Dreams come true for downtown (at least some of them)
This week's column.
On Jan. 2, 2000, I shared in this space my personal wish list for downtown projects — which, I admit, is pretty easy to do in Fantasy Land.
Ignoring such petty details as construction costs, land acquisition and zoning issues, I gushed forth a truckload of fanciful ideas for center-city revitalization.
To my credit, I did include with each item a "reality check" with at least one expert on the feasibility of the notion. But "feasible" and "doable" are distant cousins at best.
Scientifically speaking, I was just making stuff up.
Then a funny thing happened on the road to make-believe: Many of my hopes and visions actually materialized. So did some I'd never dreamed of.
A center-city park? A downtown law school? Get outta here.
One of my most cherished ideas, a downtown baseball stadium, seemed a long shot, at best. "Stubbornly clinging to the notion that the county should have bought Carolina Circle Mall and relocated a number of its agencies there," I wrote in 2000, "I would build the stadium on Eugene Street at Lindsay, a site the health and social services departments should be vacating for Carolina Circle."
Of course, Carolina Circle never housed any government offices and eventually was razed to make way for Wal-Mart. But the county offices did relocate. And the ballpark was built at precisely the site I suggested, entirely with private money.
Now it's about to break a national attendance record. Who'd have thunk it?
I also wrote in 2000: "In the heart of my downtown, what used to be the Wachovia Building would be stripped to its steel-girder skivvies and converted into apartments and condos on the upper floors and restaurants and retail space downstairs. Imagine the allure of penthouses in the heart of the city."
Seven years ago, Jimmy Black, then the chairman of Downtown Greensboro Inc., was, well, polite when asked what he thought. "I don't know that it's feasible," he said back then, "but it's not outside the realm of possibility."
The smart money in those days was on the old tower being demolished. Better to bring it down in a big pile of dust and rubble than to let it just stand there and do nothing.
Thankfully, it did stand for a while longer and do nothing.
Now it's being renovated by developer Roy Carroll as condominiums, shops and offices under the new name Center Pointe.
Carroll and his family will live in the penthouse unit.
But I'm no Nostradamus, for sure. Just lucky. You throw enough things against the wall and something's bound to stick.
As for the rest of my grandiose visions, they remain stuck right where they started: on paper.
There's no passenger rail service to the airport, no performing arts center. Most significantly, there's no International Civil Rights Center and Museum.
As practiced as we've become at doing the impossible in downtown Greensboro, the city's greatest claim to history remains a promise unfulfilled, a coming attraction that never arrives.
We can find all kinds of excuses why it's unfinished.
Allegations of murky bookkeeping.
A lack of deep-pocketed corporate headquarters.
Skip and Earl.
Penn and Teller.
Flatt and Scruggs.
(Add your own excuse here).
The fact is, the museum ought to be a done deal by now.
By the sheer collective will of this community we could have made it so.
If there's one key lesson in downtown's startling reawakening, it's the newfound ability of this community to believe in itself, and to believe in possibilities.
Look at all the other impossible dreams that have blossomed along Elm Street.
Look at how we've hung rapt on each tasty new rumor about a mysterious downtown megaproject that would have been immediately dismissed in 2000, but — who knows? — might actually happen today.
The civil rights museum deserves more than excuses. It deserves our support.
And it deserves an address in the real world, not just in the land of make-believe.
Comments (3)
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Allen, doesn't this "Triumph Center" sound spectacularly low-brow? Bowling, roller rink, etc. Hardly the jewel in the crown.
I think it will advertise Greensboro as rinky-dink, only on a big scale.
Posted on August 10, 2007 2:49 PM
Are you being, a little bit, uh, snobbish, Jim?
Posted on August 10, 2007 2:52 PM
I am thinking out loud. If I were a marketing exec, wold I recommend "branding" Greensboro as "bowling and roller skating", or are there other choices that would draw a different clientele? It's the 150th birthday of Throstein Veblen, I heard today. He wrote "The Theory of the Leisure Class". It coined the phrase "conspicuous consumption". Now, what is it Greensboro wishes to be conspicuously consuming? Or is there, perhaps, an entirely different direction, away from consumerism itself?
Posted on August 12, 2007 8:57 AM