Conversion of the Lucky Strike complex is nearing completion.
Tall, tapering smokestacks and water towers on the eastern edge of downtown Richmond are reminders of the once-prospering manufacturing site for cigarettes sold around the world.
Tobacco companies left Tobacco Row decades ago, but over the course of the past 20 years, the buildings have found new purpose as multi-use developments.
![]()
The latest project is the Lucky Strike complex at the far east end of Cary Street. The three buildings there are among the final restorations of Tobacco Row buildings.
"It's finishing up the transformation of Tobacco Row," said David Herring, executive director of the Alliance to Conserve Old Richmond Neighborhoods. "It has taken 20 years, but those are massive buildings to revitalize."
Revitalization projects such as the Lucky Strike complex demonstrate the adaptability of historic buildings, he said.
"I think that can be attributed to good design and good materials," Herring said.
Tobacco warehouse
The warehouse is being converted into 131 apartments as an expansion of The River Lofts at Tobacco Row.
The building is the largest of the three at the Lucky Strike site. Built in two phases in 1912 and 1929, the six-story brick building was originally a tobacco warehouse for the American Tobacco Co., which made Lucky Strike cigarettes.
The apartments in the River Lofts at Lucky Strike are available with floor plans for one bedroom, one bedroom with a den, two bedrooms and lofts. The average size is 1,000 square feet.
The average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $1,050, and the average two-bedroom monthly rent is $1,550. Parking in the garage costs $85 a month for one space and $120 for two.
Apartment features include hardwood floors, granite countertops, stainless-steel appliances and spa-style bathrooms. The common areas at Lucky Strike consist of a media room/theater with a stage, a community room with a business center and a wood-paneled clubroom.
The development has 177 parking spaces, most of which are in a garage inside the apartment building. "It's one of our only buildings in Tobacco Row with parking in the building," said Kirsten Brinker, spokeswoman for Forest City Enterprises, the developer.
Residents began arriving in February while some areas of the building were still under construction. Work on the final set of apartments was finished last month.
Forest City is putting finishing touches on the common areas, which should take one month. The company has leased about 30 percent of the apartments.
Power plant
The site's second-largest building is identifiable by a smokestack and a silo.
"The power plant burned coal and made steam that turned turbines, and it provided electricity as well as steam" for the American Tobacco Co., said Charles Macfarlane, managing member of Mac Partners, a Richmond development firm.
Macfarlane shares a 70 percent ownership in the building, which was built in 1929, with partners Sam McDonald and Chris Dillon. Odell Solutions, an affiliate of Odell Associates Inc., owns the remaining 30 percent.
Odell Associates, which did the architectural design for the renovation, is moving into the building.
"It has a lot of glass and light and open space, and the thought was that it could make some really spectacular offices," Macfarlane said.
When completed, the power plant's renovation will create 18,500 square feet of usable space, including a 3,500-square-foot mezzanine. Odell's headquarters will occupy 15,000 square feet.
Mac Partners is marketing the remaining 3,500-square-foot space to prospective tenants. "It could be a coffeeshop or another retail business," Macfarlane said. "But most likely it will be an office user." Construction will be finished in December.
The garage
The third building, a one-story maintenance garage built in 1929, was finished last year, and the first occupants moved there in December.
"We're the pioneers at the moment here," said Julie Rautio, a partner at Capital Results, a government-affairs and public-relations firm. "We were the first to put the flag on the moon in the Lucky Strike complex."
Capital Results occupies 4,800 of a total 7,200 square feet. An economist, a bookkeeping firm and a graphic-design firm rent the remaining office space.
Three of the five partners in Capital Results own and manage the building under the auspices of Lucky Strike LLC.
Because all three buildings at the Lucky Strike site stood vacant for years, they were in bad shape when their new owners took over. A portion of the warehouse's roof had collapsed. The garage roof had several large holes.
Then there was the graffiti. But that was deemed historic. Capital Results preserved a 5-foot-square section of it in its break room. A visitor recognized it as the work of a graffiti artist who now paints for celebrity clients in Los Angeles, Rautio said.
In addition to being "a shelter for people who liked to spray-paint graffiti on walls," Rautio said, the maintenance garage was "a pigeon roost for nothing but the world's finest pigeons. . . . It took more than imagination to see what it could be."
Transforming a maintenance garage from the 1920s into contemporary office space was no easy task, said Burt Pinnock, owner of Richmond-based BAM Architects, which did the design.
"The amount of light coming through the building's skylights is great if you're working on vehicles, but it's a challenge if you're trying to read a computer screen," he said.
Pinnock took design cues from the building's eight garage doors, one of which found new life as an interior wall. The doors' grid patterns were the basis for moveable walls that divide the office's main area, for example.
Throughout the project, the goal was to complement the historic elements of the building rather than mimic them, Pinnock said. "It was always a matter of, 'Let's make sure what we do is recognizable as new and not a copy of what was here.'" Enditem
