News-Record.com

On a sunny day years ago, a station wagon bumped over the curb on Benjamin Parkway and into city-owned Lake Daniel Park. Hey, didn't the driver know cars aren't allowed in the park?

He knew.

The city knew, too, but the interloper was welcomed because his name is Bill Craft. Those who work in the city's Parks & Recreation Department knew that wherever Craft stopped, at a park or cemetery, he was sure to leave behind a thing of beauty and a joy forever. That day at Lake Daniel, he planted a tree, which has since grown large.

For 35 years, Craft, at his own expense and time, has planted trees, flowers and shrubs all over the city. No one asked him to. He just did it. It wasn't long before he was dubbed Greensboro's Johnny Appleseed.

He has received lots of thank-yous for his work. The city also named a park for him along Nottingham Drive. Craft had beautified it.

Now, he has something to hang on the wall.

Greensboro Beautiful Inc., the nonprofit group that works closely with the city to improve Greensboro's natural look, has honored Craft with its highest honor, the Robert L. Garrand Award of Distinction.

City Beautiful says the award goes to an individual that has shown "long-term vision and (had) positive impact" on the city's quality of life.

The award is named after a deceased physician, who Craft says inspired him. Before Craft started getting his hands dirty as an amateur botanist, Garrand was digging and planting in Fisher Park, where his home at Simpson and Victoria streets overlooked the west side of the park.

Craft occasionally stopped by to help Garrand and another amateur, retired physician and park resident Richard Spencer. Craft still stops in Fisher Park. He was seen recently helping residents who hold periodic clean-up days.

Craft, along with Fisher Park resident Ann Stringfield, also gives tours of Green Hill Cemetery, which borders the neighborhood.

Craft not only identifies the dead people beneath the tombstones, but very much alive trees and plants in the cemetery. He planted many of them, including two rare torreyas, a conifer that grows naturally only in Florida and south Georgia.

He also planted windmill palms, after reading they grow well in Japan and Korea, which share the same latitude as North Carolina.

Before he started on Green Hill, Craft rehabilitated the old First Presbyterian Church Cemetery, a place that few downtown people know about even though it's in their midst behind the Greensboro Historical Museum.

"There was nothing but broomstraw in there when I started," he says.

Now, the old burial ground, whose residents include Gov. John Motley Morehead, is shaded with a variety of trees. Craft also has done plantings in Forest Lawn and Maplewood Cemeteries and Greensboro Country Park.

At Country Park, he also did the landscaping of the new Guilford County Veteran's Memorial, while also raising money for the memorial.

Once he retired a few years ago from family-owned Craft Insurance Agency, Craft had more free time for the outdoors. Inspired by the late outdoorswoman Louise Chatfield, he formed "Crafty Cruisers," a group of not-so-young friends. They have hacked out hiking trails through the woods and along the waters at Lake Brandt and Lake Townsend.

Craft is not done yet. When he and his wife, Jo Ann, take walks, he carries a sack of palmetto and other seeds to scatter in the woods along the way. More new trails meander through his mind.

"He is truly a remarkable individual and has given so much time to beautification of Greensboro," e-mailed Lee Britt, the immediate past president of Greensboro Beautiful.

Craft is self-taught. He learned by hanging around nurseries and reading books. If a contest to identify trees and plants were held between professional botanists and Craft, the smart money would be on the amateur.

He arrives at his home on Dover Road from a day's outing grimy and tired, but smiling.

"It's my hobby," he says. "If you have a hobby, it's not really work."

The photo shows genuine horsepower, fueled by oats, which were far cheaper and more available than gasoline was in World War II and now.

A horse and buggy was one an alternative form of transportation during the war, when the federal government imposed strict gasoline rationing.

An attendant at the Shell Station, which once stood across Davie Street from the old News & Record Building, fills a bucket with oats to energize the horse to keeping pulling the two-passenger buggy.

The station is long gone, with the site now part of what will become Center City Park. The former newspaper building survives as part of the Cultural Arts Center complex.

The houses down Davie Street have vanished, replaced by the center's outdoor theater and the YWCA's playground. The church steeple in the background has been removed but the buildings below it remain. The former First Presbyterian Church now houses the Greensboro Historical Museum, for which this photo came. During the war, the public library and other civic organizations occupied the former church.

The photo is among 350,000 negatives that the late Carol Martin, who photographed the city from 1938 until his death in the early 1990s, willed to the museum.

When a reviewer of a John M. Barry's book wrote that the writer "digs up (the) deadly past to learn its lessons for the future," the reviewer was referring to Barry's "The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History." The book was about the 1918 flu pandemic that killed millions worldwide.

A more apt example of digging up the past to see the future would have been Barry's book, "Rising Tide," published in 1997 and nominated for the National Book Award.

The book chronicles the great flood of 1927 that drown the Mississippi Valley from Illinois to the Delta, killing thousands and making 700,000 people homeless.

Barry warned in the book then the devastation could happen again. As in 1927, he said, the nation in the 1990s was unprepared and even indifferent to the possibilies of a hurricane-caused flood in the lower Mississippi area.

In an interview here in 1997, he said he had visited Greenville, Miss., recently and saw that a 31-story had been built between the levee and the Mississippi River.

"I don't think,'' he said. "they are treating the river with respect."

He was in Greensboro that year with his wife, Anne Hudgins Sullivan, who grew up here and is the daughter of the late Edward Hudgins, who was chairman of the city school board in 1957 when he and school Supt. Ben L. Smith convinced the board to integrete the Greensboro schools in light of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision.

The Barry couple was spending half of each year in Washington and half in New Orleans.

In his book, Barry writes, "The complexity of the Mississippi exceeds that of nearly all other rivers. Not only is it acted upon: it acts. It generates its own internal forces through its size, its sediment load, its depth, variations in the its bottom, its ability to cave in the riverbank and slide sideways for miles."

What's astonishing about the book are parallels that critics of Bush Administration are sure to see in the response to the present disaster.

The '37 flood hurt black people the most, and began their migration from the lower Mississippi region to the north. The black refugees - and that is the word used then and now - complained about horrid conditions and treatment in the refugee camps.

The flood brought criticism to one politician and praise to another.

President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican, ignored the floor. He refused to visit the damaged area or to even send a letter of condolence for humorist Will Rogers to read at a flood-related event.

As a result, Herbert Hoover, who seeking the GOP nomination (Coolidge was not eligible to run again) stepped in the void and led the flood relief effort. His public relations machine made sure Americans knew all about what he was doing. As a result, he won the presidency in 1928.

Later, black people came to view the Hoover administration as hostile. That and the coming of the Great Depression, blamed on Hoover,led to a break in the 70-year loyalty black people had held for the GOP since Abraham Lincoln. They became Ronosevelt Democrats and have remained such to this tday.

Barry's book, a page turner, is recommended reading to anyone who wants to understand politics of the Deep South and the role the Mississippi River plays.

And readers will like Barry. Even though he wears a high fulatin title as "distinguished visiting scholar at the center for Bioenvironmental Research of Tulane and Xavier universites" (at least he did before the flood), he's a regular guy, a former jock.

He played football at Brown University and served a stint as an assistant coach at Tulane in the early 1970s. Tulane, a brainy school, was every team's choice as a homecoming opponent. But while Barry was there, the Green Wave upset the school's arch-rival LSU, and also beat the North Carolina Tar Heels.

Barry left football to write, but got the inch again in 1990. He took a year off from words to coach the Sidwell Friends School team in Washington.

The area’s housing give-away market has never been hotter.
At last count, four houses can be yours for free.

Of course, there's a stipulation that will require a trip to the bank for a loan. Those who take the houses must move them. Relocating a house isn't cheap.

First Presbyterian Church is offering a two-story house at 620 N. Elm St. to anyone who will move it. If no one comes forward, the house likely will be demolished for a parking lot. Preservationists and Fisher Park residents want to find a way to save the house, built in 1930.

The house's fate will be discussed at a meeting of the Greensboro Preservation Commission Wednesday at 4 p.m. in the City Council Chamber at the Melvin Municipal Building.

A recent posting on this blog said it's doubtful any vacant lots exist in Fisher Park for the house. Ann Stringfield, former president of the neighborhood association, however, has e-mailed to say lots are available in Fisher Park.

Starmount Co. will give away the Dick-Albright House, a lovely white two-story house with a two-column portico, near West Friendly Avenue and Green Valley Road, across from Friendly Shopping Center.

Marvin Brown, in his 1995 book, "Greensboro: An Architectural Record," said part of the house was probably built in the 19th century. It's been moved before, in the 1950s from across West Friendly, where it stood in the way of the shopping center.

One of the past owners is believed to be W.W. Dick, who built the venerable Dixie Apartments across from First Horizon Stadium. In the 1920s, Dick started work on a structure behind a row of buildings in the 200 block of West Market Street. He ceased construction after city inspectors said he had failed to acquire a zoning change. Dick never resumed construction and the walls remained standing until recently.

Preservation North Carolina is trying to find a new owner for the Jonathan Harris House, built in 1830 by a Quaker abolitionist. The house stands in a commercial area on N.C. 68. A Greensboro woman who owns 14 acres in North High Point has offered to give three acres to anyone who will move the house there. So far, no takers. Mike Stout of Preservation North Carolina says technically the house is not free. PNC is charging $4,500 to cover its expenses. But the good news is that by dividing the house and moving it in parts the cost may be only $25,000, he says. That's doesn't include putting everything back together once it arrives at the new site.

Finally, investors who bought the Arbor House property at West Market and Spring streets are trying to find someone to move the old house. The 1875 house, built for a daughter of former Gov. John Motley Morehead and her husband, stands at the site of a planned condominium project. Presevationists are trying to persuade the investors to incorporate the house into the project.

Mike Blake, who owns Blake Moving Co., says moving a two-house can often cost more than building a new one. The big expense is lowering utility lines along the route. One way around that obstacle is breaking the house into parts, as Stout proposes for the Harris house. This was done recently for the large Reedy Fork Ranch House on U.S. 29 North near Bryan Park. The house was divided into sections and moved to Chapel Hill. But then there's the cost of reassembling the house.

"There's no easy way," says Blake, whose company ten years ago moved the 7,500-square foot McAlister House from behind First Presbyterian Church to North Church Street.

He declined to reveal the price, but the church reportedly paid $138,000 for the move, with the new owner, Ann Carlson, paying for renovations once the house arrived.

People aren't the only ones who have taken a beating and soaking from Hurricane Katrina.

Gulf Coast history has been battered, especially in Mississippi, landscaped with homes dating back to before the Civil War. Confederacy President Jefferson Davis' home, Beauvoir, in Biloxi, was hit hard by the storm.

The other day, Greensboro planner Sue Schwartz, who is president of the American Institute of Certified Planners, e-mailed David Preziosi, executive director of the Mississippi Heritage Trust, to ask if there were anything she and others could do to help preserve what's left of Mississippi's historical landmarks.

In essence, the reply was plenty.

Preziosi e-mailed Schwartz that "any rallying on our behalf would be great. The best help we can get right now is money to help carry out the surveys that are needed to cover the enormous area Katrina has devastated."

He said the Mississippi Heritage Trust is already working with the National Trust for Historic Preservation to bring in volunteers to help with surveying.

"We are trying," he said, "to get areas surveyed as quickly as possible so that we can prevent unnecessary demolition of historic structures just because they are in heavily damaged areas."

Schwartz says she realizes human needs come first in the aftermath of the storm, but plenty of money seems to be pouring in to help people. Now, perhaps, is the time for consideration of other concerns. She heard an organization of arborists is raising money to save live oak trees in the Gulf.

Schwartz says anyone wanting to help the Mississippi Trust should go to its web site: http://www.mississippiheritage.com or the web site of the National Preservation for Historic Preservation, www.nationaltrust.org. The National Trust can also be contacted by calling 1 800 944-6847.

Schwartz has written her check, in honor of her boss, Andy Scott, who directs the Greensboro Housing and Community Development Department. Scott is a native of Laurel, Miss., hard hit by the storm and adopted recently by the North Carolina town of Shelby.

"He's my favorite Mississippian," she says, "next to Elvis."

Here's an email that downtown lovers will love.

It's from Bernard McCormick, a Philadelphia native who lives in Florida, where he's with a magazine publishing company in Fort Launderdale.

When Floridians take to the North Carolina mountains in the summer, he often follows to write stories. He's also a train buff, and he recently saw Greensboro's J. Douglas Galyon Depot, which on Oct. 1 will become a stopping place for passenger trains after a 26-year lapse.

"I happened to be in Greensboro last month and saw the station under renovation. Beautiful place. In fact, a totally impressive downtown, one of the country's best kept secrets. I much admire North Carolina's commitment to rail service; quite a contrast with much of the country."

He makes reference to the state's desire for more Raleigh-to-Charlotte trains with stops in Greensboro and various smaller cities.

"I can see great things for those little towns, such as Salisbury, all along the line.

"They will become very pleasant residential locations for people commuting to Charlotte or Greensboro. We are buying a place in the mountains so I hope to spend considerable time in a state that seems to things right."

McCormick can be emailed at bernie@gulfstreammediagroup.com

They should have bought Timex clocks, which can take a licking and keep... you know the rest.

Downtown's two street clocks, including a Rolex no less, give the correct time, as people love to quip about broken timepieces, "only twice a day."

The Rolex, on North Elm Street in front of the Chamber of Commerce Building, stopped at 7:21 a few weeks ago. This is $20,000 timepiece whose minutes and seconds are suppose to be kept precise by satellite.

Chamber officials say they hope to get the clock up and running again soon.

This is the clock's second breakdown since the chamber installed it 1998. The next year, a delivery truck rear-ended the clock, knocking it down. The delivery company's insurance paid for a replacement.

The other broken clock, without a brand name, is at Bellmeade and Commerce Place. It has been stuck on 2:09 for years.

Tom LaRose, whose family owns a watch parts business then located on on Commerce Place, bought the clock from a jewelry store in Marietta, Ohio. He placed it in the early 1980s beside his father's clock museum, which occupied an old Packard auto dealership at Commerce and Bellemeade. The building now houses Architectural Salvage.

The clock museum closed in 1984, but the street clock ticked on until the early or mid-1990s. An extreme cold spell in the city halted it. The clock has never resumed running.

Meanwhile, with the renewed emphasis on restoring original facades on downtown buildings, the time is correct, pardon the expression, for bringing back the Wimbish Insurance clock. The four-side clock extended for years from the Southeastern Building over the sidewalk at North Elm and Market streets.

When people couldn't decide where to meet, they'd usually compromise by saying, "meet you under the Wimbish clock."

The clock was taken down when the city passed an ordinance prohibiting signs extending over the sidewalk. The city recently modified the ordinance.

The Southeastern Building was recently sold and architectural firm of Teague Freyaldenhoven Freyaldenhoven is studying the 13-story, built before 1920, for possible new uses.

Everyone is writing about Hurricane Katrina. What makes poet Muriel Hoff's storm-writing different is that her poem, which seems to be about Katrina, was written in 1972. No natural disaster that year, she says, prompted her. As with many of her poems, something just moved her to start writing.

She says as she watched the news about Katrina, she remembered the poem of more than 30 years ago. She said to herself, "The poem has all the facets that I've been seeing on TV."

She found the poem and put a title on it, "Waiting for Help New Orleans Superdome."

Come let us count
the heavenly bodies.
The forlorn, forsaken,
neglected, detached.
Let us not forsake them.
They are not to be feared,
but rather uplifted,
brought higher. Hope
is for the downtrodden the elixir of life.

Let it not be said
that misery went unheeded.
Pick up the payments,
promulgate the wealth,
favor the fearless and
never forget to be forgiving.
Strive for the simple single endeavor.

Hoff, who lives in the Starmount neighborhood, has had 50 poems published in different literary journals and anthologies, and self-published a book of poems, "Messages Via Muriel."

She belongs to various literary clubs and is a former president of the old Greensboro Writers Club.

Now 82 and a self-educated writer, she says her muse works mysteriously. When she reads back a poem to herself, she finds in it words she has never used before and doesn't know their meaning.

"I have to go to the dictionary to look them up," she says.

When she does, she finds she has used the words correctly.

For preservationists striving to save the former Margaret Gay house in Fisher Park, hope came recently when the Greensboro Historic Preservation Commission granted the house a reprieve.

The preservationists can draw inspiration from two houses that were rescued from demolition and moved in High Point and eastern Guilford County. Both will likely be declared Guilford County Historic Landmarks next week.

Because the Margaret Gay House, built by in 1930 by widow Gay and used for offices, is in the Fisher Park Historic District, the commission voted to delay owner First Presbyterian Church from demolishing the house for a year.

The church wants to remove the two-story house for parking.

The delay will give the Fisher Park Neighborhood Association and church leaders time to explore options. Options include moving the house, jacking it up and parking cars underneath or leaving the house as is, with the church creating a shuttle system to nearby parking decks.

The church has said it will give the house to anyone who'll move it.

To keep costs down, the house would have to be moved a short distance. After this blog mentioned recently that Fisher Park, the city's oldest subdivision, lacks vacant lots, former neighborhood association president Ann Stringfield said not so. The neighborhood has open land where the house could go.

The two houses that Fisher Park people can draw hope from are the Annettie Brown House in High Point and W.R. Smith House on Brightwood Church Road near Whitsett.

Julie Curry, the county planner who works with the historic property commission, calls the Brown house the last pure Queen Ann style house left in High Point.

Until last year, the the house that widow Brown built in 1897 stood on a hill on aptly named High Street. It looked down on the railroad tracks, which resulted in the founding of High Point in the 1850s. (The city gets its name from being the highest point between Goldsboro and Charlotte on the state-owned railroad leased to Norfolk Southern Railroad.)

The house's savior should come as no surprise - Dorothy Darr, active in High Point preservation since she moved there in 1982 from Manhattan.

She lives downtown in the the old O. Arthur Kirkman Sr. house, built in 1913 and also on High Street. Kirkman was a prominent furniture industry person, who had a private rail siding leading from his yard to the nearby main tracks.

The Darrs fixed up the Kirkman house, which features Tudor touches. It subseqently became the first house in High Point listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Darr was soon into various other preservation projects, including saving the remains of old William Penn High School, the former black school where the famed jazz musician, the late John Coltrane, played in the band.

She became interested in the Brown house two years ago, after the furniture-related company that owned it announced it would be torn down for additional showroom space. The house had been used in recent times for offices.

After Darr inquired, the company offered her the house if she'd move it within 30 days. She did, hiring Blake Moving Co. of Greensboro to relocate 3,000 square foot house last winter a half-block away to Oak Street, still in the High Street Historical District.

She's still tinkering with the house, but expects she'll rent it out as offices. She'll seek to a National Register of Historic Places listing for the house. It's eligible because of its age and architecture.

This Tuesday, the county historic preservation commission is expected to declare the Brown House a County Historic Landmark. That brings status to the house and a 50 percent cut in property taxes for Darr.

"It was managable," Darr says of the reason why she undertook the challenge of moving the house.

The commission that same night is expected to give the same landmark honor to the older W.R. Smith House, a coastal style cottage. Smith built the house in 1840 near the hotel he owned that served stagecoach traveler on what's now Burlington Road.

Jerry Nix, who is to eastern Guilford County what Dorothy Darr is to High Point, protested after the town of Whitsett rezoned the Smith house for a subdivision. As with the Brown and Gay houses, the owner told Nix he could have the house for free if he'd move it.

Nix, who had moved other historic structures, relocated the house a half block to land he owns behind the historic Daniel Foust House on Brightwood Church Road. In 1995, Nix restored the Foust house, built in stages from 1850 to the 1870s and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Nix is restoring Smith house inside and out hoping to get it as close to its original look as possible. He plans to rent it.

The county's historic properties panel meeting will begin at 5:30 p.m. at the Smith House. Later, members will walk to the backyard of the Foust House and vote on whether to make the Smith and Brown houses county historical landmarks.

Approval is expected for both.

Before Bob Blumenthal closed Blumenthal's on Hamburger Square and moved the store to the suburbs, about 100 people came in wanting to buy what was not for sale.

They sought the store's vintage blue porcelain exterior signs crowded with slogans and the names of products sold in the store, or better, once sold.

The signs had been up for at least 60 years. They were erected by Bob's father, Abe Blumenthal, who founded the store in 1926 and came up with its slogans "The Store with the Heart" and "We Sell for Less."

The products advertised on the signs included knickers, which Blumenthal's hadn't carried in 50 years. The porcelain also boasted of Bell Bell work clothes and jeans.

Blue Bell Inc. vanished 20 years when bought by VF Corp. Even when Blue Bell was still around, the company's logo - a bell - looked woefully outdated on Blumenthal's facade. It was a plain old bell. The company had years before jazzed up the bell to make it more abtract.

Bob Blumenthal did sell a piece of one sign to an antique dealer and gave to the Greensboro Historical Museum one of the two neon signs from inside the store. The interior signs offered free cigarettes to customers if their sales receipts had a certain series of numbers.

Never mind that Bluementhal's quit selling cigarettes years ago. Bob and Abe Blumenthal, who died at age 91 in 1993, were not about to change signs that had been hanging from the ceiling for 60 years. The signs outside also advertised cigarettes.

The neon sign Blumenthal kept now hangs in his new store in the Price Place Shopping Center on West Market Street.

He gives a bandana instead of smokes to customers with the correct series of numbers.

As for the rest of old signs, Blumenthal retains custody. He plans to use them as wall decorations at the new store, which opened two and a half weeks ago. At his wife's request, he transferred to the couple's house one small sign with the name Blumenthal's. It decorates the front door.

Blumenthal also refused to part with the old store's antique wood display tables and sales counter. They now serve the new store. His goal, he says, is to make the new look as much like the old as possible.

That means as few frills as possible. But he won't be able to duplicate the manhole cover on the floor of the old store. When Abe Blumenthal expanded the store years ago, he built on space that included a manhole cover. He decided to leave it.

And there's one other major difference between the old and new: the floors.

The old store's were concrete.

"My legs will tell you they were concrete," says Bluementhal, who stood on them for the 37 years he worked in the downtown store.

Sounding apologetic, he says carpet was already there when he relocated.

Oh, one Blumenthal's sign remains downtown. It's atop the building, which is believed to be more than 100 years old, reportedly a former blacksmith shop.

"It would take a crane to get it down," Blumenthal says. "Besides, it's probably holding up the building."

"And that's only because the carpet was already there," he says.

For at least 15 years, the old Wachovia Building at Elm and Friendly has been good for nothing - empty, all 16 stories.
Now, for the time being, the ground floor picture windows are worth looking at. They are truly picture windows, filled with pictures - the works of Greensboro photographer Les Seaver-Davis.

To use a fancy art word, the exhibit is "eclectic," meaning the images of many unrelated subjects and styles. They include motorcycles parked in front of a university in Phnom Penh, Cambodia; a plane flying over the Washington Monument; a vividly clear black and white shot taken long ago of the now-vanished Guilford Hotel in downtown Greensboro; a panoramic shot of the North Wilkesboro Speedway. The latter includes a sentimental essay to the old track that NASCAR abandoned.

Seaver-Davis, a 61-year-old Greensboro native, specializes in panoramics, although he still takes conventional photographs.

Roll your eyes along the panoramic of Grimsley High School. The Main Building looks curved and the Science and Vocation buildings seem distant, although in reality they are a short walk away from Main.

The exhibit offers 360-degree panoramics of Silver Lake, the harbor at Ocracoke Island on the Outer Banks, a panoramic of Grandfather Mounting and of Los Angeles.

He also features panoramics of golfers on one the Grandover Resort courses and on the Greensboro Country Club's Ross Course in Irving Park. He also includes a 360-degree view from atop Grandfather Mountain.

Seaver-Davis says he labors hard to get these wide shots. It isn't a matter of snapping a super-wide angle lens on his Nikon D100 digital camera.

For the Grimsley picture, he took 29 images and combined them digitially on his computer. The result is an eight-foot long photo.

He had to get permission of Grimsley's principal to chop down a bush that was blocking one frame.

The old Wachovia Building, owned by Jefferson-Pilot Corp. and under contract to a buyer who is considering new uses for the 1960s office building, is the only place Seaver-Davis's photographs are on display.

When it comes to the touchy subject of historic districts in Greensboro, watch out what you say.

An innocent remark can be twisted into a rumor.

Recently, a consultant the city hired from planning firm of Mary Means & Associates of Washington, appeared before a group that included people from the city's three historic districts: Aycock, Fisher Park and College Hill.

Ann Stringfield, a former president of the Fisher Park Neighborhood Association and strong advocate of historic districts, remembers the consultant saying words to this effect:

"If historic districts are so good, why aren't they growing" in Greensboro? The city hasn't created a new district since 1984.

Districts have been proposed for the College Park, Westerwood and Dudley neighborhoods, but each time residents rose up in protest. They said they didn't want the city telling them what they could or couldn't do with the outside of their homes.

The consultant's remark got people to thinking that perhaps Means & Associates was here to determine whether the city should continue with historic districts or abandon them.

Stringfield, for one, left the meeting worried, although she had a feeling the consultant didn't intend her remark to mean historic districts were endangered. The consultant was trying to get at what troubled people about districts.

But Stringfield says the comment might be genesis of the rumor now making the rounds of Aycock, Fisher Park and College Hill that districts might be eliminated.

Mike Cowhig, in charge of historic districts for the city's Department of Housing and Community Development, says there's no truth to the rumor.

He says Means & Associates are conducting surveys to determine ways procedures in the districts can be improved in districts to lessen complaints.

"The whole idea is to improve the process," he says.

Besides, Cowhig says, Means & Associations is pro-preservation. The company's web site says Jackie Barton, one of the consultants involved in the Greensboro assignment, has "a passion for heritage development."

Cowhig says firm founder Mary Means was instrumental in starting the Main Street Program that has helped revitalized main streets of towns and cities throughout the nation.

The firm's Web site lists clients that include historic Bates College in Maine, Historic St. Mary's City on Maryland's Eastern Shore, American Farmland Trust and Blackstone River National Heritage Corridor Commission.

The rumor also could be fueled by the housing and community development's department decision to consider creating a new form of zoning - a conservation district - for the Cedar Street neighborhood.

The Cedar Street area, lined with old houses including one dating to before the Civil War, is eligible for historic district consideration.

But a conservation district - other cities, including Raleigh, have adopted the concept - would have less stringent requirements than a historic district. The department's decision whether to ask the city council to create the conservation district zoning classification is expected soon.

Cowhig says Means & Associaties is still surveying and is expected to make a preliminary report soon.

Ann Stringfield still feels insecure about the future of districts, and not because of anything Means & Associates is doing.

"I don't think the city's leadership likes historic districts," she says, adding, however, that she has no evidence that the city council wants to abolish them.

Asked if she thought that was a possibity, Stringfield, a veteran of many City Hall battles over preservation and neighborhoods, replied, "I would not be surprised at anything that happens anymore."

When a coffee shop wants to be on a street that has seen better days take it as a sign the thoroughfare is on the rebound.

The Greensboro Historic Preservation Commission will review a rezoning request to allow a coffee shop in one of Summit Avenue's best looking old houses. The commission will meet Wednesday at 4 p.m. in the city council chamber.

The two-story house at 623 Summit attracts attention because of its immaculate condition on a street where a few houses aren't so neat.

When the surrounding Charles B. Aycock Neighborhood was approved for listing on the National Register of Historic Places some years ago, the register application identified 623 Summit as an "eclective foursquare" house. That means its architecture is of many types.

The application also said the house was built between 1910-15 by traveling salesman Jesse Keith.

Stefan-Leigh Kuns Geary, a city Department of Housing and Community Development staff member who works with the city's three historic districts, says the actual construction year was 1913, according to tax records.

That was when Summit Avenue was considered the city's gold coast. Big homes belonging to the Cones, Sternbergers and other people prominent with Cone Mills lined both sides of the street.

A street car line ran down the center. It carried baseball fans from downtown to minor league baseball games played from 1902 to 1929 at Cone Athletic Park, past the Summit and Bessemer Avenue intersection.

Summit began to go shabby in the 1960s. Since the early 1980s, after the neighborhood became a local historic district, the street has showed slow signs of improvement. Two once grand houses across from the 623 house are being restored to their former beauty for residential use.

The city and neighborhood are working on a master plan that could bring beauty, charm and busineses, homes and apartments to Summit.

After years of residential use, the 623 Summit House was purchased by businessman Stanley Montgomery, who restored it for offices. The Greensboro Women's Resource Center occupied the house for awhile and is now located in a new building across the street.

Mongomery is seeking the rezoning. He could not be reached for comment.

"The interior is absolutly gorgeous," says Geary, who attended an opening house there recently.

To her, a coffee shop, would be "just the type of business that Summit Avenue wants to see.''

The historic preservation commission will only make a recommendation about rezoning. The recommendation will be sent to the Greensboro Zoning Commission.

Preservationists are grieving over the loss in flooded New Orleans of a certain style of dwelling, the humble shotgun house. The Crescent City had hundreds of these narrow houses on small lots close to the street.

In many Southern cities, shotgun houses were considered shacks and shanties. But New Orleans embraced them - or did until Hurricane Katrina knocked them down or flooded them beyond repair.

The New York Times reported last week about how these houses and how they meant so much to the city's culture and character.

In Greensboro, the demise of shotgun houses caused just the opposite reaction: good riddance. Hundreds, nearly all on the predominantly black east side, were bulldozed during redevelopment projects in the 1960s.

Along a now vanished section of Percy Street, near the railroad tracks between East Market and Lindsay streets, shotgun houses lined both sides of the street. The city garbage incinerator also was on this stretch of Percy.

Shotgun houses also dominated many side streets, including now departed Nixon's Alley, between the railroad and the N.C. A&T State University campus. No one who lived in them or passed by them ever described them as charming.

In Greensboro, shotguns tended to be unpainted, bleak and built with the cheapest lumber.

But now they're mostly gone, and lovers of old architect miss them. Several dozen or more survived redevelopment. Now most of those are gone.

Mike Cowhig, a planner for the city's Department of Housing and Community Development, says his list shows only four shotgun houses remaining: 2005 Stamey St, 1007 Bennett St., 1715 McConnell Road and 1918 Golden Gate Drive.

A drive to the four addreses found three of the four gone. On Stamey Street, which dead-ends into U.S. 29 North, the shotgun house has been replaced by a new frame house. A new brick home stands at 1007 Bennett and 1715 McConnell is now a vacate lot.

However, a boarded-up shotgun house remains at 1514 McConnell. And several duplex shotgun houses look well-kept in the same block. Brick shotguns are rare. Most were built of wood.

The most surprising surviving shotgun house is in what many Greensboro residents still call McAdoo Heights, off North Elm Street near Cornwallis Drive.

Located just off North Elm Street near Cornwallis Drive, it was a little town within the city, with most residents working for nearby Cone Mills.

The Heights' business thoroughfare was State Street. The old stores, including the notorious Pump Room tavern and the X-rated Star Theater, are long gone. The old commercial buildings have been transformed into fashionable stores, restaurants and offices.

The residential part of McAdoo Heights looks pretty much as before. Most of the houses are bungalows, several steps above shotgun houses. Yet one shotgun houses is squeezed in between two houses on Golden Gate Drive. It has an unusual white frame addition to the front that doesn't match the rest of the house, which is red shingles, also uncommon for a shotgun.

Shotgun houses get their name because it is said a person could stand at the front door, fire a shotgun and the shell would exit the back door. In some places they were called railroad houses, apparently because they stood on undesirable land near railroads, such Suggs and Percy streets. In Charleston, they're called Freedman Houses. Many freed slaves lived in them after the Civil War.

Wilson, in eastern North Carolina has a black neighborhood filled with shotgun houses that's listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In 1995, Abbie Powell of Augusta, Ga., a crusader for preserving shotgun houses, visited Greensboro and toured a row of houses on Broad Street, just off Bennett. The houses have since been demolished.

New Orleans loved its shotgun houses because of their quaintness. They sported different colors. Porches were of Victorian design, with gingerbread and other elaborate architectural ornamentation. Bunched together, the houses made it easy for a neighborhood to be neighborly.

The shotgun house design is said to date back to 17th century Africa and brought to the United States by Haitian immigrants who settled in New Orleans. The houses were ideal for New Orleans' steamy climate. High ceilings made for good air circulation. The timbers of choice were cypress and cedar, stalwarts against water and moisture. The houses were sturdy.

"I visited a friend who lived in one," Cowhig says. "It was wonderful."

The shotguns withstood dozens of hurricanes until Katrina came along. Whether they'll be rebuilt remains to be seen.

Golfers are amazing historians. They play golf everyday on courses all over the world and hit thousands and thousands of shots.

Yet, they can vividly recall the smallest details of long-ago rounds.

Sergio Garcia, the young Spanish sensation, didn't have to be reminded that this year's Chrysler Classic of Greensboro is not the first time he's been to Greensboro.

He remembers well coming here in 1998, as an amateur, to play as an amateur in a tournament at Sedgefield Country Club that was part of what's now called the Nationwide Tour, designed for players trying to advance to the PGA Tour.

"I remember I nearly made a double eagle," he says, referring to a score of two on a par 5 hole.

He says he hit a drive and a second wedge to Sedgefield's Par 5 downhill 5th hole. He nearly holed the wedge.

"Joe made a double eage that week," said Garcia, referring to Joe Ogilvie, the former Duke golf star, who pulled off this rare feat on the same 5th hole and went on to win the tournament.

It was at Sedgefield, Garcia says, that he met Oglivy and they've become best of friends on the big tour.

Garcia also remembers hitting a shot on Sedgefield's 8th hole that landed on the tee at the 9th. He was told the ball was out of bounds.

That led to a big number on his scorescard but he remembers finishing third overall in the tournament. Not bad for an amateur.

He also remembers he couldn't speak much English during that tournament. An interpreter helped him.

"I still don't," he said of his ability to speak English.

Actually, he now speaks it pretty fluently. He needs no help from interpreters.

He's playing in the Chrysler Classic of Greensboro for the first time since turning pro after the Sedgeville event. He said he's returned because of fond memories of the previous visit, good things he had heard about the CCG and about the Forest Oaks course. He was impressed when he watched the tournament on TV in previous years.

Talk about relics and antiquities. If you want to see a golf club with a wood head, the kind that Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player played, try the Greensboro Historical Museum.

You won't find one at Forest Oaks Country Club, scene of this week's Chrylser Classic of Greensboro.

Back in the early 1990, when metal woods - yes, it's an oxymoron - started becoming popular, many pros quickly switched to Big Bertha metal drivers.

But many still carried a genuine wood fairway club or two in their golf bags.

Golf manufactuers who had trailers set up on the Forest Oaks practice range earlier this week and caddies questioned said they know of no player who now uses a wood club. They said they're not sure if wood clubs are even manufacturered anymore.

Rich Adcox, a caddy for Japanese player Hidemichi Tanaha, says he gets to peek into the bags of other players, and the last time he saw a wood club was in the late 1990s.

He says those clubs belonged to Dillard Pruitt, a former touring pro (now a PGA Tour official), and Omar Uresti, who is still playing. Adcox said Uresti clung to his three-wood made of wood after everyone else had gone metal. Oresti is now an all-metal man himself.

"Technology," Adcox says, explaining why metal woods are now the standard. The pros can hit the ball farther with them. Anyone who used wood clubs would be at competitive disadvantage. They'd lose money.

It's kind of scary when you think about it, Adcox said.

There are now young pros on the tour, such as Charles Howell, "who have never hit a persimmon wood club," he said.

Adcox and the likes of Jack Nicklaus believe there ought to be a tournament set aside when the pros play with wood clubs, steel shafted irons from yesteryear and a golf ball that isn't as juiced up as those of today.

Footnote: For the sake of historical accuracy, metal woods aren't a modern-day invention. Irwin Smallwood, retired from many jobs at the News & Record, including sports editor and golf writer, said he remembers that baseball great Wes Ferrell, an excellent golfer, carried an aluminum driver back in the 1950s.

Real old-timers will remember that driving ranges of long ago stocked metal drivers for those who arrived without their own clubs. The metal wouldn't wear out as fast as wood.