Here’s a historic photo to warm you up this winter day.
Elite athletes chugging warm beers in the Monroe Park cruiser race. They had to chug a beer, do a lap or two, chug another beer, repeat until the beer is gone.
Photo and description from William Pickett.
Here’s an old redlining map, courtesy of Mapping Inequality, which shows Oregon Hill and Randolph in the worst hazardous category.
1989. Courtesy of William Pickett.
John Murden at Church Hill People’s News has a post on this–
Clara Cline at The Wild Wander has these fantastic Boy Gangs of Richmond patches available. Pick’em up at this weekend’s Richmond Craft Mafia Handmade Holiday event.
The names are taken from Charles Wallace’s The Boy Gangs of Richmond in the Dear Old Days: A Page of the City’s Lesser History, an out-of-print history of the city’s rapscallion youth by Charles M. Wallace from 1938.
William Pickett’s van in front of 718 S. Laurel Street in ’84.
Rubber Snakes, Oregon Hill, Richmond, VA (1990), courtesy of the Bill Altice collection.
Courtesy of Billy Pickett. By the way, in appreciation of allowing his photos to be posted here, here is his business card-
There is a new interpretive sign beside the canal on the North Bank Trail showing the location of the old water works below Hollywood Cemetery.
This photo shows the RF&P RR train tracks on Broad Street in the first quarter of the 20th century. This view (maybe 1915?) is westward, with the Elba train station at the rear of the view. This playground was arranged through the R.F. & P. RR by “Mrs. Bolling, of the Richmond Playgrounds Association”. It harkens to a time when Oregon Hill could sort of claim to extend to Broad Street.
Here is part of the 1889 Baist map, which shows how the train turns from W. Broad to Belvidere then heads down past the penitentiary. The train tracks turned at Pine, thence south on Belvidere, and turned east along Byrd street, entered level, through a tunnel, to continue downtown to the old Byrd street depot.
(Special thanks to Richard Lee Bland and Fred Rodgers for the images and history notes, as seen on the Fans of Monroe Park FaceBook page.)