Status: under contract to be sold
The James Monroe Building has held the top of Richmond's skyline since 1981. The Commonwealth has emptied it, listed it, and put it under contract. What happens to 470,000 square feet of finished building is now an open question — and the answer is being decided quietly, by people who have not been asked to consider reuse.
2 accounts in the archive
Where things stand
Early 2026
The Commonwealth engages JLL to market the tower. There is no asking price. The parcel is assessed at $77.8 million.
Summer 2026
The Department of General Services confirms it is negotiating with an interested buyer, but will not name them or discuss terms.
August 2026
The listing is marked under contract. Three blocks west, demolition begins on the Pocahontas Building — a fight preservationists had already lost.
Next
A sale needs the Governor's approval. Demolition of state property goes before the Art and Architectural Review Board. Neither step requires anyone to make the case for keeping it.
The case
59%
Roughly three‑fifths of a new building's lifetime carbon footprint is burned before anyone moves in — quarrying, smelting, hauling, pouring. That debt was paid on the Monroe in the 1970s. Demolishing it throws the receipt away and starts a second one, and a replacement tower spends decades just catching up to the building it replaced.
50 yrs
The Monroe recently crossed the age threshold that opens the door to federal and state rehabilitation tax credits — the single most effective tool Virginia has for making an old building's numbers work. The state's own listing broker has pointed to this as what makes the tower a good candidate for residential conversion. That changes the arithmetic entirely.
470k
Richmond's downtown population has grown sharply this decade and the housing has not kept pace. Here is 470,000 square feet with 600 structured parking spaces, river views from the upper floors, and a floor plate already sitting inside the central business district. Converted, it is hundreds of homes. Demolished, it is a parking lot with a view.
$400m+
The Commonwealth's new downtown office building is estimated in the mid‑$400 millions. The state has said renovation costs would be roughly equal to new construction — a comparison that assumes a full state‑spec rebuild, not a private conversion drawing on tax credits. Those are different projects with very different maths.
The objection
This is the honest state of play, and there is no use pretending otherwise. Ask Richmonders about the Monroe Building and a good number will tell you it is drab, forbidding, a slab of grey concrete that greets everyone arriving on I‑95. People who worked in it remember slow elevators and tired corridors. That view is real, it is widely held, and any campaign that ignores it deserves to lose.
But taste is the weakest reason to destroy something, and it is the reason that has aged worst. Richmond has done this before. Buildings that one generation found embarrassing — Victorian rowhouses, cast‑iron fronts, early skyscrapers — were cleared by people entirely confident in their judgement, and the city has spent decades and a great deal of money regretting it. The buildings that survived long enough to be looked at again are now the ones on the postcards.
The Monroe is a disciplined late‑International‑Style tower by a Virginia firm, built at the moment Richmond decided to grow upward, and it has held the top of the skyline for forty‑five years. You do not have to find it beautiful to think it is worth more than rubble. The question is not whether you like the facade. It is whether we are certain enough about our own taste to spend a half‑million square feet of finished building on it.
On the record
The greenest building is one that is already built.
There's not any glaring issues.
Those two statements are on the record and can be checked. Everything else on this page is sourced at the foot of it. They are also, between them, the whole of what the formal record holds — which is why the rest of this page is given over to an archive of first-hand accounts, gathered from anyone who actually spent time in the building.
The building
Designed by Ballou, Justice & Upton, a Richmond firm, and completed in 1981 as the James Monroe State Office Building. At 449 feet it was the tallest building in Virginia for twenty‑six years, and it is still the tallest in Richmond — though it sits at the bottom of a hill, which is why it never looks it.
It was meant to have a twin. A second identical tower was to rise at the north end of the parking deck, joined by a low structure between them. The recession of the early 1980s killed it, and the footings are still there on the roof of the deck — a set of concrete stubs waiting for a building that never came.
What we're asking for
Nobody here is asking the Commonwealth to keep an empty tower on its books, and nobody is trying to stop a sale. We are asking that the disposal of the largest building in Richmond not treat demolition as the default outcome. Specifically:
Publish an independent adaptive‑reuse and conversion feasibility study — one that prices the building against federal and state historic tax credits — before any demolition approval is sought.
Any transfer of the property should require that demolition come back for public review rather than proceeding as a private matter once the deed changes hands.
The tower has crossed the fifty‑year threshold. It should be formally assessed for eligibility for the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register — a determination, not an assumption.
If it does come down, it should not vanish unrecorded. Measured drawings, photography and a full three‑dimensional survey should be completed and placed in public archives first.
Addressed to the Department of General Services, the Art and Architectural Review Board, the Department of Historic Resources, the Governor's office, and the members of the General Assembly who hold the purse.
The archive
Buildings get argued over in square feet and dollars. They get lived in as a lift that took four minutes, a view of the river from the twenty-second floor on a clear morning, a particular corridor in February. That second thing is the part nobody writes down, and it is the part that disappears first when a building comes down.
So this is a record of it, open to anyone who has one — people who worked there for twenty years, people who delivered post to it, people who have only ever seen it from I-95.
We publish what people send, favourable or not. If you worked in it and could not stand it, that belongs here too. An archive that kept only the flattering accounts would be worth nothing to anybody later. Entries are read before they go up — to keep out spam and abuse, and for no other reason.
2 accounts most recent first
never seen it in personl, but I'd love to have the opportunity. let's save this beauty!
We lose more of our architectural heritage, sadly we notice its significance only too late, when it's torn down.