"When are you and your fellow dreamers going to quit beating the dead horse that was downtown and realize that it is never going to be like it once was? Please start living in the 21st century.
Greensboro shops on West Wendover Avenue, West Friendly, High Point Road (or whatever it’s called) and New Garden Road.
Throwing money at the old downtown simply subsidizes the few speculators who have invested in downtown properties. When downtown is a good place to open a business, the city will not have to put money into it."
I said many times, the mighty Pheonix must crash and burn before it can rise from the ashes. Attempts to keep it flying will only result in your being crushed under its weight when it ultimately falls to the ground.
Problem is Downtown Greensboro died in the late 1940s and no one wants to admit it. From the City of Greensboro website:
"From the turn of the century to the late 1950s, the East Market Street Corridor flourished. It was the shopping and social center for many of Greensboro's African Americans, who owned businesses on the street and provided services to those shut out by segregation practices in other Greensboro neighborhoods.
This lively community began to wind down in the late 1950s and 1960s when, under the guise of "urban renewal," thousands of people and more than 80 businesses (many minority-owned) were displaced. Most of those businesses never reestablished."
We are being crushed under the weight of a giant dead bird.
It wasn't just African-American businesses that were bulldozed. The majority of those businesses were white owned. East Market St and the Bessemer Community was the most successful economic region in the entire Piedmont Triad prior to annexation by the City of Greensboro. The first big box retailers and fast food restaurants in the Piedmont were here. Family businesses thrived here. You see, there was ample free parking in Bessemer whereas downtown there wasn't and like it or not America had entered the age of the automobile.
Why was 3 miles of a thriving east Greensboro community bulldozed "under the guise of "urban renewal," just 2 years after it was annexed into the City of Greensboro? A desperate and failed attempt to save an already dying downtown. Why pick downtown over other communities? Downtown was owned by Greensboro's most prestigious and wealthy politically connected families, the other communities were not. One must remember, in those days Greensboro had no district representation-- the entire city council lived in Irving Park.
Downtown was already doomed. The Interstate Highway System was began in 1956 diverting traffic off of US 70 (Market Street) and in 1964 the morons on the Greensboro City Council set the stage for another round of downtown death with the construction of what was at the time the most expensive municipal road construction project in the history of North Carolina-- Wendover Avenue. Wendover Avenue set the stage for Friendly shopping center and the many shopping centers on West Wendover.
All the while the developers knew they could always count on the Greensboro City Council to step in and use taxpayer dollars to save the dying downtown they, themselves were killing.
I've lived in east Greensboro all my life-- the very community written about on the City of Greensboro website-- I know what took place here. That was the first of not 1, not 2 but 3 rounds of downtown renovation/revitalization during my lifetime that all resulted in the need for yet another round of downtown renovation before the previous round was finished. Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. GPAC is the beginning of Round 4 of downtown Greensboro revitalization in my lifetime. Think about it.
So we provide incentives to fix the damage caused by incentives but it won't bring dead birds back to life.
