Did you know that Capitol Square, the popular green space that surrounds the State Capitol building, was developed by the City of Richmond in 1804 as its first park?

But “it was not a park for everyone,” said Christina K. Vida of The Valentine, the museum of Richmond history in Downtown. “The laws on the books banned Black people from entering unless they were with a white child or doing manual labor on the grounds.”

That is just one of the discoveries that Ms. Vida plans to share with visitors to a new Valentine exhibit focusing on the good as well as the ugly historical aspects that infuse parks, recreation centers, athletic fields and even tree plantings in Richmond and surrounding areas.

The exhibit is titled “Breathing Places: Parks & Recreation in Richmond,” a term coined by a Richmond committee in 1851 recommending more parks, including Monroe Park. The city purchased the property for Monroe Park in 1851 in creating its first stand-alone “breathing space.”

The exhibit opens 10 a.m. Wednesday, May 5, at the mu- seum at 10th and Clay streets and runs through early next year.

Along with detailing the history and growth of Richmond’s green spaces, Ms. Vida, the Elise H. Wright curator of general collections, has sought to incorporate racial disparities that characterized parks and recreation development before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the changes that have taken place since.

For example, Ms. Vida noted that city leaders began discussing around 1900 the creation of a park for Jackson Ward, then the center of the Black community, but never did anything until 1981, when the 4-acre Abner Clay Park was opened with meager offerings. The first significant improvement to the park was completed last year.

As the exhibit notes, it took until the 1930s for Black people in Richmond to gain a significant outdoor space, Brook Hill Park, a 16-acre recreation space at School Street and Brook Road where the Main Post Office now sits. Abruptly closed in the early 1960s, Brook Field was long managed by Arthur Ashe Sr., father of tennis great and Richmond native Arthur Ashe Jr. It was the park where the younger Ashe first learned to play the game that would propel him to international recognition.

Ms. Vida said that racial bias not only impacted the size, location and quality of recreational spaces, but also influenced tree plantings.

She said the study that will be referenced laid a map of city trees over a 1930s map a federal housing agency created that redlined Black neighborhoods as places banks should not make home loans and yellow-lined neighborhoods where Black people were known to walk through in urging caution in making bank loans there. The overlay shows that neighborhoods that were red- or yellow-lined as unworthy of home loans north and south of the James River still have the fewest city-planted trees and the smallest amount of parkland.

City Hall just began to address the issue last year with the creation of five parks in South Side.

The exhibit will be open to the public every day except Monday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., without any pre-registration, museum director Bill Martin stated.

“Hopefully this exhibit will inspire people to experience these places and consider how community access can be improved going forward,” he stated.

Admission tickets are available online at www.TheValentine.org or at the front desk, he stated. The museum generally charges adults $10 and seniors $8, but does not charge youths and children under 18, students, military personnel, museum members and SNAP recipients.

Details: TheValentine.org.