Monday, April 30, 2007
Roanoke, don't make the Chapel Hill mistake
From the RoundTable blog
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Get rid of the "weenie stand"? Displace half the City Market vendors? Good grief, Roanoke civic leaders, whatever are you thinking?
I write not as a Roanoke resident, but as a frequent visitor to the Star City from Blacksburg. Like many of our fellow Blacksburgers, my wife and I very much enjoy our visits to the market area and the wonderful flowers, produce and other items sold in its outdoor stalls. We like meandering from vendor to vendor, stopping for lunch or, if we're there later in the day, enjoying a glass of wine and then staying for dinner.
We also have great fondness for Center in the Square and have many a happy memory of shows we've seen there. We have enjoyed the art museum and look forward to visiting its new incarnation when the swooping, dramatic new building opens. The science museum has given us a fine place to take grandchildren, as well. Twists & Turns, Orvis, On the Rise and Say Cheese are high on our center-city visit list, too.
Occasionally we cross the covered pedestrian bridge (I still say the city should have named it "Bridget") to pay homage to the city's Grand Old Lady, the Hotel Roanoke.
But in Roanoke, as in all cities great or small, businesses come and businesses go, including a few very pleasant ones that formerly operated in Roanoke's City Market area.
The point of all this is to make a plea for leaving the market vendors alone. They and their stalls provide great color and charm. Remove them for a new Center in the Square entranceway and/or fountain, and you will lose something you very much need to retain.
Years ago, in the 1960s, a similar "civic improvement" was made in downtown Chapel Hill, N.C. There, the shopping street's charm and color was in large measure attributable to the Franklin Street "flower ladies," sweet, pleasant older ladies who sat beneath parasols selling bunches of beautiful cut flowers.
Then change came to Chapel Hill in the form of scruffy beatniks, later called hippies, who joined the flower ladies on the sidewalk, selling New Age trinkets that included drug-related paraphernalia. People complained, and the town leaders responded by banning all street vendors.
Gone were the marijuana cigarette papers and mysterious little pipes. Gone, too, were the flower ladies, and with them, the street's charm. In the years that followed, fewer people came there to shop, and one by one, stores closed. Today, this once-vibrant shopping street has a surprising number of empty storefronts, considering its excellent location.
What Chapel Hill's leaders did was a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
It is doubtful that building a nice new entrance to Center in the Square will result in attracting a single additional patron. Also, as delightful as a fountain would be, it's likely that people would actually prefer the human interaction they now get from the market's vendors.
As is, the City Market isn't perfect, but it is real. It isn't a tourist attraction tricked out to look like a movie set or theme park.
OK, maybe it's not quite as real as it once was in the heyday of its prostitutes and winos, and probably this sanitizing change has been for the better. Yet in its present state, this part of downtown Roanoke is the genuine article. Roanoke, please think carefully before you follow Chapel Hill's example and displace those vendors -- and downtown's charm.
Riley is a communications professor at Virginia Tech.
