Richmonds Monument Avenue by Sarah Shields Driggs, Richard Guy Wilson, Robert P. Winthrop (review)

BOOK REVIEW Book Review Winner of the SESAH zoor Book Award Sarah Shields Driggs, Richard Guy Wilson, and Robert P. Winthrop with original photography byJohn 0. Peters, Richmonds MonumentAvenue, Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001, xi+ 28opp., illus., $45, ISBN o-80J8-260J-J· T here is no better mirror of American culture -its aspirations, progress, and disappointments -than the fabric of its cities. And, as stage-sets for the extraordinary and everyday experiences of their inhabitants, the image and identity of city streets are everybody's business. Through their close study of one of the South's most remarkable streets, the authors of Richmond's Monument Avenue underscore these urban truths. Conceived in the r88os as a splendid thoroughfare distinguished with fine houses, careful landscaping, and unique commemorative statues, Monument Avenue fits firmly in the tradition of the City Beautiful. So too, its conception and realization involved matters ofreal estate speculation, transportation, and societal values that resonate with the histories of other familiar "streets of power," particularly New York's Fifth Avenue and Chicago's Prairie Avenue. This street, however, 1s Richmond's Monument Avenue, and its story necessarily engages a rich if often discordant local heritage, for nineteenthcentury Richmond was caught at once in the progressive fervor of the New South and the nostalgic pull of the cult of the lost cause. As a result, the book is a study ofhow power and identity intersect to define urban form and is dedicated to exploring fully whether Monument Avenue is a "shrine to Richmond's obsession with its past" or a model of modern urban planning designed to endure adaptation and change. The authors acknowledge that Monument Avenue's story is a complex tale to tell, engaging the history of the city and its politics; the statues and buildings that line the street; and, most significantly , the people who built and lived on the street together with those figures-from Robert E. Lee to Arthur Ashe-who are represented in its statuary. Collaborators Sarah Shields Driggs, Richard Guy Wilson, and Robert P. Winthrop craft a lucid story through meticulously researched chapters, thick with descriptions of the street's material culture, that explore how and why Monument Avenue was created. The book begins with a glimpse at Monument Avenue's "Origins," a chapter that offers a deeply structured context of Richmond's socio-political and economic history. Not only does this section situate Monument Avenue in the city's chronicle of pre-Civil War and post-Civil War prosperity and its urban consequences; moreover, the formative discussion reveals a key subtext that is woven through the book: the racial tension that is an uncomfortable yet recurrent theme in Richmond's history. Chapter 2, devoted to "The Statues," follows . Five commemorative monuments linked to the Civil War and conceived to evoke a poignant southern history (depictions of Robert E. Lee ARRIS 73 BOOK REVIEW [189o}, J.E.B. Stuart [1907}, Jefferson Davis [r9o7}, T. J. "Stonewall: Jackson [1915}, and Matthew Fontaine Maury [1929}) together with the recently added Arthur Ashe statue (1996) render Monument Avenue a "great gallery of outdoor sculpture." This chapter, however, reveals that its masterworks, which both venerate the old South and optimistically anticipate the modern South, are not mere objects of public art; they are political and cultural symbols, ripe for the potentially conflicting interpretation by dominant and decentered members of the community. A discussion of "Building A Neighborhood," chapter 3, presents an overview of Monument Avenue's tout ensemble, a quickly evolving melange of great houses, town houses, new apartments, and houses ofworship, and the personalities that forged their development-real estate speculators, builders, land owners, and new residents. In parallel to the treatment of the memorials in chapter 2, chapter 4, "Houses, Styles, and Architects," examines the architectural fabric of Monument Avenue, covering informative background concerning the regional figures and national players, including John Russell Pope and William Lawrence Bottomley, who designed its buildings. Another central theme ofthe book commands this chapter: the notion of "unity with diversity," which, the authors assert, distinguishes the spaces and places of Monument Avenue. This idea extends to both the accommodations of stylistic breadth...