Fulton: Populated More by a Spirit Than People

By Larry King

Anybody who leaves Richmond by driving east on Main Street goes through an open field of about 300 acres just before he gets to the Henrico County line. The field is empty except for some trees and four widely scattered buildings.

The buildings are all that is left of the neighborhood of Fulton. Two of them are vacant. The third is as incongruously crowded as an oasis teeming with Bedouins and camels in the middle of a desert.

The building houses Grubbs' Super Market. Clay Grubbs, the owner, started selling groceries in Fulton 45 years ago. He is 66 now and still selling groceries there, despite the fact that Fulton, strictly speaking, no longer exists.

Almost 20 years ago, the Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority designated Fulton Richmond's most blighted area; 70 percent of the housing was called "deteriorated enough to require clearance;" another 22 percent was seriously "dilapidated." The Authority started buying up Fulton.

As it did, the people living and working there -- about 3,000 of them -- took the money they got for their homes and businesses, if they owned them, and the relocation benefits the Authority paid, which ranged up to $15,000 and moved away.

Bulldozers knocked down the buildings and trucks hauled off the rubble. This was called urban renewal. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

We had a reunion over Labor Day, right behind the store under those trees, and there were people there I hadn't seen in 20 years," Charles Hockaday said recently. He works for Clay Grubbs and has for 20 years. He is 42 years old and was born and grew up in Fulton.

"We all sat around and talked about when this was a real neighborhood. You had everything you needed here. Come on out here and let me show you." Hockaday led the way out of Grubbs' store. He stood on the sidewalk and pointed across Williamsburg Avenue toward places where streets had been torn up and buildings had been knocked down.

"Across the street here, there were two supermarkets. Down on the next block, you had a People's drug store, then a restaurant. Across tht street on the next [missing] was another drug store and a [missing] and a five and dime store.

"The liquor store was over there, and then there was a little cafe. In the next block there was a shoe store, two shoe stores. There was a movie theater down there. Man, you never had to leave Fulton."

"When the redevelopment (Authority) started buying up the houses, it just about ruined my business," Clay Grubbs said. "They drove all those people out of here. My ace in the hole was that I had delivery service. And I'd built up a half-decent reputation...But there were a couple of years there when I took $75 a week out of the business. I'd have gone broke if my deliveries hadn't carried me.

"My customers started coming back after a while, once they realized I was still there." Grubbs pointed down an aisle, past the boxes of frozen food he had been pricing and putting up on the shelves. "That lady down there lives out on Route 5 now, out in the country, but she still does her shopping here. I think most of them thought I wouldn't be able to stay, once all the people were gone, but after a while they came back."

"There's only one person still living in Fulton," Charles Hockaday said. "Spencer Armstead. He's the only one left down here, him and his mother. Come one back here." Hockaday walked back through the store and into a stockroom and pointed from a loading bay across the field at the fourth building still standing in Fulton.

"He wants to keep that house," Hockaday said, "but the Redevelopment people say they're going to knock it down. He's been back and forth to court with them and everything."

Hockaday looked across the field at the fourth building, barely visible at the other end. "Doesn't look like he's home, now... no, wait, there he is. See that blue pickup truck heading across there? That's him."

The truck stopped, too far away for the driver to be seen clearly. Hockaday said, "If I thought I could, I'd buy a house and move back down there with him. But I think it's too late to do that."

It probably is. The Redevelopment and Housing Authority already owns Armstead's building, having acquired it through exercise of the state's right of eminent domain after Armstead's mother, who held the title, refused to sell it.

"The decision not to try to save any of the houses for rehabilitation was the community's," Robert Everton said. He is the Authority's director of community development. The community decision was actually made two ways. One was the practical decision by the individual people to sell out and move on; the other was a formal decision by the Fulton Project Area Committee, or PAC.

The area committee was formed in the late 60's, when the Authority's original plans for Fulton started coming under fire from the neighborhood residents. Those plans dated back to a 1962 Community Renewal Program, which called for Fulton to be razed and replaced, for the most part, with industry.

The committee drew up its own plan, literally. At a meeting, the committee members asked Authority officials to leave the room, and then sketched a map on a napkin. They widened Williamsburg Avenue and moved it a bit, forming a buffer between industrial zones west of the street and east of the James River, and a business district centering on Grubbs' store and houses and apartments, which lay east of the street.

In general, the Authority accepted this plan. In 1970, it was approved by City Council. As it evolved, the committee members decided that all of the old buildings in Fulton would have to be demolished and replaced.

Everton said, "The Fulton project's a real example of community involvement. We worked with the people of that community every step of the way...for a couple of years, we were down there for meetings two or three nights a week, and I don't mean till just 9 o'clock. I mean till 11, 12, sometimes two in the morning.

"...Probably, if we were starting today, we'd still clear the area. When an area's as far gone as Fulton was, there's not any choice, really.

"...That one house is just not in the plan. When you're trying to build a project of this magnitude, with new streets and everything, the chances of any one house being in exactly the right spot so it doesn't interfere are almost nothing."

That one house is actually just a chunk of a building. It is what is left of a row of nine attached brick houses that used to form the 700 block of Denny Street.

Six of the houses have been knocked down. Two of those that are still standing -- 700 and 704 Denny St. -- are empty and boarded up. Spencer Armstead and his mother, Marian Armstead, live in the house between the two vacant ones, at 702 Denny St.

Strictly speaking, Denny Street, like Fulton, no longer exists. There is a stretch of sidewalk and paved street in front of the three houses, but it ends in a pile of dirt and rubble just beyond them. The grassy field surrounds the houses and the patch of street.

Spencer Armstead stood outside his house, looking around. "They're supposed to rebuild this community," he said. He gestured at the field. "As you can see, there hasn't been a whole lot of rebuilding done."

Armstead is almost 30. He was 12 when the first plans to redevelop Fulton were devised. He won a scholarship just before he was to enter high school, and went to an exclusive prep school in Massachusetts. He was in his junior year there when the area committee was formed.

When the plan to tear down Fulton was approved by City Council, he was nearing the end of his freshman year at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. People had already started moving out of Fulton when he left college during his senior year to travel out West. By the time he came back to Fulton, in the winter of 1974, buildings were already being torn down.

"All they've done is build one church and those housing projects and those houses up on the hill," he said, pointing off to the east at Fulton Hill.

(Actually, almost half the project is completed," Thomas Bradford said. Bradford is the project manager for the Redevelopment and Housing Authority. "People just don't realize it because it's not in Fulton, or it's not in what they think of as Fulton. It's east of Government Road, up on Fulton Hill.

"There's about 250 unit of housing in the apartments and the public housing projects there and, I think, 13 single-family units. As it stands, the plans call for 600 or so units in all.")

"Why do they want to build up there on that hill when there's all this flat land right here?" Armstead said. "This is the best soil in Richmond. This is a prime location.

"You've got the river and the railroad tracks over there. You're 15 minutes from the airport, five minutes from downtown. When you see all this prime land standing empty, you've got to figure there's more going on than meets the eye."

(There's really only about 90 acres in the Fulton area, down in the bottom below the hill, that you can build on," Bradford said. "The rest is flood plain.")

The arguments that Armstead and the Authority trade back and forth all dance around one central issue, but seldom touch on it directly. That is whether Armstead can stay in the house.

His grandparents bought the house. His mother was born in an upstairs bedroom. He was born in the same bedroom. "Whenever I want to find where my roots are," he said, "I just go upstairs."

Roots do not have a place in an urban renewal master plan. The plan, after all, was devised by other people with their own roots in the same community. They decided that the best thing to do was tear the whole place down and start over.

The problem with relying on the area committee decision, Armstead said, was that it was made by old people who saw no future in Fulton. A group he formed, Together Inc., was made up of young men, all under 30. "We were the ones who would have been willing to come back into the community," Armstead said. "The area committee just couldn't deal with us."

Together Inc. has more or less dissolved, as Fulton disappeared around it. Armstead has lost in court to the Authority, repeatedly. Armstead figures he has two choices left; to go into federal court, or to try to have his house declared a historic landmark.

In the meantime, he works for his father from time to time. He tries to keep vandals away from his house. He promotes Fulton reunions -- large, informal gatherings held behind Grubbs' store on Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day. The first one, four years ago, drew about 100 people; the last one, about 1,500.

They all show up to celebrate living in a community they had left, that their representatives had helped decide to destroy. Armstead recognizes the irony of it. They decided it. When they were talking about it, when I was a kid, I thought it made some sense. I looked around and said, "Hm, yeah, they ought to tear some of this crap down."

"But, man, anything would have been better than this." He gestured again at the field surrounding his house. "This is just sad, man, it's just sad."