonial Place must have presented a spotty, inconsistent pattern of development. There tended to be more houses toward 38th Street, presumably because it was nearer the streetcars on 35th (would-be homeowners on Massachusetts and New Hampshire Avenues must have been daunted by the prospect of hiking from the trolley through the muddy, unlit streets of those early years). Georgia Avenue had four houses--three huddled together in the 500 block and the house at 615 standing in solitary splendor. Here lived the William Hudgins family; Mr. Hudgins was a buyer for D. Carpenter & Co. (drapery, furniture, carpets, etc.) on City Hall Avenue.

5-2. Carolina Avenue

Carolina Avenue also had four houses in 1915, and its residents were a microcosm of the middle class occupations characteristic of Colonial Place at this date. At 501 lived Oscar Witherspoon, a bookkepper for J.S. Bell, wholesale meat suppliers; at 505 (brand new in 1915) was William Woodhouse, an agent for Continental Life Insurance Company. Past Yorktown Circle in the next block, James H. Hurst had lived at 614 Carolina since 1912. He was principal of the Henry Clay Public School in downtown Norfolk, but in 1918 he would become Norfolk Superintendent of Schools. The large brick house at 620 belonged to Waldo Gustin and remained in his family until the late 1960s.

5-3. Virginia Avenue

In comparison to Carolina, Virginia Avenue was heavily built-up. It boasted nine houses, starting with the pair of new homes at 525 and 527 (only one of which was occupied, by J. Herbert Lackey, floor manager at Miller, Rhodes and Swartz). Logan L. Mallard, a building contractor, lived at 530 in the first of three houses which stood shoulder-to-shoulder. 534 Virginia was occupied by Frank M. Smith, Jr., a realtor who was holding it down for his company which owned it. Finally, 536 was the home of Gavin E. Swarthout, a teacher at Maury High School. The next block had only one house, at 638, the home of engineer R. Walker Foard. One of the few houses in any 700 block (these blocks seem not to have opened initially) was 711 Virginia, the home of Sidney F. Pollard, chief clerk of the John L. Roper Lumber Company.

5-4. Maryland Avenue

The six houses on Maryland Avenue were evenly divided between the 500 and 600 blocks. The large house at 522 was built in 1912 and was occupied by J.M. Baldwin, a civil engineer who seems to have been active also in real estate investments. 610 Maryland was the home of W.A. Davis, a man who wore two hats--one as a harbor pilot with the Virginia Pilot Association and one as vice-president of the Norfolk Realty Corporation. Next door, at 614, lived Frederick Horton, a steamboat captain. Across the street at 615 was Mrs. Clara Cox, a widow with two daughters (Miss Nancy and Miss Virginia), both of whom taught at the 7th Ward Public School. Now called James Monroe School, this was the school which all Colonial Place children would have attended prior to the construction of J.E.B. Stuart in 1922.

5-5. Pennsylvania Avenue

The 500 block of Pennsylvania was a beehive of activity in 1915. S.L. McGonigal had just completed some of his distinguished brick houses and was building still others. The house at 524 had been built in 1912 and housed John R. Fisher, a cutter with Carr, Mears & Peebles, a gentlemen's outfitters and uniform suppliers on south Granby Street. The large house at 520 had been built in 1914 and was the home of Rowland K. Denby, head of the insurance department at Baldwin Brothers, a major downtown realty firm. In 1920 Mr. Denby sold his house and built the house next door at 516. The homes at 519, 523, and 525 Pennsylvania were occupied in 1915 respectively by a Naval officer, the manager of the Steif Piano store, and an all-too-common occupation in 1915--"agent." (In our day this gentleman would be called a sales representative.)

PART SIX: EVEN MORE 1915 INHABITANTS

6-1. Delaware Avenue

Beyond Pennsylvania Avenue, the east-west cross streets of Colonial Place were dotted with houses, the greatest concentration being on the high ground of Massachusetts Avenue. There were two houses on Delaware Avenue--at 516 and 630. The latter was the home of Bennett B. Herbert, a shipping clerk in the family concern, Southern Distributing Company, of which Claude Herbert was president. The Herbert house, at 536 New York Avenue, had been built in 1908 and is possibly Colonial Place's most distinguished house architecturally. It is a pure Queen Anne Revival house, typical of its type, of which examples can be found in the neighborhods of many American towns and cities built between 1895-1915.

6-2. New Jersey Avenue

New Jersey Avenue had three houses--at 536, 616, and 622. The family in the large gabled home at 616 was headed by Robert M. Davis, cashier of the Chesapeake Knitting Mills in Berkley, the industrial enterprise owned by the Sloane family who lived in The Hermitage (now the Hermitage Art Museum) on the Elizabeth River.

6-3. New York Avenue

Four houses besides the Herbert house adorned New York Avenue: 511, which had been bult in 1914, was the home of Frank Clifton Cross, secretary-treasurer of the downtown realty firm which bore his name. 533 had not yet been occupied in 1915. The two houses in the 600 block--608 and 634--were the homes of Sidney J. Stagg, a railway clerk, and James Chase, a printer.

6-4. Connecticut Avenue

The single house which Connecticut Avenue could boast in 1915 was the large stucco at 525, built in 1912 by W.M. Reay and occupied by his family. Mr. Reay was the founder and owner of W.M. Reay Electrical Supplies, an enterprise still in business on West 27th Street.

6-5. Rhode Island Avenue

Approaching the northern end of Colonial Place in 1915, we would find the streets more thickly populated with houses. The five on Rhode Island Avenue included 517, the home of Alonzo A. Hainsworth, director of the Epworth (Methodist Church) Community House on Boush Street. Mr. Hainsworth would later join the City Department of Public Welfare. At 601 Rhode Island lived Louis W. Harding, an official in the U.S. Government bureaucracy in Norfolk; and the large buff-colored brick house at the corner of Rhode Island and Mayflower (728 Rhode Island) was the home of Gilbert R. Swink [Photograph of this house], an attorney with the firm of Bird, Swink and Moreland in the downtown Law Building.

6-6. Massachusetts Avenue

The six homes on Massachusetts Avenue seem to have attracted families allied to one another by ties of kinshp and business. The wide brick house at 514, for instance, was the home of Mordaunt Etheredge, a principal in the firm of Thomason and Etheredge & Company, real estate dealers. The other member of the firm was Caliborne Thomason, who lived at 612 and who, like Etheredge, was involved in several different and apparently interlocking real estate companies. The stately home at 517, now owned by Hope House Foundation, had been built in 1912 by Frank Clifton Cross (please refer to 511 New York). In 1915 it was the home of Charles E. Holland of Roundtree and Holland, commission merchants on now-vanished Roanoke Avenue downtown at the docks. Across the street at 518 lived J. Peter Holland, real estate dealer, developer, and candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1916. At 527 Massachusetts lived Colonial Place's only clergyman, the Reverend Ernest R. McCanley, pastor of the First Lutheran Church.

6-7. New Hampshire Avenue

Only one house stood on New Hampshire Avenue in 1915, the W.M. Urquhart house at 608. Mr. Urquhart was secretary-treasurer of Tuttle, Bonney and Urquhart, Inc., merchant tailors and haberdashers in downtown Norfolk.

6-8. Colonial Place Comes to Fruition

The occupations of neighborhood residents in 1915 suggest the forces that were soon to transform Norfolk into a major city: Within two years the Naval base would be established on the Jamestown Exposition grounds at Sewell's Point, and the dreams of the many real estate promoters would come true. By 1918 Norfolk was in the grip of a tremendous boom and Colonial Place finally came to fruition--though not quite in the sense its founders had planned. If 1986 residents could visit 1920 Colonial Place, they would find themselves very much at home, among streets lined with familiar-looking houses, the saplings of now mature trees growing along the curbs, and a trolley grinding down Newport Avenue.

PART SEVEN: CONCLUSION

7-1. Colonial Place in 1916

A time-travelling Colonial Place resident of the 1980s who ventured into the neighborhood in 1916 would find familiar sights--the layout of its streets, some of its houses, and its flowering bushes and trees. But its atmosphere and the lifestyle of its people would have presented a very different picture from the one we've come to know.

7-2. Daily Life

First of all, the neighborhood would have been quieter. Since Colonial Place was connected to the rest of Norfolk only from the south, there was no cross traffic between Colley Avenue and Granby Street. Much of what traffic there was--mainly delivery vehicles--was horse-drawn until well into the 1920s. Ice, coal and grocery wagons, store delivery vans, and the ever-present wagons delivering building materials rattled through the streets, with only an occasional car. But most of the traffic was foot traffic. The first morning streetcars from downtown brought a steady procession of domestic servants to Colonial Place kitchens; most of us have forgotten (if we ever even knew it) that nearly every middle class family had a cook and a general servant. In the absence of our labor-saving appliances, domestic help was oftentimes a necessity, and even families of modest means could afford to pay their wages--$3 to $5 a week. In a day when black people were denied a range of employment opportunities, domestic service was their mainstay. Yard men could be hired for 25 cents to 50 cents per day (when we first moved into our house in May 1965, I can recall my very elderly neighbor, who had built her house in the 1920s, complaining bitterly over the demise of her garden, bemoaning the loss of her 50 cents/day yard man!).

7-3. The 7:30 a.m. Streetcars

After 7:30 a.m. the southbound streetcars would have picked up men at every stop, for nearly all the residents of early Colonial Place were employed in the shops, offices and businesses on Main Street and south Granby Street downtown; and in 1916 only the most affluent (of whom Colonial Place had very few) drove to work. A few young women probably would have been among those going to the offices in 1916, but virtually no married women worked outside the home. Indeed, there was plenty to do inside--doing the laundry by hand or getting it ready to send out to one of the many laundries of the day (every middle class family who could afford it had at least its bed and table linens sent out), or coping with the ever-present ironing in an age when all fibers were natural ones. And of course much of the women's time was consumed with the coal range in the kitchen--do you ever wonder why so many houses have two chimneys, one by the kitchen? The hot, dirty coal range cooked the food and heated the water, although by the teens the gas stove was entering the domestic scene.

7-4. The 8:30 a.m. Streetcars

By 8:30 a.m. the children would have gone to school, walking to Monroe School in Park Place. The "7th Ward School" was the only one hereabouts until 1922, when J.E.B. Stuart School opened to meet the needs of the burgeoning young population of Virginia Place and Colonial Place. Older children walked (only wimps rode the trolley) to Maury High School and, after 1922, to brand new Blair Junior High, which took 8th and 9th grade students--a progressive concept in the 1920s.

7-5. Morning Shopping

The children having departed, Newport and Colonial Avenues would have had a steady traffic of walking ladies carrying wicker baskets, some accompanied by a maid and wicker baby carriage, heading for the shops on 35th Street. Looking at 35th Street today, one finds it difficult to believe that it was in the teens (and remained until about 1967) a thriving neighborhood shopping center with a wide variety of grocery stores, meat markets, fish markets, pharmacies, and other neighborhood shops. This was where Colonial Place wives bought the family goods. In the absence of modern refrigeration, most went shopping every day, a social outing which would allow chance visits with friends and acquaintances from church and people they had known from school.

7-6. Lunch and Early Afternoon

During the late morning, the streetcars would be doing a brisk business among ladies boarding from the Newport Avenue corners to go downtown, clad in hats, white gloves and coats in all seasons except the very hottest summer days. Some were bound for luncheon dates with other middle class friends in the downtown tearooms, matinees at the Wells or other downtown theaters, or perhaps an afternoon picture show although most of the film theaters were not built until the 1920s. Shopping in the downtown department stores and specialty shops in response to the newspaper ads occupied much leisure time and provided entertainment for a population that had no malls and no shops along Little Creek Road or Virginia Beach Boulevard. The women disembarking from Colonial Place trolleys around noontime were oftentimes bound for luncheon engagements and the bridge parties which occupied so much of the time of the middle class women in the America of 1916. One can read in the Virginian-Pilot social columns, organized by neighborhoods, of the incredible (to us) activity of garden, bridge and literary clubs, to say nothing of church missionary or auxiliary societies. These meetings took place in the afternoons in women's homes, and Colonial Place played its full part. By the early 1920s there was a literary club at which Colonial Place women lunched and then reviewed the books of the day. No doubt in 1917-18 there was also considerable time spent planning for the bazaars, bond drives, and other "war work" which women undertook in support of the effort for World War I.

7-7. Late Afternoon

During the late afternoons and evenings, the tinkling of pianos would have been heard from many Colonial Place houses. This was an acoomplishment every family had to have in an age when the Victrola was new and when there was neither radio, television, nor any movie houses nearer than downtown. Reading, parlor games, singing around the piano, sitting on the front porch in the warm weather and greeting strolling neighbors were the usual after-dinner pastimes. The absence of air conditioning made the open porch an absolute necessity, and it is arguable that we've lost something significant by locking ourselves up in our cool houses on summer evenings. Those 1916 residents who were more entertainment-minded could wait for the streetcar to take them to the theater downtown if they wished, confident they could get back home, as the trolleys ran until 11:30 p.m. and later on weekends.

7-8. Churches

For Colonial Place youngsters in those early days there were organized events--boy and girl scouts in the churches, and the church activities which occupied groups of children who were much less mobile than groups of today. The area churches bustled with activity and were frequented by most families in the neighborhood. All of these were in Park Place or further afield; Park Place Methodist Church on 34th Street (its present building dating from about 1920, Park Place Baptist on Colonial Avenue at 32nd Street, The Episcopal Church of the Ascension on Llewellyn Avenue at 31st Street, and Knox Presbyterian Church at 28th and Llewellyn (not located in Colonial Place until 1940). Much of the life of the community in 1916 revolved around these churchres, though some Colonial Place residents retained their allegiance to downtown churches when they moved here. The Catholic parish was Sacred Heart in Ghent, and when significant numbers of Jewish families began moving out from the center of the Jewish community on Holt Street after 1920, their focus remained on the old neighborhood or on the new temples being built on 16th and 17th Streets in Ghent.

7-9. Boating

During the teens there was some talk of establishing a yacht club on East Haven, but it never came to fruition. With the Lafayette River (then Tanners Creek) surrounding the neighborhood, there was undoubtedly a fair amount of boating and rafting activity in fair weather. In the winter when Knitting Mill Creek (between Mayflower Drive and Colley Avenue) froze over, there was ice skating and inevitably, the mishaps when the ice gave way, all dutifully reported in the newspapers.

7-10. Going to the Beach

In the summertime, those families with cars (a few hardy women at the wheel, risking the tuts of disapproval from the hidebound) could drive out to Virginia Beach, or, more commonly, to Ocean View. Those without cars or with fathers afraid of getting stuck in the sand could go by trolley. Going to Ocean View from Colonial Place meant taking the trolley which ran east along Rhode Island Avenue to Granby Street, via a trestle over East Haven. Upon reaching Granby, one transferred to the Ocean View trolley and enjoyed a pleasant journey through open country to the Ocean View Amusement Park at the north end of Granby Street. Going to Virginia Beach was a more ambitious undertaking and required the whole day. One had two options here, either going to Virginia Beach proper (17th Street) or going to Cape Henry. The most efficient way to reach 17th Street was to board the Colonial car and ride down to Union Station (near present day City Hall), then take the electric train which ran over the Southern tracks parallel to the present Virginia Beach Boulevard. To reach Cape Henry, one took an electric car which ran out Princess Anne Road, then parallel to the Pennsylvania RR tracks to Little Creek, and finally along Shore Drive to the Cape. Those who remember riding this line say it was the best and the most interesting trolley ride in the area, and the speedy cars stirred up quite a breeze on hot summer nights as they brought their beachgoing passengers back to Norfolk.

7-11. Life changes by 1930

All this was a way of life that was already passing by 1930. Prosperity, the coming of the automobile, and the development of new suburbs changed all. By the 1930s Colonial Place was no longer a new suburb. It was filling up, taking its place as one of Norfolk's substantial urban neighborhoods. As it became connected to Granby Street and Colley Avenue, it lost its isolation; and as businesses spread northward from downtown, more Colonial Place residents drove to work. By the World War II era, a way of life that was simpler, cheaper and more certain had given way to the complexities (and joys) of modern life. (Return to Brief History)