When Brittany Smith opens a new barber shop location on Fifth Street this summer, she’ll be doing more than cutting hair, she said.
“To be a Black business owner that’s occupying this space, I look at it as an honor first of all, and I look at it as a responsibility. It’s a responsibility to really rejuvenate the presence of Fifth Street,” the owner and master barber of The Cutting Room said.
Fifth Street was Lynchburg’s Black commercial district from the late 1800s through the 1960s, when segregation separated residents and their shops, restaurants, hotels, entertainment venues and other community hubs by race. The Fifth Street Historic District spans about seven city blocks and thrived as a mecca for Black community, pride and unity, local historians say, until Lynchburg’s landscape shifted with integration, Black businesses went under and many Fifth Street buildings were left empty or targeted for demolition.
By the early 2000s, what once was Black Main Street was “worn out and left behind with its many vacant buildings, vacant parcels, and unkempt parking lots,” as described by the city’s Fifth Street Corridor Master Plan.
Today, with the help of historic tax credits and local redevelopment initiatives, developers are adapting Fifth Street’s surviving structures to modern uses. Smith’s new shop, for example, is being built in Fifth Street’s last surviving Green Book location, called the Humbles Building. The pharmacy that once operated there was regularly included in the guidebook that was published annually throughout the mid-1900s to help Black travelers find safe places to sleep, eat and stock up on essentials in the South during the Jim Crow era.
The other seven Green Book sites once located on Fifth Street have been knocked down over time. Moving forward, Smith said, she hopes redevelopment and preservation go hand in hand on Fifth Street and in the building she’s moving into.
“Barbering is one of the staples of African American communities, and I want to be a safe place where people can come and feel appreciated, have a place of peace and tranquility and community, just like they would have back then.”
‘Fifth Street had a spirit and a soul’
Growing up in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Beatrice Hunter remembers making frequent trips to Fifth Street from her home in the nearby Tinbridge Hill neighborhood.
She can retrace her steps by memory — and by smell. At the corner of Fifth and Madison streets: the crisp clean scent of the laundromat. Heading up Fifth Street from there: the sweet smell of johnnycakes and the sponge cake and jam layers of fresh Washington pie. Next: a fish market, and Pisces Restaurant, famous for its fried fish sandwiches.
“And you can really smell that fish, so you may want to cross the street there,” Hunter said with a chuckle.
Farther up Fifth Street, she’d catch the smell of popcorn at the Harrison Theater and men’s aftershave at barber shops and social clubs.
“Fifth Street had a spirit and a soul,” Hunter said. “Fifth Street was part of our living, so it was alive.”
The spirit was one of community, she added, where everyone came to “meet and discuss and unify” and where the unspoken rule was to take care of each other. The owner of the funeral home even used his hearse as an ambulance when medical emergencies arose, she said.
In the neighborhood’s heyday in the 1920s, 30 Black‐owned businesses lined Fifth Street from Federal Street to Park Avenue, according to the city’s Fifth Street Master Plan.
Long before then, the street was a major commercial thoroughfare for Lynchburg, said Ted Delaney, the director of the Lynchburg Museum. Since the 1700s, Fifth Street has been a main access point to the downtown area and the primary connector between the James River and western destinations like Roanoke.
Starting in the 1880s and 1890s, Delaney said, Black residents of Lynchburg began to build up Fifth Street to create a corridor where they could own and operate their businesses and support each other in a “separate but equal” Jim Crow society. The commercial district thrived for decades as Black families’ income was funneled into the street’s Black-owned businesses.
Teresa Harris, who in 2023 put together a four-episode documentary series to document Fifth Street’s history, said those who remember the neighborhood in its prime recall it as “a place where you could come find community among people who had common identities, common experiences” and collaborate on how to “reach a level of excellence needed in order to succeed in a biased world.”
In the mid-1900s, Black people were moving out of Lynchburg as the center of the tobacco industry shifted farther south, and as greater economic and political opportunities became available farther north and west, Delaney said.
And in the late 1960s and early ’70s, integration changed Lynchburg’s business landscape and Black residents “had access to other opportunities that they hadn’t had before, so the businesses on Fifth Street were less frequented,” Harris said.
“So they moved off the street,” Hunter said. “They went because now they can go to the plaza, to the stores that carry more products, they can go to the mall. So there’s no need for them to open up a business here.”
Today, Fifth Street is unrecognizable from its prime, Delaney said. Buildings left vacant were often demolished in the decades that followed Fifth Street’s decline, he said, likely due to a combination of city action to remove neglected and condemned buildings and efforts made by private business owners and developers to meet changing habits of Lynchburg residents.
“It’s really shocking to me how few buildings are still standing,” he said. “Then, there were places where you would stand and you would be surrounded by tall buildings like you are on Main Street today, and that feeling of it being a commercial district with lots of tall buildings all around you, that feeling is gone now. It’s hard to imagine how robust that street was today, given that there’s been so much loss.”
Hunter said the “unification and family” feel of Fifth Street disappeared with its Black-owned businesses and buildings.
“My heart has been broken for many years now because of what has become of Fifth Street,” she said.
Other structures were occasionally built in the spaces left behind, said Marjette Upshur, the city’s director of economic development and tourism, including the Community Access Network, which opened its doors on the corner of Fifth and Federal streets in 2018 and which Upshur considers “the biggest boost” to the corridor. The nonprofit provides medical care to patients regardless of age, income or insurance status.
Rehabilitation and preservation at the Humbles Building
When Daryl Calfee, co-owner of Penny Lane Properties, first learned the history behind the Humbles Building that he was setting out to redevelop, he knew he wanted to protect it.
“And now the spirit of the building gets to live on with Brittany’s barber shop on the first floor,” Calfee said. “It’s about bringing those forgotten spaces back to life.”
The three-story, tan brick structure towers at the corner of Fifth and Jackson streets and is known as the Humbles Building for its first owner, Adolphus Humbles. Born in 1840, Humbles was a successful businessman, developer and community leader who became Lynchburg’s first Black millionaire and an early supporter of the Fifth Street commercial district, Delaney said.
The Humbles Building, which was constructed in 1915, was home to many businesses throughout its history, ranging from insurance companies to the pharmacy advertised in the Green Book, Delaney said. Most notably, the building housed the doctor’s office of Walter Johnson, who was the first Black doctor to be credentialed at Lynchburg General Hospital — and who’s also known as the “father of Black tennis” for his effort to desegregate the sport and coach tennis greats such as Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe.
Under Fifth Street
Since 2009, Lynchburg has been working to bring utility and streetscape improvements to Fifth Street, from the John Lynch Memorial Bridge to the MLK Jr. Memorial Bridge.
The current, and final, phase of the improvements aims to replace the over 100-year-old water main that runs under Fifth Street. New storm inlets, wider sidewalks, fresh landscaping and other upgrades will also be installed, with project completion expected by December 2026.
Calfee said the Humbles Building had been vacant for decades and was in “such a state of decay” when Penny Lane began renovations in 2024. The awning had been collapsing and pulling the front of the building off with it over the years, Calfee said, so his team had to bolt the building back together from the inside out. The renovations cost $185 per square foot, much higher than the $88-$100 average Penny Lane typically sees with similar projects.
The more than $1.3 million project was only possible because of historic tax credits and local redevelopment incentives, Calfee said.
“Those are infusions of capital that make the project sustainable. Without them, the cost would be so high that it just wouldn’t make financial sense,” he said.
State credits provide 25%, and federal credits can provide an additional 20%, in dollar-for-dollar reductions on eligible rehabilitation expenses when developers preserve the historic character of a building. In Lynchburg, Calfee said, he’s also able to tap into investment grants in the city’s Enterprise Zones and tax exemptions through the city’s real estate rehabilitation program to make ends meet on difficult renovation projects.
That funding made it possible so that, today, the Humbles Building is home to five apartment units on the second and third floors and a commercial space, claimed by Smith, on the first floor. Every apartment but one has booked up since the upstairs renovations were completed earlier this year, Calfee said, and construction on Smith’s shop space will continue before a planned opening later this summer. Apartment rents range from $1,100 per month to $1,600 per month depending on the layout and number of bedrooms, according to the property’s website.
Smith’s business, The Cutting Room, now operates from one location on Thomas Road and another on Bedford Avenue. She plans to turn the Bedford Avenue shop over to a barber she’s mentored, she said, in order to focus her attention on the new Fifth Street space.
The Fifth Street shop will be her first storefront location, and Smith said she hopes the visibility from the road and sidewalk will help her client base continue to grow. The space is also much larger than where she’s worked in the past, and she plans to one day open a barbering academy to make the best use of it.
“If I can support a student, and then that student in turn builds a solid career, it impacts their family and it in turn impacts the entire community,” Smith said of her dreams for the academy’s role in the neighborhood.
A microcosm of Lynchburg’s redevelopment trends
Calfee’s not alone in his work on Fifth Street.
Steps away from the Humbles Building, developers Tinker and George Burkhardt, in partnership with a Richmond-based nonprofit called Vibrant Communities Drive Change, are renovating 709 Fifth St. The team is pulling together final financing details and approvals from the city and plans to start construction this summer, said Zack Miller, the director of VCDC Development Works.
He said he anticipates that the building — which will include five apartments and one storefront commercial space — will be ready for tenants by the summer of 2027. Initial rents will be set at 80% of area median income, which is generally considered affordable housing, Miller said.
Zoning for the ‘missing middle’
Developers interested in infill development and adaptive reuse projects, like those projects underway on Fifth Street, often look to what’s called “missing middle” design plans for housing, said Rachel Frischeisen, Lynchburg’s city planner.
If housing density exists on a spectrum, the missing middle is the range of housing types between the one end of single family homes, and the other end of high-density apartments, Frischeisen explained. Duplexes, triplexes, townhomes and smaller-scale apartment buildings can all be classified as missing middle housing.
Adaptive reuse projects that convert vacant buildings into missing middle housing are “efficient from a land use perspective” and allow the city to grow economically while staying in the footprint of existing neighborhoods, Frischeisen said.
Missing middle housing is appealing to developers, too, Calfee said. Single-family houses are not affordable to build today due mainly to the rising cost of materials, land and labor. Creating multiple units in one building is a way to “make the numbers game work,” he said, but Lynchburg’s zoning sometimes gets in the way.
Currently, the city’s zoning ordinance doesn’t allow most of the missing middle uses by-right, except in the R-4 district, which is also where much higher density development is permitted, said Frischeisen. “So naturally, there’s not really an incentive for a developer to create these ‘missing middle’ housing types when they can opt for a higher density project,” she said.
The city is in the process of updating its comprehensive plan, Frischeisen said, and it will likely include recommendations on ways to adjust the zoning ordinance to facilitate missing middle developments.
In the meantime, the VCDC team plans to start predevelopment work on the second phase of its Fifth Street project: new infill developments on either side of the 709 building and on the 712 corner lot. A third phase will tackle renovations in existing buildings across the street, Miller said. All together, the team is looking to renovate or build eight buildings, bringing about 35 residential units and five commercial units to Fifth Street, in the next five years.
The project has its challenges, Miller said. The internal staircase in the 709 building collapsed due to water damage from roof leaks, so stabilization work had to be done immediately. Historic tax credits are a “game changer,” he said, to make the numbers work in difficult building renovations, along with grant funding from the Governor’s Workforce Housing Investment Program and below-market financing from VCDC’s lending arm.
“The value of reviving historic corridors is immeasurable in my mind,” Miller said in an email. “All this will come in place of the empty lots and deteriorated vacant buildings which if left long enough could ultimately be developed into something that doesn’t match the local scale of the neighborhood. We and many of our supporters feel that it is important we build back and renovate these buildings in a way that allows for density and moderate rents while matching what has always been there for this community.”
In that sense, Miller said, community engagement is just as crucial as making construction plans and securing funding. The VCDC team has attended local events and collaborated with neighborhood groups and the Fifth Street Community Development Corporation — and plans to continue to do so — to ensure that residents’ ideas and needs are understood in the redevelopment process.
Calfee said community engagement comes down to “being really good neighbors” and forming strong relationships with the residents and business owners across the street, next door and around the corner.
The pattern of reuse has been seen elsewhere on Fifth Street in recent years, including at a former auto shop that was converted into a co-working space, Upshur said. Today, a walk down Fifth Street can include a taco at Uno Mas, a sweet treat at Hill City Donuts and more for local shoppers, she said.
And the reuse pattern holds throughout the rest of downtown and Lynchburg’s older neighborhoods, she said, as former factories and warehouses of Lynchburg’s industrial age are converted for modern use. Penny Lane Properties alone has built or restored about 100,000 square feet of real estate since it was founded in 2009, according to its website, creating space for businesses such as Bacon Street Bagels, Super Rad Arcade Bar and Golf Park Coffee Co.
In Lynchburg, “we don’t have the open land that counties around us have. We’re old, we’ve been around for a really, really long time, and our neighborhoods have their own personalities because they’ve all got a history,” Upshur said. “So we want to reuse that space wherever we can.”
Buildings renovated into housing and commercial spaces are especially helpful for the city’s economic growth, Upshur said, as they put vacant spaces back on tax rolls and attract new people to live, work and spend money in Lynchburg.
Historic building rehabilitations have been a steady trend for about 20 years, Upshur said, when the Virginia Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit program began gaining traction and prompted “light bulbs to go off in the heads of developers.”
Delaney said the tax credit process is reassuring to historians like him because it “guarantees that somebody is not going to do something radical to a building that totally loses its original character.”
“Given the choice of demolition versus rehabilitation for a new purpose, it’s hard to say that the rehab is worse,” he said. “These reuses are good for the historic fabric of the city, and in the end, it leads to some property being saved.”
Even so, Hunter said, the spirit of Fifth Street as it once was can’t be resurrected.
“It’s not the same. It will never be the same,” she said of Fifth Street, now that new developments are taking root. “I know that the history that I remember will never come back.”
