A freshman’s guide to Greater Richmond
Why wait to get shown around in person? Make friends with the CT’s concise guide to VCU-adjacent territories, and you’ll soon be making real friends with your mad where-to knowledge.
Nick Bonadies
Spectrum Editor
Why wait to get shown around in person? Make friends with the CT’s concise guide to VCU-adjacent territories, and you’ll soon be making real friends with your mad where-to knowledge.
It should be noted that the suggestions made here are just for kickstarters; when moving to a new town, especially as a freshman in college, the real reward comes from making the really cool discoveries for yourself. With any luck, too, you’ll get hopelessly lost in the process.
THE FAN
The sad truth: There comes a day in every VCU freshman’s career when they must put the salad days of dorm life behind them. If this must be so, an apartment in the Fan district is a good next step.
This National Historic District (it’s official) is so named for the angle at which the road layout protrudes west from Belvidere Street, like a fan. Exquisite historic architecture rubs shoulders in the Fan with steadily disintegrating but cozy student apartment blocks, all underlying a layer of crawling vines. Green, well-shaded parks fill in where the roads make triangular intersections, playing host to a mix of students, young families, old families and the domesticated animals that love them. They’re altogether not bad for the here and now, but later you’ll leave Rhoads and Brandt to younger faces, ever smiling, blithe and rosy like they’ve got all the time in the world.
Visit Crossroads, at Brunswick and Morris streets, for the most horrendously collegiate coffee-slurping experience imaginable. Free board games and a book swap indoors and ideal chill space at the adjacent park outdoors, whether by yourself or with your hip-as-balls compatriots. In time, you glean much about these compatriots by whether they prefer Balliceaux or Pie, two excellent restaurants/hangouts on opposite sides of Lombardy Street.
OREGON HILL
O-Hill, to the initiated. Most of the houses in this porch-lined hilltop were built in the 1800s to house iron works employees. Now the population is mostly students, who use the aforementioned porches to stare down passersby and quietly ridicule them. (Full disclosure: Possibly the single integral part of the full O-Hill experience is sitting on a porch, preferably with ideal company, to stare down and quietly ridicule passersby.)
Mama Zu‘s serves the finest, biggest-portioned Italian food you’ve ever initially avoided for its sketchy exterior. Historic Hollywood Cemetery is a perfect place to visit a slew of notable dead Virginians and take a dramatic self-portrait for Facebook in the lush green quiet. We’d tell you that you haven’t really experienced Richmond until you’ve lazed on the rocks by the river at Belle Isle, but we don’t really need to tell you that.
JACKSON WARD
J-Ward, to those in the know. Venues in this part of downtown, such as the historic Hippodrome Theater, were once frequented by artists like Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and James Brown. Now the galleries, bistros and stages here play host every month to the First Fridays Artwalk, a cultural staple for longtime Richmonders and new students alike.
Lift Coffee Shop & Cafe is in serious running for the best locally owned coffee place in Richmond – try their chai. Visit Nick’s International Food Market if you find Kroger irritatingly provincial. Gallery 5 on Marshall Street is a must-see for art lovers of all flavors. Special challenge: On your way over from campus, spot the aptly named Milk Jug Apartments. Send in a picture of yourself and your friend standing in front of it. For proving to me that you read this whole segment, I will buy you a Slurpee. No exchanges, fluid or otherwise.
CARYTOWN
None other than Southern Living magazine named this stretch of West Cary Street one of the top 10 shopping districts in the South in 2008. Southern Living’s assessment methods may be more geared towards people who can afford to shop at Carytown (people who read Southern Living) but collegiate destitution hasn’t kept this colorful strip of shops and restaurants from its status as a favorite locale for all of us.
The Byrd Theatre, Richmond’s dazzling premier “movie palace” since 1928, deserves your patronship and adulation for its nightly $1.99 screenings, among other delights. Instructions for living out the Great American Dream Date: Catch a movie at the Byrd on a Saturday, when Bob Gullege plays the organ pre-show. Perhaps you bought your tickets early and browsed vinyls together at Plan 9 Records while you waited. Post-movie, enjoy French cuisine at a nearly reasonable price at Can-Can down the street, chat whimsically about nothing at all and gaze into each other’s eyes. Then get dessert at Sweetfrog (frozen yogurt) or Carytown Cupcakes. Then go make out or something; I don’t know.
SHOCKOE SLIP / SHOCKOE BOTTOM
Just “The Slip” or “The Bottom,” to the truly enlightened. You’ll know you’ve arrived when the streets have turned to cobblestone.
Once mainly offices and retail spaces built after Richmond’s Evacuation Fire in 1865, many of the same buildings – like the former cigarette factories and warehouses of Tobacco Row – have been renovated to apartments, restaurants and a major center of Richmond nightlife. Head to Alley Katz for music from local, regional and national artists, frequently played to full capacity. Hat Factory, and its monthly RVAlution, provide the biggest dance night in the city. It was indeed a hat manufactory in its day.
DOWNTOWN
Downtown Richmond may be the home of such so-called “landmarks” as the State Capitol Building, the River District canal walk (home to the annual Richmond Folk Festival in October), the Coliseum, the Richmond Convention Center and the Library of Virginia. But we all know the truth: All we’re really interested in here is the VCU Medical Center and, more importantly, those fiendishly attractive MCV campus medical students. You stay classy, MCV.