Not having kept up with the news from my favorite city as faithfully as perhaps I should, I just got the news today that Schwarzschild Jewelers is closing its flagship store on Richmond’s once-bustling Broad Street.

If the death of the two giant department stores signed the death warrant for downtown Richmond, the evacuation of Schwarzschild’s must be the last clod of earth thrown on the coffin. Of course, the company couldn’t be expected to keep the store open as a customer-less showpiece, and I admire their pluck in staying downtown long after everyone else made the ever-lengthening trip westward.

In my college years it seemed that Richmond’s downtown was the last remaining real downtown in the East. Though all of the big picture palaces had closed a few years earlier (and even they had held on longer than their Baltimore and Washington cousins), the two big stores were open and going strong. Stylish boutiques lined Grace Street. Being at the corner of 6th and Grace reminded me of everything that Baltimore had pissed away years earlier.

It seems, looking back, that it all went away overnight, except Schwarzschild’s, bravely sticking it out in the shadow of the mighty Central National skyscraper. Even that Deco-era symbol of confidence is mostly unoccupied now, its terrazzo-lined main banking floor hosting only dust bunnies as customers. I am still at a loss to explain how the East Coast’s most livable and pleasant city, full of charming residential areas and cultural amenities, has at its core a beautiful but utterly vacant downtown. The city government has done absolutely nothing to alter the situation, coming up with periodic hallucinatory schemes to revitalize the city’s center.

It is scant comfort to know the blithe ghosts of girls trying on dresses at Miller and Rhoads will now be joined by the spirits of anxious young men trying to pick just the right engagement ring from Schwarzschild & Co.