Category: Hollywood

Richmond does not have many architectural historians. We lost one of our best on December 15, with the passing of Edward Slipek. There have been noteworthy tributes to his work, by Rich Griset in his beloved Style Weekly here and here, by Scott Bass and Harry Kollatz in Richmond Magazine here. His official obituary is…

Rex Springston just published a useful investigative report on the Hollywood Cemetery Company’s changing display policies regarding Confederate flags, available here at the Virginia Mercury. It follows up on his earlier piece from 2020 written in the midst of the protests against Confederate monuments, where he reported that Hollywood had “temporarily” removed the once-ubiquitous rebel…

Grave vandalism has a long history. Richmond’s prized Hollywood Cemetery was even targeted during the Civil War, where in June 1863, “two china vases, containing bouquets, were deposited upon a grave, and stolen almost as soon as left,” and reporters heard “of plants being torn up by the roots, and every species of sacrilege perpetrated…

Last week, I made it out of the house and up to Hollywood Cemetery. This is the time of the semester that I usually walk my class through the cemetery on a field trip. But of course there is no opportunity for a field trip this semester. So I tried to recreate the experience as…

We approach the one-year anniversary of the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville which left one dead, over thirty injured, and a nation scarred and seared. The purported prompt to the rally was the city’s decision to remove its Robert E. Lee equestrian monument (erected in 1924) from a public park. The horrifying events of…