The Hippodrome Theater: Second Street's Stage
Near Richmond, Virginia
The Hippodrome Theater opened in nineteen fourteen on Second Street in Jackson Ward, built as a vaudeville and movie house by a man named Charles A. Somma. The street it anchored was already becoming what people would call the Deuce, the heart of Black nightlife in Richmond.
By the nineteen twenties, the Hippodrome had become one of the premiere stages on the Chitlin' Circuit, the informal network of theaters, nightclubs, and dance halls across the South and the urban North where Black performers could work without navigating the indignities of white-owned venues. The Circuit existed because segregation made it necessary. Within those constraints, it incubated some of the most significant American music and performance of the twentieth century.
The names that played the Hippodrome's stage during those years form something close to a complete list of the era's giants. Billie Holiday. Louis Armstrong.
Nat King Cole. Ella Fitzgerald. Ray Charles.
James Brown. Bill Robinson, who had grown up in the same neighborhood. Ida Cox.
Moms Mabley. The theater caught fire in nineteen forty-five. It reopened in nineteen forty-seven, rebuilt in an Art Deco style with new air conditioning and technical equipment.
The reopening ceremony drew a crowd of roughly two thousand people to Second Street. The theater went through cycles of closure and revival across the following decades. Today the Hippodrome has been restored as a working performance venue.
The Taylor Mansion next door, built in nineteen oh seven, houses a restaurant. Second Street is quieter now than it was in nineteen thirty, but the Hippodrome is still there.
