This weekend, the back corner of Brambly Park filled with local musicians, artisan vendors, and a table where you could pour a glass of Scott's Addition-made spirits and pitch in toward a piece of dirt. The event was called Plant a Park Fest, and the dirt in question sits one block away at the corner of Norfolk and Belleville, the former home of Christie's Fine Gardening & Creative Landscapes. Brambly Park, the Capital Region Land Conservancy, and the Greater Scott's Addition Association put the festival together on September 6 to close out a summer-long fundraising campaign tied to a deal that's been moving since spring: turning a half-acre landscaping lot into the neighborhood's first permanent public park.
The headline most people will remember is that Scott's Addition, one of Richmond's densest and fastest-growing neighborhoods, has basically never had a real park. The number worth remembering is different. The couple who owned this land, Christie and Kevin Barry, are walking away from more than a million dollars of what their property is actually worth to make sure it stays green instead of getting built on. That detail changes what this story is actually about.
What got sold, and what didn't
Christie and Kevin Barry bought the Norfolk Street property in 2012 for $241,000 and ran their gardening business out of it for two decades before retiring in 2023. Sometime in the late 2010s, they dug up the parking lot next door and turned it into a small gated green space with the kind of landscaping their company designed for clients. It became an unofficial dog park for a neighborhood that never had one, and neighbors noticed. Christie Barry has talked about being stopped in restaurants by people thanking her for it, and about a letter from two women who said they went there to dance in the moonlight.
That informal arrangement always had an expiration date. A private landowner can change their mind, sell to a developer, or simply retire without a plan for what happens next. This spring, the Barrys signed a letter of intent to sell the 0.43-acre parcel to the Capital Region Land Conservancy, a regional land trust, with the stated goal of converting it into a permanent public park, protected by a conservation easement so it can never be developed regardless of who owns it later. CRLC finalized the purchase in early August.
The math behind the gift
Here's where the deal gets interesting for anyone who has watched what land actually costs in this neighborhood. Scott's Addition property has been setting per-acre sale records in recent years, with reporting on the local market noting that land here can trade for upwards of $5 million an acre. The Barrys' half-acre lot was most recently assessed by the city at $1,777,000, consistent with that kind of per-acre pricing. CRLC paid $600,000 for it.
| Figure | |
|---|---|
| Purchase price, 2012 | $241,000 |
| Most recent city assessment | $1,777,000 |
| CRLC purchase price, 2026 | $600,000 |
CRLC itself has stated that the Barrys committed to donating more than $1.4 million in land value to get this deal done, on top of the $600,000 sale. Even the sale price wasn't simple cash on the barrelhead. To close, CRLC leaned on a $250,000 commitment from the City of Richmond and a $300,000 loan from the Barrys themselves, then spent the summer raising money from the community to pay that loan back, including a $40,000 gift from the Community Foundation for a Greater Richmond, which is headquartered in Scott's Addition, and contributions from more than twenty neighborhood businesses.
That structure is not a rounding error. It's the difference between selling to the highest bidder and choosing, deliberately, to leave more than a million dollars on the table, then helping finance your own buyer besides. Kevin Barry has been candid about why: he's talked about not wanting the greed that can come with chasing every dollar a piece of land might fetch, and about feeling humbled that the property will be preserved instead. CRLC's executive director, Parker Agelasto, has framed the conservancy's job in similar terms, saying that in real estate you sometimes have to move fast on a rare opportunity and take on some risk to get ahead of a need. For Scott's Addition, he's said plainly, the conservancy was already behind.
Why this particular corner mattered
Scott's Addition's park shortage isn't a vague complaint. It's baked into the neighborhood's physical layout. What was built as a light industrial district in the 1930s, full of low warehouses and rail spurs, was never designed with public green space in mind, and the housing boom that followed didn't retrofit much in. Estimates put the neighborhood's summer heat about 15 degrees warmer than other parts of the city, the kind of urban heat island effect that comes with paving over an old industrial district and skipping the tree canopy. The Greater Scott's Addition Association has spent the past several years trying to chip away at that gap with small interventions: the Broad Street Pollinator Park at West Broad and North Belmont, a short-lived pocket park called RoseMoore, and a tree-planting push with the nonprofit Groundwork RVA along neighborhood streets. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, the Proto Path is reportedly four to five degrees cooler than surrounding blocks on hot days, a small preview of what more greenery can do here.
Those projects were useful, but small. Christie's Garden is the first one with enough scale and permanence to change the neighborhood's baseline access to green space. GSAA president Jeremy Hoffman has said this park, combined with three others the association has helped establish since 2018, will put the entire historic Scott's Addition footprint within a ten-minute walk of a park or green space, a milestone the neighborhood has never hit before. By CRLC's own estimate, roughly 1,500 of the neighborhood's approximately 3,000 residents live within that ten-minute radius of the Norfolk Street site specifically.
What's next, and when to actually expect it
If you're picturing a ribbon cutting next spring, adjust your timeline. Agelasto has said the goal is a completed park at the site by 2028, and design work will be led by Capital Trees, the same local nonprofit behind the Low Line Green and Great Shiplock Park projects along the Capital Trail in Shockoe Bottom. At the September 6 festival, organizers set up a mood board where attendees could submit ideas for what they'd like to see on the site, meaning even the basic layout is still an open question. What's settled is the legal protection, not the landscaping plan.
The fundraising itself has been a genuinely neighborhood-wide effort rather than a single large check. Two weeks before the festival, the Richmond Flying Squirrels dedicated a home game on August 26 to the cause, donating a portion of that night's ticket sales to CRLC. Ticket proceeds from Plant a Park Fest, plus 10 percent of food and drink sales at Brambly Park that day, went toward closing out the remaining balance on the loan. Earlier in the summer, Pizzeria Mungo and ZZQ/Eazzy Burger donated directly to the fundraiser, and GSAA itself committed $5,000. Brambly Park owner Bobby Kruger, who built his own venue around preserving a tree line rather than maximizing density, put the motivation simply: the neighborhood needs somewhere dogs and their people can be outside in nature, and Brambly has been carrying that load largely alone. Kruger has said he'd like Plant a Park Fest to become an annual tradition, held the day before Labor Day each year.
Where to find green space in the meantime
Until Christie's Garden reopens as a designed public park, the neighborhood's existing options are still the ones locals already lean on. Brambly Park's own two-acre grounds at 1708 Belleville Street remain the closest thing Scott's Addition has to a public commons, with an outdoor stage, picnic tables, and a dog-friendly patio that hosts live music most weekends. Most of the newer apartment buildings in the neighborhood have added their own small dog runs and cleaning stations, a workaround that says as much about the demand for outdoor space as any survey could. And the Broad Street Pollinator Park, modest as it is, remains a quiet stop if you're walking the loop between West Broad and Belleville.
None of that replaces a half-acre park built with intention. But it's worth understanding why this particular deal, on this particular corner, is the one that finally moved the needle. Two retirees looked at a lot worth close to two million dollars, decided a park mattered more than the difference, and a regional land trust was ready to move when they did. That's not a story every growing neighborhood gets to tell.
If you're watching Scott's Addition from the outside and wondering what a neighborhood at this stage of its growth actually looks like up close, or if you already live here and are thinking through what a project like this means for your own property down the line, Steven Moss knows this part of Richmond block by block. Let's Connect.
