Welcome to Mapping Lambert’s Point
Mapping Lambert’s Point is an interactive website that seeks to tell the story of a Norfolk, VA neighborhood and - with your help - illuminate the meaningful encounters and lived experiences that have helped form a sense of place for folks who have grown up there, once called the neighborhood home, or continue to live there.
The Mapping Lambert’s Point project collects stories from long term residents as well as from ex-residents of the neighborhood about meaningful places for them, whether those are stories about their homes, their places of worship, their public (or private) spots for social get-togethers, places where they shop(ped), went to school, work(ed), went to for assistance and support, places they associate with love, faith, grace, humanity, courage, selflessness, sadness, anger, disillusionment, renewal, clarity, or simply community.
No Story is Too Small
All stories shine a light on a community’s history, its struggles as well as its efforts to overcome those struggles, its normalcy or ordinariness in the face of extraordinary challenges. All stories make clear that Lambert’s Point’s identity is shaped by the individual and collective actions, aspirations, beliefs, dreams, encounters, hopes, and memories of the people who have called the neighborhood home.
There is little doubt that Lambert’s Point has undergone significant change over the past century or that those changes are likely to continue, making much of the neighborhood unrecognizable to folks whose families might have lived there in the 1910s-1940s or who themselves might have grown up and/or raised families in the community in the 1950s-1990s. Many young people living in Lambert’s Point today are unfamiliar with the neighborhood’s history or the past efforts of its residents to forge connections, strengthen bonds, and build community. It is our hope that the Mapping Lambert’s Point project allows stories of the neighborhood to live on even as particular places change or vanish. It is also our hope that Mapping Lambert’s Point gives voice to the people who have lived - and in many instances continue to live - in the neighborhood and through their daily actions and interactions have striven to sustain and support the community.
Stories Told by Current and Former Residents
Mapping Lambert’s Point seeks to accomplish these goals by embedding stories told by current and former residents of the neighborhood into a virtual map that allows the places they describe to live on even as the neighborhood changes. The interactive map allows visitors to the site as well as to the neighborhood to follow themed journeys about the community’s residential, social, spiritual, commercial, and civic life during different eras. One of the project’s primary objectives is to give Lambert’s Point the opportunity to tell its own story and, in so doing, expand understandings of the community’s cultural history.
Mapping Lambert’s Point is intended as an ongoing project whose richness will largely depend on the investment of its contributors in adding new stories. What we are presenting currently is the first phase of the project, which focuses on stories about the neighborhood from the first half of the 20th Century. Most of these stories were gleaned from archived news published in the Norfolk Journal & Guide. Future stories will be derived primarily from folks who grew up in the neighborhood (or whose parents or grandparents did).