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

DATE: SUNDAY, April 2, 1995                   TAG: 9503310111
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: G-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

URBAN RENEWAL"S DEVASTATION

Not all the people displaced by urban renewal in black Roanoke were black themselves.

Some were Lebanese-American families who had run groceries in those neighborhoods.

There was snow on the ground the Sunday the special section was published and Roanoke life insurance agent Henry Monsour, 40, said he gathered his son and three daughters around him. He showed them the section's old photographs of Northeast Roanoke and told them how their grandfather, his dad, once ran a store there.

"Not only was this part of the history of the black people," he said later. "It had a lot to do with the Lebanese community back in those days, a lot of them struggling, trying to make a living and support their families."

His father, George Monsour, was born in Roanoke in 1909 and baptized at St. Andrew's Catholic Church in Gainsboro. As a young man, George Monsour worked in a relative's store on the west coast of Africa. Then he brought his wife, Isabelle, and their first children to Roanoke. In 1951, he went into business as George's Grocery at 214 Kimball Ave., N.E.

In the early years, the Monsours and their three eldest sons lived in an apartment behind the store. By the time Henry and his sister were born, the Monsours had moved to a home in Northwest Roanoke.

Henry worked at the store as a boy. His father sold fresh chickens, bologna by the slice, kerosene for heaters, wine, beer and a full range of other groceries. The Roanoke City Directory shows George's Grocery gone by 1969, torn down in Roanoke's second wave of urban renewal. The city's main post office now stands in that spot.

George Monsour received about $6,000 for his land, business and the apartment in back, Henry Monsour said. "My father never recovered from that. He tried to open a couple other stores," but they failed. At retirement, George Monsour was unloading tractor-trailers at drug stores, his back still aching when he got home. He died in 1982, when he was 72.

"It devastated his life and our life," Henry Monsour said of urban renewal. "He ended up dying with very little assets, but he never lost hope. He was a very religious man."

by CNB