Brandon Johnson & Robert Clark, GNP contributors
Few people in Greenville may remember a five-block neighborhood by the Tar River officially called Shore Drive.
The people who called it home called it “Downtown.”
The Sycamore Hill Missionary Baptist Church anchored it. Squat wood-sided homes sheltered at least 268 African American and 23 white families.
Oral histories picture it as a vibrant, thriving neighborhood that was more than 130 years old.
Then, in the 1960s, it vanished. Not overnight, but completely, nonetheless.
Today its remains live just below the grass of the Town Common.
GNP spent much of the fall 2021 searching for the history of the neighborhood. The quest was prompted by a Greenville City Council vote that summer that set the stage for commercializing the Town Common.
The old neighborhood, entombed below, scarcely got mentioned during the debate.
Neighborhood called ‘Downtown’
The Town Common hasn’t always been the grassy, tree-filled riverfront park that many know it as today. About 60 years ago it was home to a close-knit, self-supporting African American community.
“Everything that we needed was right here,” Alton Harris, who once lived in Downtown, recalled in an oral history recorded in 2017.
“There was a supermarket. We had our own grocery stores. We had our own little shoe store. We had our own doctors. We had a Black dentist, and we had the Black lawyers. Everything was right here,” he said then.
Harris grew up in Downtown, but like many other ex-residents he could only speak nostalgically about a place he used to call home.
Although the neighborhood may have been rich in community, the same could not be said about its infrastructure.
While there are many recollections of Shore Drive being a proud, thriving neighborhood, most of those voices come from inside of the community and speak of the people.
Outside voices speak less kindly of the physical conditions of the neighborhood.
Dr. Andrew Best, a long-time family practitioner in Greenville, recalled this about one Downtown home: “I could tell you that the house overall on the inside was what we would call uninhabitable at its best or worst.”
Best described the wood homes in Downtown as “shacks,” and he said he “could look through the floor at the ground.”
His gave his recollections in a 1999 oral history held in the digital collections of ECU's Joyner Library.
A 1966 “Neighborhood Analysis” prepared by the state for the City of Greenville described the neighborhood as “slum” with “many blighting factors.”
That analysis set in motion the city’s decision to relocate the Downtown citizens and level their community.
Time of ‘slum clearance’
On Sept.1, 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the U.S. Housing Act. Its purpose was “to provide financial assistance to state and local governments for the elimination of unsafe and unsanitary housing conditions, for the eradication of slums, for the provision of decent, safe, and sanitary dwellings for families of low income, and for the reduction of unemployment and the stimulation of business activity,” the Living New Deal website says.
In 1958, the Greenville City Council leaned into the Housing Act by creating the Redevelopment Commission of the City of Greenville, also known as the RCCG.
The RCCG wasted little time. In 1960, it marked the Shore Drive Redevelopment Project as its first project.
“From 1962-1982 the City of Greenville was a direct recipient of federal dollars” for redevelopment, Merrill Flood, a long-time Greenville city planner, told GNP. The federal statute required that the city use the money for the elimination of blight.
City sees ‘slum’ to clear
“Blight” is a word used often in official city documents of the time to describe the conditions of the Downtown community.
“Sometimes ‘blight’ was stretched. Sometimes actual blight was removed,” said Flood. But former residents of Downtown believe the city went overboard with the new federal funding and was unfair with the acquisition of properties.
According to an ECU Joyner Library summary of its digital Greenville Urban Renewal Files, the plan drawn up to acquire land around the Downtown community was estimated to displace “268 colored families and 23 white families.”
The payout for homes was low and the Redevelopment Commission’s own real estate agent said that “they were offering too little money for owners to sell their homes.”
There is also mystery surrounding the church's acquisition. Best claimed the RCCG and the city’s Housing Authority agreed to “just go ahead and develop around it.”
That is until the church caught fire and burned down.
After the church burned, the RCCG decided to purchase the land it occupied, which, according to the Greenville Urban Renewal Files, “caused controversy resulting in many charges being brought against the RCCG.”
None of the charges panned out, and “eminent domain” was cited as the reason. Under the concept of eminent domain, the government can take private property for public use
Although Downtown’s original home and business owners were upset by the acquisitions of the properties, “by some, it was believed the Shore Drive Redevelopment Project was an attempt at rebuilding this area of Greenville. Additional current thought was that most of the area was more suitable for land uses other than single-family residence,” the Greenville Urban Renewal Files say.
Town Common debate continues
The city’s 2010 Town Common Master Plan is designed to improve the 21 acres of parkland to accommodate more and more people moving to Greenville. All the while, the plan says, the history of the site and the citizens who once lived there will be acknowledged.
The 2010 master plan was responsible for the construction of the Sycamore Hill Gateway Plaza that now stands where the church once stood.
“Designed as a contemplative space for healing and remembrance, Sycamore Hill Gateway Plaza commemorates Downtown and its close-knit community,” the plaza’s website says of the monument.
The Gateway Plaza is the city’s attempt to give something back to the community that was destroyed.
“Downtown. They call it Uptown. Don’t say Uptown around me,” Harris said, chuckling, as he told the story of the neighborhood he grew up in.
Johnson and Clark produced this report for the Fall 2021 capstone course, In-depth News Reporting.
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