The Planning Process
After Ashe died, the Richmond City Council formed a committee consisting of the city manager, two City Council members, a member from Ashe’s family, and nine citizens each representing one of city’s districts. They proposed to rename the other main thoroughfare which runs perpendicular through Monument Avenue from the once-segregated tennis court of Byrd Park north past the Richmond’s historic museums, including the headquarters of the Daughters of the Confederacy, “Arthur Ashe Boulevard.”46 With only minor changes and funding, this seemed the most plausible proposal. Because public commemoration carries a great deal of symbolic value, however, changing the avenue’s names, as Barbee explains, “would have taken away the genteel name The Boulevard and positioned the life of Arthur Ashe as the defining feature.”47 The proposal never came into fruition, but during this time a different way to commemorate the life of Arthur Ashe had already begun.
Not long before Ashe’s death, Virginian sculptor Paul DiPasquale took his son to see Arthur Ashe address a large crowd of young tennis players in Richmond. Matthew Barbee writes that this event convinced DiPasquale to begin creating a sculpture in honor of Richmond’s most influential athlete. The sculptor soon reached out to Virginia Heroes, Inc. and began his collaboration with the organization and the Ashe family in designing a statue to be placed outside of the Hard Road to Glory Hall of Fame.48 Even while in the earlier stages of the planning process, Virginia Heroes helped to raise the nearly $400,000 needed to complete DiPasquale’s statue.
With the hall of fame plans still incomplete, the Richmond City Planning Commission considered placing the Ashe monument at the corner of Hamilton and Monument Avenue. This first suggestion set off a fury of response, despite its suggested location outside of the historical district. Urban studies professor, Robert Hodder explains that Mayor Leonidas Young responded by appointing a committee “to consider sites throughout the city in the hope of avoiding rancorous public hearing.”49
While the committee first approved the Hamilton location for the Ashe monument, Hodder writes that on June 19, 1995, the city manager, Robert Bobb, urged the planning committee to place Arthur Ashe within the city’s historic district to represent as a symbol gesturing a reconciled future.
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