The historic theater and adjoining Taylor Mansion on North Second Street could open by April 2011 as a live-music venue and theater known as The Hipp, according to a proposal submitted to the City Council.

Blue skies, puffy clouds, a light breeze and perfect temperatures had thousands of people enjoying the 2nd Street Festival yesterday afternoon in historic Jackson Ward. “With this weather, it’s going to be a great crowd,“ said Renee Gaines with Venture Richmond. She expects as many as 50,000 people will attend the 21st annual festival, which continues today at noon and ends at 6 p.m.

Thousands of people will step back in time this weekend as they converge on downtown Richmond for one of the mid-Atlantic’s largest street festivals.  The Second Street Festival returns for the 21st year Saturday and Sunday in historic Jackson Ward, the neighborhood bounded by Interstate 95 to the north, East Broad Street to the south, Fourth Street to the east and Belvidere Street to the west.

If you go What: Second Street Festival When: Saturday noon to 10 p.m.; Sunday noon to 6 p.m.  Where: Second Street in Jackson Ward Admission: Free Info: http://www.venturerichmond.com  SOURCE: Venture Richmond

Restoration of Linden Row Inn’s Mary Wingfield Scott Parlour Suite will be featured Wednesday on cable’s TLC (The Learning Channel) at 7 p.m. The project was managed by Richmond-based historic restoration expert Gable Painter. It included a complete restoration of the original wood floors and crown molding along with the installation of new wallpaper and furniture.

A Richmond historian has added a few years to the life of Maggie L. Walker. Until now, it has been widely accepted that Walker, a leading figure in the fight for rights of African-Americans and women in the Jim Crow era, was born July 15, 1867 - a date she herself used throughout her life. But Elvatrice Belsches has debunked the date with her recent discovery of a bank account opened on Aug. 10, 1872, listing Walker, then Maggie Mitchell, as 8 years old.

Downtown Richmond is teeming with a history that can serve as a microcosm for America’s own past.  It’s a history that ranges from before the Revolutionary War to the roots of the civil-rights movement in Jackson Ward to the more recent slavery reconciliation.  It’s all there, as well as everything in between, in a 6.2-mile loop that during rush hour becomes easily unnoticed.

Richmond’s mayor is trying to calm an escalating war of words between the city and owners of the Eggleston Hotel over the collapse of the long-blighted landmark in Jackson Ward. Mayor Dwight C. Jones declined to respond in detail to a statement by the owners yesterday that they got no help from Richmond in financing the planned $1 million renovation of the building, which was renowned as a magnet for illustrious black entertainers and athletes during decades of racial segregation.

All that remained of the old Eggleston Hotel yesterday was a pile of bricks and splintered wood. As a backhoe scooped up this debris of Jackson Ward history to be hauled away, Charles “Dump Truck” Shelton stood and watched. He worked as a cook in the old building before moving across the street to work at another Eggleston family business, Croaker’s Spot.

Richmond’s top planning and building official blames the collapse of the historic Eggleston Hotel on its owners’ slow response to years of urging from the city to repair the blighted building.

Piles of brick, stone and cinderblock were all that remained of the historic Eggleston Hotel yesterday, a day after the structure partially collapsed and was later demolished. A broken Eggleston Hotel sign laid nearby, and two large heavy equipment excavators sat atop the rubble. The loss of the building at the corner of Second and Leigh streets in Richmond is being felt by the Jackson Ward neighborhood and by preservationists. The building partially collapsed Saturday about 5:45 a.m.

The vacant, deteriorating Eggleston Hotel, which in its heyday hosted some of the nation’s best-known black entertainers and athletes, is no more. The hotel at Leigh and Second streets in Richmond’s Jackson Ward partially collapsed yesterday about 5:45 a.m., and the rest of the building was demolished by early evening. That corner “means so much to us as a race of people,“ said Neverett A. Eggleston Jr., whose father took over the hotel in the late 1930s and whose son owns the popular Croaker’s Spot restaurant across the street.

Bob Scudder and Dougie Bowman would have had a spectacular view of downtown Richmond from one condo on the 15th floor of Vistas on the James. They decided to go for the knockout.

Dayle Taliaferro Dunn, director of community affairs and cause-based marketing at WTVR-Channel 6, died Sunday. She was 61. A Richmond education and black-history advocate, Mrs. Dunn was serving her second term on the board of Leadership Metro Richmond. She had been on the steering committee of Community Learning Week, held each January in conjunction with Martin Luther King Jr. Day, from 1994 to 1997.

OK, so I will be the first to tell you that I don’t know my black history like I should, especially when it comes to my hometown, the capital city of the commonwealth. So when I received a chance to go on a brief tour with my old history professor at Virginia Union University, Dr. Raymond P. Hylton, I jumped at the opportunity.