Union Hill is a historic district of

Richmond Richmond most often refers to: * Richmond, British Columbia, a city in Canada * Richmond, California, a city in the United States * Richmond, London, a town in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, England * Richmond, North Yorkshire, a town ...

Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States between the East Coast of the United States ...

. According to the ''

Richmond Times Dispatch The ''Richmond Times-Dispatch'' (''RTD'' or ''TD'' for short) is the primary daily newspaper in Richmond, Virginia, and the primary newspaper of record for the state of Virginia. Circulation The ''Times-Dispatch'' has the second-highest circula ...

'', the neighborhood "generally is bordered on the south by East Marshall Street and Jefferson Avenue, on the west by Mosby Street, on the north by O and Carrington streets, and angled on the east by North 25th Street."Carol Hazard
Richmond's Union Hill neighborhood centerstage for thorny issues associated with development
''Richmond Times-Dispatch'' (May 7, 2017). The neighborhood is on the

Virginia Landmarks Register The Virginia Landmarks Register (VLR) is a list of historic properties in the Commonwealth of Virginia Virginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern and Mid-Atla ...

and the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

, and is also one of sixteen designated "Old and Historic Districts" in Richmond.

History

Street grading in the late 19th and early 20th centuries joined two hills, giving the neighborhood its name. The neighborhood is largely

working class The working class is a subset of employees who are compensated with wage or salary-based contracts, whose exact membership varies from definition to definition. Members of the working class rely primarily upon earnings from wage labour. Most c ...

and has historically been mixed race. A series of

white flight The white flight, also known as white exodus, is the sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the terms became popular in the Racism ...

and then

black flight Black flight is a term applied to the migration of African Americans from predominantly black or mixed inner-city areas in the United States to suburbs and newly constructed homes on the outer edges of cities. While more attention has been paid ...

led to a high proportion of neglected or abandoned properties in the area by the 1990s. City government responded with crime-reduction and blight-removal projects; efforts to demolish abandoned properties in the district were opposed by the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods, a historic preservationist group. Redevelopment intensified in the 2010s. The Union Hill Historic District was added to the Virginia Landmarks Register in December 2001 and to the

in December 2002.

Geography and architecture

Union Hill lies to the north of Church Hill. The architecture of the neighborhood varies, with buildings in the Federal,

Greek Revival Greek Revival architecture is a architectural style, style that began in the middle of the 18th century but which particularly flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, predominantly in northern Europe, the United States, and Canada, ...

Italianate The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassicism, the Italianate style combined its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century It ...

, Queen Anne, and

Art Deco Art Deco, short for the French (), is a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design that first Art Deco in Paris, appeared in Paris in the 1910s just before World War I and flourished in the United States and Europe during the 1920 ...

styles.National Register of Historic Places nomination form
/ref>

References

External links

{{National Register of Historic Places in Virginia Historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Virginia Federal architecture in Virginia National Register of Historic Places in Richmond, Virginia Neighborhoods in Richmond, Virginia Greek Revival architecture in Virginia Hills of Richmond, Virginia