(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 579: Greensboro’s Downtown Greenway

This week on the Talking Headways podcast we’re joined by Dabney Sanders, Project Manager of the Greensboro Downtown Greenway. We chat about opening the final section of the Greenway after 25 years of work, the amazing art projects on the route, and lessons for other cities wanting to build greenways.

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Below is a full unedited transcript of this episode:

And I did some volunteer work for them, and then started doing some consulting for them, and just kind of eased into this project. , but I will say I was really intrigued by the idea of this Downtown Greenway because I had grown up in Rhode Island, and we had an old rail trail that was converted into a greenway called the East Bay Greenway, and it was just such an amazing facility that I enjoyed personally, and I was kind of excited about the opportunity of bringing something like that to our community here in Greensboro.

We’re sort of located in the center part of the state. We’re the third largest, , city in North Carolina, and we traditionally, you know, have had a big manufacturing base, textiles, cigarettes, furniture, big industries for us here in Greensboro historically. And as those industries have changed, um, we now are, are changing as well, and are doing a lot in the aerospace industry now, which is kind of exciting.

And we are- Really thinking about these kinds of placemaking amenities that will attract people who wanna live and work here so that we can support that workforce that we need moving forward.

And so the foundations decided it was really worthwhile for them to come together and think about a couple of things. One, pooling all of those resources f- from the foundations to really put some money behind some ideas. But they also wanted to take a grassroots approach rather than a top-down approach.

And so they did a lot of community engagement, and were asking the community to think about, “What are the things that you love about Greensboro? What are our strengths? What are the things that we should try to build upon and support?” And then also, of course, getting people to think about some of the challenges that we were facing.

And so from all of that community engagement, Action Greensboro sort of developed a plan based on that community feedback of how, , some initiatives and some efforts that we ought to work towards in order to keep our community vibrant. And one of the things that came out of that was this idea of having a very strong center city being important, a strong downtown being important to the entire community.

And so a master plan for Center City- Was commissioned, and it was in that master plan that came out in 2001 that the Downtown Greenway was envisioned as a key part of that master plan.

And then the other idea, we had a minor league baseball team and stadium that was located just kind of on the northeast corner of our downtown, and it was an aging facility. And the master plan called for that baseball stadium to be moved, , into the heart of downtown, and that also was done. Both of those projects were done 100% with private funding to make that happen, and both of those projects have had an incredible impact on our community.

And the Downtown Greenway was sort of the third leg, probably the most complicated of those infrastructure projects, and we’re excited that we are finishing that up as well.

This has been a project that is 25 years in the making, an incredible public-private partnership. Um, the foundations that support Action Greensboro really drove the project in the early days. And of course, we knew that for this project to be successful, we needed a very strong partnership with the city of Greensboro, and that was established.

And after 25 years, it feels really good to be getting the four miles open.

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Um, it’s paved in both asphalt and concrete, sort of depending on where it is, and it serves a lot of different purposes for us here in Greensboro. It certainly, um, defines downtown Greensboro. It’s a very physical structure that defines our downtown. It kind of expands the perceived footprint of downtown as well because in Greensboro we have a very strong main street that is called Elm Street, and east and west of that a few blocks we have a pretty strong center.

But then if you got four and five blocks out, we had a lot of either, , surface parking lots or empty land that was ripe for development, and we felt that by building this Downtown Greenway as that definer of downtown, it would also attract other private development to come in and around it. And that has happened.

, so that’s… So the idea of defining downtown Greensboro, expanding the perceived footprint. It serves as the central hub of our entire greenways and trails system in our community. We connect eight different neighborhoods directly through this Downtown Greenway, and it’s very much a transportation facility as well as a recreation facility.

The city is actually working on a little gap in that trail system of about two miles that will connect- The Downtown Greenway to that A&Y Greenway. And if you get on the A&Y Greenway, you continue heading north, you end up running into the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, which is a very important trail across the state of North Carolina from Murphy to Manteo.

And if you get on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail and head east to Durham, North Carolina, you connect up with the East Coast Greenway, and that is a 3,000-mile greenway that is running from Maine to Florida. About 1,200 miles of that greenway has been completed, and the East Coast Greenway Alliance is working very hard and hopes within the next 10 to 12 years to have that full 3,000 miles connected.

But you can imagine once that c- our connection happens, you are then connected to this much larger, important system. And we think that will do a lot for bicycle tourism here in Greensboro, both helping people in Greensboro get out and explore, but also bringing people into our city.

Kind of see all those together. Is the greenway different now than when it was envisioned in terms of, like, what changed along the way or things, processes that might have been different? I mean, 25 years is quite a, a bit of time, and so I imagine some things have, have, have maybe not quite the same as they were when they were, , s- you know, started out.

There were some changes. They had, , set the route out and there were, , we had to make some adjustments in a couple of sections because either we didn’t have the right of way that we had expected or there was another challenge in that way. But for the most part, we were able to keep the rough framework of encircling downtown Greensboro.

And they had also been the ones that had recommended this idea of including public art as a part of what we do, and they had some kind of general ideas. You know, they had suggested that Greensboro has some really interesting and important stories to tell. Our, um, textile industry story and, um, we have quite a civil rights- history story here.

And they thought it was an opportunity for us to share those stories. And so we took, we basically took their idea, and then of course, got a little more specific and detailed as we were thinking about really getting it on the ground. And we found that to be incredibly effective of telling the stories, not only those broader stories, but as an example, we also have neighborhood benches that we commission North Carolina artists to produce for us that represent each of those eight neighborhoods that we pass through.

And it has proven to be something that the community has really responded to, and we feel that that aspect of the Downtown Greenway sort of sets us apart from some other greenways, particularly in this area. We had a tagline in the early days that we said, “Bringing us together and setting us apart.” And we really feel like that sort of encapsulates what this Downtown Greenway is doing for our community.

Barbara Peck has led our public arts selection panel since 2008, so she’s been in it for the long haul as well. And for each of our pieces, we will craft and send out a call to artists, and then that arts selection panel will review those calls. We will narrow down to a list of finalists that we interview in, in many cases- We’ll do a Zoom interview with, let’s say, you know, seven, six or seven candidates, and then we’ll pick the final three, two or three people that we’re really interested in and we actually bring them to Greensboro.

We found over the years that it, it really makes a big difference when you can have somebody and share a meal with them and have some social time as well as that pure sort of interview time. We really get to know the artists, and it gives us a sense are, are these folks that we feel like we can work with and will be a good fit for our community.

And then that, , art selection panel votes and selects the finalist who gets the commission, and then they also help sort of shepherd that process through as that artist is doing their community engagement work here to inform their piece and, of course, all through the design and ultimately the installation.

And so we are transitioning to the City of Greensboro having full maintenance and ownership and operational responsibilities for the Downtown Greenway, and we’ve set aside… We have a memorandum of understanding and kind of a vision for, , things that the city ought to think about, and one of those is being open to those opportunities that might present themselves in the future for public art.

So I imagine something similar is happening in Greensboro where you guys put out some art that, , local artists have created, and there’s a conversation or maybe somebody, , , is new to the scene and, and gets famous, , and b- becomes a part of the community in that way. So I think that’s interesting, too.

We were… I… Looking back on it, I feel very lucky that Brower was the artist we selected because- He was so knowledgeable and so good at his craft that we were kind of new to it. We, we didn’t know as much as we do now, of course, 25 years later. And, , he really did an amazing job, , sort of setting the bar there.

But we had a little bit of criticism in the beginning that why had we selected this national artist instead of picking a local artist? And what, what Brower did when he got here, we were making a lot of community connections for him, and he met a local artist that he just really hit it off with, and he ended up commissioning that local artist to help him with the project.

And we heard later that they had developed such a rapport working with each other that Brower then took him, our local artist from Greensboro, and had him work on a project of his in California. And that would’ve been an opportunity that this local artist probably would not have had on his own, and we just love that it was such a positive experience for both of them.

And we were really pleased, um… Again, we did a, a national call for artists as well as a call to local artists for that piece, and Radcliffe Bailey, , really rose to the top. I have to say we were a little surprised that Radcliffe made an application for this piece, because he was just working on, um, a level at which, you know, I wouldn’t have imagined that our budget would have been something he would have wanted to work with.

But he was very intrigued by that topic. His, Radcliffe’s father had been a railroad engineer, and so Radcliffe, , his work typically dealt with African American history and culture, and his work often will have a railroad theme somehow embedded in the work. And so we were really pleased to commission Radcliffe to do that piece.

And what he envisioned with that, he actually took… It was… We had a little bit larger site at that Freedom Cornerstone. We had done some major roadway work there to make the intersection safer and to get the greenway in, and so we had some excess- Right of way that, that Radcliffe could use. And he took, um, an image of a Dogon ladder, , from the Mali people and on the western coast of Africa, and he kind of overlaid that Dogon ladder.

That’s sort of the framework of the pathways that run through that Freedom Cornerstone site that you would see from overhead. And then the piece that he created, um, the, the major piece, which is called Ascension, , has a quite a large concrete base that is in the shape of the hull of a ship that’s been dry docked, and so that’s referencing Middle Passage.

And on top of that is a metal structure that you can interpret as a railroad track. It looks like a railroad track, and of course, that is another sort of historic divide between Black and white communities. , and but you can al- and also a reference to that Underground Railroad. But then you can also look at that structure and interpret it not as a railroad track, but as a ladder, and start thinking about people sort of ascending beyond their circumstances.

And on the top of that, um, metal structure is a, a neon star, a bl- that’s lit at night, it’s blue, and that’s referencing the North Star. And of course, if you were traveling on the Underground Railroad, you’d be traveling at night under dark, and so you would use that North Star as a guide to be sure that you were continuing to head in the right direction towards freedom and safety.

And I loved what Radcliffe shared, um, when he had the idea of that neon star. We had done our community engagement meetings with Radcliffe in a nearby historic site called the Historic Magnolia House, which was a Green Book site listed in six different editions of the Green Book. And it’s a, has been beautifully restored, and it’s a really nice place to, , have a meeting, so we held those community meetings.

And the owner, , Natalie Pass Miller, was giving Radcliffe kind of a behind-the-scenes tour, and they went into the basement and there was an old, kind of broken down neon sign that had been the original sign for the Historic Magnolia House. And so that kind of triggered to him, oh, that would be sort of a cool idea to do a neon sign, and then of course, thinking about that North Star.

And as you say, , lots of communities were building these highways through their towns to make that separation. So we did have that same experience in Greensboro in the late ’60s, um, early ’70s. And the… I guess the good thing was that, um, that highway didn’t extend further into another African American neighborhood called Old Asheboro.

There was some neighborhood opposition to that, and the rest of that highway system was never built. So we were able to actually take some excess right of way from that overbuilt roadway and, um, create a much… It’s, it’s actually a much safer environment for vehicles, and it also, of course, allowed us to create this very nice environment for pedestrians and cyclists as well.

Um, I also… It’s really wonderful hearing stories of how other people are using it. We have been hearing of families who are using the Downtown Greenway, um, riding their bikes to take their kid to school. We know that, , people and families are getting together with friends and using it either to maybe go downtown to a restaurant or a bar.

We have a lot of run clubs, and we have some cycle clubs that use the Downtown Greenway regularly for that. Um, so I, I love the fact that the community is embracing it in a lot of different ways.

There’s so many different things that you can use it for. I’m wondering also how the Green- Greenway acts as green infrastructure as well. There was some mentions of bioswales and other, , you know, infrastructure things that could help with stormwater runoff and that type of thing.

We recognize that Building this kind of facility in a very urban environment gave us a real opportunity to make a difference in that way. And we worked with a design firm that really had a specialty in storm water management. We were intrigued by that. So we have installed the first innovative storm water treatment facilities on a roadside that were ever done in Greensboro, and we wanted to…

These are these tree wells that basically are capturing water. , instead of the water running down the street, you know, down the gutter going straight into the storm drain system, these tree wells encourage that water to actually flow into the tree well. And there’s a highly specialized soil that’s designed for drainage, and that water, , begins to get some filtration just through the natural microbes that are in the soil.

And then of course, as that water dissipates, it’s just dissipating down into the groundwater system. So you have less unfiltered water that’s going into the storm drain system. And again, because of this public-private partnership, we felt this was probably something that the city, I don’t think, would have done on their own.

It had never been done in Greensboro, and we thought, “Why don’t we use our Downtown Greenway project as an example?” Kind of a little pilot project to show how effective they can be. And of course, they’re beautiful as well. If you think about that area, I think some communities call it the verge, which is that area between either a sidewalk or, in our case, the Downtown Greenway and the roadway.

You know, that little strip of grass there. Often it’s just a strip of grass, and with these tree wells we have a much wider space and we’re allowed… It gives us the opportunity to plant trees and other shrubs there. So you have this beautiful environment, as well as an environment that is environmentally friendly and sustainable.

Of course, we won’t see those direct effects right away. It’s kind of a longer term vision for that. But in addition to the tree wells, we have one section that has solar powered lighting. It was the first solar powered lighting that Greensboro had installed. We have lots of pollinator gardens as well. We started out with one and had such great community feedback to that.

And the more we thought about, , these various pockets of gardens that could– that go along the Downtown Greenway, we thought creating these little pollinator coordinators, again, in this very urban environment, would be something nice to do.

Obviously, some of it, part of it, is in a, in a kind of a trail section where it’s off on its own, but then other parts seem to be next to that, that road that you talked about, and then others seem to be parts of sidewalks almost.

If you had to purchase all of the right of way for this, , in your center city, the cost probably would be prohibitive. Um, but in our case, we had that divided highway that you and I were talking about earlier, Murrow Boulevard, which was a six-lane divided highway, did not carry a lot of traffic on it.

We knew we could take at least a full lane of traffic out of that to convert, so we did not have to do right-of-way purchasing for that because the city owned it. That’s on our east side. On the west side, we had a railroad corridor that had one commercial user using that line, and we had the sense that maybe we could convince that commercial user not to use it any longer, and we could do a rail-to-trail conversion on that line.

I will say we were successful with that. Um, we did have to pay for that. It was… We were naive in the beginning, thinking that the railroad might just abandon it. Um, but that’s not how it works.

I will say we did not have to do as much right-of-way acquisition as you might imagine. Um, it was more kind of little bits and pieces that we might need here and there. W- there were a few properties. Um, one of the properties for one of our cornerstones in the northwest corner, our Tradition Cornerstone, had been a gas station and a convenience store, and we just knew, being right there in the corner where it was, , that we, we wanted that property, and were lucky enough to be able to purchase that.

Um, so we had a lot of cooperation, , even from some private property owners. In, on the northern section, , we had very tight right of way. We did not have… We had just not even quite what we needed, and we had a property owner who really believed in the project. And when we approached them- , about needing additional right of way of, of their property, um, they actually donated the right of way instead of asking for that compensation because they knew what this project could do for our community, and they also knew that ultimately this project would increase their own property values.

And, um, so we… I feel very fortunate that we were able to acquire most the right of way that we needed in a way that wasn’t particularly painful outside of the railroad negotiations.

But people did have concerns about, oh, are people gonna be, you know, we g- are we gonna have people walking up into our backyards and that sort of thing. And we did, um, work with those residents. We, um, offered to build a fence along all of those backyards, and we offered to put gates in those fences at our expense that the property owners would control so that they would have access, because people were very excited about the Greenway happening.

They just wanted to make sure that they had some protections of their property. And of the… There were probably 16 or so residents, and of those, all but one of those residents requested, , that gate, and we took that as a real sign of people appreciating the project.

Did it wax and wane with different mayoral administrations, or was it, was it just continuous support for the project?

Um, this Downtown Greenway connects or goes through Four of our five city council districts. So in a way, that was a very nice thing because we had a lot of buy-in from people who had a direct interest. You know, their, part of their district was a part of the Downtown Greenway. So we’ve, we’ve been very fortunate that we’ve had, um, really good support from not only our elected leaders through our city council over these years, but also from our city staff and our city manager’s office.

Lots of… We’ve worked with, I say we’ve worked with, I feel like, almost every single department within the city in some way over the years with this project, and the city staff has been really incredible to work with. I will say in the early days, you know, as I mentioned, this idea for the Downtown Greenway was driven by the private sector, by Action Greensboro, and I don’t know that the city staff loved the idea at the beginning.

But as, , the private sector put money into it and we did all this due diligence and we began to see how the community was responding to it, the city staff really came along. And of course, over these years, the interest in bike/ped infrastructure has only continued to grow. And I, I would say we were kind of a front runner in that.

You know, um, we did it pretty early on when it wasn’t, greenways weren’t totally the hot thing that they are today.

That really came in 2008 when we had a first bond referendum locally that put local public money into the project to join that private money that had already been raised. And I think in hindsight, it would’ve been nice to have sort of gone and really had that partnership from, almost from day one. I think that it’s always nice to have more funding.

I mean, this was a, a big project and it was… I feel very proud of the private money that was put into the project, over $14 million. I also feel really proud of the city of Greensboro because they not only were willing to put two bond referendums locally to dedicate money to this project, but they also used that local money to leverage money from the state, from NCDOT, and then also leveraged money from the federal government.

We have some federal highway funds, um, that we have used, and it’s really nice to have- For a, a project of this size, for a city the size of Greensboro, to have that money from outside the community makes a big difference. But there are things that I wish that, you know, it’d be nice to have a few more million dollars to really do some additional things that would make it even better than it is already.

And I can really envision long-term this being such, just an integral part of people’s lives. I hope that we will see more people walking and cycling places, and not quite so car-dependent. You know, we have a lot of people who don’t think twice about driving a mile to get someplace, when it would be very easy to either bike or to walk to that same place.

So I hope we’ll have that kind of impact. And I also imagine that… And I kn- I don’t imagine, I know that we have been an inspiration to other communities. We visited some other greenways when we were in our early stages to get ideas of, of what we might think about, and talk to communities about challenges and opportunities we should consider.

And we get calls on a very, very regular basis from other communities that wanna know how we did it. And I think that those other communities, I hope will have some success from either being inspired by our work or learning directly from the work that we’ve done, so that we see these kind of projects happening in other communities as well.

We have almost 50 works of public art on the greenway that are a little above and beyond maybe what a typical city facility might have. And so we raised privately an initial million dollars. That endowment has now grown to a little over 1.8 million. Um, it’d be really nice to even bump that number up because, of course, as the years go on, there are gonna be some maintenance issues.

You know, murals don’t have a permanent lifespan, and we know over time some of the other public art will need some maintenance, and it would be wonderful to have that kinda backstop of steady income that could help, , support that.

I think that really has been responsible, I think, for our success, is that good public-private partnership. I would also encourage people to, you know, be persistent and stay positive and focused. Sometimes it’s… 25 years is a long time to have an initial vision and then have it come to fruition, but we know that this is a project that is gonna have incredibly long-lasting impacts on this community, not just for residents in a very direct way who are using it and enjoying it, but also the economic development and impact that comes.

You know, and, and I’m gonna be excited in 10 years to see the new apartment complexes and the new maybe civic structures and maybe an office building and some retail that pops up along the Downtown Greenway to support and enhance what we already have. I think we’ll see some real dramatic changes over the next five to 10 years in that way.

Um, and we spent a lot of time talking to residents about from your neighborhood, what are, are there any barriers to connection that we can help improve? And we’ve done some of that. In terms of looking at the Downtown Greenway and inside, I would s- It’s interesting you ask ’cause I just was having a conversation with our, somebody that works in our transportation department, and he was saying, “You know, we really need to look at some of these important connections and, , do an evaluation of sidewalks and street lighting and, you know, make sure that we are providing those.”

I’m a big proponent of planting trees whenever possible in, in our southern environment. To me, that’s one of the hardest things is for, you know, commuting to work. I love doing it in the spring, fall, and winter. I really don’t like doing it so much in the summer. And so, um, I, our, our transportation staff is now really thinking about the importance of looking at those connectors.

What can make some existing things like sidewalks an appropriate and a meaningful place for people to use from the Downtown Greenway connecting to places that they’d wanna visit downtown.

So it, if you’re interested in finding out where the public art is, or you wanna know where a bench is, or we have bike fix-it stations, you can filter to find out where those are if something happens to you on your bike or happens to your bike. And it also on our website has a very nice description of all of those works of public art that I mentioned, um, with photographs and who the artist is and a little detail about the inspiration behind the art.

So the Downtown Greenway website at downtowngreenway.org is a wonderful resource. The other thing I’ll say is that we have an audio guide, and this is an audio guide that a company called Otocast, O-T-O-C-A-S-T, did for us, and they have audio guides, you know, in other places across the country. So when you…

It’s an app that you can download on your phone for free. There’s also a desktop version, and what I love about it is it has all these points of interest on the Downtown Greenway, and as you’re- If you’re on your phone as you’re walking on the greenway, as you approach a piece, um, you have a couple of ways to access information.

Um, there’s some photographs on the app. There’s text on the app, and then there is an audio component that talks to you about what you’re seeing. And in many, many cases, we were able to record the voices of the artists who had created the work, so you’re hearing about the work in the artist’s own voice.

And it’s just a really nice way to experience it. It’s, it’s like having a docent along with you on the tour, but it’s self, self-guided. And again, you can access that through your phone and use it while you’re actively walking. Or if you’re sitting at home and you wanna have a virtual walk, you can access it from our website as well.