Along the Avenue of Second Place Trophies

     While in Richmond recently, I killed time with a walk along Monument Ave. I have always enjoyed this street with its buffet of architectural styles, handsome trees and gardens, cobblestones, and the monuments themselves. It is one of Virginia's most beautiful, but increasingly controversial streets.

     When I was fresh out of school, and working a job where I felt unappreciated, I came home to Richmond one weekend, found a new job, and quit the one I had in Norfolk in a dramatic huff. I needed a place to live, and found an apartment in the house below on Monument Ave. It is quite the place now, but when I lived there it was an affordable dump. You could see where a previous tenant hung pictures on the wall because the site of each frame was outlined in roach droppings. There was a football-sized hole in my bathroom floor that gave you a good view down into my neighbors kitchen. It was nothing a piece of plywood and a rug couldn't hide, but my neighbors liked to cook collards, so there was always a strange smell emanating from that hole. I didn't live there long.

     With its large globe, hound dog, ox, swallows, and churning waves, the Mathew Fountaine Maury (Pathfinder of the Seas) monument is my favorite. 

     The last monument built on Monument Ave. was that of Arthur Ashe. I like that it was sort of a raised middle finger to all the Confederates, but I can't stand it artistically. Ashe looks like he is standing on the edge of an upturned concrete culvert from which children are pouring. To keep the kids from stealing his books, he holds them at bay with his tennis racket.

     You would have to be living under a rock, or maybe a marble plinth, to not have heard about the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments. Personally I feel they should stay as part of the city's flawed, but colorful fabric, though I would like to see them somehow interpreted in a more historically accurate context. That said, if I grew up in Richmond as an African American, with these bearded bronze uncles constantly looking down on me, I know I would feel much differently.