Greensboro's Treasured Places

Architecture Really Does Matter!

For the first time in recent memory, architecture will be the topic of a public workshop and presentation here in Greensboro.

The October 18th event, entitled Architecture Matters! Downtown Greensboro and Beyond will feature Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin, who will make the case for the importance of architecture and design in our city.

This will be a real treat for Greensboro’s citizens, who hear little about the art form of architecture on a regular basis. The event marks the first time the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist has lectured in North Carolina. Kamin is a contributing editor of Architectural Record, and has served as a Pulitzer Prize nominating juror. He lectures widely and has appeared on national and local programs about architecture, including "CBS Sunday Morning," "NBC Nightly News," ABC’s "Nightline," and National Public Radio’s "All Things Considered." Kamin is the recipient of more than 25 professional awards.

He is the author of "Why Architecture Matters: Lessons from Chicago," a collection of his columns published by the University of Chicago Press."

Kamin’s presentation will be the culmination of a day-long exploration of architecture, development and historic preservation, including two interactive workshops and a walking tour. Greensboro historically has enjoyed periods of great architectural advancement, followed by periods of conservatisms. Alexander Jackson Davis’s Blandwood Mansion (1846), Charles Hartmann’s Jefferson Standard Building (1923), and Walter Gropius’s East Market Street factory (1944) are among the standouts in the city. In contrast, Greensboro’s award-winning modernist landmark, the Burlington Industries Corporate Campus (1972) was destroyed in 2004 to make way for an expanded shopping center.

Kamin’s lecture begins at 5:30 in the Empire Room at 203 South Elm Street in downtown Greensboro. It is free to the public. To learn more about this event, please visit http://www.blandwood.org/events.html#kamin

Thanks to the project sponsors Hyatt Hammond Architects, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the Craft Insurance Center, Fireman’s Fund Insurance, Preservation Greensboro Incorporated, and Downtown Greensboro, Inc. Special thanks to Judi Kastner, Preservation Greensboro’s dynamo organizer, for orchestrating the event for us!

Greensboro’s Tobacco Heritage, Part 3

To paraphrase a popular proverb, “it takes a village to raise a cigarette”…or a tobacco product. Nineteenth-century Greensboro was certainly one of those villages, with all phases of tobacco manufacturing (growing, brokering, and manufacturing) represented here. Certain phases of development grew in importance in the village, but in the end, consolidation changed the profile of the tobacco industry in Greensboro greatly.

Use of smokeless tobacco, or chewing tobacco, was wildly popular throughout the south in the mid-nineteenth century, and interest in smoked tobacco (cigars, cigarettes, and pipe) grew rapidly after the Civil War. Greensboro found itself in the midst of a territory that favored cultivation of high grade Brightleaf tobacco. Coupled with Greensboro’s excellent rail system that stretched to places such as Chatham, Randolph, Davidson, Forsyth, Stokes, and Rockingham counties, Greensboro became a central market for tobacco leaves. By 1892, thirteen “leaf houses,” such as the Cobb and Scott dealers of Tobacco Heritage, Parts 1 and 2, were located in Greensboro, each buying leaves locally and selling to manufacturers across the United States and even Europe.

As early as 1885, J. L. King and several partners established a plug and twist (forms of chewing tobacco) factory in Greensboro in a collection of brick buildings just north of the southern railway tracks. Unlike leaf buying houses, King and his partners produced a form of chewing tobacco in their steam powered factory. Stemming and clipping of the leaves occurred on the upper floor; the leaf room was on the second, and picking, casing, and storage took place on the first floor. The main four-story building was surrounded by auxiliary buildings and featured an unusual segmental-arched parapet gable. By 1902 the building is no longer marked on city maps, likely destroyed by fire.

The climate for the tobacco industry began to change around 1900. Historian A. L. Brooks promoted the idea that small independent manufacturers in Greensboro were crushed by tobacco “trusts” around the turn of the twentieth century. One such trust, the American Tobacco Company of Durham, was notorious for buying its rivals in order to reduce its competition. In the end, this consolidation of the trade coalesced the industry to Winston and Durham, leaving little remaining in the Gate City until Lorillard Tobacco Company opened a cigarette plant over 50 years later.

The changes at the site of the King factory are the most startling of this series. The image to the right was taken from the same location as the first; on the Southern Railway tracks. The factory was gone by 1902, but the area remained industrial through the 1960s. At that time, sweeping changes associated with urban renewal enabled city government to take an active role in redevelopment by acquiring private land for new roads, bridges, and buildings. The old grade crossing of Ash Street seen in the early image was replaced by an underpass in the 1920s, itself superseded by the Eugene Street overpass in the 1970s. Also in the 1970s, the 15-story Gateway Plaza was erected to provide public housing for elders.

Greensboro’s Tobacco Heritage, Part 2

The 1890s was a time of change for Greensboro, as the sleepy county seat with a smattering of manufacturing facilities grew into a small city laden with industry. Shaded village lanes (such as Elm shaded Elm Street) lined with ample Queen Anne-style residences gave way to hot dusty streets lined with brick tobacco warehouses, small-scale textile mills, and commercial establishments. Industrial expansion, enabled by a growing railroad network, was transforming villages across the state into burgeoning centers of trade and commerce, exemplified by massive industrial complexes on the outskirts of town such as Proximity, Revolution, and Pomona.

Illustrative of this growth and change was the H. W. Cobb and Company, a tobacco leaf dealer and a cross-town competitor of H. L. Scott reviewed in Tobacco Heritage, Part 2. Both Cobb and Scott were mentioned in an 1892 promotional brochure of Greensboro as “energetic, reliable and prosperous dealers.” The impressive brick building (pictured-right, and outlined in pink-below) that housed the business certainly illustrated its success, rising five full floors above the intersection of Greene and Gaston (today Friendly Avenue) streets.

Historian Ethel Stephens Arnett recalled this active period of change in her 1955 publication “Greensboro North Carolina, the County Seat of Guilford” by stating “In the industrial surge of the late nineteenth century, there were 3 factories and 13 plants where leaf was prepared for further manufacturing [in Greensboro], with tobacco coming in from Virginia, Tennessee, and South Carolina. Wagons which brought the raw plant into the Greensboro market covered several blocks; and farmers came from such distances that tobacco warehouses provided stalls for horses overnight while men slept on quilts spread upon floors of the building.”

By 1907, the building was occupied by the American Cigar Company, which was later taken over by the Seidenburg & Company Cigar Factory. R. J. Seidenburg operated factories in Tampa, Greenville SC, and Petersburg VA, and manufactured a well-regarded brand of very mild coronas. By 1925 the building had been destroyed, replaced by a series of storefronts and a five-story furniture store shortly thereafter. The classically inspired furniture building was, in turn, was reclad in the 1980s with a reflective glass curtain, and stands as the Investors Title Insurance Company. The image to the right was taken from the same approximate location as the first image.

Greensboro's Tobacco Heritage, Part 1

"Why doesn't Greensboro have big old brick tobacco factories like Durham and Winston-Salem?" The question is a good one, and one I get asked often. Considering Greensboro has been a tobacco center for over 100 years, why doesn't the city have great old buildings to show for it?

Unlike Winston-Salem and Durham, Greensboro's tobacco industry was not dominated by a single manufacturer at the turn of the twentieth century. Instead of the sprawling campus of R. J. Reynolds or American Tobacco, Greensboro's manufacturers were much smaller and evenly dispersed throughout Greensboro’s downtown. This made them vulnerable to redevelopment efforts as Greensboro grew in the mid-twentieth century. I hope to illustrate the fate of three prominent tobacco factories in this blog, to help answer the questions related to Greensboro’s missing tobacco heritage.

The H. L. Scott & Company was a leaf dealer in town, marketing tobacco from across the piedmont. The company’s fine, four-and-a-half-story brick leaf house (outlined in pink, right) was erected one block north of the center of town around 1891. The height of the building accommodated greater warehousing space, and loomed over the other one-and two-story buildings at the intersection of North Elm Street and Gaston Street (today Friendly Avenue). The building faced west overlooking North Elm Street featuring four full floors of space, with a half story beneath the ridge of its gable roofline. Double-hung windows, a parapet gable, and decorative brickwork completed the handsome ensemble.

The image to the right was taken from the same location as the first image. The H. L. Scott leaf house was altered in the early 1900s and converted to commercial space and shortened to three-stories. In the 1960s, Gaston Street was renamed Friendly Avenue, and pressure grew to redevelop the site. The 10-story office tower that stands on the site of the Scott building today was designed by the Raleigh architecture firm Valand, Benzing & Associates. Constructed in 1970-1971, it remains one of the best examples of modernist architecture remaining in downtown Greensboro from the period, and is know as the Self Help Center.

If you can’t stop progress, you better learn to steer it

The Guilford Preservation Commission, recently spotlighted in newspaper headlines due to staff cutbacks, has continued its quiet and steadfast work of saving Guilford County history…as well as steering new development to be compatible with existing architecture. The most recent review, the redevelopment of the William Fields House property, has resulted in a project makeover.

In the summer of 1982, the William Fields House at 447 Arlington Street in Southside was recognized as a Guilford County Landmark property by the city council of Greensboro at the request of the Fields House owner. The house stood out of one of three Gothic Revival residences in the city, and one of a handful that stood when the first city map was completed in 1879.

The designation included the house and its deep lot that extended from Arlington Street to Murray Street in the rear. Large lots like this were once common in central Greensboro, as urban residences often incorporated rural practices such as vegetable and flower gardens, work sheds, and even livestock. Through the years, the house and its grounds changed little, surviving a tornado in 1936, and conversion to office space. The house was well-known as the headquarters for the Olde Greensboro Preservation Society in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Fields House was purchased last year by the development company that drove the Southside neighborhood redevelopment project, with plans to redevelop the Fields site. Though demolition is always a threat, plans for the house appear likely to follow established protocol and design standards set forth by the Secretary of Interior in order to qualify for state and federal tax credits. In recognition of this, weight began to shift with interest in design review of the undeveloped rear of the property.

The developer and builder, Bob Isner, proposed "Fountain View," a four story building designed with neoclassical embellishments such as flat arches, quoins, and a Palladian window. This scheme, mirroring a project on North Elm Street (another Landmark property - the Country Club Apartments), was intended to bring some historical themes to the Southside site, and increase the diversity of architectural styles in the neighborhood.

However, the Commission had another suggestion for Fountain View. Why not unite the walls of the square by a common architectural theme, as is often seen in public squares such as Place des Vosges in Paris (pictured right) or Louisburg Square in Boston. By incorporating shared architectural elements, Southside Square would be strengthened as an outdoor space, and gain a stronger sense of place.

Bob Isner agreed with the suggestions of the commission, and enthusiastically went back to his designer, who incorporated established Southside Square design elements such as gabled rooflines, half-timberwork, solid window headers, and transoms with sidelights into the proposed façade.

Pictured here is a split image picturing the left half of the façade of Fountain View before design changes with the right half of the façade after changes. The differences between the two facades are clear.

In spite of the William Fields House losing an important element of its historic context due to the complexity of urban development, it hoped that its loss will amount to a small gain in the design and appeal of Southside Square. In this situation, the commission has influenced historic preservation and future development, both in positive ways.