Picture windows of empty building filled with pictures
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.
Apparently, passersby are noticing because "I'm starting to get several orders," he says.
He says the least appealing photos seem to be those he shot in Cambodia last year. The closer to home the photos the better people like them.
A sign accompanying the exhibit dedicates it to three living photographers: Hugh Morton, who owns Grandfather Mountain; Tex Miller, who teamed with the late Carol Martin, to shoot Greensboro scenes for nearly 50 years; and local photographer Lane Atkinson.
And three deceased photographers and one public relations man are saluted. They are Martin and his third partner,lab specialist Clarence Tucker; NCG photographer Bob Cavin; and Hugh Morton Jr., the public relations specialist. There is also a salute to a person that Seaver-Davis identifies only as JDS.
Seaver-Davis says he learned from all of the above, and spent two years while in high school at Greensboro Senior High (now Grimsley) as an apprentice with Martin-Tucker-Miller at their downtown studio.
Seaver-Davis' exhibit also offers photos of Greensboro now and then. The now include a photo every photographer loves to take: a view from the Freeman Mill expressway showing a row of neat houses in the foreground and the skyline behind them. It's Greensboro's version of the painted ladies, the Victorian Houses on a hill in San Francisco against a backdrop of that city.
The old photographs also include a 1963 rainy night scene of a woman standing on the platform at the Southern Railway Station downtown. The station would close in 1979, but will reopen to train passengers Oct. 1.
Another shows an aerial of Elm Street at night, also in 1963.
One of the most appealing photos is one taken 80 years ago and that Seaver-Davis found about 40 years ago. He's not sure of the photorapher's identity. It's of the old Guilford Hotel, probably taken in the mid-1920s. The Jefferson Standard Building, which opened in 1923, is in the background.
With their big boxy cameras, photographers of that era produced black and white shots with remarkable clarity and details.
Model Ts are parked in front of the hotel, including one that's double parked. Men in fedoras stand in the doorway of the Postal Telegraph office in the hotel. Postal Telegraph was a competitor of Western Union.
Next door is the Guilford Friendly Cafetria. Wright's Clothing, which would later move across the street to the opposite corner, has an entrance that forms a triange facing the intersection at one end of the hotel.
Around the corner is the National Cash Register Co. office. The city has left spaces along Elm for bicycles. Three stand upright against the curb.
The street looks coated with the ice, although pedestrians appear comfortable without top coats. The double street car tracks, which remained until 1936, run through the middle of Elm.
The hotel stood at the northwest corner of South Elm and Feb. 1 Place. It was torn down in about 1929 to make way for the Woolworth Building, which became the site of the 1960 sit-ins. Since Woolworth closed in 1995, efforts have be on-going to turn the building into a civil rights museum.
Seaver-Davis says he's not against altering images slightly with his computer, even old photos. He did some alterations on the windows of the Jefferson Building in the Guilford Hotel photo.
He has permission to display the photographs for six months. One visit is not enough. Seaver-Davis switches photographs. He would like other photographers to join him in displaying their work.
He thinks the old building was the right choice for a display case. Art can enliven a drab setting.
"The building needed," he says, "some perking up."