My Ghost Vapes

1994, the year Richmond buried 160 people

A city of 200,000 had one of the worst murder rates in America, and most of the people who live here now have no idea.

, 4 minute read

Richmond had about 200,000 people in it in the early 90s. In 1994 it had either 160 or 161 homicides, depending on whose count you trust. The published counts never quite matched, which tells you something about the year all by itself.

Do the math on that. It works out to roughly 80 killings for every 100,000 residents. The FBI put the national rate that year at 9.

I was around ten, in my last year at Highland Springs Elementary, which sat at the back of Newbridge Apartments. I lived in the East End of Henrico. As a kid it was a great place to live. We rode bikes all day and played outside.

Then things started to change. Because of the crack epidemic, families were leaving Richmond to get away from the violence, the gangs and the crime, and they were moving to Henrico and Chesterfield. The violence from Church Hill and Northside started spilling over into the East End. White flight happened, and most of the kids I grew up with moved out of my neighborhood.

We stayed.

How it got there

It did not happen overnight. Richmond had 51 homicides in 1981. In 1988 it hit 100 for the first time. Every account of those years, from the police to the prosecutors to the reporters, points at the same thing: crack cocaine showed up in the second half of the 80s and the gun violence came with it.

By 1993 the city already had the sixth-highest murder rate in the country among cities of more than 100,000 people. Then came 1994.

The worst of it was concentrated. A neighborhood news site that went back through the Times-Dispatch coverage counted at least 70 of that year’s killings on Southside, most of them packed into a few small areas. It counted 13 more in Church Hill south of Fairmount Avenue. August alone had 25, almost one a day. The same account says the Postal Service stopped delivering mail to Whitcomb Court until a federal judge ordered the carriers back.

Richmond finished the year with the second-highest murder rate of any city in America. The Washington Post put it in a headline the following May.

The part that gets me

The numbers stayed bad for years. There were still 140 homicides in 1997, and that was the year Richmond got tagged the murder capital of the country on a per-person basis.

Then it dropped. 94 in 1998. By 2008 the count was 32, the lowest in decades.

Sometime around 2012, millennials started gentrifying Northside and Church Hill because property values were low. Now it is virtually unrecognizable compared to when I was using drugs and running the streets. Church Hill used to be mostly drug corners, and Highland Park and Northside were much the same. Gilpin Court was called Killpin.

Now you ride through Church Hill and see young families riding bikes at night. It’s unreal.

Richmond had a renaissance of sorts in the 2010s. VCU’s men’s basketball team went to the Final Four in 2011, a flood of donor money came in, and the school started buying property all over the city and investing in vital infrastructure. Richmond is a relatively safe and sound place to live now. Most of the people here are transplants, either escaping the high prices of Northern Virginia or looking for a city life away from small-town Southwest Virginia.

I am going to keep coming back to this decade here. The crews that were selling, the federal cases, the billboards that promised five years for carrying a gun, and the music that was being made a mile away from all of it. This post is just the scoreboard.

You had to see it to believe it. Richmond looked like a war zone, and you likely didn’t spend much time in the city outside of the Fan and Carytown. Now we have thriving communities in Church Hill, Northside, Scott’s Addition and Manchester. Richmond still has its fair share of violent crime, but it’s a far cry from the city I grew up in.

Sources