Powers Hotel, The Summer of 1967

I’ve lived in Virginia Beach for the past 35 years and have traveled extensively. I enjoy browsing through boxes of old post cards and it never fails to amaze me when I find a picture of the old Powers Hotel.


It was probably an ad that I answered calling for laborers. I don’t know how else I would have found out about the job. I took a city bus downtown to State Street and Main; going right past the Robfogel paper warehouse I had worked at the previous two summers. From there I walked a block or two to the Powers Hotel.

For all its elegance, the hotel just wasn’t needed anymore. Modern new boxes, like the Holiday Inn and Howard Johnson located nearer the airport or the highway were replacing it—boxes that while not as elegant as the Powers Hotel were certainly more convenient and efficient.

What was needed, though, was more office space—specifically more office space right where the hotel was located.


But they couldn’t just blow the Powers Hotel up. It was too important architecturally and historically. Since it was still structurally sound, the city decided to keep the shell and convert the inside into offices one floor at a time.
Skilled carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and designers would convert the old hotel into a new office building. No expense would be spared to make the new Powers Offices just as elegant as the old Powers Hotel had been.

A lot of expense was spared, however, when it came to tearing the old building down. About a dozen of us unskilled, mostly college students and inner city unemployed were paid a handsome $2.10 an hour to rip the old building apart. Once hired, we would sign up each day on a worksheet, be given a sledgehammer, crow bar and hard hat, and told what floor to go to. After that, we were pretty much on our own.

Unloading the freight cars the summer before at Robfogel’s had been very physically rewarding. But this was even better. After picking a room to work in, I could just start banging away at the walls until there was nothing left but studs and old wiring. We were so untrained, unorganized, and unsupervised that it was best we worked alone so as not to hurt each other. The only requirement was that by a given day, the whole floor had to be an empty shell just as, on any given day the previous summer, a freight car had to be an empty shell. I recently retired as a letter carrier from the USPS. It seems like most of the jobs I have ever had have consisted of working something down to nothing.

For eight hours a day I just banged and pried away as hard as I could. Each suite had a bathroom with one of those old cast iron tubs in it. Those, too, would have to be busted up. Today, they would be antiques but then they were just trash. After we busted the stuff up, we’d locate a wheelbarrow and transport the junk to a window set up with a chute leading to a truck below.

The only thing I needed besides the tools they gave me were work gloves. I hadn’t even thought of them but I would have been lost without them. Fortunately for me, a guy came up to me the first day and asked me if I wanted his. I asked him what he was going to use but he assured me it was not a problem.

“I’m just signing the sheet and getting out of here,” he said. I took the gloves and promised not to rat on him, but I just couldn’t figure him out. Wasn’t he aware of how much fun he would be missing?

I did this for eight hours a day for about a month. At the end of the day I’d grab a beer or two and then hop on the same bus home. I was pretty comfortable because no one would sit next to me what with all the white dust that covered me from head to toe.

There were still floors that needed to be demolished when I decided to put the Powers Hotel, soon to be the Powers Office Building, behind me. I left it for a better paying job that proved to be even more fun. It seems the Genesee Brewery was paying $2.30 an hour just for driving a forklift. Things just kept getting better and better for me.

At the time that I was tearing down the Powers Hotel I knew it was one of the major downtown buildings in the city, but I didn’t really think it’s fame went any further than that. But forty years after that summer job my daughters, Jess and Danielle, took me to Ex Libris Books in Richmond where I discovered a book entitled Landmarks of Rochester and Monroe County.

Sure enough, there were several pages and pictures devoted specifically to the Powers Hotel explaining the significance of the building’s location at the Four Corners. Here, near the great falls of the Genesee River, was where Rochester got its start as the flour city so named because of the mills made possible by the falls. Of course, in time, the mills closed and Rochester became the flower city because of its famous lilacs.

It went on to explain that the hotel had grown in stages as the city and its commerce expanded and for this reason the building evidenced quite nicely the historical process of change.

Begun shortly after the Civil War, the original design derives from Second Empire fashions of the era, characterized by attenuated vertical proportions and mansard roof, with bracketed cornice and metal cresting. The book went on to explain that side additions were fine examples of cast iron construction and that the dormers were consistent of French styling while the windows suggested the Italianate mode.

I suppose the good news is that I was only destroying the inside.The owner of the bookstore was pretty surprised when I bought the book. “You know, I really didn’t expect to ever sell this book,” he said. “I really didn’t see the market for it in Richmond.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “I was kind of surprised to see it here myself, but it’s always nice to give a book a second lease on life.”