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

DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995                   TAG: 9501310079
SECTION: STREET BY STREET                    PAGE: 7   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THE LOSS STILL STINGS

Zenobia "Zee" Ferguson heard about urban renewal from the women who came into her beauty shop and from Theodore Holland, who ran the Hilltop Confectionery down the street from her house on Chestnut Avenue in Gainsboro.

"There was so much ambivalence on the part of citizens because of the nature of the Northeast development," she said.

This time, she thought she could force the city's long-term plans into the open. She became chairwoman of the Gainsboro Project Area Committee in the early 1970s.

She wanted renewal to begin on Gainsboro's innermost streets first and work outward. If homes were rebuilt first, she thought, stores to serve those people would follow. She figured industrial developers would push those plans so they could get the land they wanted - on the outskirts of Gainsboro.

Instead, she said, the opposite happened. An industrial park and Innkeeper motel were built on Gainsboro's northeastern edge, and the Coca-Cola bottling plant took over the southwestern corner. The good things for the people and their neighborhood life never came, she said.

"I couldn't give you any concrete reasons, but the citizens' input wasn't used," she said. "It was on paper, but the city and the housing authority worked around it."

Ferguson and her husband, Willis, reluctantly left Gainsboro in 1976. They had remodeled their three-bedroom stucco house. Zee Ferguson's beauty shop was out back. Willis Ferguson's mother planted roses and other flowers in the front yard.

They bought a more expensive ranch house in a subdivision off Cove Road. Some neighbors did the same; others, especially the ones who had been renters, have been in Lansdowne Park or other public housing since they left Gainsboro 20 years ago.

In the end, Zee Ferguson said, the community was torn apart. "There was no building onto what we already had. It was all destroyed and left void. There's no store an elderly person could walk to. ... It was left barren."

She watched people die waiting for a new house. "There were some people who got really ill. They were going to meetings and the next thing, we were going to their funeral. I knew what the people had been through, people who worked from sunup to sundown, and maybe it didn't look like something to other people, but it was their life's blood."

by CNB