My internal map of Greensboro has overlays of the town as sketched by my father and his parents, inherited memories of things I never saw. It is a ghost city where street cars run on tracks through a busy downtown, the swells live in big houses on Summit Avenue, and Hamilton Lakes and the mill villages lie outside the city limits. It seems real to me...

                        
                      photo copyright Carol W. Martin/GHM collection

My newspaper column is about the way things never stay the same and how that's OK sometimes but less good sometimes, too.

Read the whole thing after the jump.

Remaking this place into someplace else

by Edward Cone
News & Record
6-26-05

About eight thousand years ago somebody left an arrowhead in what is now New Irving Park. Maybe its owner shot the arrowhead at some supper, or at another person. Maybe it just got lost. In any case it was there for my father to find eighty centuries later. 

My father had camped out on the wooded shores of Buffalo Lake in the 1940s. Twenty-five years on he took his children there to look for little pieces of a much more distant past. The bulldozers were just beginning to scrape the terrain for the new neighborhood, as an advance guard of the upper middle class prepared for the daring leap north across Cone Boulevard. It was the first time I would see Greensboro devour its landscape on a grand scale, and despite prolonged and repeated exposure to the phenomenon since then I've not quite gotten used to it.

The past is never dead, it's not even past, said William Faulkner, but chunks of  Greensboro's past keep disappearing. The Burlington Industries building, designed for the ages, came down to make way for an upscale shopping center. Acres along Bryan Boulevard are clear cut and the countryside in all directions is pocked with quaint-named instant villages that spring up like mushrooms after the rain. Even unmourned losses like the huge Sears warehouse on Lawndale take something of value with them, some part of the story of this place.

I know, grow or die and all that. One man's progress is another's pain. Some people still miss the trees and fields along Friendly Road that predated the steel-and-glass  box erected by Burlington only a generation ago, and I live without qualms on a street of fairly recent vintage. I wish the State of North Carolina would find some money to finish the Urban Loop (or the Urban Arc, as it seems likely to be known for some time to come) before I'm too old to drive. But I also know that the completion of that road will probably doom a nearby horse farm that is precious to my daughter, and that building little mansions across its pastures and trails will not make her think more fondly of her hometown.

There are still some places where the past persists, even in Greensboro, and not just where it is recreated and neatly packaged as happens at our truly very fine Revolutionary War battlefield. It's there in secret spots like an overgrown springhouse dating back to the late 1700s on an intact but besieged family farm north of town, and it exists as part of the living present at Buffalo Presbyterian Church on 16th Street, where the original brick building has watched the world change around it since 1827. Look carefully at the names on the weathered gravestones, and then look up those same family names in this year's phone book, and you can see some human continuity, too.

The history of a place is most often an oral tradition, kept alive by people who pass along stories they heard all their lives. My internal map of Greensboro has overlays of the town as sketched by my father and his parents, inherited memories of things I never saw. It is a ghost city where street cars run on tracks through a busy downtown, the swells live in big houses on Summit Avenue, and Hamilton  Lakes and the mill villages lie outside the city limits. It seems real to me, and relevant, context for how we live now and want to live in the future.

Not everything was better back then (back there?), not everything worth preserving. You can't maintain the past untouched. I'm glad they paved Cornwallis, even if it bummed my dad out at the time. An even older Greensboro than the one my grandfather recalled built its fine houses along Asheboro Street, known in more recent times as Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Today the Southside neighborhood is bringing new life to that corner of downtown, replacing the run-down splendor of another age with modern efficiency and style. 

A certain sense of impermanence, a question of what comes next, is a defining American trait, and sometimes it defines us too much in Greensboro. It's true that our oldest and most fixed points of reference are still relative newcomers to the land where somebody dropped the stone arrowhead that my father would find by the lake where he camped as a boy. But we ignore our young past at our own expense, and risk always remaking this place into someplace else.

© News & Record 2005

Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, [email protected]) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.

Comments

[Account Deleted]

I started reading your blog a month after you wrote this. This is a great column. I once wrote an LTE about "clusters of McMansions spreading like kudzu" across western Forsyth County.

I like your "mushroom" simile better.