Moving out of The Virginian-Pilot building on Brambleton Avenue in Norfolk has been like organizing a huge, strange yard sale for a family with extremely eclectic taste and a hoarder’s sensibility.
When we sold the building to Monument Cos., a Richmond-based developer, we knew we would have to deal with the decades and decades of items that lined the many walls, dark nooks and basement crannies in a space that seems ripe for the opening of a horror movie. The huge building, which opened in 1937, has endured many permutations since the newspaper moved in nearly a century ago.
“Don’t go down there without a buddy,” people would say if they heard someone planned to trek to one of the many abandoned spots on another floor (or half floor). Each office, conference room and storage space — some long empty as staff contracted and moved into other parts of the building — was filled with stuff.
Lots. Of. Stuff.
Office furniture of every stripe and era, bookcases and filing cabinets, white boards (with words still written on them), framed photos, artwork, dishes, stacks of old newspapers, accounting ledgers from the early 1900s, refrigerators, pica poles and highlighters, a foosball table, several Christmas trees and a ping pong table.
Essential files, furniture, decorations and personal belongings moved to our office in Newport News or the printing plant in Virginia Beach. A few local nonprofits took office furniture and other equipment. Employees claimed some coveted memorabilia. Lots of papers and files were recycled or trashed.
One category of materials needed special care — our archives. While we have a large collection of newspapers and other content in digital formats, we no longer have the storage space for dozens of shelves and filing cabinets filled with photo prints, negatives and newspaper clippings.
For 155 years, Pilot and Ledger-Star journalists were there to see our communities grow and change, and those eyewitness accounts are valuable.
As the first draft of history, the stories and photos produced by the talented staff over the years had to be housed in a way that both preserves them for the future and allows the public to have access.
Fortunately, both the Virginia Beach and Norfolk public libraries stepped up to the task.
Beginning last fall, a small team of Pilot employees worked with both library systems to identify what materials each would be interested in acquiring. We carefully itemized which parts of our collection would be most relevant to local residents and where they could be found in the building (“all the contents in the scary closet” was an actual description that made it on the list).
Once the various deeds of gift were signed, the libraries planned to pack up the collection and bring it to their respective institutions.
The Virginia Beach Public Library was ready to go just as the coronavirus pandemic started to hit. Racing against time, Mary Lovell Swetnam, special collections librarian, brought a colleague to the Brambleton Avenue building and spent four long days carefully packing and moving.
The collection, which includes Virginia Beach articles and photos from the Beacon, The Virginian-Pilot and the Ledger-Star, will be in place at the Meyera E. Oberndorf Central Library, on new shelving, by June 1. Anyone with a Virginia Beach library card will have access to the new collection, as well as the complete digital archive from 1865-1976.
The Norfolk-centric content will eventually go to the Sargeant Memorial Collection at the Norfolk Public Library, once the city is running normally again and the gift is approved by the City Council. Included in that collection are photograph prints and negatives from the 1950s to 1990s, bound copies of Portfolio magazine and city directories for Hampton Roads.
While we will miss our years of memories at Brambleton Avenue (well, not the scary closet), we are grateful for our local library partners helping to preserve the legacy of our work.
