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

DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995                   TAG: 9501310069
SECTION: STREET BY STREET                    PAGE: 11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

THE LOSS STILL STINGS

As an entrepreneur and a Gainsboro native, Walter Fizer Jr. wanted a piece of that pie. He wanted to build apartments in one spot and a motel in another.

He hired an architect and a market analyst, and told the housing authority he aimed to put up a motel. The authority said no: The property he wanted was promised to developers who built the Innkeeper Motel.

Fizer, a retired Norfolk and Western Railway clerk and part-owner of the Fizer Funeral Home, said someone else beat him to the apartment site, too.

He says the authority had no faith in him and other black Roanokers. "We're still children" in the eyes of the city, he said. "We cannot handle our own affairs."

Now, when he drives by the Innkeeper with his grown children, one of them will say, "Daddy, there goes your hotel." The loss still stings.

"I'm proud of downtown," he says, "and I'm proud of the malls that have come up, but when I take a real deep look at it, I'm very, very upset that all the best of everything I had in my community has been turned into a million-dollar playground, and I got none of it."

by CNB