Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 27, 1994 TAG: 9402240045
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
56 WELLS AVE., N.E.
Inside Evelyn Richardson's high-ceilinged parlor stood a giant gilded mirror, 9 feet tall, 4 feet wide. Doorways were taken apart to bring it in.
She moved into her aunt's house 40 years ago.
It's a big white house built before 1888, one of the oldest homes still standing in Roanoke. Gainsboro was the city's original neighborhood.
Richardson was a waitress and a coatroom clerk at the Hotel Roanoke. From her front porch, she had a sweeping view of the hotel. She could see people step off the trains at the Norfolk and Western passenger station.
By the summer of 1992, she knew the city wanted to take her house to widen Wells Avenue and expand parking for the hotel. "I like it down here," she said. She was 72 then. "You know, I'm too old to go anywhere."
Within weeks, as talk swirled about the fate of her house and neighborhood leaders begged the city to leave Wells Avenue alone, Richardson was hospitalized with bronchitis. She had been sick before the road dispute. People close to her said it didn't help.
She died that October. The state paid her heirs $87,000 for the house. The city plans to move it and the one next door to lots on Gilmer Avenue, one street north of Wells.
42 WELLS N.E.
Jacob Barnett Jr., a Navy veteran and retired house painter, lived at 42 Wells nearly all his life.
His parents moved there more than 50 years ago. It's a handsome brick house with a wraparound front porch. It was built before 1890.
Now that house, too, is in the path of a new Wells Avenue. Early in December, the Virginia Department of Transportation paid Barnett $101,500 for it.
That price and the $87,000 paid for the Richardson home are two of the highest amounts ever paid for Gainsboro property. It's the land they're sitting on, though, that brought top dollar, not the houses themselves. The Hotel Roanoke restoration has sharply raised the value of nearby land.
Before Christmas, Barnett moved into the Virginia Veterans Care Center, a nursing home in Salem. He was not happy about it, but he has diabetes. Doctors amputated his right leg years ago. He's in a wheelchair.
His female kinfolk cleared out a half-century of family possessions and prepared for an estate sale. Sherry glasses, quilts, four-poster beds and a prosthetic leg with a boot attached were among the things to be disposed of.
Barnett, 68, was depressed. He didn't want to talk about it.
Asked about progress touted for his old street, he said: "I didn't get no progress. The state and the city, they got the progress."
His life is in the past, he said. He is resigned to the loss of his home. "I'm through with it."
He didn't want to talk about how Wells Avenue used to be, either. "Won't do no good no way."
At least 10 more families could have lost their homes, though, if Historic Gainsboro Preservation District President Evelyn Bethel hadn't protested the city's first Wells Avenue plan. It called for taking homes on Gilmer Avenue, too.
12 WELLS AVE. N.E.
Trudy Parker thought she'd found a great spot. Just rent a shop right across from the hotel, wait for it to be restored, then watch guests wander over to snatch up her Victorian bric-a-brac.
Her antique china and glassware brought a sparkle to the deserted old Alcoholic Beverage Control store on Wells Avenue.
She hadn't counted on the street being widened. Now her old place, with its glass-brick front windows, and four other commercial buildings will be torn down.
Parker and her stuff are gone.
Right after Christmas, the state packed up the antiques and will store them for a year. Parker hopes she'll be back in business eventually - someplace, somewhere.
16 Wells Ave. N.W.
Ruth Gassett was a Roanoke entrepreneur before some Chamber of Commerce leaders were born. She started in the 1930s.
She owned True Reformers Hall at Commonwealth and East avenues. Out of it, she ran apartments, a beauty and barber school, a beauty shop with six hairdressers and the Star City Chicken Shack.
She later ran a beauty shop on Gainsboro's famous Henry Street.
Gassett is 84 now. She still gets up at 5 a.m. She puts on her white shoes and blue tunic and starts doing hair by 7. She has been a Roanoke beautician for more than 60 years.
The past two decades, she's run her Cosmopolitan Beauty Bar out of an office alongside her home at 16 Wells Ave. N.W. It used to be the office of the late Dr. L.E. Paxton, a dentist and Roanoke School Board member.
Other beauticians work there, too - Arlene James, who does hair with Gassett, and Venezuela Waller, a 42-year beautician who operates her Casbah Beauty Salon in the same quarters. It's full of women's talk, laughter and soap-opera angst from the constantly running TV.
Gassett's house will not be taken down, but the widened road will slice into her front yard.
She's worried. Thirty years ago, the city tore down True Reformers Hall. Then, too, it was to widen roads near downtown.
A few weeks ago, trucks came and tore up Wells Avenue in front of Gassett's home and business. Her customers had trouble walking and parking near her house.
Gassett thought the Wells Avenue road project had begun without anybody telling her. Instead, workers were putting in water mains for the hotel and the conference center to be built next to it. Other crews laid underground utility lines along the street.
Road construction probably won't begin at least until June. It will go on for at least seven months. It might be finished a year from now.
Gassett's life already has been disrupted. "When they come through and interfere with my business, how am I supposed to exist?" Gassett asked in December, nervously watching construction equipment churning into the pavement outside.
"It has had me very disturbed, truthfully. I get awake 2 or 3 o'clock at night, and I don't go back to sleep no more."
Summer evenings, she sits with friends on her front porch. Used to be, she'd look across dozens of Gainsboro homes, shops and medical offices. "It was quiet," she said. "It was really nice."
Urban renewal wiped out most of her neighbors. Then First Baptist Church built its new sanctuary and parking lot across from her. From her porch now, she looks across Wells and the church lot to houses farther north in Gainsboro.
When she sits there in coming summers, she'll be on a busy four-lane traffic loop. She's not sure how that will be. She wonders if the sounds of cars will keep her awake at night.
24 Wells Ave. N.W.
The Curtises, next door and across an empty lot from Ruth Gassett, have owned their home more than 70 years.
A plaque on the door says "T.E. Curtis" - the late Thomas Ellis Curtis. His widow, Mary Lelia Curtis, now in her late 90s, lives there still.
Their son, 78-year-old James William Curtis, moved home after teaching at Virginia State College in Petersburg. Bernice Moore, James' sister, taught school in Newport News, then came home, too.
When Moore was growing up, she had black neighbors and white neighbors. "People got along so very well together. My best girlfriend was Syrian."
By the time she moved back, most of her old neighborhood had been torn down.
The Curtis/Moore home is not slated for demolition, but Wells Avenue will be busier now. City engineers say that without the new Wells hooking up eventually with a new loop planned for Second Street and Gainsboro Road, downtown traffic will become impossible.
In a recent interview, Bernice Moore at first seemed resigned to the changes. "They say it's progress, and I believe in it. I can contend with things. I'm not the type of person to condemn progress."
Then other feelings emerged. "Listen," she said, "if I said something about it, what good would it do? This section has been violated for so long that I expect anything to happen. But I expect it to be done in a graceful way, period."
Someday, maybe Gainsboro will be a neighborly place once more. "It can be done again, but I won't be alive to see it."
The Wells Avenue project ends officially at First Street, or Henry Street.
On the west side of First, in the last two blocks of Wells Northwest, there are nine more houses and several empty lots.
Officially, they're part of the city's other Gainsboro project - the extension of Second Street from downtown over the railroad tracks and along Gainsboro Road to U.S. 460/Orange Avenue.
Some of those Wells Avenue houses date to 1900 or before. Prominent Roanokers - white and black - once lived there. Some houses are abandoned. Owners have been waiting years for the city or state to explain what's going to happen.
Bob Bengtson, the city's traffic engineer, said the houses at 110 and 111 Wells N.W. will be relocated nearby. One was the home of the late Marionette Sprauve, a Roanoke music teacher for 43 years and first president of the Friends of the Roanoke Symphony. The other was the home of the late physician Dr. George Moore.
Other houses on Wells Northwest will not be touched, except to take "a sliver" of their front yards, Bengtson said. The Second Street work could begin late this year.
119 Wells Ave. N.W
One of the oldest homes in Roanoke is at 119 Wells N.W. It's a red brick house with white columns along a curving porch from the front to the side yard.
J.P. Henebry, a Roanoke jeweler, lived there at the turn of the century. His company, Henebry's Jewelers, was bought by a corporation years ago and is now a chain of stores in several states.
Dorothy Stuart's father owned the house after Henebry. She lived there for 48 years. Many years ago, she said, she was doing business at Henebry's jewelry shop and gave him her address on Wells. "He said, `119? I lived the happiest days of my life there.' "
Emanuel Edwards, a former Roanoke lawyer who now lives in Greensboro, N.C., bought the house 10 years ago. He traced the property to 1887 but never learned when the house was built.
In the old days, black entrepreneurs owned houses in that block. They included Mack Barlow, owner of Henry Street's Dumas Hotel, real estate investor Green Penn and Stuart's father, A.F. Brooks, who with Penn financed construction of the Hampton Theatre, once the city's only black theater.
Roy Burrell, a retired construction worker, is one of the last inhabitants of Wells Avenue Northwest.
Burrell rents the house at 120 Wells near the Coca-Cola plant. With so many houses missing now and gaps standing between the ones remaining, the street has the look of a jack o' lantern's Halloween smile.
Government people came around to talk with Burrell about what they're going to do with nearby roads.
"They told me they'd take half the yard out but I wouldn't have to move and if they do any damage, they'll fix it. Whether it'll be noisy or what it will be," he said, "I'll have to wait and see."
by CNB