$36 million apartment community in Jackson Ward Nears Completion
By: SEAN GORMAN Richmond Times-Dispatch
May 8, 2020

A new apartment community is nearing completion in Jackson Ward on part of the
former St. Joseph’s Catholic Church that closed its doors decades ago.
The project includes several apartment buildings that rest on the 2.5-acre site bordered
by North First, North Second, East Duval and East Jackson streets.
Constructors work on the exterior of the former convent in Jackson Ward, Richmond, on Monday, May 4, 2020.
DANIEL SANGJIB MIN/RTD
The site had been mostly vacant for years until a Maryland-based nonprofit group began
redeveloping it two years ago into 154 apartments, just under half of which are lowincome
senior units housed in one building.
The remaining units are mixed-income apartments that are in three other buildings on
the property, which rests in the Jackson Ward neighborhood, the historic center of
commercial activity for the African American community in the city.
“We worked very closely with the Historic Jackson Ward Association and just the
surrounding neighborhood to get zoning approvals for this project. It was not a by-right
development,” said Matt Engel, the senior development manager at Enterprise
Community Development, a Silver Spring, Md.-based nonprofit real estate development
firm that spearheaded construction.
“There were things that the community demanded and wanted in this development, and
we felt proud to deliver it,” he said.
For example, Engel said neighbors asked for a retail component to be included in the
$36 million project. There is 6,000 square feet of commercial space, but efforts to rent
out that space were put on pause amid the coronavirus pandemic, Engel said.
Off-street parking for the apartments, another request from neighbors, also was included
in the project, he said.
For decades, the city had been trying to redevelop the property, which rests near the
Interstate 95/64 interchange.
***
Senior housing is one component of the development.
The project has 72 units of low-income apartments for seniors who moved out of the
Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority’s Frederic A. Fay Towers building in
Gilpin Court.
Those new units are in a new four-story building along Second Street.
Residents of the senior housing units have already moved into The Rosa building, said
Angela Fountain, a spokeswoman for the RRHA.
“RRHA is looking forward to restoring a historical landmark to a livable space that will
accommodate a mixed-use community with a range of incomes,” Fountain wrote in an
email about the redevelopment.
The RRHA also has been moving residents from the Fay Towers building to other sites
in the city, including to the former Highland Park Public School building on East
Brookland Park Boulevard, where 77 one-bedroom senior units were created.
Work continues on transforming a third site — the former Baker School on West Baker
Street in Gilpin Court — into roughly 50 one-bedroom units.
“As far as RRHA’s plans for Fay Towers, the building will eventually be emptied, and
RRHA will pursue a to-be-determined redevelopment strategy for the building,”
Fountain said.
***
Mixed-income housing and commercial space is the other part of the project.
There are 82 units of mixed-income housing in three other new apartment buildings,
located along First and Second streets.
A former convent on the property is being renovated into eight loft-style units.
Roughly 30 of the 82 units are affordable housing while the rest are market-rate units,
Engel said.
The on-site leasing office has been closed because of the coronavirus. Virtual tours of
the available apartment units were created.
But Engel said leasing the apartments units has gone slowly.
The Jackson Ward project calls for 6,000 square feet of commercial space, but plans to
lease out the space have not been finalized, Engel said.
That space is on the ground floor of one of the residential buildings at the corner of First
and Jackson streets.
Some potential tenants have expressed interest in leasing that space, but he said efforts
to do so have been hampered by the situation involving the coronavirus.
The potential tenants have included a restaurant and a coffee house, said Engel, who
added that no leases have been signed. He declined to identify the tenants that have
expressed interest.
***
In 1879, the bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Richmond organized a black
congregation that would become the first Catholic Church for “People of Color in the
South,” according to a 2016 survey of the former St. Joseph’s site conducted by historic
resource consulting firm Dutton + Associates.
Money was raised to construct a new church for the congregation. Around 1900, St.
Joseph’s Catholic Church was built, Engel said.
About a decade later, a neighboring trade school, Van de Vyver Institute, was built and
named after a former Richmond bishop.
But after Interstate 95 cut through Jackson Ward in the late 1950s, it “basically just
ripped the heart out of the neighborhood,” Engel said. “There was a lot of vacant land
left where they had razed buildings to build the freeway, and it just sort of killed that
north side of Jackson Ward.”
The church and the trade school shut down in 1969, Engel said, and those buildings
were demolished shortly after they closed.
Next to the church was a former Franciscan convent that remained on the property,
according to the Dutton + Associates survey.
The former convent building was eventually abandoned, and it is now being renovated
into eight market-rate apartments.
Neighbors had a sentimental attachment to the dilapidated former convent and wanted to
see it preserved, Engel said.
“It was not, financially, a winner for us,” he said of renovating the convent.
The former convent’s condition was a “disaster” before work began on it, said Kelly
Ennis, co-founder of the Verve Partnership, the Baltimore-based interior design firm that
designed the apartments for the development.
Still, the former convent had some interesting features, Ennis said.
“I would call it a little jewel box of a building,” Ennis said. “It has a huge fireplace,
some really ornate architectural details … window details.”
Next to the convent is an existing memorial bell garden, which contains the former
church bell used at St. Joseph’s. That bell garden remains as part of the development.
Names for two of the newly constructed buildings also have historic connections.
One of the new mixed-income apartment buildings is called The Van de Vyver after the
school that had been on the property, according to the Enterprise Community
Development’s website.
The senior housing building is named The Rosa after Rosa Bowser, the first black
teacher in Richmond public schools.
The entire development meshes historic preservation, affordable senior housing and
market-rate units with retail space, Engel said.
“It’s trying to do five difficult things at once,” he said.
sgorman@timesdispatch.com
Sean Gorman