Reporter:
The famous line from Joni Mitchell's song, Big Yellow Taxi, laments that they paved paradise and put up a parking lot. That was in 1970, when much of downtown Salisbury was undergoing the suburbanization that characterized that era and was turned over largely to surface parking lots. But they didn't have to pave over paradise. Much of what was there before was pretty ordinary: car dealerships, garages, bowling alleys, armories, VFWs... and if you go back far enough industry, mills and even livestock. But as the city spread outward following Routes 50 and 13, so too did much of what you might've found in the center of any large town. And so here we are now looking at a vast sea of asphalt behind the historic buildings that line Main Street. All that surface parking surrounding Unity Square is now the center of a court fight. It pits would-be developers of a large residential complex against some public officials, notably Mayor Randy Taylor, over the highest and best use of this valuable downtown real estate. Without getting into the legal trenches of this multimillion dollar dust up, we thought it ould help to look back and see how we got here. So we decided to go and see Creston Long, history director at Salisbury University's Nabb Research Center. Alright, so we're inside the Nabb Center, a beautiful library here at Salisbury University. Hey Creston, good to see you.
Creston Long:
A lot of businesses that had been operating in downtown Salisbury since the early 20th century either began closing or moving out of the core of the downtown. And there were buildings of all kinds downtown on those parking lots, including if we go back far enough, there were even some livestock yards in downtown, but much more to the period that we're talking about, like auto mechanic shops that were attached to car dealerships, which were downtown
Reporter:
Long, was ready for us with aerial photographs, maps, and city planning records. Going back a century,
Creston Long:
There were small parking lots behind some of the businesses, but nothing like exists there. So there were two things. There was the decline of those businesses or the movement of them outside of the downtown area. And at the same time, and this is something that I guess we probably know less about, there was at least it seems to be an increasing desire for open parking spots now, where that was coming from, where that was expressed by a broader public, or if that was part of city planning because planners thought it was a good idea, that would take some real teasing out.
Reporter:
What's striking from a modern point of view is that city planners actually saw vast parking lots. That's a good thing that even as a sign of progress, something that could help Main Street businesses survive in the 21st century urban planners trying to revive old downtown sea surface parking lots as a sign of decay. They not only represent disinvestment, but also cause pollution in the form of storm runoff and summertime heat domes. But in the 1960s as central cities all over America, were being hollowed out, Salisbury's leading lights saw it differently.
Ian Post:
It's kind of a big reason for it. In one of the documents we have out, this is the Salisbury y co comprehensive plan that was published in 1962. So it was the work of several years of surveyors and different consulting groups all coming together to create this massive plan. And within that is the central business district, the CBD,
Reporter:
That's Nabb Center archivist Ian Post looking over the city planning documents and the library collection, which is open to the public. So basically 1962, they came up with a blueprint of sorts and
Ian Post:
That's what we're reckoning with now. Yeah.
Reporter:
Now I'm assuming that that blueprint did not call for a vast sea of parking lots. So what went wrong?
Ian Post:
Actually, it's kind of funny. It did parking. This ...
Reporter:
... Is on purpose.
Ian Post:
Parking has not been a unique, it is not a unique struggle for Salisbury, I think even among cities. But even within here, this isn't a unique question that Salisbury's faced. It happens all the time and they were, I think one thing that I've seen here is they're starting to identify what happens over the next decades. And what Dr. Long was talking about with the growth of commercial businesses going outside of the city, they identified that a lot of commercial businesses are moving along the highways and outside of the central business district. And in order to incentivize that, they need to encourage more parking and lower rent. Those were the two things that they talked about in here to incentivize downtown growth.
Reporter:
Nabb Center researchers did an oral history in 2018 with lifelong Salisbury resident Henry Hanna, an expert on community development at SVN Miller Commercial Real Estate on Main Street. Henry recalled how Salisbury was just within the past generation.
Henry Hanna:
Downtown was the center for social activity. I mean, if you wanted to buy shoes you went to, there were probably two or three shoe stores. There was Smalls bootery. There was the Vernon Powell Shoe store was here.
Reporter:
He also remembers how all that changed.
Henry Hanna:
You can look at some of the transportation changes and see how the highways came through Route 50, cutting through Salisbury and Route 13 being enhanced to become a part of the US Highway system changed Salisbury for Route 13. It allowed new retailers to move out of downtown and go towards the college. So Montgomery Wards was downtown, but they went out on what was called the bypass.
Reporter:
But Hannah also talked about how the parking lots have sprang up as downtown emptied out, we're never meant to be a permanent solution. Today's redevelopment proposal, he said, have the roots back in the 1960s and seventies. Those hopes, however, seem to have been indefinitely deferred or have they even in 2018 when Hannah gave this interview, he and others in the city thought that redevelopment was imminent.
Henry Hanna:
But when you see the projects that are going on downtown Salisbury today for some of these parking lots that are going to be redeveloped with residential and mixed use, those ideas started in the sixties when people were abandoning downtown and there was urban renewal was the federal program, urban renewal to buy those properties. And they thought they were going to buy them. They were going to tear down the dilapidated buildings that were there and put parking, and that was going to be a short term change for them to be redeveloped. So if you look at that from the sixties and seventies and think here we are 50, 60 years later and we're finally seeing those parking lots being changed to housing services, commercial services, that's a long time that it didn't happen. But I think now it is finally coming into fruition.
Reporter:
Whether or not the current Salisbury Town Center project by the Gillis Gilkerson company ever gets off the ground, may now be in the hands of the courts if a deal can't be worked out. What's striking about this is that that same obsession with parking is what informs much of Mayor Randy Taylor's fight against the proposed residential development. It's an echo of the 1960s, but there's a Catch 22 here. Offer lots of parking, but there's little to attract folks downtown or bring development and more downtown residents, but stretch the city's capacity to accommodate their cars. So here's hoping that the city can find the middle ground without spending millions of dollars on lawyers.
With Colin Bright, this is Kevin Diaz for DeMar Republic Media.
