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Several hundred people sat in the dark in UNCG's Cone Ballroom Thursday night to see slides and hear speakers extol the talent and genius of late Greensboro architect Ed Loewenstein.

Dabney Sanders, who does work for Action Greensboro and who discovered Loewenstein's designs when she moved here six years ago, said she wondered why his name was heard so little in the community.

She set about to correct that with "The Loewenstein Legacy," a symposium open to the public that will continue this morning. From 1 to 4 p.m. today, eight Loewenstein designed homes will open for tours, and again from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. An admission fee will be charged.

The symposium and tour are sponsored by Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNCG's Department of Interior Architecture and financed with contributions from many, including Dick and Jane Levy. Jane Levy is Loewenstein's daughter.

"Modernism came to Greensboro kicking and screaming," she told the symposium, relating that her father moved here in 1945 after a marrying Frances Stern of Greensboro.

Loewenstein, a MIT grad, practiced architecture before WWII in Chicago, where he was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Bahaus movement of modern architecture founded by Walter Gropius and other German architects who immigrated to America to excape the Nazis.

Loewenstein's firm, Loewenstein & Atkinson, stayed busy in Greensboro from the time it was formed in 1948 until Loewenstein's death in 1970 (at age 57) from a heart attack.

Yet during his time, many in Greensboro poked fun of his modernist style. The city's love of neo-Georgian, Tudor revival, Southern colonial and ranch-style architecture was tough to crack.

To keep the firm busy, Loewenstein also designed traditional homes and buildings, such as the neo-Georgian president's home on the Bennett College campus.

But his heart was in modernism.

It wasn't brought out in symposium, but the Loewenstein firm worked hard to be named architects of the Greensboro-Guilford County Government Center, built in the late 1960s.

As he often did with projects, Loewenstein collaborated with others - in this case, William Freeman & Associates, an architectural, engineering and planning firm in High Point. They bid a complete package, even designing the utilities, the sewer system, the landscaping and other details.

The city and county, however, chose another modernist architect: Edwardo Catalano of Cambridge, Mass. He designed two square concrete structures. In the summer issue of Landmarks, published by Preservation Greensboro Inc., PGI Executive Director Benjamin Briggs identifies the center as the "Brutalist" style of modernist architect.

The two buildings have never caught on with some in Greensboro. One wonders what might have been had Loewenstein, who designed the old library building a block away that's being converted for the new Elon University law school, had done the design.

Catalano's name arose during the symposium. The Argentine native taught at N.C. State University's School of Design in the 1950s before moving to MIT.

Richard Longstreth, professor of American Civilization at George Washington University, showed two slides of the modernist house Catalano built for himself in Raleigh. One shows the house new; the other as it appears now, in near collapse.

Longstreth said too many modernist strutures and whimsical buildings of the 1950s and 1960s are disappearing. The style defined the times and can't be duplicated, especially the houses, which often required large lots that would be too expensive today.

Longstreth says many ask how any house or building can be historic if they can remember when it was built.

"We can't be snobbish about these things," he said. "They represent an important development in American housing."

He said it's foolish to believe the recent past doesn't deserve the same attention as the distant past.

Dabney Sanders should feel better. Greensboro seems finally appreciative of Loewenstein. The univeristy's Department of Interior Architecture has created a scholarship in his name.

And the symposium and homes tour may be the first in North Carolina about post-war modernist architecture.

Nancy Doll, director of Weatherspoon Art Museum, said, "I've never worked on a project that resonated with so many people."

As the old saying goes, be careful what you ask for.

There has been much talk recently about "calming" or "taming" traffic on some of the city's oldest and busiest streets, including East Market in front of the N.C. A&T State University campus and Spring and Edgeworth streets in the historic Cedar Street neighborhood downtown.

East Market is a done deal. It has been narrowed from eight lanes to six, split by a landscaped median and parking on both sides of the street.

Spring and Cedar remain unchanged: speedy one way-streets. But that may change if the City Council next week approves a plan for improvements to the neighborhood, including traffic calming.

Residents complain that cars rush along Spring and Edgeworth, making it risky for pedestrians to cross intersections. The city says the fast-moving traffic makes the neighborhood less attractive to newcomers and detracts from its residential image.

No one suggests that taming would be a bad idea, but there's a trade off. Traffic might do more than slow down. It might creep.

The best example of taming is the half-mile of Spring Garden Street, between Tate and Aycock through the UNCG campus. It used to be a two-way street with no landscaping and the look of having no relation to the campus it passed through. For UNCG, it was an intrusion rather than an asset. Students dodged cars trying to cross the street.

After a $3.2 million makeover in 1997 and 1998, Spring Garden looks like a narrow, lovely campus street shaded by trees, with a grassy median, brick crosswalks and others pleasing features.

But if you're in a hurry, better find another route. Spring Garden has been calmed it to the extent it suffers from paralysis at times.

At 3p.m. the other day, it took a long line of cars about 10 minutes to travel from Tate to Aycock. At one intersection, two light changes were needed to get through.

When classes change on campus, a green light loses its meaning. Traffic must stay stopped while students stream across Spring Garden going from classroom buildings on one side to the other.

East Market has been slowed, but traffic isn't crawling - not yet anyway. A&T's campus occupies only one side of the street. Students aren't crossing in large numbers.

Residents in the Cedar Street neighborhood would like to see Spring and Edgeworth streets between West Friendly Avenue and Smith Street revert to two-way thoroughfares, with on-street parking.

That would certainly slow traffic once it crosses West Friendly, after moving swiftly on four-lane, one-way portions of both streets.

But neighborhood residents, while ridding themselves of one danger, may acquire another: raging motorists.

Drivers are used to having it their way - that is, one way - on both streets.

REMEMBER HIPPIE HILL? THEY'RE BACK.

Speaking of UNCG, Hippie Hill may be getting high again.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, the hill outside the Brown Music Building overlooking the shops along Tate Street became a gathering place for flower children. Dope was smoked, music was played and everyone seemed happy - except some Tate Street merchants and univeristy officials.

Hippie Hill emptied out by the mid-1970s, when the university covered it with shrubs bearing prickly leaves.

But a patch of lawn grows again outside the Brown Building. The other day, a half-dozen or so young people - looking motley and out of the mainstream, of course - gathered on the hill to soak up sunshine and watch the passing scene.

No one was seen firing up a joint. For one thing, the UNCG Police Department, a block away, is bigger and more aggressive than it was 35 and 40 years ago.

Put logic aside. Gas rationing in World War II was not meant to save gasoline.

Gordon Knowles of Greensboro, who remembers the war years, said it was rubber that Uncle Sam was trying to stretch, not gas.

In a letter responding to a story last month about Guilford Dairy switching to horse drawn milk wagons during the war because of gas and tire shortages, Knowles the only reason for rationing gasoline was "to limit driving and therefore conserve tires."

"Gasoline was plentiful during the war," Knowles said, "but after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, 90 percent of the United States' crude rubber was cut off, and our production of synthetic rubber earlier in the war was miniscule. Tires were essential to the military."

One thing the government didn't ration during the war was brain power. If only Americans used the same ingenuity to overcome today's problems and shortages as they did then. Nothing in those days went to waste.

Knowles said fiber was extracted from silk and nylon hose to make powder bags for artillery weapons, tin cans for various military usage and even household cooking grease. It was a fource of glycerin, Knowles said, to make explosives.

"I can remember helping my mother,'' he said, "carry those things to the curb for weekly pick up."

History may be in the making at Moses H. Cone Hospital and it will be for nothing - as in nothing will be going on outside the hospital.

This will be bad news for contractors, but good news for visitors, who for decades have endured detours, dust, dirt and disruptions trying to get from their cars to the hospital's entrances.

When the hospital's new heart and vascular wing, going up at the south end of the main building, is done this spring that's it, at least for a while.

For the first time in decades, no new construction projects will follow immediately on the Cone campus, which forms a 1.2-mile square and is getting crowded.

Glenn Waters, Cone Health System's chief operating officer who has been at his job only three and a half years, checked with his secretary who has been there 35 years. She said she can't remember a time when something new wasn't being built.

The hospital opened with one building in 1953. It remained that way for a while.

But then construction became constant, with all projects having one thing in common: the same distinctive brick. The brick is long and narrow and over the years has acquired the name, "Moses Cone Blend." It comes from the same quarry in Pleasant Garden, according to Waters.

In the hospital's early years, even privately-owned support buildings, including the now-demolished Professional Village doctors office complex, used Moses Cone Blend to create uniformity.

The hospital campus - it's truly that, because it includes a dormitory - now numbers seven buildings and two parking decks.

In addition, the main building has been added on to countless times. The original building has been expanded from 190,545 square feet to 956,325, and that doesn't include the latest addition.

The main building is taller, longer and wider, with a striking atrium added to the front. Staff and visitors gather there for meals, to talk and to listen to a pianist.

Waters says space on the Cone campus is about tapped out. If there is new construction, it likely will go on top of what's already there. Waters raised the possibility of a satellite campus being created.

He says Moses Cone Health System is selecting a consultant for the Cone campus master plan, which is constantly being updated. The system tries to project what kind of services will in demand in the years ahead. The hospital staff foresees fewer beds needed for general hospital patients and more for intensive care patients. Additional space likely will be required for out-patient services.

Just because passersby and visitors won't be seeing cranes and consturciton crews for a while won't mean the hospital isn't changing. Inside, renovations will be taking place.

"There is always something," Waters says, "going on around the hospital."

Long before Lorillard Tobacco Co. opened a cigarette plant in Greensboro in 1956, and long before it moved its headquarters from New York to here in 1997, men named Pierre Lorillard were making smoke in Guilford County.

Their shotguns blasted away at coveys of quail and plentiful doves.

Pierre Lorillard IV and his son, Pierre Lorillard V, were among dozens of northern industrialists starting in the late 19th century and continuing to the Great Depression who found Guilford a happy hunting ground.

Financier J.P. Morgan liked shooting so much that in 1904, he bought shares in a hunting lodge near Climax. Parts of the lodge survive.

Several others, such as railroad millionaire Jay Gould's son, built a lodge southwest of High Point. Clarence McKay, founder of the Postal Telegraph Service (a competitor of Western Union) had a big house and hunting preserve near Sedgefield. The caretaker's house remains.

Businessman O.W. Bright of New York had a lodge near Whitsett that still stands. Philadelphia businessman Benjamin Cardeza's "Great Oaks," later renamed Reedy Fork, was recently dismantled from its site on U.S. 29 and moved to Chapel Hill, where it's being reassembled.

Lorillard IV and V never built a lodge. Instead, they paid the property taxes to a group of farmers in northern Guilford in return for hunting rights on their land.

In 1898, the Greensboro Patriot reported that Lorillard paid $560 to an agent in High Point to cover the taxes for those farmers.

The Lorillards may have slept and dined in private railroad cars, perhaps parked on rail siding between Greensboro and Stokesdale, along the old Atlanta & Yadkin Railroad. Most super-wealthy people of that era had rail cars.

Lorillard IV, who died in 1901, came to Guilford first, probably in the 1890s, not too long after he made his greatest innovation - and it wasn't a new brand of cigarettes. In the late 1880s, he designed the formal attire for men known as the tuxedo. He named it after Tuxedo Park, N.Y., the town he developed for rich people like himself north of New York City.

Pierre V was still hunting in Guilford as late as 1924. The newspaper listed "P. Lorillard" among the 37 northern industrialists who had paid $10.50 for a license to hunt.

The newspaper always identified the Lorillards as P. Lorillard, possibly because the company was named P. Lorillard Tobacco Co. until it became just Lorillard in 1968.

The tobacco company is named for the original Pierre Lorillard, a French immigrant who founded the company in New York in 1760.

Although Lorillard was bought by American Tobacco Co. in 1910 and then became independent again a few years later, at least one Lorillard remained active with the company when it opened its Greensboro plant at East Market and English streets.

Herbert A. Kent, the company's chairman and president who came for the grand opening, had Lorillard blood, if the genology found recently on a Web site is correct.

It says Emily Lorillard, Pierre IV's daughter, married Herbert Kent in 1882. They had a child the next year, whom they named Herbert Kent.

It was probably that Herbert Kent, or perhaps his son, who rose to become president and board chairman of P. Lorillard Tobacco Co. in the 1950s.

The company's Kent cigarette brand was named for Herbert Kent when it was introduced in 1952. He apparently was the last family member who worked for the company. A 1960 publication on the company's 60th anniversary said the comany lacked Lorillards, although Kent was listed as a consultant.

The question, for which an answer may never be known, is whether the visits of Pierre Lorillard IV and V had anything to do with the company eventually opening what's now its only surviving plant in Greensboro.

Maybe Pierre V brought Herbert Kent here as a child on a hunting trip. Kent may have liked what he saw. When it came time for the company to build a new plant, he chose Greensboro.

Or it could be just one of those historical quirks, and the Lorillards were here long before their plant and headquarters.

There are still Pierre Lorillards out there. One man with that name - and without any roman numerals - is an assistant film director in Hollywood.

That 100 volunteers devoted a recent sunny autumn Saturday to hard labor - planting trees in Glenwood - shows Greensboro has matured like a tree when it comes to trees.

In the past, the city's relationship with timber has been conflicted. Residents loved the beauty of trees, but often, when a tree grew tall and beautiful - chop, chop. It came down to clear the way for a housing or commercial development or a street widening.

One of the worst removals came as the 1890s gave way to the 1900s. City fathers removed the elms from the street that was named for those very trees.

Back in 1839, when the city was still a village with bascially four streets - North and South and East and West - local leaders paid a black man known only as Gill $39 to plant elms along North and South streets.

That led to the renaming of the street.

As Greensboro grew into a city (a city charter was adopted in 1870), leaders and merchants lost interest in the elms along Elm, even though in places they formed a lovely canopy. The trees, people thought, gave the growing city a small town look.

Perhaps Southern Power Co., which evolved into Duke Power, had some influence in the decision to cut the trees. The company was putting up power poles along the main street. Tree limbs got in the way.

In recent years, the city has been restoring foliage to Elm Street - not elms because of the Dutch elm blight, but various other species.

Even so, in a recent news release from Greensboro Beautiful, Emilie Sandin, co-chair of the group's Urban Forestry Committee, said, "Since 1984, Greensboro has lost 18 percent of its tree cover."

Development and ice storms account mainly for the shade losses.

Two years ago, Greensboro Beautiful, the Green Industry Council (made up of landscapers, nursery owners and irrigation contactors) and the Guilford County Cooperative Extension service started the NeighborWoods program.

With the help of city urban forester Melissa Begley, the groups picks a neighborhood for a massive tree planting. The first, in 2004, was the Eastside Park Neighborhood, off O. Henry Boulevard.

For this year's chosen place, Glenwood, neighborhood residents, master gardeners from the county extension service, American Express employees and Girl Scouts planted 68 trees. They included nutall oaks, black gum, bald cypress, several kinds of cherries, red and Jane magnolia.

Neighborhoods that would like to be considered for next year's planting should contact Begley at 373-2150 for an application. The neighborhood will be named in June, with the planting taking place in November.

If you're interested in doing a little urban exploring to a little-known place that's close to the center of the city, this weekend is your chance.

The former club house of the Casa Seville Apartments, which may be the only structures in Greensboro designed in Spanish Colonial Revival style, will be the site Friday night, Saturday and Sunday of the 4th annual Candlelight Show, an art exhibit presented annually by artist Anne-Karine Thorsen.

She uses the old club house, with its 18-foot high ceilings and giant fireplace, as her studio. Art books decorate the mezzanine, which includes two rooms.

The aparments and studio are listed as being on Bessemer Court, just off Cridland Drive between West Bessemer and Wendover avenues. But be warned: Bessemer Court, which has an official street sign, ends after a few feet in the backyard of a house that faces Bessemer.

Visitors must go about 20 feet north of the Bessemer Court sign and turn onto an unnamed alley. It goes up an incline behind the five Casa Seville duplexes. The club house is the tall stucco structure at the end.

Thorsen, a Norwegian native, specializes in canine art - portraits of family pets. She'll have a few of her own works displayed, but she says the show really honors Frank Rowland of Winston-Salem and six local artists.

Rowland is well-known in the art world for his landscapes, streetscapes, still lifes and abstract pieces.

Thorsen reads with amazement the places Rowland has had solo or group exhibits: Paris, Tokyo, artsy Carmel, Calif., New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Frankfort in Germany, Madrid, Malibu and many others. Several dozen corporations have Rowland pieces in their collections, including Disney Studios, Encyclopedia Brittanica, AT&T and Playboy.

Rowland worked in Chicago and other places for years, but recently moved to Winston-Salem to be near family. Now in his 70s, he's still making art with the passion of much younger man, Thorsen says.

"It's like each day in the first he has ever painted or the last day he's ever going to paint,'' Thorsen says.

He'll have about 50 works in the candlelight show. The other artists with works to be displayed are all from Greensboro: Connie Logan, Denise Land, Nancy Bullock, Judy Meyler and Helen Farson.

The event is so named because the first year, 2001, a snowstorm knocked out electricity in the area.

Candlepower allowed the show to go on. Everyone commented what a Christmasy atmosphere the candles and the roaring fire in fireplace made. So, Thorsen has used candles in lieu of electricity each year since then.

Her studio looks like one a visitor would expect to find Monet or Manet at work. It just fits the discription of an artist studio. Several other artists used the place as a studio before Thorsen rented it.

One wonders why the builders of Casa Seville in the late 1920s added such an elaborate club house to serve what were originally seven duplexes, two of which have been removed.

Thorsen said she heard the apartments were meant as quarters for Vick Chemical managment when the company - now part of Procter & Gamble - had a plant at the corner of Wendover and Cridland.

But old-timers in Fisher Park who go back to the late 1920s and early 1930s say the apartments existed before the plant arrived.A check of old files at the Greensboro Public Library indicate the Vick Plant was opened in 1938 in a building at 325 Wendover previously occupied by the Breneman Co., which made window shades.

The houses could have been built by Brenenman or by Cone Mills, which had a plant along Wendover at one time. Or an independent contractor could have constructed for workers at the plants that existed along Wendover between Cridland and Virginia Street.

The old-timers also say Casa Seville apartments have always been inexpensive to rent. It was not the kind of places management types would rent.

But people with loftier occupations have rented - and still rent - units. They like idea of living in apartments like no other in the city.

Whatever the reason the apartments were built, their unusual Spanish architecture make them a hidden gem in Greensboro, much like the hard-to-find Lyndon Street Row Houses in the southeast corner of downtown. Built in about 1905, they may be the only row houses in North Carolina.

If an architect was involved in the design of the Casa Seville, the best guess would be Harry Barton, who loved the various styles of Mediterrean architecture. His former home on Kemp Road West is an example. So was the old Guilford County Home for the poor that stood on Burlington Road.

The Candlight Show is open to the public free from 5 to 10 p.m. The show will also be held Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.