Bulldozers taking down city's first Holiday Inn and first integrated motel
In recent decades, the building being demolished at Randleman Road and Interstate 85-40 was infamously known as the Southgate Inn. It attracted transients and police offices making arrests for drugs, prostituion, murder, shootings and beatings.
But in its prime during the 1950s and 1960s, the motel and a twin lodging place made local history on two fronts.
In about 1955, they became the city's first two Holiday Inns. The one on Randleman Road was called the Holiday Inn South. The other at 16th Street and U.S. 29 North was the Holiday Inn North.
They were built and operated by Greensboro developer John R. Taylor in the style of early Holiday Inns, a chain found in Memphis in 1952.
The buildings were one story and formed a U. They offered in room TVs, a swimming pool and restaurant. For years, respected civic organizations met at the two motels.
The two Holiday Inns also quietly made civil rights history in late 1960 or early 1961. Taylor integrated them. They were believed to be the first previously all-white lodging places to allow black people as guests.
Taylor, who owned the motels and large developing company bearing his name, was liberal in his beliefs for the time.
He and his family were determined to do their part to integrate Greensboro.
They made a major contribution because until then about the only places black visitors to Greensboro could stay overnight was a converted house, the Magnolia Inn on Gorrell Street, and a cinder block lodging place around the corner on Gorrell Street.
"I can't teach a Sunday School class and say one thing and then do another," Taylor said in a civil club speech in 1963, in which he justified his decision two and a half years earlier to integrate.
He told the group that integration had not hurt business. That went against an argument by businesses who refused to integrate. They feared white customers would stay away.
And the Holiday Inn South made political news in 1963, says Jack Betts, a Charlotte Observer writer and Greensboro native.
In an email, Betts cites James Spence's book, "The Making of a Governor," about the 1964 campaign, particularly the Democratic primary, between Greensboro's Richardson Preyer, Canton's Dan Moore and Wake Forest resident I. Beverly Lake.
Betts says the Spence book says a meeting was held Sept. 8, 1963, at the Holiday Inn South to introduce Preyer to about 50 Democratic leaders from the state. He said Greensboro's Hargrove (Skipper) Bowles, who would run unsuccessfully for governor in 1972, was there. Gov. Terry Sanford, who was ineligible to seek re-election, was there, too.
Preyer annouced for governor the next day. He lead the voting in the spring primary in 1964, but didn't get the necessary percentage of votes to escape a run-off. Runner-up Dan Moore called for a second primary. Lake endorsed Moore, who beat Preyer the second time. Moore went on to win the governorship that fall.
By the 1970s, the two Holiday Inns had become outdated. They were no match for the new high-rise Holiday Inn Four Season, which is now a Sheraton.
The two original Holiday Inns were eventually sold and became a series of independent motels, with the Southgate eventually taking over the former Holiday Inn South.
At the Southgate, police practiced "knock and talk." Without a warrant and suspecting illicit taking place, officers knocked on room doors to ask to look around. The practice was legal.
When the Southgate closed in 2004, the building became the La Cabana Hotel. The La Cabana sign sign remains, announcing it's "under new management." Three-fourths of the motel has been flattened, with one empty-wing remaining to be bulldozed.
The former Holiday Inn North, across from the now being revived Carolina Circle Mall, continues on as the Executive Inn and Suites.