The video follows the route of English painter Eyre Crowe's visit to the city in March 1853. He arrived along the the Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad and stayed at the high-end American Hotel one block south of Capitol Square. On his first full day in the city, hoping to find "a possibly dramatic subject for pictoral illustration," Crowe set out into Shockoe Bottom to witness several slave auctions. Crowe recorded what he saw there in his powerful painting Slaves Waiting for Sale .

Over a hundred and fifty years later many seek to understand more about the slave trade. The sites where people were bought and sold in Richmond have been obliterated by twentieth-century development, many of them under an interstate. This video is meant to help viewers imagine what the built environment of mid-nineteenth-century Richmond looked like and recognize the significant physical footprint of slave trading in its commercial district.