Pride and Surprise: We had many conversations with residents of Greenville about the story of the town center’s revitalization as an exciting, attractive, busy place. All sorts of people talked with us: city officials, developers, educators, artists, shopkeepers, restaurant owners, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, journalists, students, parents of students, and wage earners. Two sentiments about the town prevailed: pride and a sense of surprise.

The first we almost expected. Of the more than half dozen towns where we have spent time over the last several months, I would say they all share the trait of having intense pride for investing in, among other things, the revitalizing of the downtown space. This was true in Sioux Falls, Holland MI, Burlington VT, Rapid City, Eastport ME, and Redlands CA. This same sense of pride came through clearly in the thousand or so responses we received in the “nominate your town” request to suggest places we could visit. (Here was the original nominating page, still open for new suggestions.) People love their hometowns and what they are building there.

The second was unique, so far, to Greenville – the surprise from residents at how quickly and broadly their town has improved. Greenville reports on itself that it had a long way to go. The vision of Mayor Max Heller in the 1970s to rebuild the town after the collapse of the textile industry to one of culture, recreation, and commerce was beginning to see some results after a long decade. But even into the 1990s, people recounted to us, there were not many reasons to go to Main St., and there were a lot of reasons not to. There were few restaurants and lots of empty storefronts. The now elegantly-restored Westin Poinsett Hotel was “the tallest crackhouse in town” hitting its nadir after its demise from a grande-dame hotel to a retirement home to abandonment. The general warning from residents to each other was about the derelict nature of the southern edge of downtown, including the traffic bridge that crossed the Reedy River above its natural falls. “Don’t go near the bridge,” people today said that people used to say. Now, people generally marvel at the changes over the last 15 years.

Folksy language: You know you’re somewhere when people say, “Katy, bar the door!” in the middle of a conversation. And you know it’s a place where people don’t cautiously spoon out their language, wary of soundbites. Here is an example:

One piece of the plan for rebuilding Greenville included demolishing the traffic bridge over the Reedy River, a bridge that hid the view of the falls beneath it, and for prettying up the space around the falls with a park complex. Fifteen years of controversy roiled over an idea that was embraced by some and met with strong resistance by others. “Why take down a perfectly good bridge?” asked a group of people who were happy to let things be, and who didn’t see river revitalization as an attractive proposition. “The River, Yuck!” as it was “all kudzu and poison ivy.” By today’s retelling, these folks were all about “Katy, bar the door!”

Well, the bridge did get demolished, the new Falls Park area with the elegant pedestrian Liberty Bridge was dedicated in 2004. And so much more was developed or restored: the Swamp Rabbit Trail along an old rail bed for runners, walkers and bikers, the Peace Center for the arts, old textile mills, the restaurants and brew pubs, specialty shops selling everything from Jerky to ice cream, the ice rink, the Fluor Field, the in-town baseball stadium which is now a bookend to the west-end (which is actually to the south) development. “It used to be a mile’s a ways out,” but now walking that distance to the field suggests that expansion is going to continue a ways beyond that.