Fan Area Historic District

Fan Area Historic District covers 85 blocks of west Richmond, Virginia, between North Harrison Street and North Mulberry Street, and between West Main and West Grace streets. The name comes from streets that radiate westward from Monroe Park, many following early 19th-century turnpikes. Most of the neighborhood was built between 1890 and 1930, with the heaviest construction from 1900 to 1915, when contractors and speculators put up whole blocks of brick row houses and town houses. Typical houses are two or two and a half stories, with frame porches and slate mansard roofs. Italianate, Queen Anne, Richardsonian Romanesque and Colonial Revival designs dominate, and a few earlier buildings survive, including the 1817 Federal-style house known as Columbia. The district holds about 2,370 contributing buildings and few intrusions. Its scale, materials and ornament give it unusual cohesion, and it adjoins the Monument Avenue and West Franklin Street districts. University expansion in the 1970s and 1980s removed older houses on the eastern edge, which set the eastern boundary.