Hard work gave life to vision of downtown Fayetteville

Source: The Fayetteville Observer, N.存倉C.Sept. 05--When Army brat Malia Allen returned to Fayetteville in 1995, her mother said she had better not catch the 18-year-old downtown."Why, Mom?" Allen remembers asking. "What's downtown?"The response came in a whisper."Prostitutes and bars."In truth, most of the prostitutes and bars were gone by 1995. But so were most of the people.Downtown's reputation as a lurid blend of neon-lit topless bars, violence and crime lingered, enough to leave Hay Street a ghostly place, the promised revitalization painfully slow to gain momentum.But the overhaul of downtown could not have begun until Hay Street was rid of what then-Mayor Bill Hurley called its cancer -- the 500 block, the most concentrated strip of shadiness in the state."Nothing good can happen until you get rid of that," he said. "This was our image in the whole state and even the whole nation, because of the GIs. That was the sad thing about it."It was 30 years ago this summer that Fayetteville held an impromptu party to watch the wrecking balls swing into the first of those notorious establishments. That event was one of several fronts in the fight to revive downtown's fortunes that year, along with the first Dogwood Festival and the dedication of a statue honoring the Marquis de Lafayette, the Revolutionary War hero for whom the city was named.This weekend, many of the surviving city leaders of that era will gather to rededicate that statue as part of the annual Lafayette birthday celebration and to remember how the battle to revitalize downtown began.By the late 1970s, Hay Street had faded from the postwar boom that buoyed many American downtowns. All the department stores except the Capitol had been tempted away by Cross Creek Mall.The district was left with little but topless bars and tattoo parlors."They even had a topless tattoo parlor," said John Smith, the former city manager. He knew downtown's reputation when he came to Fayetteville as an assistant city manager in 1977, "but it was still a pretty amazing scene down there at night. It was rip-roaring back then."Bruce Daws is the city historian, but in the late 1970s he was an undercover narcotics officer who worked on Hay Street. He remembers the bright neon lights of the topless bars, one after the other along the 500 block and beyond."The sidewalks would be teeming with people just milling about," he said. "There would be fights that would break out, both along Hay Street and the back streets."On payday, the ranks of local prostitutes would be swelled by women from out of town brought in to take money from GIs flushed with cash.A military policeman was stationed at City Hall to process all the soldiers who would be arrested on Hay Street. There was a dedicated paddy wagon to ferry them back to Fort Bragg.The doors of the Prince Charles Hotel were constantly being kicked in by police conducting raids."For law enforcement people, it was one-stop shopping for all kinds of criminals," Daws said.John Swope, an industrial developer for the chamber of commerce who helped tempt the Kelly-Springfield tire plant to Fayetteville, told Hurley about a company from which he had a verbal commitment to come here during the 500 block's inglorious days."Much to his dismay, the CEO of this company flew in unannounced with his family one weekend and saw our downtown," Hurley said. "It killed the project."Something had to change, but demolition was not the only tack taken. The Downtown Merchants Association tried to reason with club owners."We went to them with a pitch that if they would clean up their act, get rid of the overt prostitution and the drugs, that we would help promote that section of downtown for the night life," said John Malzone, who was then president of the association. "We just couldn't get them to budge."Hurley became mayor in 1981, toppling popular incumbent Beth Finch on the promise that he would do something about the 500 block. But he had no clue how to do it."I'm not a developer. I had no earthly idea," he said. "I just knew there were a lot of people in Fayetteville who agreed with me."Smith, who became city manager in 1980, was one of them."There was a lot of inertia," remembered Smith, who is now retired and lives in Asheville. "There had been some plans made, but there were so many moving parts that nothing ever got done."What the effort needed, Smith said, was a start. Just some achievable goal, even if all the pieces were not in place.M.J. Weeks had the same perspective. Bernard Stein, owner of the Capitol, and fellow entrepreneur Bobby Allen had persuaded Weeks, a real estate developer, to run Fayetteville Progress Inc., the first downtown revitalization group."I always told them the only way it was going to happen was you had to make a big statement with something," Weeks said.But the 500 block seemed insurmountable."It was bigger than one person," Weeks said. "It was too many angles, too much to overcome."Weeks worked his connections with North Carolina National Bank -- now known as Bank of America -- to generate funding for a complex of upscale housing atop Haymount Hill, which looked down on the 500 block.But Weeks knew the project's potential tenants would not want to live that close to the bars, the neon and the prostitutes."He told John Smith and the council, 'If you get rid of the drugs and prostitutes at the bottom of the hill, I will develop 700 Haymount,' " Hurley said. "That was the catalyst the city needed."Not that it was an easy choice. The council could not use federal urban renewal grants to buy the properties because those funds included relocation assistance for uprooted businesses."The object was to try to get rid of some of that 迷你倉ess," Smith said. "We didn't want to just locate it someplace else."Instead, the council put up $3 million in local money and City Attorney Bob Cogswell went to work negotiating with some 27 business owners.Some questioned the hefty investment in downtown."It turned out to be a popular project, but there were a lot of questions about it when it first arose," Smith said. "It took political courage."On July 28, 1983, Hay Street "took a tumble," as described in the slogan on pins people wore that day. A crowd cheered as a wrecking ball smashed into the first of the 500 block buildings."I really think a lot of Fayetteville just suffered through a horrible reputation and a horrible self-image," Smith said. "I think a part of that party down there was the people of Fayetteville saying, 'We can turn this image we have around.' And the biggest part of that image is these two blocks of Hay Street. That's what everybody sees and judges Fayetteville by."Also that year was the first Dogwood Festival, headed by Malzone. Operating on a shoestring budget, a committee brought a host of existing events under one umbrella for a weeks-long celebration of the city and county."There are those people who have always loved Fayetteville," Malzone said, "but there are those people who have always wished they were someplace else, in those days especially. So it was a bit of a challenge."The festival survived and ultimately thrived. A cornerstone of the first one was the dedication of a statue in Cross Creek Park on Green Street commemorating the Marquis de Lafayette. For those who led the city at the time, the statue stands as a monument to a belief in downtown's future.Martha Duell came to Fayetteville from France after marrying an American soldier during World War II. She had established the Lafayette Society in 1981 and set about raising money to have the statue built for Cross Creek Park.But Duell did not seek pledges from the city's high rollers."She did it the hard way, with bake sales and various little fundraisers," said Hank Parfitt, a downtown merchant and current Lafayette Society president. "By 1983, she had raised enough money to have a dadgum statue out there. That's incredible.""I wanted it to be a gift from the citizens and not from the big shots," Duell said. "So a lot of people helped build, helped put the statue up there, and that's what makes me feel good."Eventually, Cross Creek Park became part of the Linear Park trail, one of dozens of downtown improvements in the past three decades, large and small, public and private. Some proved more popular than others.Hurley caught a lot of flak for the dozens of expensive cast-iron pots that appeared on Hay Street one Sunday morning. They had been ordered by an architect overseeing the beautification project. A reporter overheard a councilman referring to them as Hurley Pots, and the name stuck."Now I have to explain to my eight grandchildren why their name is associated with all these pots," Hurley said. But he feels time has vindicated them."It took Raleigh 20 years later to get their pots," he said. "We blazed a trail."Though the leafy, paved Hay Street concourse is far removed from the chaos of yesteryear, downtown still doesn't bustle the way the leaders of 1983 expected."We were hoping, I guess, that once we got rid of all of that, that people would come back to the downtown area," Hurley said.But they didn't. Not in large numbers, not for years."It was excruciating," Smith said.Gradually, developments followed: Closing the Hay Street mall to traffic, then reopening it; an All-America City Award in 1985; new City Hall, Police Department and Public Works Commission buildings; the Airborne & Special Operations Museum that squashed what was left of Hay Street's bawdy past; the mixed-use development on the 300 block.Downtown groups advocated for the district. Robin Kelly pushed for a 10-cent downtown tax to support it and also fought to save some of the historic facades. Investors such as Ralph Huff and Menno Pennink kept faith in the area.There also have been failures: The Docks at the Capitol project; the struggles of the Hotel Prince Charles to stay viable; the doomed plans to build an art museum.But slowly, steadily, commerce has once again taken root downtown. Allen, the Army brat who came home in 1995, moved her Bumbledoo baby boutique to Hay Street from Franklin Street in July."I love it," she said. "I'll never go anywhere but downtown."Stephen Wheeler has watched it all from Holmes Electric, a cluster of family businesses that has operated from the 100 block since 1908."It was a bustling center, then it became sporadically used center," Wheeler said. "It was a ghost town; now it's a thriving new downtown again."Wheeler said his family often discussed moving the businesses, but his father, Luke, was a steadfast believer in downtown and gave up a lot of business to stay there."My dad said one time he wanted to make sure he stayed and supported downtown," Wheeler said. "He knew it was going to get bad, but he believed in downtown."Wheeler said he has seen other derelict downtown districts bounce back fast with new identities. Hurley reckons that should be put in perspective."It seems like a long time," he said. "But not when you've got a town as old as this."Especially since one part of downtown had to die so the rest could be saved."I guess," Smith said, "you had to destroy the village to save it."Staff writer Gregory Phillips can be reached at phillipsg@fayobserver.com or 486-3596.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 The Fayetteville Observer (Fayetteville, N.C.) Visit The Fayetteville Observer (Fayetteville, N.C.) at .fayobserver.com Distributed by MCT Information Services自存倉