Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 16, 1995 TAG: 9505160070
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In readers' answers to the question we posed a few days ago, no obvious consensus emerges. As indicated in the selection of responses published on today's Commentary page, a variety of ideas were offered.
A few common themes, however, run through the suggestions.
Like the dog in the Sherlock Holmes story that was a significant clue because it didn't bark in the night, proposals for big, start-from-scratch projects may be remarkable for their general absence. The emphasis, rather, is on further development or utilization of existing resources (such as Mill Mountain Zoo, Roanoke Regional Airport and Explore Park), or on ideas that do not involve much by way of bricks and mortar.
An exception, of sorts, is Jack Spraker's entertainingly written proposal to build a major-league prison in Roanoke ... though did we get the impression that his tongue is firmly planted in his cheek? Other, more straightforward exceptions are calls for a major low-cost housing initiative and for a new Roanoke city library.
Preserving old buildings - for example, the historic, but empty, Norfolk and Western Railway offices across the street from the hotel and convention center - drew as much interest as putting up new ones. Suggested uses for the old NW offices: downtown apartments, space for an urban university, a casino.
This is part of what could be considered, albeit in a broadly defined way, the single theme that comes closest to dominating the responses: the theme of transportation.
Under that rubric could be collected not only ideas for the adaptive reuse of the old railroad offices, nor for that matter ideas only for improved transportation in its traditional economic-development role as mover of goods and people. Also raised is the notion of developing transportation themes, such as museums and greenways, that themselves would both draw tourists and improve livability within the region in a way to enhance its attractiveness for economic growth.
For now, anyway, transportation as a regional specialty is more a trend of thought than a movement, more a diffuse tendency than a sharply focused blueprint. Perhaps the most comprehensive suggestion is from McCluer Sherrard of Martinsville: that Roanoke become The Transportation City via a multisite Virginia Museum of Transportation with such attractions as a railroad devoted exclusively to recreational excursions.
His ideas may strike some as, if not outlandish, then at least impractical and unlikely. But whatever comes of them, those ideas display a couple of noteworthy characteristics. First, they feature the concept of synergy - the interaction of several localities, of Virginia Tech and its surrounding region, of different modes of transportation - to get a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Second, they assume that the Roanoke region needs to find its own niche based on, to use Sherrard's word, its own persona.
By virtue of its history as the NW headquarters, Roanoke has an emotional connection to railroads; one danger of emotional connections is that they can make us forget to watch out for the rocks of hard reality. Neither, however, should we dismiss too readily the power of emotional connections to transform dreams into doable deals.
Emotional ties may well have spelled the difference between success and failure of the Hotel Roanoke project; without the emotional connections that Roanoke's old Jefferson High School held for many, its renovation probably would not even have been attempted. Will memories of Roanoke railroading prove the next major force for the region's economic advance?
by CNB