Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310066
SECTION: STREET BY STREET PAGE: 12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Now, Gainsboro is a neighborhood of 190 old homes - many of them vacant - on a few streets and 79 small ranch-style homes and duplexes on redeveloped lots. There is one small office building, several industries, and acres of vacant, weedy lots, many that the housing authority says it can't give away.
Earl and Clara Reynolds, parents of former Assistant City Manager Earl Reynolds Jr., have been at 331 Harrison Ave. N.W. for 57 years.
Most of their friends are gone now, and renters have taken their places. Earl Reynolds, a barber who's 78, still walks an hour a day and takes his scissors along to trim the hair of older men who can't get out much anymore.
Eight or so houses near the Reynoldses have been demolished. "They tore down the best ones first," Clara Reynolds said, referring to demolitions 20 years ago. "This was a beautiful street back then, beautiful old homes."
Pauline Stevens Kegler was born in the house her father built at 215 Patton Ave. N.W. She doesn't like to publicize her age; suffice it to say she has lived in that house almost every day of this century. The city came in and remodeled it for her a few years ago.
From her front porch, she has seen some good years in Gainsboro. "Everyone would get along all right together." Neighbors visited each other. Sunday mornings, they'd all go off to Sunday school.
"I knew all the people." She doesn't now.
Neighbors have moved away or died. The house next door hasn't been lived in for a dozen years.
"There's been 14 homes torn down on this block," she says.
She looked down the street at the rows of old houses set apart by empty lots and she says with certainty, "After I'm gone, this will all be pushed down."
Lullaby Edwards Curtis, 80, has lived in the 200 block of Wells Avenue for 40 years. When she moved there, 85 houses stood on the Gainsboro stretch of Wells. Now, only 11 remain, and at least four are vacant.
The Coca-Cola expansion 10 years ago took the western end of Wells. Stuck now at the end of a dead-end street, Curtis looks out her back windows at the Coke plant, its trucks and its giant stacks of plastic cartons.
"Every night, [there's] bumpin' and knockin'. Sometimes it makes so much noise it shakes the house."
On her street now, she said, "Nobody comes here hardly ever."
by CNB