Cover Story Something Old, Something Hip An influx of artisans from near and far revives a once-dying Petersburg. by Elizabeth Cogar Not long ago, artist Parks Duffey introduced himself to someone who insisted that Parks Duffey was dead. Nope, not dead. Just living in Petersburg. And the Richmond-born primitive painter of all things historic is not alone. In the past few years, a quiet migration has occurred. Unusually low real-estate prices and the unspoiled charm of Petersburg have lured people involved in the arts. Prime architectural specimens can be had unrestored for as little as $10,000, restored for under $100,000. The prevalent peace and quiet is conducive to creativity. For a town that was nearly blown away by a tornado on Aug. 6, 1993, the recent gust of come-heres has been welcome. "Prior to the tornado," says Petersburg Mayor Rosalind Dance, "we were enjoying an economic renaissance. The tornado set people back a pace." With many residents living above their businesses, tornado damage created a new population of people who were both homeless and jobless. "From that point on," says Dance, "we've been trying to turn ourselves around. ... There's an excitement there, an energy there, and we're starting to turn the bend." This won't be the first time Petersburg's rebuilt its economy and its heart and soul. In fact, it's something of a comeback town. Settled on the banks of the Appomattox River in the 1640s, early residents established an important trading center and point of departure for westward expeditions. Riverfront tobacco warehouses were burned during the Revolutionary War, but the town rebounded with steady tobacco, cotton and ironworks growth. Again, in 1815, fire destroyed the town. Then, during the Civil War, its strategic location for both the Confederacy and the Union made it a target for both. Some 70,000 from both sides died in and around Petersburg during a 10-month-long siege. Once again, the town had to rebuild. As one of the state's leading tobacco cities, Petersburg has been hit especially hard in the latter part of this century by the closing of major tobacco manufacturing operation Brown & Williamson. Losing close to 4,000 jobs was exceedingly painful for a town of less than 40,000. In addition, military cutbacks at Fort Lee have taken a bite out of local consumer spending. Recent improvements to the downtown historic district were severely damaged by the tornado. All of these setbacks have challenged city leaders to redirect Petersburg's future. In what may appear to some passers-through to be an economic ghost town, there's a sprig of new growth creeping up through the cracks in the sidewalks of this 350-year-old burg. Yes, plenty of buildings on Sycamore and Washington streets are empty, but there are signs of life. Historic Union Station is being restored and a riverwalk is being created. The Governor's School for Arts and Technology will open there next fall. Homes are being revitalized, many by artistic newcomers who value the venue for its aesthetics. Mayor Dance says the renovation possibilities "give them opportunity for expression and brings out their creativity." And the town is doing its best to give them a warm welcome. Last year's big catch - New Millennium Studios - was partially the result of the city's willingness to roll out the red carpet as only small government can. "When they come to meet with us," Dance says of new business prospects, "they get the top." A public-private partnership recently put up some $55,000 to bring in consultant John Elkington, president and CEO of Performa Entertainment Real Estate in Memphis. Elkington's claim to fame is Beale Street, Memphis' answer to New Orleans' Bourbon Street, the top tourist attraction in the South. Elkington has been visiting Petersburg over the past five months and is now compiling data for a plan due to Petersburg city officials in December. Involving artists in the retail and entertainment is the key, he says: "There are many forms of entertainment - it's not just rock 'n' roll and restaurants. The visual arts are just as important." Still, there are challenges ahead. "One of the difficulties here is that perception is not reality," Elkington says of the city's bad crime rap. "The statistics don't hold that up. There's very little crime downtown, and part of the reason is that there's very little in downtown." Having converted Beale Street from forlorn to fabulous, Elkington says, "It was a lot worse than Petersburg. Petersburg is a piece of cake compared to that." The Artist in Residence Parks Duffey three years ago ran into a friend who had purchased a house in Petersburg. "I said, 'Petersburg!' I was like, why Petersburg?" His curiosity piqued, Duffey visited the day before the tornado hit. "The next thing I knew I was moving to Petersburg." He loaded up the truck and moved to a 4,000-square-foot frame abode on the Gold Coast of Petersburg proper: High Street. On an Indian summer afternoon, Duffey sits in an old chair in his living room, a half-renovated affair with white muslin covering the plasterless walls. Jars of brushes surround the base of an easel nearby; a painting in progress of his living room's interior awaits further attention. Trying to describe his new hometown's appeal, Duffey says wistfully, "It's sort of desolate, sort of like a time warp. And it's a candy store of architecture." On his street alone, there are Egyptian Revival, Federal, Georgian, Second Empire, Colonial Revival, Queen Anne and a plethora of other styles, some amalgams, some pure. Duffey's passions for history and painting are revealing themselves in portrayals of the buildings there, including his own 1803 home. Calling it an "early doublewide," he explains that the house was moved and expanded in its past. The mayor of Petersburg once lived there, as did Edmund Ruffin. Jefferson signed the deed. Most early mornings, Duffey has paint brush in hand. "I get up with the trains, 3 or 4 a.m., and I start painting." He works in different rooms in the house, depending on his mood and the light. Duffey has set his sights on restoring the house to its original state, tracking down fireplace mantels and researching its history. One upstairs room is filled with research materials and bits of china he's unearthed in his backyard. "If I get tired of painting I just go out and dig. The house has given up all the information." Of the detail in his house, Duffey says, "The woodwork is unbelievable." Not to mention the ghosts: Once, when Duffey threatened to move, the sewer lines backed up in his English basement. During another outburst, a painting flew off a wall. Trailed by three eager hounds - Chief, Fran and Dora - Duffey bounds down his back steps, past the kennel with five puppies, to the sunlit field beyond. There, amid weeds and the remains of a summer vegetable garden, he waxes poetic on the merits of his 3-acre piece of Petersburg. "It's beautiful at nighttime with the trains going through. I like the quieter atmosphere." The town is a never-ending source of inspiration. He's particularly fond of the small-town-ness of it all: "It's like Tennessee Williams gone awry," he says with a pleased smile. "But, really, I was so amazed at the diversity of the people here." And the influx of out-of-towners, astonished at the real estate values, continues. "Sometimes I think it's like Hooterville - there are lots of Lisa Douglases around here," Duffey says of the transplanted New Yorkers who have suddenly found themselves in a real-life "Green Acres." And the palette of artisans - cabinetmakers, painters, sculp-tors, etc. - is rich. A former roommate of Duffey's came down for a visit from Washington, D.C., and ended up buying three houses. "Somehow there's like a magnet," he says. Duffey had hoped to open an arts center this year in a 19th-century building downtown. His plans were to have his own space there and additional space for other artists - a la Alexandria's Torpedo Factory. But the city sold the building to a dialysis center instead. "That's not the direction I thought the city was heading in," he says. More than a few locals have been disillusioned with the city's choice to allow health services, including some mental-health agencies, to locate downtown smack dab in the middle of the tourist attractions. While Duffey remains loyal to Petersburg and its potential, he's decided to open a gallery and studio on Uptown Main Street in Richmond for now. He'll paint there and at home in Petersburg. "It's like an unpainted canvas," says Duffey of downtown Petersburg. "It could be a hell of an arts center. There's quite a community of artists here. The town is ripe for it." The New Yorkers Sitting in a new deli called Leonardo's, Dolly Holmes and her husband, Mark Pehanick, explain their unlikely decision to move to Petersburg from Brooklyn, N.Y. "We wanted to get out of New York," says Dolly. "We'd been there a long time. Too long. We got an old house here and could afford to fix it up." After reading about Petersburg real estate in Old House Journal, they decided to see for themselves. What they found, says Mark, was "a nice preservation-minded community and a lot of potentially great studio space." For $30,000 they bought an 1828 house that hadn't been lived in for 25 years. Over a year's time, they renovated and expanded the 1,700 square feet to 2,500. "We were looking for a change, and this was dramatically cheaper than New York," says Holmes. Holmes is a graphic artist and painter; Pehanick is a carpenter and a sculptor. Having left a job at Sports Illustrated to move to Petersburg, Holmes says she has only a few regrets. "I miss really good bagels on demand," she laughs. "I miss WNYC radio, intelligent liberal talk radio." Holmes says that when she and Pehanick told friends they were moving from sophisticated New York to little Petersburg, "friends said, 'Who will you talk to?' But we've met some really sharp people." In fact, friends have been easy to come by. "You meet people here so fast," Holmes says. "We have as many friends here already as we have in New York. It's very welcoming. They really want people like us down here, and in New York they didn't care." Now that their house is nearly finished, Holmes and Pehanick hope to soon find reasonable studio space and get back to their original loves - painting and sculpture. Pehanick is optimistic about their prospects for showing their work. "I think it will be easier to be successful here," he says. "When you're in a show in Soho, you could be in one show of 10 in the building, and there are 10 other buildings on the block, so then you're one of 100 in one block. You get lost in the shuffle." To make it in New York, he assesses, "it's much more about hustle than talent." Holmes agrees. "And we're not hustlers, didn't ever want to be." The Museum Mogul As director of The Valentine Museum, Richmond's bastion of local history, Bill Martin concedes that he ought to be living in Richmond. He took the job nearly three years ago, but he's still commuting from Petersburg. Why? "I love my house and I don't want to give it up." For eight years Martin was director of tourism in Petersburg, following a position as director of the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Jacksonville, Fla. Excellent housing was a pleasant bonus when he took his job in Petersburg. "The housing costs are so low. There are wonderful houses for half the price you'd pay in Richmond. People can find fully restored turn-of-the-century houses for under $100,000." He purchased a house on Petersburg's Central Park, now called Poplar Lawn Park. "That's my front yard." He's particularly fond of his classic New York-esque address: 109 Central Park. The allure of Petersburg, says Martin, lies in "good neighborhood associations, a sense of people taking care of each other, a sense of involvement." At the moment the tornado struck in 1993, Martin and the city manager were meeting in a building that collapsed around them. He was very involved in helping business rebuild. "It's certainly been difficult for the city since the tornado. We had a fragile retail district to begin with. It was draining to watch people suffer. We lost so much." At 25 minutes, "It's not a terrible commute," says Martin. "If I lived in Brandermill, it would take me longer. But, still, people say, 'Oh my gosh, that's so far away.' There is that sense of separation. People here think it's another world." The Big Time Tim and Daphne Maxwell Reid made their first visit to Petersburg on Christmas Eve of 1996. City officials knew they were coming - and they knew why, too. The Reids were looking for a place to plunk down $11 million. "People said, 'Are you gonna be Santa Claus or what?'" he laughs. "There was a lot of excitement." They quickly chose a 60-acre site for their New Millennium film studio, broke ground Feb. 17, 1997 and opened the first phase of their project July 12. "It's hard to believe that a year ago this was a soybean field and I was looking for a place," Tim Reid says. Reid, formerly of the sitcom "WKRP in Cincinnati," had been looking around Virginia for a place to build a film studio. Although he spends time in California working on television projects "Sister, Sister" and "Save Our Streets," his home is in Charlottesville. "A lot of other cities in the state had this 'What have you done for me lately?' attitude," Reid says. "They just did not seem to understand what we wanted to do. It's because of that that we're here. ... Petersburg said, 'we understand the importance of this and what it means.' The local government jumped in and made things happen. They helped with permits, zoning ... made it easier than I've ever had. That's not unusual but it's extraordinary for a city in economic downturn." While some cities in that situation may have been put off by the possibility of having to spend money to bring Reid to town, Reid says, "the people here just 'got it' and they went to the state and lobbied for it." New Millennium is the "only full-service studio in the state totally geared to filmmaking," Reid says. "Hopefully we'll become a central hub. ... When people think about making movies in Virginia, they'll think Petersburg the way they think of Wilmington in North Carolina." Making movies means big bucks to a little town. "We're going to make three films here next year," Reid says. An announcement regarding those projects will be made soon. "Seven to eight million will be spent to make them and 90 percent of that will be spent in this area," he says, explaining that a 2.5 multiplier - for every one dollar spent, the return on investment is 1.5 - will bring the economic impact to around $18 million. "Since I've been here, we're beginning to see that Petersburg is on a comeback. It's just been a forgotten city, depressed," Reid observes. "The good news is that, unlike many cities, there's still that look of yesteryear in Petersburg - it has a richness that is now invaluable." Reid points out that other cities like his native Norfolk had the budget to tear down old sections like Church Street whereas Petersburg did not. Reid sees this as a major plus, enhancing the city's photogenic quotient. Reid is pleased to see other arts professionals choosing Petersburg. "The more artisans who come here, the more people I have to choose from to do what I want to do." He mentions a computer company who recently relocated from Silicon Valley to Petersburg. "I don't know what's calling us here," he muses, "maybe it's close encounters." The Weekenders Joe and Lisette Adams live in a renovated Victorian cottage in Brooklyn, N.Y., and work at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. She's an art handler and he's an installation manager. Both are painters, too; at the moment, he has a show up in Soho and she has one in Williamsburg, a part of Brooklyn that is like the new version of the East Village. Like many New Yorkers, they have a weekend home. The thing is, theirs is in Petersburg. "We had been looking actively in southern New Jersey and upstate New York, and we'd seen some interesting places," Joe says. "But they all had one huge drawback: the Yankee winter. I'm a big outdoorsman, and having grown up in the South, I'm used to two months of winter." Joe heard about Petersburg from a college friend so he and Lisette decided to check it out. Richmond transplants Parks Duffey and Gerhard Overman toured them around. "Property values there were undervalued, we felt. It was just crazy not to buy. Plus, it gave us a toehold back in the South." "It's a little tiny town with an extremely depressed economy and a lot of charm. It's very quiet and very safe," Joe says. He acknowledges that some take issue with the safety component. "In Richmond, they think Petersburg's the drive-by capital of the free world." He says he checked the FBI statistics - the latest figures put Petersburg's crime rate about on par with Richmond's - and put his fears to rest. "It's really lovely and a really nice break from the city." His favorite aspect of the town is, by far, the Appomattox River. "I'm a fly-fishing freak. It's something I just can't believe nobody has tapped into. ... It's a fisherman's dream. It's epic. World class." But isn't Petersburg a little far for a weekend retreat from New York? "Door to door it's a six-hour drive," Adams says. Both Adamses are accustomed to long drives so they don't mind this one. He figures that between February and September they made the trip 18 times, some of those for weeklong visits. Joe travels relentlessly in his position at the Guggenheim - this week Spain, next week China - so for him, Petersburg is a respite. "We're intending in our minds to end up there. Petersburg is this huge, huge lifesaver ... a great breath of fresh air ... a golden parachute." Their house, a 3,200-square-foot brick Federal townhouse which they are renovating a little bit at a time, is on Grove Avenue. They bought it for $25,000. Not only does it have "buckets of character" and plenty of room for an at-home painting studio, but it sports a view of the Joe's personal nirvana - the Appomattox River. Says Adams with an intoxicated tone of reverie, "It's sweet." The Commuter "It's a bear," says Alice McCabe of the 45-minute trip she makes twice a day to and from her job teaching art at Short Pump Middle School in Richmond's West End. "64's not bad, but 95's just unbelievable. The trucks and tourists - it's like living in Northern Virginia. And I know - I've lived in Northern Virginia. It's like a parking lot sometimes. I finally had to get a car phone." Mostly, she uses it to call the State Police to report disabled vehicles. "I make one call a trip, but I've made as many as six." McCabe does not pretend to have gotten used to the commute from Petersburg, but she has found a home she loves and has no intention of leaving it. The driving is taking its toll, though, even if the Petersburg Pike no longer does collect quarters. "It makes me think I want to leave Henrico County and find something to do down here. I've got a lot of possibilities." Her arrival in Petersburg was just as happenstance as that of her neighbor Parks Duffey. A friend had told her about the town, "and I said, 'Petersburg!' I thought it was basically a drive-by town." Soon enough, she decided to have a look-see. "I was down here looking at houses during the real estate fair that Historic Petersburg Foundation has every April," she recalls of the epiphany that led her to leave her Fan District home for the 1760s frame house she bought on High Street two years ago. A real estate friend told her that the 3,800-square-foot house would sell for $400,000 in Richmond; she paid around $100,000. "It's interesting because most anybody that comes down here and starts looking at houses and likes architecture ends up moving down." McCabe's house is definitely worth coming home to. Everywhere there are signs of creative forces, past and present. McCabe's colorful, ornate decorating style reflects her keen photographer's eye. A front hall as wide as most living rooms features a staircase with 240-year-old detailed carpentry. Large windows flood grandly proportioned rooms with light. Historians have told her that Colonial Williamsburg Foundation was once interested in moving the house down to their site. Perhaps the most endearing aspect of domestic life in Petersburg is not so much what one developer coldly calls the "building stock," but a sound heard from a backyard near McCabe's house. It's late afternoon, the sun is sinking on what may not be a sleepy town much longer, and a rooster is crowing loud and proud, awakening the neighborhood to a new day in Petersburg.