
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, April 20, 1993                   TAG: 9304200041
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A CONCRETE SOLUTION FOR PROJECT

To walk downtown from the neighborhoods that ring downtown Roanoke isn't much of a task for healthy legs. Ours is a small city, easily reached on foot from Old Southwest or the West End, Southeast or Gainsboro.

The Lincoln Terrace housing project is home to many walkers.

No fitness fad, it's a way of life.

Our most recent census, in 1990, showed that 86 of every 100 households in Roanoke had access to a motor vehicle.

But in Lincoln Terrace, more than three people of every 10 don't have access to a car.

Many people walk.

When they do, they're bound - usually - in one of two directions. Down Burrell Street toward Orange Avenue and downtown.

Or up Liberty Road, over the bridge that spans Interstate 581 and on to the busy Food-Way Market or Williamson Road.

Not that, traditionally, Lincoln Terrace has been a place that most Roanokers would care to walk.

In the 41 years since it opened, conditions within the Northwest Roanoke housing project have mirrored urban life.

It originally provided safe, warm, dry homes for families when they stumbled, for whatever reason, onto hard times.

Bolder and meaner and more deadly with each passing year, neighborhood strongmen took over. Each time they squeezed a trigger, another deadbolt clicked on another door.

Each new report of violent crime dug a deeper hole for Lincoln Terrace and it became the place for Roanokers to avoid - five streets lined with squat brick buildings and stuck with a reputation for harboring the darkest dreads of our times. Drugs, guns, broken families, unemployment. For many Roanokers, Lincoln Terrace wouldn't be far down that word-association list.

Was it fair? Surely not - sweeping generalizations applied to entire neighborhoods never are. The decent people didn't cede all 300 apartments and move out; they just didn't make headlines.

But image, arguably more vital than substance, made Lincoln Terrace an obvious place to avoid.

Residents are eager now to do a little spin-doctoring of their own, publicizing their community work with police; the panels that screen prospective new tenants; their arts and crafts lessons for children; their community centers and their bids to regain control of places long ago seen by many as totally out of control.

Maybe those of us who don't live in Lincoln Terrace can return with a little bit of symbolism of our own. Maybe we ought to look at the worn paths in the grass that foot traffic has cut along Burrell Street. Maybe we can be dissatisfied with the unprotected, sloping walkways - just road shoulders, really - that Lincoln Terrace walkers brave as they approach the bridge over the highway.

Maybe, unintentionally, we've dug a moat around a community reliant on its legs by never building sidewalks linking Lincoln Terrace to other parts of town.

Symbolic, sure. But sidewalks are red carpets, and it's time to roll them toward that island on the hill we've too long found so frightening.

by CNB