Cayla Menges & Hannah Bolick, GNP contributors
Pinning down what kind of commercial structure the Greenville City Council wants to build on the Town Common is a bit like playing Whac-a-mole.
Out of one hole pops the latest idea, set in motion in June: a cafe, maybe with a rooftop patio, as council members describe it.
Out of another pops an in-progress plan for a 6,000 to 12,000-square-foot “event center/civic building,” as the city’s design contract with The East Group says.
Out of yet another pops an 11,000-square-foot “event center & restaurant project” from a 2016 update to the Town Common master plan.
And out of the first mole hole pops the 2010 master plan and its “multipurpose civic building” and cafe and flexible meeting space and outdoor patio.
Something commercial may be built at the Town Common, the city’s public-owned central park. But what, it is hard to say.
The Greenville News Project spent four months looking into the Greenville City Council’s intentions for commercializing an area of the Town Common. It found that what officials say does not always match various on-paper plans.
What they say
To The East Group’s project manager, Myriah Shewchuk, the commercial development of the Town Common will feature a “civic building.”
She is spearheading the creation of a schematic design of what the development of a recently rezoned 1.4-acre riverfront space could look like. The design is part of the Town Common Master Plan’s long-term vision for the park.
The design features a “living shoreline”, which Shewchuk said would eliminate the current bulkhead and incorporate a more “natural” water’s edge by including vegetation native to riverbanks and streams.
“In that plan, it does include the removal of the bulkhead and implementation of a combination of walkway and living shoreline along that water’s edge,” she said.
Although the 2016 update to the master plan features the idea of a living shoreline, Shewchuk said there are no immediate plans to remove the sidewalk along the bulkhead by the Tar River. Still, its removal is listed in the master plan as a “long-term vision.”
As for the proposed civic building, Shewchuk said it will be elevated above the floodplain based on floodplain ordinances in Pitt County.
“Our goal is to practice sustainable, resilient design, taking into account the fact the Town Common more frequently inundates [floods] with the more severe weather events we get,” she said. “So, we need to be incredibly smart about how the building is sited, about how the water’s edge is treated.”
The East Group is an engineering and architect business. Its task for Greenville is to incorporate a civic building into a 1.4-acre space in the northeast corner of the Town Common that does not have the same land use restrictions as the rest of the park.
Alongside a civic building, Shewchuk said, the master plan features a kayak rental facility, but it does not currently have a specific location.
A civic building on the Town Common is an opportunity for a public-private development partnership, Shewchuk said.
“It will really help with developing, helping with recruitment, retention of the downtown, of the economy of the area, really taking advantage of our urban waterfront,” she said.
GNP reached out to all Greenville City Council members and one, Rick Smiley, agreed to an interview. After numerous attempts to contact the others, Brian Meyerhoeffer replied by directing GNP to city employees.
Smiley said the council has discussed the civic building being a “meeting space.” He said the council intends for the space to include a cafe.
“If you imagine a small building with a grill on the first floor and some bathrooms and that the roof, somebody can rent [it] out for a wedding reception or a party then, OK, yeah, that's a convention space,” Smiley said. “But nobody was ever talking about putting anything within a normal person would think of as a convention center there.”
When asked about the city’s characterization of the proposed building as an event center, Smiley said he believes there is a distinction between an event center adjoining the amphitheater, as was the original plan, and one that stands alone.
“So I can understand why a citizen would look at that and think, ‘are you just moving that [the event center] to here and keeping it at the same scale?’ I don't think that… this part of the park supports that level of scale,” he said.
During the June 17 city council meeting, following a presentation on the proposed Town Common development, Smiley asked Assistant City Manager Michael Cowin to confirm that the most recent conceptual designs included the construction of one 4,000-square-foot building and one 1,000-square-foot building.
Cowin confirmed that.
Former Greenville City Council member Marion Blackburn, speaking during the public comment period of the meeting, referenced this size estimate and said she believed it should be smaller.
Then, Mayor P.J. Connelly asked Cowin to reiterate what both the 2010 master plan and the 2016 update say about the size of the commercial building intended for the Town Common. Cowin said the plans show an 11,000-square-foot event center and a separate kayak and canoe rental facility.
“OK, so it was always, for the last 11 years, in the plans, there’s always been a large structure,” Connelly replied.
The city council next met about the Town Common a few days later. The council’s original intent was to rezone 5.23 acres—26% of the 20-acre park—for commercial development.
Smiley moved to reduce that to 1.4 acres, and to define a new zoning category for the commercial use of parks. He said this would make clearer to the public exactly what the council’s intentions for the space were.
The council approved the smaller size but rejected creating a new zoning category.
During that debate, council member Will Litchfield said citizens who contacted the city about plans to rezone part of the park seemed to be confused about what the city wants to do.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity to have some event space, an ice cream shop, kayak rentals,” he said.
“Again," he added, "it seems that there are one or two, or maybe even more than that, individuals in the community that are providing misinformation about what’s going on down there or it's going to be developed into some huge metropolis, and it’s just not true.”
What the documents say
While there’s not a metropolis in the 2010 master plan and the 2016 update, they do show a sizeable structure.
In 2009 the city surveyed citizens to find their priorities for the Town Common. The results listed “Vendor Spaces” as the last of eight priorities. The first was a pedestrian bridge connecting to River Park North and the rest included memorials, “public structures” and restrooms, and river access for boating.
The 2010 plan said the public structure could include a café or snack bar along with the public restrooms. It also envisions a civic building “which could house a cultural museum, art galleries and a space” to rent out for public or private events and could include a second-story patio.
As for the vendor spaces, the plan seems to envision temporary “vendor tents.”
The plan says the main reason for including private enterprise on the Town Common would be to “fund a park management corporation to maintain and manage the Town Common.” It also said the enterprise would be an “addition tax base” for the city.
The discussion of the private enterprise at this point in the document included cafes, restaurants, gift shops and newsstands. It also describes an express service retail location and a canoe, kayak and bike rental location.
In 2016, the master plan was updated and the civic building morphed into an “11,000 Square Foot Event Center With a Cafe, Restrooms, Office Space, Storage Space and Expansive Views Out Into the Park,” a recent presentation slide says. It also included a kayak rental facility and renovations to the amphitheater.
This version was still intended to be located adjacent to the existing amphitheater.
That presentation, made to the City Council on June 17, referred to the proposed structure as an “event center/restaurant” that would be built and operated by an independent developer.
“The event center/restaurant would be a premier first-class venue for: meetings, convention events, weddings and other private events, city hosted events, indoor and outdoor dining with views of the park and the river,” a slide said.
The presentation named as examples Greenville’s private-sector Rock Springs Center, The Martinsborough and 400 Saint Andrews event centers.
In 2018 The East Group began work on a Request for Proposals (RFP) for the development of a “restaurant/event space.” The conceptual design shows two buildings: one labeled “potential restaurant/event space” and the other labeled “potential retail space.” Now the examples were Milestone 229 in Columbus, Ohio, and the FedEx event center in Memphis, Tennessee.
In its most recent proposal to The East Group, the city says the structure is to be “consistent with building uses and sizes identified in the 2016 Town Common Master Plan.'' Verbiage in this document referred to the structure as an “event center/civic building.”
The document said the building’s size could range anywhere from 6,000 to 12,000 square feet. That’s double to quadruple the size of the total square footage of the iconic SupDogs eatery at East Fifth and Reade streets.
There is no set date for when the city will receive the RFP from The East Group. That makes the start of construction on whatever the council intends to build on the Town Common just as hard to pin down.
Menges and Bolick produced this report for the Fall 2021 capstone course, In-depth News Reporting.
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