Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 26, 1995 TAG: 9503280008
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Rarely has such a short road been so long on money and frustration.
Wells Avenue is just one-third of a mile long, but the state and the city of Roanoke spent $5.8 million to turn it into a grand entranceway to the city and Hotel Roanoke.
The street reopened a week ago and has wowed lots of neighbors. ``Honey, it's just simply beautiful,'' says Evelyn Williams, who lives a block away on Gilmer Avenue. ``I call it `The Boulevard.'''
Eighty-seven period street lights are still to be installed and it's too cold yet for some plantings, but most of Wells Avenue's finery is out: the blooming serviceberry trees, the little-leaf lindens, the cherry trees, the dogwoods, the timber-frame bus shelter, the pedestrian plaza, the stone walls and the elaborate landscaping.
There were three contentious years of public and private meetings on the widening of Wells for hotel and downtown traffic. Gainsboro residents urged city leaders to be kind and remember that much of Gainsboro and all of an adjacent black neighborhood were destroyed years ago to build roads, public buildings and businesses. As a result, the government turned away from plans to tear down a dozen homes and soon will have spent $619,000 to move and remodel the only two Wells Avenue homes finally displaced for the four-lane road.
The new Wells is loaded with curtsies to Gainsboro. Roanoke landscape architect David Hill and his staff at downtown's Hill Studio designed a ``Gainsboro/Roanoke'' logo pressed into street-light poles and the metal grates at the bases of trees. African grasses soon will be planted on the hillside along the street, and Gainsboro history will be recalled in artwork for the pedestrian plaza.
The team used Gainsboro residents' ideas, Hill said, in the design of the ``Historic Gainsboro'' signs that will stand at each end of the new road and the sand-set bricks in the sidewalks. Designers photographed trees and architectural details on other Gainsboro streets so Wells' new features would echo the rest of the neighborhood. The landscaping, street lights, bus shelter and other ``enhancements'' cost the city $644,000.
To Evelyn Bethel, president of the Historic Gainsboro Preservation District Inc., this high gloss obscures deep rifts between her neighborhood and the city. She leads residents who still are against both the Wells realignment and construction to begin in late summer of another four-laner along Second Street through Gainsboro.
``The pretty designs are nothing but wallpaper over a very deep hole,'' she says.
At a November 1992 news conference announcing the final plans for Wells, City Manager Bob Herbert unveiled seven programs that would be put into action, with special attention to the people of Gainsboro: training for 400 jobs to be created by the hotel and its adjacent conference center; housing rehabilitation; a ``professional park'' for new minority businesses; a small-business loan pool; minority contracts for hotel renovation; expansion of the Gainsboro library; and minority participation in the planning of nearby Henry Street.
Bethel says she has heard complaints that black residents of Gainsboro are not getting hotel jobs. A white man who attended gatherings of hotel workers told her he was seeing few black workers, and two black applicants called Bethel to complain that they weren't hired.
She referred them to the leaders of four community organizations who broke away from her years ago to broker Wells Avenue plans with the city. They include her own pastor, the Rev. Kenneth Wright of Gainsboro's First Baptist Church.
Another of those leaders, Alvin Nash, deputy director of Total Action Against Poverty, says the Wells widening was an ``infringement'' on Gainsboro but a reasonable one: ``It was about as good as it's going to get. There was a lot of care, I thought, to get everybody's opinion.
``The question is, is [Gainsboro] any better off than it was before construction? I think it is. I think the value of the neighborhood should go up substantially.''
As for jobs, Nash says he doesn't know how many blacks and Gainsboro residents were hired. ``Is it a fair representation of the neighborhood?'' he asks. ``I'll have to wait and see. There's no question that Doubletree [operator of the hotel] is aware of the effort to train people.''
Doubletree Hotels' humans relations director could not be reached for comment.
Some of the carrots dangled by the city at that 1992 news conference are going to take awhile, Nash says. As TAP's housing director, he's organizing home-buying seminars for Gainsboro, but expects it will be a couple of years before there's a measurable increase in owner-occupied and renovated homes. Other initiatives, like the professional park, he says, are more closely tied to the Henry Street project just getting off the ground.
Gainsboro's biggest threat, Nash says, is the neighborhood's divided leadership. ``The stakes are too high to hold grudges.''
``Right now, I think there needs to be a strategic plan for Gainsboro.'' Nash says it should come from the neighborhood itself, not the city, and perhaps from some new thinkers.
He would like to see the focus move away from black Roanokers' mistreatment by the city in the past. ``I agree with all that's been said,'' he says, ``but it doesn't develop a house or develop a block.''
Bethel agrees; but, she says, her organization developed a Gainsboro revitalization plan more than three years ago. It included a proposal for a medical center, a snack shop and a small grocery. ``We have not had a chance to get it off the ground, because every time we look up, city leaders are coming over here with additional development.''
Thelma Washington, a hairdresser on Gilmer Avenue, and many of her neighbors say Wells is attractive. ``It's right pretty,'' she says, but she wishes the street had been left alone. ``I don't feel too well about it, but what's done is done.''
The apprehension lives on along the streets of Gainsboro.
``I hope they don't make me move,'' says Lullaby Curtis, 80, who has lived half her life at the western end of Wells, three blocks from the hotel. She became nervous recently when a man called about buying her rental house. ``I can always walk downtown when I have to,'' she says. Besides, she says with a chuckle, ``I have too much stuff in here.''
by CNB