Demolition commences on West Grace Street
Max Walpole, Contributing Writer
Construction workers spent the past few weeks demolishing several buildings on West Grace Street.
The buildings are the former sites of Erika’s Restaurant and Cloud Hookah Bar & Grill, which have sat abandoned since 2021. Neither site is owned by VCU.
Construction supervisor Scott Messe said once the demolition was done, work will start on a new building. The building will be a four-story mixed-use building with two restaurants on the bottom floor and 21 apartments on the upper floors, according to Messe.
Messe estimated that construction on the new building will be complete by roughly July or August 2025.
VCU student Zephyr Conrad said that they were skeptical that the new student housing would be affordable.
Conrad said that considering the new building will be so close to campus as well as Plaza Artist Materials and several restaurants, they expect the cost of living there to be upcharged.
“It’s just like, we can’t afford it,” Conrad said. “I can barely afford to live in a dorm at this point. I don’t think I can do an extra 1,000 a month for living above a restaurant.”
Ellis Chang, an art student, said he is glad that the construction workers created a corridor where students could walk past the work site, as the construction made the sidewalk inaccessible to pedestrians.
“I know there’s some construction going on right in front of the Brandt and Rhoads Halls where it’s just completely cut off, and you have to cross the street if you want to keep going,” Chang said. “So I appreciate that they’ve put a little, like, walkway there.”
Chang said he was looking forward to visiting the new restaurants set to be built on the bottom floor.
“I think I’m excited to see what restaurant they put there because I’m always up to try new food,” Chang said.
Tom Doland, a longtime resident of Richmond, said West Grace Street was a much different place during the 1980s.
“That was the place to be. There was just everything. There was probably at least five different bars and nightclubs there, maybe more,” Doland said.
He said the more “legitimate” nightclubs were located downtown.
“But if you just wanted to go to the seedy places where they did, like, gothic night and punk night and stuff like that, that was all right there on Grace Street,” Doland said. “You couldn’t turn around without running into somebody with a giant mohawk or something crazy.”
Doland said he started noticing changes to West Grace Street around the mid-‘90s when VCU began buying up properties along the street, replacing locally owned businesses with chain stores and restaurants.
“It just started to feel like VCU was trying to sort of sanitize it for your protection,” Doland said.
Doland said he believes this shift towards a more controlled, corporate environment came at the expense of local hangouts which developed naturally.
“They’ve moved away from organic sort of community spaces that kind of pop up on their own, and there used to be a lot of those,” Doland said. “They didn’t set out to be that. It just sort of happened that way, but now VCU is trying to sort of engineer it that way to make it so that it’s perfect in the way that they think perfect should be.”
Doland said he laments the loss of the colorful community that thrived on West Grace Street throughout the ‘80s and early ‘90s.
“And when all you’re left is, you know, trying to present a shiny clean image and make a good tidy profit, then sometimes other things get lost,” Doland said. “I don’t think it’s on purpose. It just happens that way. But I will go on the record as saying I miss it.”
Editor’s Note: VCU does not own the buildings that housed Erika’s Restaurant/Cloud Hookah and is not connected to the private redevelopment taking place there. VCU is developing the West Grace Residence Hall at 700 W. Grace St.