Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310074
SECTION: STREET BY STREET PAGE: 10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Twenty-three more Gainsboro homes were targeted, along with 21 businesses, including George's Grocery, which stood at Centre Avenue and Third Street for 70 years.
Former City Council member James Harvey said the neighborhood was so decayed that politicians were frightened when they toured Gainsboro before the city won a federal grant for Coke. "I kid you not," he said. "We were afraid to get off the bus over there, because it was a slum area - people sitting around drinking wine."
A Roanoke Times & World-News editorial said the project would displace "a number of dilapidated buildings that serve as breeding grounds for blight and crime. ... It should also be a stabilizing force for the rest of Gainsboro."
Cora Lee Wilson's boarding house at 330 Loudon Ave. N.W. was in the bull's-eye, too. She'd been there 40 years.
Luther Wilson, her son, said his mother had chickens and an outhouse in the back yard when she first moved there in the 1940s. She added a bathroom, a back porch, a kitchen and a dining room. "She even dug up the basement herself," said Mary Wilson, Luther's wife.
"She didn't really want to go nowhere," he said, "but they started talking about eminent domain. She had to leave everything she'd built up and start over again."
He said it wasn't right for the city to pay his mother only $13,000 for her house, then give it to Coca-Cola, which profited from it.
Cora Lee Wilson bought a house on Hanover Avenue Northwest, where Luther, his wife, Mary, and some of the elderly boarders from Gainsboro still live. Cora Lee Wilson caught pneumonia and died not long after they moved.
The boarders, most of them old bachelors who got $150 each for the move, were disoriented when they went searching for old friends. "When they moved up here, they were a little frightened," Mary Wilson said. "A couple of them did get lost and we had to hunt for them. That's where they lived all their life, down there."
Luther and Mary Wilson own the Hanover Avenue house debt-free. They work the night shift - she as a weaver, he on the balljoint - at Precision Fabrics in Vinton.
As they were being moved out of Gainsboro, Luther and Mary Wilson were told they might get jobs at the Coke plant. The city used the lure of Gainsboro jobs to persuade the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to lend Coke $4 million for the expansion.
The Wilsons went to the housing authority and to the Virginia Employment Commission to apply. They were turned down. "Everybody we talked to, I think they got the same runaround they gave us," Luther Wilson said.
A few Gainsboro residents work at the Coke plant now, but others hired shortly after people were moved out soon were laid off.
Twenty property owners went to court, saying the seizure of their homes was unconstitutional because it benefited a company, not the public. Others said the city's offers for their houses were below fair-market value. A judge ruled that the city could condemn the homes because Gainsboro was "blighted."
Charles Davis, then the housing authority's community relations officer, said he felt people were not treated fairly.
"Since the city had a plan for the land," he said, homeowners should have been paid at commercial or industrial rates. "I think everything was sold at residential values, and they were depressed values at that. But I don't think the city ever leveled with the people about what they were going to do or how it would affect them."
Some former Gainsboro residents and business owners place part of the blame on Taylor, the first black on council and the mayor from 1975 to 1992, for what they say were missteps in the Gainsboro project. "He could have delayed it. I don't think he could stop it," says Claudia Whitworth, publisher of the weekly Roanoke Tribune. Her former office on Henry Street was torn down by the city.
Few would be quoted by name criticizing Taylor. One man said, "I don't have nice words to say about it."
"Sure, there were times when I wanted to do things differently," Taylor says, "and I engaged in dialogue along those lines. There are things I would have done very differently." He declined to be specific, saying he'd resolved not to cast judgment. "Mayor Taylor had his day."
by CNB