For many Richmonders, the city's role in the global slave trade of the late 18th and 19th century is an invisible secret. In recent years, that's been changing as the outlines of Richmond's Slave Trail -- the tortuous journey African slaves took from boats unloading downriver from Manchester to the auctioneer's block in Shockoe Bottom -- have started to take shape.
It's no wonder that the re-proposed plan to bring baseball to the Bottom -- smack in the middle of the Slave Trail and a few hundred yards from Lupkin's Slave Jail and a historic Negro burial ground (half-buried itself beneath I-95) -- is raising eyebrows again. Even if developers took pains yesterday to point out that their project would be sensitive to the area's difficult history.
Style Weekly's Scott Bass wrote about the issue over the weekend, before full details on Highwoods Properties' proposal were made public:
“I know I am adamantly against putting a ballpark in Shockoe Bottom,” McQuinn says. “I just don’t think this is the right place.”
She and other members say it’s unlikely such a proposal would be approved by City Council by year’s end, if ever, and pushing something of this magnitude now is likely to create tension between the developers and a new city administration come January. “I don’t see why they would be interested in trying to shove this thing through,” she says.
TD columnist Michael Paul Williams picks up the ball this morning with more details:
Project officials, who briefed members of The Times-Dispatch's staff yesterday, say they will work in conjunction with the Richmond Slave Trail Commission to construct the Slave Trail "as an integral part of the development."
Space would be reserved, most likely in the Seaboard Building, for interpretive elements and a genealogical research institute. Plans call for monuments, plaques or other items to tell the story of the slave trade in Shockoe Bottom and beyond.
The project also call for an office building in the vicinity of Lumpkin's jail, though the developers hasten to add that they want to preserve the jail site.
City Council Vice President Delores L. McQuinn, the chairwoman of the Richmond Slave Trail Commission, had not met with the project developers. But she sounded like a hard sell yesterday.
She said the developers had merely appropriated the commission's plans for Shockoe Bottom. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing.
"I would love for someone to come in and help develop it, the vision for the Slave Trail," she said. "I just don't know if it's appropriate for a big baseball stadium to be put there, too. What we've been through the last few years as relates to a stadium being in the area, I'm opposed to that. But I'm still going to be open to what they have to say."
There are plenty of hurdles between Highwoods' dual Boulevard/Bottom proposals and the first pitch in a new stadium -- the politics of Richmond's forgotten history should be an issue that is not left in the dugouts.
