You're looking at a compact history lesson that reveals much about the city's economic progress. The state Capitol, which dominated the view for 120 years, is hard to see now, hidden by a century's worth of high-rise construction.

Richmond's builders began reaching for the sky in the first decades of the 20th century. Their ornate but elegant work still shines, especially the Mutual and First National Bank buildings.

Development paused briefly for World War I but resumed quickly in the Roaring'20s with more streamlined designs that hinted of the coming modernist approach. In 1929, the former Central National Bank building topped out on East Broad Street. Robert P. Winthrop, the Richmond architect and writer, described the sleek Art Deco tower as "an almost perfect example of the skyscraper of the 1920s."

The Hotel John Marshall was completed the same year.

Good thing, too, because Richmond's skyline barely changed for the next 25 years, as construction was constrained by the Great Depression and World War II. The only major addition during that period: the Medical College of Virginia's West Hospital building on East Broad, a New Deal project finished in 1941.

In the late 1950s and the 1960s, the city's skyline rose again. Main Street and Capitol Square sprouted plain, oblong boxes of concrete, glass and steel.

Over the next few decades, Richmond's skyline grew even higher, with the construction of the city's biggest buildings: a couple of bank headquarters, the new City Hall, the James Monroe state office building (originally intended to be twin towers), The James Center, Riverfront Plaza and the Federal Reserve Bank, designed by the architects of the World Trade Center.

But Richmond also began looking closer to the ground. The revitalization of Shockoe Slip in the 1970s unleashed a rush of renovation among the city's almost endless variety of 19th-century buildings that spread to Shockoe Bottom, Jackson Ward and Broad Street. Thirty years later, it's still gaining ground.

For the past decade, the real energy focused on converting old warehouses and factories into condominiums, apartments, offices, restaurants and stores.

That's not about to change. But the latest burst of development has us once again glancing toward the sky.

Riverside on the James opened this summer on Brown's Island with a high-rise office building flanked by a tower of condominiums. But it also features the renovation of an early 20th-century power plant for future retail space.

That mixture of the old and the new offers a hopeful signal about the prospects for downtown, which has faced so many challenges and disappointments.

It seems fitting that Richmond should build its future on foundations created a century ago or longer. Downtown is starting to look like a boom town.

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