Norfolk’s Confederate Monument is all but gone from downtown. Now what?

Norfolk — Johnny Reb is gone.

So too is almost all of the 60 feet of marble that held the bronze Confederate soldier high above Norfolk’s downtown for nearly all of the past 113 years.

The City Council has discussed taking the statue down for at least five years, voting in 2017 to remove it once legal questions had been answered. But after a man was seriously injured when protesters took down a Confederate statue in Portsmouth, those legal concerns gave way to public safety worries and the mayor announced the immediate removal of the monument on June 11.

Ten days later, all that remains is a couple of stubborn pieces of stone that contractors were having trouble figuring out how to separate and remove — a poetic coda for a monument that has proven difficult to move over the last three years due to thorny legal issues finally quashed by the legislature this year.

Spray-painted messages mark the steps at the former location of Norfolk's Confederate monument on Monday, June 22, 2020. (Kaitlin McKeown/Virginia Media)

For now, the soldier statue and the various pieces of the stone monument remain in storage with the city. Before it goes up in Elmwood Cemetery, the resting place for some 400 Civil War veterans from both the Union and Confederacy, the city will still have to have a public hearing and take solicitations from places like museums or battlefields that may want to host the monument themselves, said city spokeswoman Lori Crouch.

[ Previous coverage: Intentional or not, local Confederate monuments were built on or near former slave sites ]

The public hearing is scheduled for July 7. After that, the solicitation period will last 30 days.

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All told, the removal will cost the city $175,500, Crouch said. That doesn’t include the cost to put the monument back up at Elmwood. And when it is, Crouch said it won’t be at it’s full 80-foot height.

Instead, the statue will go right on top of the base inscribed in memory of the Confederate war dead — without the few dozen feet of marble column that elevated the statue before it was removed.

Ultimately, it will be closer to 30 feet tall and join other monuments to Confederate soldiers already erected in the cemetery.

A person works near the base of the former location of Norfolk's Confederate monument on Monday, June 22, 2020. (Kaitlin McKeown/Virginia Media)

As for that empty space in the center of the roundabout at Main Street and Commercial Place?

Crouch said the city is exploring public art options. The three-stepped pedestal that formed the very bottom of the Confederate Monument could soon hold something very different.

Mayor Kenny Alexander said Monday he wants to leave that spot fallow until the city can have a discussion and figure something out thorough an open process, to make sure that spot is safe for whatever is located there and for anyone who would visit it.

Ryan Murphy, 757-739-8582, ryan.murphy@pilotonline.com