“Norfolk’s Yacht Haven” – The Hague, By Amy Waters Yarsinske
This article describes the origin, and earliest days, of The Hague in Norfolk, Virgina, one of Hampton Road’s prime locations.
Samuel Smith’s Creek pushed toward soggy marsh farmland, splitting so that one branch crept toward Elmwood Cemetery while the other trickled through what would eventually become Stockley Gardens. To the west was John P. Colley’s farm and Brambleton, also once a farm. A wooden footbridge spanned the tidal creek water with a path running from the bridge to one lone house. Pleasant Point belonged to Dr. William Martin in 1810, and was subsequently acquired from his estate by a nephew, Jasper Moran, two years later. The wooden footbridge would be replaced with Norfolk’s first steel-riveted bridge in 1895 and, in keeping with the progressive nature of the times, a pair of trolley tracks was soon laid across the bridge. For many years the tracks were still visible—long after no trolleys ran into Ghent.
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Although most of Ghent was laid along a standard grid plan, the siting of the south section of the suburb by Smith’s Creek and a Y-shaped inlet off the Elizabeth River suggested a different planning approach. Marshlands at this area were filled and the shoreline given a semicircular shape. The resulting street, Mowbray Arch, soon became the favored location for the stately houses of Norfolk’s upper-middle and upper-class residents. Ghent’s plan was not particularly innovative, but it successfully exploited the area’s strategic waterfront location, providing views over the creek to the grass banks on the opposite shore. While Ghent originally covered more than thirty blocks in area, the Mowbray Arch section displays, even today, the highest concentration of houses built during the late nineteenth century. This area is contained by Smith’s Creek, commonly called The Hague, and Olney Road, a four-lane traffic artery connecting the two arms of the creek and providing east-west access to Norfolk’s downtown. The development of Ghent, interestingly, was quite similar to the development of Roland Park, located outside of Baltimore, Maryland, in 1891, by an English real estate syndicate.
By the early 1950s Norfolk was being touted by Frederic C. Heutte, the city’s superintendent of Parks and Forestry, as the “Venice of America.” Heutte saw the shades of the Grand Canal in the city’s most picturesque waterway—The Hague. Though The Hague is but a small Y-shaped twig of the Elizabeth River, historically it is one of the Hampton Roads area’s most interesting waterways. The shortest leg of The Hague abuts today’s Chrysler Museum of Art at Yarmouth Street; the other is confined at the Stone Park on Olney Road, before Christ and Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church. This latter stretch is bounded by an arc of substantial residences. In days gone by the west bank was bounded not by towering apartment buildings and residences, but commercial boatyards and piers as well as anchorage and moorage space usually crowded with sleek sail and power yachts, oyster boats and fishing trawlers, knockabouts of various design and condition, tugs and barge hulks. The Hague has a surface area of roughly twenty-five acres and a shoreline about two miles long. It was indicated commonly on maritime charts by the prosaic name of Smith’s Creek, by early accounts, and also Paradise, Pudding and Colley Creeks, depending on a particular section of the waterway.
Beyond Heutte’s comparison to Venice’s Grand Canal, The Hague, as its name implies, recalls The Netherlands and Dutch banking house that sponsored the development of the Ghent community, in which the waterway is situated. The first plat recorded of the area was of the Norfolk Company and its subsidiary, the Ghent Company, in 1897, designating this water as “The Hague.” In selecting this name, Ghent’s progenitors honored the founder of the Dutch banking house, Adolph Boissevain, and The Netherlands’s seat of government, The Hague.
The Virginian-Pilot of July 6, 1909, reported that the Common Council had appropriated $3,000 to purchase stone for the continuation of the Mowbray Arch seawall toward Olney Road. The stone was to be brought from the Norfolk Navy Yard at Portsmouth, where it had been left by contractors who razed the government’s seawall. It was noted that the stone had been offered to the city at a “fabulously low price.” On either end of the seawall were parks. Lee Park was juxtapositioned where The Chrysler Museum of Art, formerly the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, was later built, and Stone Park was once the scene of bands playing as United States Navy gig boats tied up and relieved load after load of white-suited naval officers in search of freshly starched and behatted young ladies.
Repairs and improvements to The Hague were conducted on a steady basis between 1902 and 1912. In the spring of 1912, drainage work was done in the vicinity of the gas plant, visible in many early photographs of the area, to reclaim a considerable portion of marshland and at the same time relieve the city of one of the worst eyesores on the upper branches of Smith’s Creek. The bridge at Monticello Avenue provided passage over the creek’s northern branch, while the Duke Street Bridge was used by residents to traverse the southern branch or Pudding Creek, as the locals called it.
According to city of Norfolk records, the greater portion of The Hague’s bulkhead was built in 1919. Three years later, a circular bulkhead was added at the Yarmouth Street end. That area was improved further in the late 1920s in connection with the development of the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences. The late Mary Chamberlaine Reid was active in the beautification of Stone Park at the Olney Road head.
Later, in a public hearing concerning projected navigation and sanitation improvement, which was conducted in November 1945, a person who had lived in the vicinity for fifty years testified that the waterway was becoming narrower and shallower. He pointed out that the bottom had been rising gradually as the result of the pressure of buildings and earth on filled land and the oozing or sliding of the soft land under pressure into a low area. Along with the filling in of the bottom of The Hague, there had been a subsiding of the high land on the shore, the resident explained. He also warned that frequent dredging of The Hague would only undermine the lateral support of the land upon which the houses along the water were built.
There is much more than can be written about The Hague, but space precludes it here. This tranquil waterway has changed through the years as homes along its banks have been added and some razed to make room for far larger buildings. What The Hague continues to offer those who live in Ghent is one of Hampton Roads’s prime waterfront addresses and, most certainly, one of its most commanding views of the Elizabeth River.