Shockoe Slip Historic District

Shockoe Slip is a compact commercial neighborhood in downtown Richmond, built around a triangular, stone-paved plaza with a fountain at South Thirteenth and East Cary Streets. Warehouses, tobacco storage buildings and mills stood here as early as the eighteenth century, and the area was rebuilt after a fire in April 1865. The surviving buildings are mostly two to four stories of red pressed brick, with corbeled cornices, segmental-arched windows and storefronts framed by cast-iron columns and pilasters. Several warehouses faced the Great Basin of the James River and Kanawha Canal, linking the district to the canal trade. The Columbian Block, built in 1871 with Italianate features, anchors the plaza. The nomination values the district for its consistent scale, its rhythm of repeated three-bay fronts and its brick and ironwork. Later documentation notes its transformation from a blighted area into a restaurant, retail and visitor destination, and an expanded boundary that takes in nearby warehouse and railroad structures.