Residential renaissance: Changes make downtown living more attractive
Residential renaissance: Changes make downtown living more attractive
About 1,500 people live in downtown Greensboro, twice as many as there were just five years ago.
While the city center has become a comfortable and even fashionable residential area, the pioneers of urban living had a lot of negative attitudes to overcome.
“We couldn’t get any financing,” said Jerry Leimenstoll, who, along with his wife and fellow architect, Jo, began to convert an old store building on South Elm Street into their home in 1985. “We went to every bank in town. And I’m not exaggerating. I remember this one guy just laughed at us — he literally laughed in our face that we wanted to borrow money to live downtown.”
Sometimes the resistance took the form of skepticism or fear of urban crime.
“It’s a conservative town — at least it was when I lived there,” said Erin Murphy, a Baltimore native who moved into The Lofts at Greensborough Court in 1991 when she came from New York City. “‘Why would you ever want to do that? Why would you want to live downtown?’ ... The perception of our co-workers was, ‘You guys are weird.’ Everybody wanted to live in the suburbs with a big lawn.”
Why indeed? Residents say they love the convenience and urban feel of living downtown, and the number of restaurants and cultural outlets. But they would like to see more basic retail services, such as a grocery store, that are abundant in other areas of the city that houses more than 258,000.
“One of the huge benefits downtown offers is the access to cultural amenities, nightlife and recreational opportunities,” said Ed Wolverton, president and CEO of Downtown Greensboro Inc. “There are almost 50 restaurants you can walk to.”
Other attractions include three theaters, parks and public spaces, a library, coffee shops and a bakery, he said. CityView at Southside apartments and other residential spaces have helped attract more shops and services to Elm Street and Southside, and city leaders expect a planned $165 million development project at the corner of Elm and Lee streets to have a significant impact.
“There are many, many great amenities that people find very valuable,” Wolverton said. “We’ve got all sorts of nice things that make downtown Greensboro desirable.”
There are many more amenities now than there were when the Leimenstolls and Murphy arrived years ago. Murphy now lives in Atlanta and works as a senior product manager for the Internet service provider EarthLink. She came to Greensboro when she worked as an editor for the now-defunct Omni magazine, which moved its offices from New York, and she lived here until 1996. At that time, there were no more than a dozen restaurants downtown, most of them open only at lunch, and not much in the way of nightlife. Now there are 47 restaurants downtown, many of them open for dinner, Wolverton said.
Downtown living has gotten a boost from people like Murphy and the Leimenstolls who brought a different attitude to the city, said Russ Clegg, who works as a neighborhood planner for Greensboro’s Department of Housing and Community Development and lives on the edge of downtown in Fisher Park.
“This neighborhood was pretty solidly back to life when we moved in,” he said. “Where Aycock, we’ve kind of watched it take more halting steps. Southside’s a whole other interesting kind of case of a neighborhood that took off when people didn’t expect it to. But again, I think a lot of people who moved into that were not from Greensboro. I think it will depend on people moving here from elsewhere.”
Clegg and his wife, Angie Smits, are Triad natives who returned to the area in 1997 after a decade in Brooklyn. They left New York for a more affordable place to raise a family.
“If you had grown up in Greensboro, it never would have occurred to you to live near downtown,” said Smits, part owner of Southern Territorial Associates, a book publishers’ representative. “You would live out in a subdivision. The fact that we lived in New York and came back here, this was the kind of neighborhood that we wanted to live in. When relatives came to visit us, it was kind of funny — Russ’s nephew was looking around kind of surprised and said, ‘I thought it would be dangerous.’”
People commonly assume downtowns are dangerous, but crime statistics show them to be among the safest neighborhoods in any city, Wolverton said. A “perceptional survey” conducted by DGI last year showed that people generally feel safe in downtown Greensboro. On a scale of 5, the survey returned a 4.3 for how safe people feel downtown during the day and a 3.4 for how safe they feel there at night.
Clegg and Smits are raising two children at the northern edge of downtown, just as the Leimenstolls raised two children at the southern edge. Ramsay, 20, and Will, 18, spent their entire childhoods living in downtown Greensboro.
Will says the only real drawback of growing up in the downtown area was the absence of other families.
“I wished that I was living in a neighborhood more, just so I had neighborhood friends,” he said. “I would go to friends’ houses in Sunset Hills a lot, and just walk around the neighborhood. It was a lot of fun, and I couldn’t really do that here. But since then I like it a lot more. I didn’t ever dislike it, I just wished I had neighborhood friends.”
Their parents are grateful that the family’s pioneering efforts have finally paid off. Nearly 25 years after they got laughed at for trying to get a loan to build a home downtown, financing is no longer an issue.
“We’ve been tenacious, that’s for sure,” Jo Leimenstoll said. “It’s very rewarding now that we can get an appraisal for our property that reflects what we’ve invested in it. That was a long time coming. We were never doing it for that, but it’s very good that we’re now at that point.”
Contact Eddie Huffman at 373-7335 or eddie.huffman@news-record.com.
The Leimenstoil family 071909
The Leimenstoll family enjoys the tree-shaded patio behind their home on South Elm Street in Greensboro. The family moved to downtown Greensboro in 1985 and has seen it evolve into a fashionable residential area. Residents say they enjoy the proximity to restaurants and cultural outlets, as well as the urban feel of living downtown, but they also would like to see more basic retail services, such as a grocery store.
