Exile

Under the circumstances, it seemed inevitable that it would come down. Going all nostalgic: the Belk wing had Record Bar, Red Baron, and, I think, Chick-fil-A, among others. That was the part of the Mall I most visited, including Belk. Well, Baskin-Robbins, Eckerd, and Heyward Mahon, too. Eckerd at Christmas when I was really young to buy those cheap Ronco gimmicks that I thought my mother would like--and never worked.

There are so many things that can derail a scheduled groundbreaking, etc., that I think it's fair to say not being on schedule is business as usual.

No doubt. Laurens could use the boost, too. South of McAlister, on the east side of 291, the commercial parcels are all really narrow. Sherwood Forest backs up really close to the road. A big challenge not to just build more little standalone retail buildings. On the other side, though, plenty of room. As long as Tanners survives unscathed... I suppose, in addition to McAlister's demise, the departures of both Dan River Mills (early '80's; from the building directly across from BB&T and the nearby ugly white 4-story box) and J. E. Sirrine (from what is now the Buck Mickel Center; some time later) deprived that area of a decent daytime population of engineers and other moneyed professionals. I don't know who inhabits the larger building in between--the "252 Building," as we called it. Walt Brashier used to own it and had his office there; maybe still does. I mention all that partially out of nostalgia, partially to observe that whatever Renaissance that part of 291 experiences will likely depend on some significant office component. Otherwise it'll be "flyover country." But pulling that off would require cobbling together parcels, which is way easier said than done. So I'm not holding my breath.

Incidentally, growing up in the 60's-70's, we never called it "Pleasantburg Drive," and that was at least largely true of, e.g., radio and television stations. It was, in fact named "Pleasantburg Dr.," but colloquially it was always "291" or "291 Bypass." Has that usage fallen by the wayside?

Imagination running wild here: The window of opportunity for this may have already passed (assuming such window ever existed), but it'd be great if a developer were to, say, attach an appropriate office building and a Hampton Inn-level hotel, and push it upscale (kind of like what they did with GM). Puppies&Kittens is right: Parkins Mill and Augusta Road did & would definitely support a well-done concept. I haven't paid any attention to McAlister in a long time, though. If Tech were to relocate student services, there's still the University Center, right? And if so, what real mall potential is there if non-retail tenants are still using a lot of space?

Seems to me it's the only way Greenville could become a >1 mall town. I can't remember the last time I saw a mall under construction. Anywhere. But maybe I'm just not looking in the right places.

Blackbeard's treasure?

Yeah. I was thinking that, with that roof pitch, at its highest point it might get close to Embassy Suites height. But hard to tell.

It's Rudolph Anderson. That's a pretty significant editorial miss by the News. Gordon was the schools Superintendent, and to my knowledge, has no jets dedicated to his memory.

According to Google Earth, Japanese Dogwood Lane just east of Main is 921'. The sidewalk in front of City Hall is 966'. I'm guessing this building will top out roughly equal to City Hall in elevation.

The last post before this was GMan's own claim that the site is cursed. Now it's "the hotel." Are we being punked?

That building was originally the Plaza Theater. I'm sorry to hear it's going to be demolished. I've always had a faint (and admittedly unrealistic) hope that it would be revived as a theater, maybe along the lines of the Enzian in Maitland, FL (outside Orlando).

Not a problem. We agree to disagree. I will say, however, that the level of certainty that you're expressing is beyond the knowledge of even the most well-connected, successful agent, developer, or city/county representative. You're essentially saying that you have sufficiently detailed knowledge of every single instance both currently and historically to speak absolutely. Sorry, but your burden of proof is way bigger than mine.

All I'm doing is accounting for location decisions based on the knowledge that I have. I haven't made any absolutist statements. I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that a city might be able to come up with some sort of incentive to lure to the CBD even those companies who have good reasons not to locate downtown (though you don't seem to think that such good reasons exist, as far as I can tell). But the fact remains that some companies prefer (even strongly prefer) *a* (particular) suburban location (not "suburbia" in general). I get that this is Urban Planet, and believe me, on one level I'm with you. But not everybody loves urbanity. That's just the reality, and we live "next door" to those people. As for Apple, I'm speaking of their 4th campus, which, e.g., Raleigh is still in the running for. Of course Apple has a presence in some CBD's. I never stated or implied anything different. What I said was that, for their 4th campus, they *prefer* a suburban location. I did not say (or imply) that, come hell or high water, they're going to locate in the 'burbs. Who knows, they may put up a supertall in mid-town Manhattan. But if they do, it will be against their initially expressed preference.

You'll have to take my word for it. I know this professionally first-hand, and I also know it via friends who are decision-makers for their own companies. I'm not operating from newspaper reports, so I'm not inclined to do the research to satisfy that--fairly arbitrary--demand. But then, in another thread, someone just (today) noted that the "Greenville Snooze" isn't particularly reliable with details, so what you're asking for wouldn't be particularly authoritative, anyway, even if I found something to support what I'm saying. But I'll grant you this: they don't generally say "we want to be in suburbia." They'll say something like, "we want to be along 385 not far from Southchase." Or "the closer to Spartanburg the better, without leaving Greenville," (meaning really Greenville County, less likely the city) or the like. Six of one, half dozen of another.

I don't disagree with you in principle. To be more transparent, pretty much all my statements have an unwritten, "Given that we're unfortunately locked into this crummy (if not corrupt) system of government incentives..." prefixed to them.

A few observations: 1) Lower cost is huge. 2) As for consulting employees, some do, some don't. I'm aware of examples of both. It is true, though, that the larger a company gets, the less employee input there is in this kind of decision, if for no other reason than the cacophany that it would create by giving everybody a voice in the process. 3) These decisions are made with boards and stockholders looming in the background. It may be a bad decision, but that doesn't mean it's not a rational one. 4) It's not the company putting the cost of the infrastructure (such as there is) on the backs of taxpayers, it's the municipal government. Go after them. 5) As for why TD paid for empty space for so long, I'm as flummoxed about that as you are.

None? You don't know that, which you demonstrate by immediately shifting to probabilities. All it takes is one counter-example to blow your theory. Apple, for example, which has publicly expressed its preference for suburban locations for its next campus, wherever it lands. And I know first-hand of companies who don't want to be downtown (in Greenville). Period. This can be for a whole host of reasons, some of which you've more or less accurately summarized. And if Greenville gets out-competed by Mauldin, then bravo for Mauldin. What's good for Mauldin is good for Greenville, and vice versa. We're all in this together. Greenville's Goliath might learn something and not fall to Mauldin's David next time.

Great pics, but this angle makes me long for the day when that old Bowater parking garage is no more (that imaginary day).

I don't get the vitriol. This is more proof that some people/companies just don't want to be downtown, no matter how great we think it is. To each his own. Don't get me wrong--I wish they'd stayed downtown, but for every reason to stay, there's a reason to leave, and for some the latter is more weighty. Who am I to cast aspersions--it's their $$? But we can certainly learn how to make the CBD even better so that the inflow exceeds the outflow. ("we" as in those tasked with marketing Greenville). BBT moved into what amounts to an operations center, right? No point in having that downtown--that move makes sense to me. And I think TD's suburban campus is very nice and, as some on this forum have noted, makes a great statement on I-85, along with Hubbell, ICAR, and the developing hotel village. Yes. It's an opportunity--or at least that's the way Greenville's marketers need to be looking at it. You never know: there might be a whale out there that wouldn't look at all without big blocks of available space.

How historic is it? Built in the 30's or 40's? Not sure that qualifies. I actually knew the owners back in the 70's. If it's the same family (this would be children or even possibly grandchildren), then not much to do. We can disapprove, but there are houses just like that one going up all over the place.

That's right. That Publix's survival amazes me; but I wonder what effect HT will have on it. Interesting to see.

I don't subscribe to market failure theory. I do believe markets can be distorted, but only by governments or quasi-governmental bodies (e.g., the Federal Reserve). I also believe that entrepreneurs occasionally miscalculate. Overdevelopment is a case of miscalculation, and so (don't throw anything at me!) it may be the case that Camperdown's 15-story addition, if it includes a lot of office space (which I'm pretty sure it does), would be ill-timed if it goes up any time soon without signed leases. Even if you factor in govt zoning and approvals, if the developer is allowed to proceed, the government becomes a co-miscalculator, but one with no exposure, unlike the developer. It's fine for local govt's to say, e.g., highrises here, midrises there, lowrises over there, etc. (via zoning), but trying to use zoning like a sheepdog to herd developers to specific areas--meaning tenants in reality--doesn't make any sense to me. Since it's the developer who directly bears the costs of failure, and since they're trying to please tenants, they should be given a pretty wide geographical latitude, IMO. But let's say that the Camperdown office building does go on line with a bunch of empty space, and Greenville's vacancy rate goes up. Rent will go down, which can be a very good thing, because it may be incentive enough to bring in one of the big tenants that everybody wants downtown. Office vacancy is cyclical just like everything else. As for the malls, McAlister opened in '68, BT in '70, GM in '77 or '78, HM in '80. McAlister and BT coexisted pretty well. GM didn't seem to do any damage to them either. If zoning were to have been exercised to "fix" the situation, it would've had to be HM that got nixed or moved or whatever. And anyway, what you're suggesting seems to me to be zoning writ way too large. GM wasn't even in the city limits when it was built, if memory serves. It seems to me that most retail areas are cyclical. It's no surprise that Bell Tower declined, along with DT in general, a major death blow in my opinion being the departure of all those medical offices from Pendleton to Faris and Grove. As for McAlister and GM, it seems really to have been Dillards' purchase of Iveys and JB White, and then consolidating them down to one store at Haywood that precipitated their declines (not the whole story, of course). How long did McAlister operate as a mall? 30 years? That's not a failure. Even Bell Tower, as marginal as it always was, lasted a dozen years. Not exactly a failure out of the box. But both were relatively quickly repurposed in good ways. So IMO McAlister went from success to success, and BT from margin to success, by redirection of that capital to (by that time) higher and better uses. The only real mall miscalculation in Greenville was that redo of GM (which operated for well over 20 years), though even there, nobody could have foreseen the compounded effect of Ward's liquidation+JBW's purchase-and-closing. That was "a series of unfortunate events." The real mistake was increasing the size of the mall. They should have shrunk it--cozy would have worked better for the high-end they were targeting. Hindsight... You're right about infrastructure costs, and that's a limitation that could be reasonably applied to development. If developers know they have to pick up the tab for extension of infrastructure--which is eminently reasonable--then they're much less likely to go out into the hinterlands; but it wouldn't unnecessarily sheepdog them into specific pre-defined locations either.

Seems to me it's not whether that crowd (to which I don't belong, for the record) goes bonkers, but where actual prospective tenants want to be. If, say, a desirable company with no previous ties to Greenville were to want 80K SF, but refuses to go downtown to an existing 80K, and Joe Developer proposes a building in suburbia to accommodate them, what would you do? Ultimately overdevelopment of office space is on one or more developers; it's not a thing for government to fix. It's entrepreneurial miscalculation, which happens. And since people who have skin in the game (entrepreneurs) calculate better than those who don't (government officials and other bystanders), there's no reason to believe government manipulations will do anything other than make a less-than-optimal situation worse. (E.g. as I understand it, Apple wants its second HQ in the burbs, or at least not in a DT area).

So, like Camperdown, the office building for the current tenant will be built before anything else happens on the site. Makes sense. According to Google Earth, Cobb Tire's building is at 937 ft. The highest point on the entire site (not including the buildings on the other side of U. Ridge) is rougly 980 ft. Here's hoping they truck in a mother lode of dirt to raise the base of their "iconic" building so that those people walking around on top of it in the renderings aren't looking in the first or second story windows of adjacent buildings. I think that raising the ground level along U.Ridge and Church--a relative drop in a $1 billion bucket--would make that County office building really stand out, and done well, could make for a pleasing facade for the whole development. Or build the mother of all parking garages to level it out and to build on top of, like at Camperdown. But that would likely make for an ugly facade.