Downtown Newport News

By William A. Fox

Read about Newport News' history as a vital early settlement in the nascent America and its center for commerce and more, until the start of WWII.

Settled in 1621, Newport News has the oldest English place name of any city in the New World. Its name is said to have come from "Newport's news" that supply ships were coming to save the starving Jamestown colonists in 1610. Farming and fishing were the primary occupations until Collis P. Huntington chose Newport News for the eastern terminus of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in the 1870s. In 1886, he founded the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company, which has built some of the most famous ships in history. By 1900, a vital city had grown where there were previously only farms and forest. Through vivid images, maps, and reminiscences, Images of America: Downtown Newport News tells the story of the city's once popular and thriving downtown commercial, social, and entertainment area, which met its end from flight to the suburbs after World War II.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Jul 26, 2010
• ISBN: 9781439626184

William A. Fox

Author William A. Fox was born in Newport News during World War II. After working as a naval architect in Newport News, New York, Spain, Italy, and Iran, he retired in 2006. He is the author of Always Good Ships: Histories of Newport News Ships, as well as many articles on local and maritime history.

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2009

INTRODUCTION

This is the story of a once popular and thriving commercial and entertainment center that met its end from urban renewal and flight to the suburbs in the 1970s and 1980s. Newport News was selected by Collis Potter Huntington in the 1870s as the eastern terminus of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O). Huntington subsequently founded the Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company there in 1886. The shipyard, now owned by the Northrop Grumman Corporation, employs more than 20,000 and is the largest private employer in Virginia. Some of the most famous ships in history have been built at Newport News including the liners SS America and SS United States, the aircraft carriers USS Enterprise, and all 10 ships of the USS Nimitz class. Newport News natives include world-famous entertainers Ella Fitzgerald and Pearl Bailey. Writer William Styron grew up in Newport News and used the city as the locale for some of his books.

Newport News was first settled in 1619, but was little more than farms until the late 1880s. Its name is said to have come from Newport’s news that supply ships were coming to save the Jamestown Colony in 1610. The famous Battle of the Ironclads between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia took place off Newport News Point in 1862. Newport News is the oldest English place name of any city in the New World. Today its population exceeds 183,000.

Newport News was a planned city with excellent utilities, and it was a boomtown as the shipyard and railroad grew in the 1890s. Downtown was crowded and busy, with many late-Victorian commercial buildings along its main thoroughfare, Washington Avenue. Hundreds of Victorian homes lined West Avenue and its numbered streets. Downtown reached its zenith during and just after World War II, but its narrow streets, designed for horse and buggy, were unsuited for automobile traffic, and it started to decline in the 1960s. In a pattern common to many American cities after the war, residents and businesses moved out of the congested downtown area of the city, in this case to the farm and forest lands to the north and east. This trend intensified after consolidation with the City of Warwick to form the city of Greater Newport News in 1958. Today downtown is all but abandoned by retail business, and almost all of its old buildings have been razed and replaced with new housing, office buildings, and parking for the shipyard and the navy. But Newport News has grown and prospered as its center of activity has moved northward. The city celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1996 with the motto, A Bright Future on Historic Shores.

Downtown was a lively place, now much beloved and fondly remembered by the older generation. Residents of that generation are getting fewer in number as the years pass, and the history of downtown is fading from memory. This was once a thriving place with native and immigrant communities and hundreds of businesses, shops, churches, theaters, restaurants, hotels, and attractions. M. Quincy Holt recalled, Downtown was fun. You couldn’t walk a block along Washington Avenue without stopping and talking to someone. The photographs and text on these pages will help recall what it once was like in downtown Newport News. For reference, the reader is encouraged to consult the aerial photographs and maps in chapters 8 and 9.

Due to the limits of time, space, and availability of images, many of the people, places, and things which made downtown so memorable have not been included here. Hopefully, the reader will enjoy this walk around old downtown.

Author’s Note: A busy minority district, now known as the Southeast Community, developed to the east along Jefferson Avenue. This area declined at the same time and for some of the same reasons as the downtown area. The Southeast Community has a rich history, and it deserves a book of its own. Hopefully, this will be written soon.

One

EARLY DAYS

Newport News Point is shown as Poynt hope to the left of center on this detail from John Smith’s 1612 Map of Virginia. Typical of maps from that era, north is to the right and the James River (Powhatan flu) and York River (Pamaunk flu) appear to be running north and south. The harbor of Hampton Roads is at the bottom, and the future location of the city of Hampton is shown as Kecoughtan. (Courtesy of the Library of Virginia.)

This is a view of Newport News Point that appeared in the May 1859 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. This is the earliest known depiction of the future location of the city. Just two years later, Camp Butler would be established by the Union army in this location, and in March 1862, the famous Battle of the Ironclads between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia took place in these waters. (Courtesy of the Mariners’ Museum.)

Collis Potter Huntington, the founder of the city of Newport News, is pictured here in his New York office in 1898. More than 25 years before, he had selected Newport News as the eastern terminus of his Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Railway saying, There is a point so designed and adapted by nature that it will require little at the hands of man to fit our purposes. He had first visited the area as a peddler in 1837 and believed that it was the perfect place for a port city. Forty years later, he began to purchase land for a city, and he chartered the Old Dominion Land Company in 1880. (Courtesy of the Mariners’ Museum.)

The first map of the city of Newport News was drawn by civil engineer Eugene E. McLean in 1881. On the map, downtown is the area shown below the railroad, which arcs down to a pier on the James River. The