Noob School - Episode 88: Growing Greenville with Mayor Knox White

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

On today's episode of Noob School, we're joined by none other than Mayor Knox White of Greenville South Carolina. Tune in for the incredibly interesting story of Greenville, and a look into Mayor White's pivotal role in growing Greenville from a one-horse town, to one of the United State's most incredible hidden gems, and some amazing things to come to the city. I'm going to be sharing my secrets on all my social channels, but if you want them all at your fingertips, start with my book, Sales for Noobs: https://amzn.to/3tiaxsL Subscribe to our newsletter today: https://bit.ly/3Ned5kL #noobschool #salestraining #sales #training #entrepreneur #salestips #salesadvice

New School. All right, well, welcome back to Noob School. We've got a big podcast for you today because we've got the mayor of Greenville, Knox White, with us. Thanks for being here. Glad to be here, John. Awesome. Well, you know, Greenville is a wonderful city. Of course, we both grew up here and have seen it under Knox's leadership just get better and better.

More people are moving here. It's a very safe, wonderful place to live. And so I thought I would ask Knox to come and be on the podcast, and we're going to talk about what he's seen in the city in terms of developments over the years. And in particular, I've asked him to point out kind of the selling skills or the selling tools that he's had to use to get some of these things done. Because you can imagine just about anything you want to do in a city, some people are going to love it and some people won't love it, right? I mean, you're not going to get 100%. So thanks again for being here today. Yeah, thanks.

Yeah. Well, let's go back to the beginning. I mentioned that you grew up here. I know you went to Christchurch, same school I went to for most of your childhood, right, until you were in ninth grade? Kindergarten through ninth grade. Yeah, okay, okay. Which was in downtown Greenville at the time.

Oh, that's right. It was one little school. I got an institutional memory of downtown Greenville. It goes back a long way. Right. I mean, when I walk around downtown, I remember what it was like the 1960s and 70s. Right. I guess from that school, they could take you just across the street and you'd be on

the main street almost. That's exactly right. Well, you weren't supposed to be, but you could be. It was kind of a dangerous place to be. Yeah, yeah. And then Greenville High. Yeah, Greenville High School. It's also not too far away.

Yeah, and also was kind of surrounded by issues and you did leave the campus very often for sure. But Greenville High was a wonderful experience for me. It was a word today you'd use as diversity. It was my great diversity experience, but I loved it. And he made a lot of friends, and it was very formative for me. Probably good for you in terms of your political career to have met double the people, you know, since you went to two schools. That is true.

I'll run to people all the time who are in positions of some note now in the community where it's a pastor of a church or business or something and our neighborhood leadership. And I went to Greenville High with them. It's kind of a little secret weapon. No one's ever asked me about that. But this is one of my secrets. You know, it makes a difference, the relationships. Well, from there off to Wake Forest, where you studied history. Any particular type of history?

Well, it's a history major. Okay. It's always been interested in history and government and politics and community affairs in high school as well as college. Okay. Okay. Have you read or heard about Dan Carlin and his history? It's got a kind of history of the world. Oh, the podcast thing, yeah.

I'm getting ready to take that on to listen to the whole thing, yeah. There are a lot of good podcast and sort of history, sort of things you didn't know about history and should know, make it a lot more interesting for sure. Did you use that all you studied in history of different, you know, civilizations and everything else? Does that help you with like the management of Greenville? over the last 20-something years?

Well, I would just say that I do love history, which means I love the local history as well. It all translates together American history and then local history. So historic preservation means a lot to me. One of the ideas in my head when I ran from air was, and always has been, that we're going to make sure that the city never tears down another historic building.

Because the city green vault, truth be told, in the 1970s, they tore down the old city hall. Shouldn't have done that. beautiful, one-of-a-kind building. When I came in as mayor, the Poinsett Hotel was definitely at risk. A lot of people, conventional wisdom, was that the Poinsett Hotel should be bulldozed, came very close. There's actually a really good back story, which, if you want to be talking about it,

about how it was saved. But I'm very proud of the fact that we've kind of retired the wrecking ball. I've been mayor of 20 plus years, and we have not torn down buildings like that. In fact, I've always looked at Falls Park and Reed River Falls as a, historic preservation project as much as anything else. Because you could argue just like the Ponset Hotel and other buildings around the river that we saved, that bringing back the waterfall, which had been hidden away for 40 plus years, was an act of historic preservation.

If you look at it that way, and that's how it's, you know, my motivation in doing it was partly that. Yeah. We're going to jump back to this sequence, but since you mentioned the waterfall, one thing I've seen, and of course you know this, but, you know, for, for, for, a while there, you know, before you develop the other side of the river, you know, people would come down to one side of the river and they'd go across the bridge and they would just stop. And they didn't know what to do and they would go back the other way.

And now, since you've opened it up and built it out and made that wonderful kind of grassy area over there, people are going around now. It's a wonderful loop. We added a staircase so you can access Falls Park from both sides to the river now. The staircase has been on the wish list for a long time. We got it finally, we got it done with the Camperdowne project and with the Bohemian Hotel. Yeah. But yeah, I think one of the great areas to watch now for the future is the other side of the river around the Bohemian Hotel, United Carolina Bank, corporate headquarters.

That's going to be built out behind Camperdown. It would be very exciting place, shop, stores, restaurants, and that kind of thing. So I'm not sure what you're referring to the other side of the river. So you mean like where the Bohemian is? UCB? Right. Okay. Well, the side falls apart.

Because like I said, you went across Liberty Bridge and that was like, yeah. And that was the end of it. Right. And we always knew it had more potential than that. So it's going to be kind of the next degree of area development. And that's one of the reasons. It was exciting to get the Bohemian Hotel there. Oh, man.

And Mr. Richard Kessler, who had the audacity to knock on the door of the White's law firm to ask if he could buy their building. No, he did. You know, the White's firm been there for a long time. And I think it's fair to say the building was not. for sale, but it was when Mr. Kessler arrived, and he told me he was going to do something like that, and he did. Wow.

Wow. He must be quite the interesting fellow. I mean, all that art that he has and all of his different hotels. I tell people the Bohemian Hotel with its great art and the eclecting nature at all, whether you like it or not, everything in between, it's a perfect expression of his personality. That hotel is Richard Kessler. He lives in Savannah, Georgia, grew up there. He made his career in Florida.

back to Savannah and that hotel reflects his eclectic personality, his collections of art and everything else. He collects a lot more than just art, by the way. He collects everything. And the Bohemian Hotel is a piece of craftsmanship. The stonework and the woodwork, I watched it during the construction project, watched his personal architect up on a ladder putting the stones into the building at 6 p.m. in the evening because one of those stones exactly right, I thought, wow, it's a work art and craftsmanship throughout. Yeah. It's meant for the ages.

That's how you want to. It's beautiful. Yeah. And when you get down on that lower level, you feel like you're, you know, up in western North Carolina or something. It's just, you're looking at the trees and the water. And you finally see the other waterfall. Yeah.

Right. For people who come to Greenville for the first time, the whole place is just enchanting. You see the major Falls Park waterfall and then you, in the back is the other waterfall that only a few of us natives knew about all this time. I mean, it's just spectacular. I was down there yesterday, in fact, and there must have been, I don't know, 50 or 60 people on the lower falls. How about that? That's pretty cool.

On a, or was it Monday? Yeah. Monday afternoon. So cool. So cool. So, you got into immigration law after law school, right? Was that usually professional team? That was my professional career.

Okay. How did you, how did that, and that's interesting to a lot of the people that follow this podcast are figuring out what they want to do or kind of what path they want to take. How did you go from that type of law to public service? Well, they're really very different. They might have in common is that I was gravitated to my law practice toward governmental agencies, federal law in that case. I also like to travel and I liked working with people from other countries. So that was the appeal of that area of law for me. And it was always exactly that way. I mean, I had a great client list and thoroughly enjoyed working with people from Germany and all across Europe and Asia.

And it just appealed me in that sense. But also, it kind of cleared my head of the city world because there was no conflicts with that. And it's so different from working in the city. The only where they would kind of parallel is when I had clients, my immigration practice, that would cause me to spend time, say, in Asia, I couldn't help myself. I'd go to other cities and take a lot of notes and come back with a lot of big ideas about, you know, Greenville needs something like that. We're traveling in Europe.

So there was a little parallel with that, I suppose. The city manager at the time used to joke about that. If I had an overseas trip as part of immigration practice, he always said, I'd ready when you come back because he knew what I was going to do. Get some notes. Yeah. But also it gives you perspective. The Reedy River, Falls Park, baseball stadium, Unity Park, all the projects we work on here are big projects.

They're extremely significant. They change the trajectory of Greenville. and in our world, big price tag, big project. You go to other places in the world and you see, no, we're a small city. Our biggest project is a small project in a major city in the United States or in Asia or someplace. So it gave me a little perspective. Interesting. Okay. We're not that big a fish, you know.

And so did you know, like when you were in college and law school that you wanted to get into public service? Yeah, I was always involved in when I was at Greenville High School. student body president. That tells you right there. Yeah. And same at Wake Forest, and class president, that kind of thing. So I've always been interested in that way. And, you know, they always tell the, you know, younger people, that the leadership aspects that you learn in those roles in student government, they are transferable. That you do learn a lot if that's what you want to focus on. I learned a lot. And Greenville High, when I was in Greenville High, when I was in Greenville High School, I was actually chairman of the mayor's youth commission for Mayor Max Heller.

So I named Max Heller As a senior in high school And so I always had an interest in that kind of thing I worked in political campaigns for other people And watched Carol Campbell and other people up close I worked in D.C. on Capitol Hill When I got out of law school, I went to Washington and worked in D.C. legislative assistant

And I was very much into the substance of legislation that was kind of the nerdy gags that had just been to law school so now I'm in D.C. So give me a file. Give me a file, a big thick file. And I'll go through it and write the memorandums or whatever else. But it was exciting being up there and seeing government work, if you will.

But the big change for me was I did not, at that time in my life, focus on cities and city development. That's something I picked up on and then learned and really became a passion. And I would say the last 20 years, that's my passion. It's urban planning, urban design, sort of the psychology of when makes cities work well. As you walk around, what do you experience? had a lot of good mentors on that. Good books I read, seminars I went to, experiences and mentors

who helped me develop, I guess, eyes and ears for what makes the city work the way it should. Right. So tell us about that. For example, Grievel, what kind of personality would you say Grievel has? Well, it's funny to use that word because really poured a moment in me for myself was my second year's mayor. We brought in an urban planner who became a good friend. And he was, really, he was on the best urban planners in America.

And he was from Greenville, South Carolina. So there you, that's why. And I learned that the psychology, again, of being on the street, what makes you comfortable. You and I were talking before we started about crime. We have a low crime city, thank goodness. We could always have an episode. But Greenville, South Carolina, compared to any city I go to, is one of the safest cities you can be in. and walkability.

Well, it all goes back to what makes people comfortable in that environment and what creates vibrancy on the street. And those are sort of the tricks of the trade, if you will, of urban, good urban planning, good urban design. So I walked around with my early mentors. And I remember we were walking around and this team of people I was with. They stopped me and said, hey, stop where you are, Mr. Mayor. And how do you feel?

How do you feel was the phrase? And I said, if I feel fine, he said, no, no, I don't mean how you feel illness-wise. I mean, how do you feel in this spot? And I remember looking around thinking, not too good. And I'll tell you where I was, I was at the intersection of Coffee Street and Main Street. Wow. And in early mid-90s or whatever, you didn't feel good there. Businesses were closed, a little bit of threatening.

It felt a little bit threatening. As you know, at that time, Greenville Development really was the Hyatt Hotel. Right. I mean, we had beautiful trees down Main Street. We had the Peace Center. We had some early restaurants. Sobies would open soon. Points at Hotel was closed.

Really the only vibrancy and heartbeat was a Hyatt Hotel. And if I told someone to meet me downtown, it could only mean one thing, meet me at the Hyatt. And even a block or two away at Coffee Street, you felt unsafe. You felt a little bit threatened. That's how far we were from it. But learning that and okay, well, how can you turn this around? What can you do to make it a safe and pleasant place to be? Well, you've done it.

And again, I'm not sure how. You know, I live downtown and am down there all the time, walk in. And it is truly one of the safest cities that I go to. And I go to quite a few cities around the, mostly the southeast, but cities that I would have expected to be on par, like Charleston, for example. I've been going to Charleston a long time. It's not near as safe. is Greenville. There's some threatening people on the streets and there's incidents.

Well a lot of cities in America I find this one place is nice, a block is nice, but then you turn the corner and go down another block and it's not nice. Right. It's not safe and I have that experience. I don't want to name names, but major cities in southeast I am told to go check out. It's really, yeah, this is nice, but around the corner. And what we've done in downtown Greenville by intentional design is create the entire downtown footprint enlarging it and making it all safe. And the formula, I don't mind, I said I used the word personality a minute ago, and that's a really important word, because there's two things I think that were drilled into my head early, and I've tried to focus on for these past many years with our downtown planning, is first is mixed use.

That means that you, you know, block by block everywhere, we have a focus on, you know, do you have a good balance of residential with retail and office? And the reason that's so important to kind of get inside the mind of how urban planners think is that people in those particular lines of work are there from different times a day. So a business is open from nine to five. And that's really important. Office workers, at lunchtime, they get on the street,

eat at the restaurants, and after COVID in some big cities, they learn, again, how important that is. If the office workers are not there, then you've got a real problem for the mom and pop businesses. So office workers are very, very important. Retail, of course, is more different kind of hours are going on there. But that's why the key really is residential.

So having people live in a block by block in downtown core is absolutely critical. And that was our major focus back in the early 2000s. It's kind of conventional wisdom now, but every city has to focus on that to get that right balance. And having people living in the downtown core, sort of getting a critical mass makes all the difference. You were talking about other cities not being safe and all. People living there provides an undercurrent of eyes and ears on the street. and it is real, it is palpable. We lived it.

So coffee in Maine and I was just talking about changed radically when we had residential on the second floors on Coffee Street. And we watched, you know, five people, five residents here, five more here, suddenly we had 35, 45, 45, 100 people living downtown. In the early days, it made a palpable difference. They called City Hall when there was a problem.

I mean, I can still remember early on when we had just a few people living downtown, but at least we had some people living downtown. And, I mean, they'd call all the time, and we kind of drove us crazy in the city hall. But I thought, well, they are driving us crazy, but isn't that good? Isn't that good that somebody cares

that there's a light out on coffee street? Or there's an issue on the street that needs to be taken care of, and you compound that and build on it, and we did just that, very intentionally. We started with the second floor residential with a few people doing it, and then we graduated to incentives by the city,

incentives to build in the first of the units of 25 units and 100 units and on we went. And in the early days we provided land. We sold the land. We didn't give it away for people who would build mixed-use projects, include residential. So that's your project over by the cemetery. That's your project points that corners behind City Hall. The Richmond Street Garage, the Spring Street Garage has residential on both sides. We built a critical mass of residential throughout the,

early 2000s and that's when things flipped. Suddenly downtown Greenville felt safer. Right. And how did you know that? How did you know that that was the key? Because every good urban planner in the American the world has been talking about it for years. That having a mix of uses, people there

at different times a day. And residential is particularly good because those people are there after five o'clock. They're there after five o'clock, walking the dog, going to the coffee shop, whatever it takes, whatever's going on. They're their own weekends and they build a critical mass and then other people want to be with people. And that's what we have now going on.

That's what people come downtown. Yeah. We have this core. And we did it intentionally and every city in America kind of knows this formula but has trouble making, understanding it. They come to Greenville to see it in action to see how it works. I tell them it works. And now we have a thing where people complain about we have too many apartments or too many condos downtown. And I would go back to the word balance.

You do need a balance. So I would be the first to say, yeah, right now we need more office workers. We're out of office space. Our office spaces are full in downtown green. We need more office workers. We always need more retail. But the retail we have now is very much a product of the fact that we built up the residential. Now we have national retailers as well as local retailers coming into downtown.

and it's because of the rooftops, it's because residential. So do we have too many residential? Well, I would just say this. When you're walking around downtown, especially West End, right at the baseball stadium, and you now feel safe and it's interesting, you can thank the residential. Because if those residents weren't there,

you would not feel safe. And it's just something people have to learn. That's interesting. Well, I'm glad I asked you because I didn't know what the secret was, That's definitely it. Well, I mentioned personality. My little thing was, that's really important.

And then the other thing that we do that I think is other cities learn from it. You said the word personality, which really struck me because we use that word. We top all the mix-use off with all the other things that make Greenville unique and different. And that's public art downtown. Helps with walkability too. You're walking around. You always see things, sculpture, public art. That adds to personality, keeping the lights and the lights and the trees.

year-round. We did that many years ago and it's personality. And then the ultimate expression of our personality, our uniqueness would be false park. You know, reclaiming, rediscovering the river, reclaiming and rediscovering the waterfall, which is now our identity as a city, is the ultimate personality change and that's what really turned us in a new direction. So it's mixed use and a heavy dose of personality. Right, right. Also, you know, I think The music's really been picking up too, you know, in terms of being a music city between, you know, what's going on with the Peace Center and what's going on all up and down the street. There's a lot more music than there used to be.

Yeah, I think it's another good example, too, how we're like a continuous improvement process in downtown Greenville and the city of Greenville. I think one thing I really, so many things about Greenville, I think, are cultural. We've always been good at planning, always. You know, talk about a downtown plan and nobody laughs you out of the room. It's serious. We're great at public-private partnerships and just an attitude of collaboration. And we also don't put our head in the sand and ignore our problems or ignore our shortcomings. And I put kind of music scene in that category, to you the truth.

For many years, I can name a lot of issues that have come and gone. This is one that's been out there that we don't have a music venue of smaller size. We've got the Peace Center, the Arena, Bonscore Center. that message would people have worked on that. And now I would predict in about two years, three years, we're going to turn that around pretty radically. We'd have a lot of music opportunities, music halls to make Grebel the kind of place it should be in terms of music and what that means for the community. And you'd have an excellent busking program, I must say. Well, all kinds doing that, but thank you very much for being out there. You know how that started,

by the way? No. The music on Maine, people playing musical instruments on Main Street. It's kind of take for granted now. And we, you know, we got some there better than others and that kind of thing, but at least we do have people wanting to do it. But it all started with me, because this is getting back to personality in downtown public art. A group of governor school kids came to see me. They were on my schedule. I didn't know why they wanted to see the mayor, but hey, come on. So I was meeting with the kids at the governor school. And the reason they wanted to see me was they wanted to play their musical instruments on Main Street. Now, here you have kind of like world-class talent high school kids at the governor school.

And I was like, you mean, you, they're not, someone's not allowing you to play your music downtown. No, sir, no sir. We're told we have to have, we can't do it because you can't collect money and that kind of thing. And, well, so we, that's where the program started. We actually would like you. We would like you to play music.

In fact, we've been trying to figure out why no one's doing it. And it turned out because we were actually telling them they can't do it. So we set up a program, the acoustical cafe, I think we called it in the beginning. We gave them a license and a, we gave them a location, we organized it. And we also gave you a bucket. I guess you got a bucket. You got your bucket, so you're official. So now you can ask for money.

We can put the bucket out there. But that's how it started. And in quick order, we had musicians from all of the region who came here and we had, again, diversity and mix use is important. I just mentioned on Big Way, but even in music is important. We, this program, we used to have a lot more musicians, I mean, magicians, jugglers. We even had a fire eater at one time. And we're kind of back, John, to just the musical instrument. So if you can step up your game a little bit, I appreciate it. I think there's like 70 something that have licenses now

that play. And I've gotten know quite a few of them in there, you know, people think they're out there just to get money. But I'm telling you, the rewards you get from being on the street and just meeting people that are here visiting and it's really a nice thing to do. Yeah, but early in our program we had a person called. It was a woman called and said that she wanted to sign her husband up for the street musician program because he was practicing his trumpet or I think it was trumpet at his at home and she wanted him out of the house. She wanted him out. Yeah. Yeah. And she called, she said, can I sign him up? and talk of this. Well, let's segue

to one of your significant projects, could be the bridge, could be Unity Park or baseball stadium, could be lots of different things. But give us one that was particularly hard to get done where you had to sell in multiple ways

to make it happen. I think I learned in all of these projects, I would go back to Falls Park. I learned that first of all, you do have to sell things. It's that people can be at different perceptions. That's how it always starts, that you're talking around each other.

And, you know, the Carolina Foothills Garden Club and Harriet Whitech was president, had this vision of a park around the waterfall since 1967. The bridge was put there, the highway, four-lane highway bridge was put over the waterfall in 1960. So I'm pretty short order. They were already visioning this idea.

And that it brought in some great landscape architects to design some kind of, conceptuals. And so good idea, but it would never happen without removing the bridge. And the bridge became kind of the third rail issue that no one wanted to talk about. In fact, when I came in as mayor, the official city of Greenville design documents, downtown plan documents actually said removal the Camperdown Bridge was quote no longer relevant. In other words, we're supposed to pass it over, it's over with, move on. And that's what I came into. But the Garden Club, was determined and met with them early on. Your mom was part of that. Talking about, you know, this has got to be a priority. So we launched the effort, discovered a few things early on, discovered first of all that most people who lived in Greenville had never seen the waterfall. So here we are talking about a vision of a park around a waterfall people haven't seen. That's the first challenge. And what to do about that? And we were, this is before the internet.

we were able to get the renderings that the Garden Club had produced over many years of a beautiful park around the waterfall. Actually went to the Greenville News back in those days. They would be talked to us about things like that and say this is the vision. People keep talking about the bridge. The bridge, the bridge, why would you remove a perfectly good bridge? That was the single-minded thoughts. And no one had ever seen what you might get if you didn't have the bridge. And so the Greenville News at our request,

actually put on the front page of the paper a color rendering of Falls Park, what the falls would look like with no bridge, with no highway bridge, but instead a beautiful pedestrian suspension bridge. First time, well, it changed everything with my experience over the next several months. I could go to community clubs and other events where I was used to people sitting there very like this and suddenly some people were kind of open to it that, oh, it's not just about taking down a highway bridge, it's what you get for doing that. And that was a huge leap.

And so I learned a big lesson there. People are visual. Yeah. You know, if they're just focused on the bridge, we were never going to win that battle, that argument. But if we could change the focus, see a picture. And I tried to take that idea forward on baseball stadium, Unity Park later on, showing people what it, you know, suspend your belief for a moment.

Yeah. Let us show you what we're talking about. And it's still a challenge. But that was my big takeaway there. This is very interesting. I saw it change everything. Very interesting point. because people will focus on, let's say, if you're selling a business, something, and say,

well, that's $2 million. You say, no, look at this. This is what it's going to get you. This is what your business is going to look like five years from now if you do this. You're going to make $10 million or something. So interesting, just changing the perspective and using the visual. Right. So you had a visual of the baseball stadium, visual.

I remember I saw Unity Park. By the way, how's that tower coming? We raised from the very beginning, I mean, 10 years ago, what became Unity Park and the early documents that didn't have a name, we always had a vertical element because it's so flat. It needs a focal point. Or to put it in other words, it needs a Liberty Bridge for Unity Park. What would it be? It's always, always, always been, again, going about 10 years, a tower of some type. The current one, which has been designed by terrific.

He's an architect of, he's equal to Miguel Rosales who designed the Liberty Bridge. Paul Indris is the same kind of guy. He's an internationally known architect and creating a great piece of art. And we raised private money for one half of it. And the other half is to be paid for with hotel visitor taxes. So it's visitors and private money for this feature of the park. It's going to be through the permitting process in a couple months. And we've got some other things to work on.

But I think it's still important to have a focal point. And I became, but during the Unity Park discussion, it went in a different direction. We built Unity Park, we designed Unity Park with the neighborhood taking the lead. So Mary Duckett and Lillian Fleming and Stacey, Reverend Stacey Mills of the Southern Inside neighborhood took the lead back in 2016, 2017 to help the city shape and design a park. What does the neighborhood want to see in the park? the spray park, water park for kids. Yeah.

Good element. And Mary Duckett in particular is the one who first pointed out that that tower is so important in many levels to the African American community because, first of all, it sits exactly between the former white park and the former black park. It sits right in the middle. You can believe that. Mabry Park and Meadowbrook Park. So symbolically, it's important.

And it also, and this is Mary Duckett's words, not mine, it tells the rest of Greenville that we're here. The southern side community, West Greenville, are here in a very dramatic way. And Stacey Mills always said, and the kids of the neighborhood can finally see the mountain ranges because they don't grow up seeing the mountain ranges. So it's got a lot of stuff going on there. The Unity Park's coming along, and of course, the opening was just a year ago. Yeah, yeah. It's wonderful to see people in grace. My grandkids love the spray park. Yeah. They love to go over there. That's a, that's a, that's a amazing how you got the bridge thing done that way. Well, I'll tell you a bridge story that it

doesn't get told very much. So we had the public controversy over about a five-year period over whether taken down the bridge or not. And I had one member of city council who was very much against taking down the bridge, as a lot of people were. But again, perceptions. Most people had never seen the waterfall. So it was a hard sell looking back at it in particular. I'm amazed we did it at all. But this one council member, had seen, saw the vision in the newspaper I just talked about. It was really the first time he had seen himself what we were talking about, a beautiful park that Harriet White's in the club had envisioned.

And he wanted to see me because he'd had a change of mind. He said about the park and he came to see me and he said, you know, I've seen this vision now. And it's not just about the bridge. It's about what we get for it. He said, however, I have a suggestion. I think we're going about this the wrong way. And I said, well, what do you mean by that?

And he said, well, I think instead of removing the highway bridge, we should move the falls. I couldn't do what you just did. I had to sit there with a straight face. What would you propose we do? He said dynamite. So it was going and the wheels just kept coming off all the time even after the vision.

But even after we began to build a consensus to do this, we had another big issue which was, you know, we didn't own the bridge. The city of Greenville did not own the highway bridge. It was owned by the state of South Carolina Highway Department. So it was a whole other set of issues in how we were able to get the State Highway Department to deed us the bridge, if you will, so that we could tear it down. And the long and short of that story is, and this is another good example where you can do all the planning, but sometimes you need to get lucky. Sometimes your prayers are answered, you get lucky too.

In this case, we did. Harriet White and I had a chore to do. We were to get, and Harriet was getting president of the Garden Club. Tommy White's wife, and Harriet and I were to go to Columbia, South Carolina the next week to visit with the new director of the State Highway Department. Her name was Betty Mabry, first female to be appointed in that position. And we're going to drive to Columbia and meet with her with the astounding request that they give us the bridge so that we could tear it down. Yeah, yeah. And I was at a reception or something, and somebody came out to me about just a couple days before we were going to Columbia.

And somebody came up to me and said, did you know that Mary Freeman, a friend of ours, you know, Mary Caleb Freeman? Yeah. Mary Freeman's sister is the new head of the highway department. And I was like, what did you just say? And this told me that. And I said, well, is her name Betty Mayberry? And she said, yeah, I think that's her name. I said, that is amazing.

I'm going to Columbia in a few days to talk to Betty Mabry, head of the highway department, about the Camperdown Bridge and all. And John, I don't know who this was who I'm talking to. This is so many years ago, and I would love to know who it was. And this person said, well, Betty is the, I believe I'm correct, like president of the Columbia, South Carolina, Council of Garden Clubs. What? So I went, the reception was at the Commerce Club.

I went to one of their phone booths back when we had phone booths. And I called Harriet White from the reception. Said Harriet, we're going to Columbia to see Betty Mabry. I just learned that she's Mary Freeman's sister and she's head of the council of garden clubs. And Harriet White said, oh, that Betty Mabry. She knew her. So Harriet called Betty Mabry. And Betty Mabry, director of the highway department, said, no, you're not coming down here.

I'm coming to Greenville. She drove to Greenville and she went under the highway bridge, looked at it with us and looked at the waterfall. And she basically said, how can I help? How can I help? I'm telling you that I don't know if we'd ever would have had a highway commissioner director in that era who would have so readily wanted to help us. And that's how it happened by the way. State Senator Vern Smith, Virginia Oldrick. A lot of people worked with them to make that an easy vote by the highway department. It never was a con. They gave us the bridge so we could tear it down. That's amazing. That's amazing. Well, I think it's a great lesson, you know, for the, for the people watching, the nude schoolers is, you know, if you can, if you can find a way to have some angle into somebody

other than just nice to meet you, we're starting from scratch. It makes all the difference in the world. You might get lucky. You might get lucky. Find out who that person is. Yeah. There's probably a connection somewhere. Yeah.

That's actually a good takeaway on that too. Yeah. There's always a good question to ask. Is there a connection? Right. Is there some way to do? So I had, I've asked my, some of my noob schoolers early this morning. If anyone had a question that I should ask you today.

And I picked one question to ask. And the question is, you're doing so much long, you're known for doing long-term planning and working on these projects that take time. You know, a typical political situation or place. political office is there's a lot of just frantic problems like people are dealing with problems and stuff like that how do you get your staff motivated to stay focused on the longer term that is hard because city government any local government every day there are neighborhood issues there are zoning issues there's crisis

as your police department fire department and it's really tough on a city manager to to do that starts with the city council though here Again, a tradition of planning that at least we have a plan, that we all kind of touch, put our hands on certain things and say, we're going to make this happen. It may take a year, it may take four or five years. But you are distracted all along the way. There's no getting around that. Every project I've experienced, every project has been way longer than I would like it to

have been, five years, six years. Baseball was probably 10 years, I mean, ups and downs, but that is always a major. But I do think it's a role of the mayor in particular. somebody's got to be kind of the vicar of the staying with the plan. Right. And where the end in mind is. And I do try to remind myself that that is one of my primary goals, my primary responsibilities as mayor, because the city manager has to, every day,

fix all these other problems of going on. And I have to kind of restrain myself and respect that role as well. And then city council members can kind of come and go and have their own, their own passion projects that they're interested in. And I think my role is to kind of help them realize their passion, frankly, what they want to do. I want to be supportive. But I also want them to be supportive of things that my passion projects would be and what the community's projects should be. Because everything I've talked about are projects that, you know, I didn't invent them.

They didn't come in my head alone. They've been out there. They've been planning documents. We've been sort of, you know, we ought to remove the Camperdown Bridge. We have a waterfall for crying out loud. I mean, what city has that? But people just moved on. And baseball downtown was very controversial.

And then Unity Park was a whole side of town with segregated parks. It was back there. No one paid any attention to it. But, you know, somebody's got to kind of focus on. This is what Greenville needs to do. We needed the arena. Remember that? That went on for 15 years.

Public referendums voting down on the arena. And, you know, we had to pull people together. No, Greenville has to have that in downtown. in the early days when people didn't go downtown. There's some reason you can go downtown. So the arena, of course, the Peace Center being extremely important that this community built a Peace Center, Performing Arts Center. The city of Miami built a Performing Arts Center and opened one just about four or five years ago.

Greenville has and still has a first class facility going on since like 1888. All of these are pieces of the puzzle, but my job has been to at least focus on where the city needs to go next. Is there a next project beyond Unity Park that I haven't heard about, like the next big thing? Yeah, there always are, and there absolutely is now that I'm very excited about. Unity Park is a long way to go. We're going to be building the largest footprint of affordable housing in the entire city at Unity Park on land that has been vacant land since like 1964. Wow. Vacant land, no houses.

The neighborhood had been hollowed out, if you will, over decades, and we're rebuilding the southern side. neighborhood and we're doing it with the leadership of the neighborhood. So that's going to be exciting to watch and it's going to happen. We've donated all this valuable, valuable land for affordable housing. Then the other side of Unity Park on Maybury Street is going to be an enormous opportunity for the city. It's going to be a chance to have perhaps hotels, mixed use. I hope it's things that really are like a lot of public art, some things that really attract you to the other side of the park. That's going to happen and we're going to sell that very valuable land. It's going to also have affordable housing as a major component. We're going

to sell that property and reinvest it in the West Greenville neighborhood. So that's a huge project. The conference center is still out there. We have some good opportunities there. We have state money. We've had a commitment of county money and of course, city money, using hotel taxes again. And Greenville's conference center, a meeting hall, if you will, needs to be downtown where the hotels are and the restaurants. Yep. Doesn't need to be out on Pleasantburg Drive anymore. That just, that doesn't work.

And unless you love Krispy Kreme Donuts and then, you know. So then we've got to get that downtown. And then, of course, County Square, we've got to watch that very closely what the county's doing there. And it's going to be a beautiful project. It's going to, it will absolutely stun and surprise people. I don't think people have any idea just what's going to happen on the Old County Square project. I've heard about Whole Foods and, but there's so much more that's coming out there. that's coming out there.

Yeah. It's going to be, our job is to make sure it's done well, that it's done right in terms of urban design, walkability, connectivity to downtown. That's kind of the city role and all that. And then finally, I would mention the old auditorium site coming into Greenville, a big hole on the ground. That whole corridor from the law enforcement center into downtown is going to have a radical change.

We're going to put trees down the middle, wide sidewalks, make it walkable. It's going to look like downtown Greenville instead of something in the middle. on the side. Yeah. So there's four really good examples there. That's really cool. It turned to the downtown area. That's going to be really cool.

That area needs help. So that's awesome. Yeah, you'll see it built up. And with the auditorium site finally being developed, that's a green light for a lot more happening in that area. We're just about out of time. I had one more question. After reading, I know you read Renaissance Man about Tommy Weich.

And then you worked with Mayor Heller and Tommy and Bush. and those guys, I'm sure, were kind of doing their thing when you were coming up. Yeah. What did you learn from those guys? Well, and another person I mentioned is Pat Haskell Robinson, who was the first female chamber president, member of city council many years, and she was a colleague of all the people who had. I once asked Pat, because she was a friend of my families, knowing what I know now, why did you live in Greenville, South Carolina, in the 1960s and 70s?

There was no place to eat. Yeah. You had to fix it. And she came from, I think, well, she came from Connecticut. So her family had found herself in Greenland. And she said something. I always thought he was important. Because she was so impressed with people like Charlie Daniel and Buck Mickle in particular.

And she said, I just saw this leadership corps in Greenville that had such ambition for their city. They saw in Greenville something that could be so much greater than was here. And because she saw that, the early efforts at Plainville. planning, the audacious idea that we could even take a downtown and do something different with it. So we always had that ambition about our city, our community, and we can't lose that. And now we have a wonderfully walkable, say, world-class downtown, but the whole city reflects on it. I always, the rollout from downtown, I want anyone to think that it's just about downtown because it's not, the entire North Maine area was on its back a few years ago.

I mean, now look at it. People are renovating houses, building homes, and all around the city, you see the, you see the, effects of the beautiful downtown. Yeah. Well, you're doing a great job. All you have to do is just walk down Main Street and people can tell. And you've been doing it for a long time. So we, Greenville appreciates it.

And thanks for being on the podcast today and helping us understand how you do it. So thank you. Glad to be here. Yes, sir. Thank you. Yes, sir.