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Outside Photo by Alvin Swilley

The Seaboard Building is a Norfolk landmark. Photo by Alvin Swilley

Mayor Paul Fraim explains the city’s pending plans for the building. Photo bu Alvin Swilley

Elegant interior of the Seaboard Building Photo by Alvin Swilley

Old Norfolk Seaboard Bldg. Rekindles History of Massive Resistance Era

Leonard E. Colvin
Chief Reporter
New Journal & Guide
 
    Last week a gaggle of the city’s media was given a tour of the 108-year-old  Seaboard Building in the 200 block of Plume Street.
       Norfolk Mayor Paul Fraim and other city officials were on hand to announce the city’s future plans  to move a good portion of books and holdings at the Kirn Library to the facility. Kirn, Norfolk’s central library, will soon be torn down to make way for the downtown station of the city’s light rail system which is under construction.
       Norfolk recently bought the building for some $7 million and is investing millions of dollars into preparing the building for the city’s short terms use of it.
But the mayor and Peggy Hail-Phillps, Norfolk’s City Historian, hinted that down the road, the city is looking at the building as a multi-use facility  to deposit the assets currently in the Sargeant Room of the Kirn Library and perhaps housing various historic museums.
During the tour of the Seaboard Building, Mayor Fraim, in response to a New Journal and Guide question on the subject, noted some of the  “ghosts” still  haunt  the graceful old building, where behind closed doors some 50 years ago, strategies were planned to  delay and derail the integration of public schools in Norfolk and the idea of desegregation and civil rights, in general.
       The city has begun planning for a special 50th anniversary observance in 2009 that commemorates the end of “Massive Resistance” in Norfolk that occurred on February 2, 1959.  That is when the first African American students entered formerly all-white high schools that had been closed to derail school desegregation in Norfolk.
A commission of area citizens has begun meeting to coordinate various private and public events, which include the production of a stage play depicting the political and social leaders of the city who opposed and supported Massive Resistance to school desegregation in Norfolk.
       The Seaboard Building has recently been used by an insurance company without destroying much of the original architectural theme and structure of the building.
It was built when Norfolk was being recognized as  a growing community in need of an expanded  federal court and mail distribution system.  Norfolk’s population had increased by 112 percent by the end of the 19th Century and the need for expansion of such services was important.
       The handsome building has served a number of purposes after the federal court and mail distribution system were moved to the newer, larger federal building along Granby Street, which is now known as the Hoffman Federal Court House.

Posted May 21, 2008

  
       The building also has served as the headquarters of the city’s Social Services agency.
        It served as Norfolk’s City Hall from the spring of 1938 to 1965. At the end of the WWII, city leaders, housed in this building, began planning much of the Norfolk that is known today.

Grand plans to rid the city of its bustling downtown honky tonks, whore houses and huge acreages of dilapidated houses  got approval by a progressive minded council which ushered in the first integration of various city boards and commissions.
       On blueprints designed by city and national urban designers,  plans to erect new buildings and facilities for commerce and cultural expression were laid out in the Seaboard Building. Over a thirty-year period, bulldozers, directed by the city’s then newly created Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority (NRHA),  tore down the old and unsightly and a great deal of the city’s historic federal-era  and post Civil War buildings.
Further, it also demolished many of the city’s historic black buildings. Bank Street Baptist Church, one of the oldest religious institutions, once sat where the rear entrance of the Chrysler Theater sits today, according to marker there now. The church was displaced to its current location across town off Chesapeake Blvd.
       The routes to old downtown Norfolk from the outlying neighborhoods were dominated by a series of mostly  narrow muddy roads. The new Norfolk downtown was connected to outlying areas by the series of broad  streets and avenues, that exist today.
       The city’s plans to become a thriving metropolis  complimented the fact that it  had become the largest city, in terms of population, in Virginia.  With this huge commercial seaport and U.S. Naval presence, Norfolk was the center of political and economic power by the mid-1950s.
       But black city leaders, such Attorneys Joseph Jordan and  Hugo Madison, complained that the city  had a hidden agenda to rid Norfolk of its Blacks and poor.  While most of the old black neighborhoods downtown were torn down, communities like Ghent were spared.
       And while the city council and other city leaders had devoted years to create a new Norfolk  from the  offices  of the Norfolk City Hall on Plume Street, they also were the architects of one of the darkest racial periods of Norfolk’s history.

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