A Sad Feel-Good Story
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The Free Lance–Star’s iconic newsboy statue, Lance, has returned to its longtime home in downtown Fredericksburg.
For two decades, the bronze statue stood watch in front of the newspaper’s front entrance off Amelia Street, between Douglas Street and Washington Avenue.
When the newspaper moved out of downtown in 2016, Lance came along and was installed outside the front entrance of the new office building at 1340 Central Park Blvd.
The Fredericksburg Frees Press reports on an old newspaper icon reclaiming its position.
Mary Washington Healthcare purchased that Central Park building earlier this year to house a portion of its workforce, and the newspaper moved to a smaller office in the Central Park Corporate Center. Lance, however, remained on the property Mary Washington purchased, and the newspaper’s parent company, Lee Enterprises, didn’t move the statue to the new office.
The Vakos Companies, which now owns the former FLS property downtown, has long wanted to move Lance back to its former site, where there now sits an apartment building and The Publisher Hotel (whose name pays tribute to the newspaper’s history there).
Is it telling that the newspaper company didn’t care, it was up to others to do the honorable historical act?
Consider the old Free Lance-Star building, which when it was first built wasn’t exactly received with enthusiasm. By the time, the Free Lance-Star was a shell of itself and it was time to let the building go, there was lots of nostalgia about the building and its loss, as the bulldozers cleared the way for The Publisher Hotel. It, too, had its critics, but it’s proven a wonderful addition to the William Street corridor that ushers people into downtown. Now, Lance has been restored near to where he once stood in an appropriate tip of the hat to the city’s past, and its future. A job well done.
Editorial cartoonist Clay Jones, who at on time worked for Lance’s newspaper The Free Lance-Star, pays tribute to the newsboy statue with a cartoon and a nice I-was-there column about when newspaper publishers cared.
When I was hired by The Free Lance-Star in 1998, there weren’t newsboys, but there was Lance, a statue in front of the newspaper building. Lance was erected in 1994 as a tribute to the newsboys of the past.
Lance was part of our home, not just for us at the paper but for downtown itself. The newspaper was situated at one of the entrances to downtown, just across the street from the Confederate Cemetary…
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