Flooding from the remnants of Tropical Storm Gaston five years ago was the fault of the city of Richmond’s inept operation of its sewers and negligent maintenance over decades, a lawsuit filed by 19 Shockoe Bottom businesses charges. Gaston dumped a foot of rain in just a few hours on Aug. 30, 2004, sending a wall of water raging through the Bottom and causing flooding across the area. Eight people died in the city and its suburbs during the storm.

Nineteen businesses that operated in Shockoe Bottom have sued the city for $25 million in damages caused when the remnants of Tropical Storm Gaston flooded their neighborhood.

As first dates go, it was a little on the extreme side, seeing as how they almost died and all. Then again, it wasn’t really a date. Justin Walker was simply giving his classmate Jessica Hammer a ride on a very rainy afternoon. A couple of ill-advised turns later, they found themselves in Shockoe Bottom, generally a fine place to be except on this day—Aug. 30, 2004.

As the Shockoe game plan for downtown Richmond switched from bats and balls to scalpels and sutures, Carey and Cookie Padgett pitched bird-watching as a boon for the Bottom. On Tuesday evening, the West End couple visited 17th Street in search of purple martins, which return each summer to swoop and swirl around the Bottom’s Bradford pear trees.

Sarah Johnson fumed when her Volkswagen Jetta was towed this summer from a parking lot in Shockoe Bottom. She got angrier when she discovered that the towing company should not have charged her more than $65—far less than the $155 she had to spend to retrieve her car. “How in the world could they get away with that?“ she asked.

With a proposed baseball stadium now apparently dead before arrival, the latest big idea for Shockoe Bottom entails a state-of-the-art medical complex. Several members of the City Council have lined up in support of at least studying the concept, as has former councilman and current Del. Manoli Loupassi. Advocates—chief among them Paul Goldman, who also was a force behind the city’s current elected-mayor system—say the economic benefits could be huge. That’s an open question, which an ad hoc study commission presumably would answer. Other open questions concern what, if any, role VCU would play, how the business proprietors of Shockoe Bottom feel about the idea, and what state regulators would have to say about the public need for such a facility.

Some members of the Richmond City Council are putting their support behind a proposal to build a specialized medical complex in Shockoe Bottom. They are drafting a resolution to be presented as early as next month to Mayor Dwight C. Jones and the City Council seeking to establish the Shockoe Bottom Medical Complex Exploratory Commission, which would study the feasibility of creating a medical, research, education and hospital complex.

Five members of Richmond City Council are joining forces to issue a resolution seeking to establish a medical complex commission that would study the feasibility of creating a medical, research, education and hospital complex in Shockoe Bottom. Council members Douglas G. Conner Jr., Chris A. Hilbert, E. Martin Jewell, Reva Trammell and Bruce W. Tyler are patrons of the resolution.

Thousands of purple martins are returning to Shockoe Bottom, after all. A few weeks ago, it appeared that most of the Bottom’s summer visitors had moved somewhere else this season. But about 4,000 to 5,000 martins are once again swirling over the Bottom at dusk before swooping into a row of Bradford pear trees just north of the 17th Street Farmers’ Market.

The Burial Ground for Negroes could have provided a teachable moment for Virginia Commonwealth University. Instead, the repaving of a parking lot built near, or possibly above, Richmond’s oldest municipal cemetery for blacks has again pitted the educational leviathan against a small but vocal group of protesters. Rather than excavating the site north of East Broad Street near Interstate 95, VCU is heaping yet another indignity upon the buried slaves and free blacks. It’s moving us further away from a Shockoe Bottom campus connecting the long-buried pieces of Richmond’s slave-trade history.

A disputed tract of land in downtown Richmond that may be the site of a centuries-old burial ground for slaves and freed blacks attracted a flurry of attention yesterday. About 20 student and community activists protested the repaving of a Virginia Commonwealth University-owned parking lot at 15th and Broad streets, saying a historic black burial ground was being desecrated.

Critics of a proposed bus-transfer center at Main Street Station are pushing for a more-centralized site in downtown Richmond as the project is entering a key public-review phase. The critics have organized as the Better Station Coalition and launched a Web site urging supporters to send e-mails to city officials who will be asked to approve GRTC’s plans for the second level of the historic, city-owned train shed in Shockoe Bottom.

Work crews with the Richmond Department of Public Utilities are testing floodwall gates along the James River today and tomorrow. Floodwall facts: The wall is 4,500 feet long on the river’s north side and about 13,000 feet along the south side, and made up of earthen levees, gates and concrete walls. There are three overlooks: at Ninth Street and Semmes Avenue, Hull Street and the Mayo Bridge, and at 12th and Byrd streets.

The idea of developing a specialized medical complex in Shockoe Bottom is picking up support. Del. G. Manoli Loupassi, R-Richmond, sent a letter yesterday to Mayor Dwight C. Jones and the City Council requesting that a commission be appointed to study the idea.

You are about to read three words you thought you’d never see in this space: I was wrong. Three months ago, I boosted Shockoe Bottom as the inevitable site of a new Richmond baseball stadium and all but urged Mayor Dwight C. Jones to grab a ceremonial chrome-plated shovel and break some ground, already. As it turns out, the stadium proposal was about to have dirt shoveled on it. It died last week when Highwoods Properties withdrew its $363 million redevelopment plan for Shockoe Bottom.