News-Record.com

You can call him Roy.

Or you can call him Mr. Wachovia Building.

Lots of people do.

Although Roy Carroll II says a more accurate appellation might be "Mr. Old Wachovia Building," he's not particularly fond of the "old" part.

Carroll, 43, a Greensboro developer, has worked for nearly two years trying to remove the biggest vacancy sign on the Greensboro skyline. His passion for the project has become so pronounced that he and it have become almost one.

If, ultimately, he should fail, Carroll recently joked, "I tell my wife we'll have to leave town in disgrace."

Don't pack your bags just yet, Roy.

Carroll unveiled renderings of his planned mixed-use makeover, to be called Center Pointe, at a Friday news conference and also announced that he'll open a sales office Monday. Carroll still needs funding help with the project, presumably from local governments (hardly a gimme in any community). But you've got to admire his imagination and his moxie.

Youthfully trim with graying brown hair and gleaming eyes, he's the mirror image of his daddy, who was the first boss I ever had at an old Bi-Rite supermarket in northeast Greensboro. Especially when he smiles. And Roy Carroll II smiles a lot when discussing the Wachovia project.

Never mind that the empty high-rise with the Pepto-Bismol complexion has for years driven developers queasy with its staggering price tags and endless complications.

It has been bought and sold and gutted and painted and named and renamed and imagined and reimagined several times over since it first opened in the heart of downtown in 1966. One local developer even suggested we should just blow the darned thing up and start from scratch.

Carroll understands why. "From a private development point of view this is not a feasible project," he says.

He should know. Thus far, Carroll has sunk $600,000 into the building. "And the meter's running." He has seen its price tag balloon from $20 million to $37 million.

Still he's smiling.

A clever gambit to help underwrite the building's restoration with federal historic tax credits went nowhere with the National Parks Service.

And still he's smiling.

"This is not a Roy Carroll project," he says. "This is an entire Greensboro project as I see it," he says. "I think everybody realizes the importance of this building's renovation to our community. To have a healthy city we can't let the heart of our community die or suffer."

So, with each setback, Carroll has kept coming back.

"We've been able to resuscitate (the project) each time because of the support of the community," he says. "I was trying to count on hands and fingers and a calculator the other night the number of people in our community who have been extremely supportive of our efforts on this project and who have come along, when we're having a tough day, and loaned their expertise and helped us figure out a way around a particular hurdle."

So, even when the quest for crucial historic tax credits flopped, Carroll wouldn't give up. He simply started over. Again.
And instead of paring down his grand vision, he expanded it: He'd strip the building down to its iron-girder skivvies and redesign the facade. Instead of its familiar boxy, plain-Jane profile, he'd add some style and personality. Instead of 16 stories, now there'd be 17.
The result: an elegant new elevation with concrete balconies with aluminum rails, aluminum awnings, ornamental strips of granite and decorative spires at the top. Carroll's vision: a restaurant at ground level, offices on the second story and 156 condominiums the upper floors, including his own on the top.

Give Carroll credit. His hometown roots and passion for Greensboro haven't let this project slip into the overstuffed local file of Good Ideas that Never Happened.

Not that his wife Vanessa has ever doubted the grand plan, he says.

"You know we're gonna need new furniture," she told him.