Main Street, Main Street, Greenville

Source document Quoted word for word from HALS SC-21. Not written, edited or summarised by this site.

The Greenville Main Street design is consistent in quality with other projects by the historically significant landscape architectural firm, Lawrence Halprin & Associates. The design for Greenville s Main Street was initially awarded to Lawrence Halprin & Associates in By the time of its implementation in the firm submitted the final construction documents. Associates was a firm created by Nishita, Don Carter, William Hull and Byron McCulley after a career transition by Halprin. It continued to share office space with him.2The streetscape of Greenville s Main Street also represents an early adoption of a street diet design, which converts an auto-centric environment to a pedestrian friendly space. In addition, the space is a well-preserved example of a modernist streetscape.

It is significant for its design and construction, having great artistic value and being the work of a master. Description: The initial five-block sequence starts on Court Street and moves north terminating at the Beattie Place and Main Street intersection at the corner of the Hyatt Hotel and Convention Center. A Greenville News Article dated April 29, describes the following features of the design: tree covered malls and sidewalks, diagonal parking, two-lane traffic and plenty of flowers.3 One councilwoman is quoted in the article as being impressed with the intimacy the plans bring to downtown, especially the gardens, park benches, and decorative lighting planned at each intersection in the five block area.

4 The newspaper article includes an illustrative plan of a typical block of the five-block sequence. The plan highlights the verdant street tree canopy, diagonal parking, lush corner plantings, and the materiality of mid- block pedestrian crossings. Construction documents are archived with the Greenville City. A section (east to west) through a typical block of the design has generous 1 Main Street, Greenville (The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Date Unknown). 2 Main Street, Greenville. 3 Dale Perry, Design Plan Picked (The Greenville News, 4 Perry, Design Plan Picked. MAIN STREET HALS NO. PAGE 2 sidewalk widths of 18 ft. for pedestrian traffic bordered by a 4 ft. buffer planting bed that screens pedestrians from the diagonal parking and the flow of two-way traffic of Main Street.

The reduction to two lanes of traffic allowed for the generous widths of the sidewalk and the introduction of diagonal parking. A section (south to north) up the block visualizes how pedestrians are given preference over the automobile with not only crosswalks at the end of the blocks but also mid-block. These mid-block crossings break the larger city block into manageable lengths and also act as a traffic-calming device. The crossings are denoted in the design through the continuation of a square pattern impressed in the sidewalk concrete. The break from the blacktop pavement of the road to the sidewalk material of the crosswalks signals that pedestrians have right of way. Many present-day designs emphasize the importance of change in materiality visually and textually.

This design provides and early example of this technique. At the north end of Main Street the final block of the sequence opens up into a plaza the shape of a triangular cut. Significant Landscape Features Trees The Halprin era design incorporated the following trees: Acer rubrum, Cornus florida, Pyrus calleryana, Magnolia stellate, and Quercus phellos. The tree most consistently carried forward from the original design is the Quercus phellos. Over the course of time these canopy street trees have transformed what was an auto-oriented spaces into a shady oasis. The straight growth of the willow oaks has outstripped the height of many of the historic structures. The trees have popularized Greenville s name by making Main Street green, but also have outgrown the space.

Careful management including air spading the roots and incorporating vertical drains has helped preserve the historic trees. In a few cases the original trees have been replaced with saplings of the same variety and in other cases a larger perimeter has been cut in the sidewalk to accommodate growth.5 The most significant change to the tree planting in recent years has been the replacing the Acer rubrums with Ulmus parvifolia as an understory tree. The Chinese elm has become a popular replacement for many street trees because Dutch elm disease has destroyed native elms. The red maples have functioned similar to elms in the streetscape. In the planting the red maples alternated with the street lighting in the buffer planters that separate the sidewalks from the diagonal parking.

The root 5 Phone interview with Scott Drayton former Assistant Administrator of Parks and Grounds. MAIN STREET HALS NO. PAGE 3 mass of the red maples was too large for the 4 ft. planter width.6 A few Cornus florida exist near pedestrian crossings,but are too small to be the original. None of the original Magnolia stellate were identified in a tree survey. Buffer Planters & Corner Planters The use of heavy concrete forms in the streetscape and corresponding hotel planters eventually became characteristic of this era of design. While many find this heavy-handed in the case of Greenville s streetscape the curbed wide and long planters (with bold 3 in. diameter protective rails) provide distance and screening from the diagonally parked cars.

At the pedestrian level the cars do not seem present. In most cases Ilex cornuta run the length of the planter alternating with the streetlights and the Chinese elms. The heavy rails deter the pedestrian from cutting through the planting and protect trees from car accidents, but have frequent enough intervals to access the parked vehicles. The annual and shrub layers have varied throughout the years from the specified Azaleas, Camellias, and Yucca plants. The city regularly maintains the intersection corner plantings with fresh annuals. Each intersection varies; some have clipped boxwood with Japanese maples and others Nandina domestica with annual flowers. The plants and shrubs in the longer planters are not maintained in a seasonal way and have suffered some neglect.

The curbing near some of the willow oaks has been removed because of expanded root growth. Sidewalks Sidewalks measure up to in width. This is wide enough for outdoor caf seating in front of restaurants. The material design includes a paving pattern of small squares impressed in the concrete. Mid-Block Pedestrian Crossings Halprin and his associates consistently designed spaces with the flow of movement in mind. Mid-block pedestrian crossings signal that this is a pedestrian space. They also provide an additional crossing for large blocks and pre-empt jaywalking. Two Lane Traffic The design reduced the four-lane road into a slower two-lane street. The change transformed what had been an artery into a pedestrian oriented space.

This intentional choice is one of the most frequently 6 Phone interview with Scott Drayton former Assistant Administrator of Parks and Grounds. MAIN STREET HALS NO. PAGE 4 mentioned aspects of the design in newspaper clippings. Diagonal Parking The design continues to encourage economic investment in downtown through providing short-term parking for the local businesses. The diagonal parking provides that access but also calms traffic because it requires backing in and out via the street. Pedestrians are buffered from the parking through the long wide planters. Benches: Ground Mounted The original bench design included slatted wood benches with wrought iron curved frame and two posts mounted into the ground. In recent years straight-backed powder-coated steel benches have replaced these.

Light with Traffic Mast Arm and Traffic Signal At the intersections Halprin s former associates integrated several street furnishings into one reducing the clutter Halprin critiques in Cities. Instead signage, cobra lights, and traffic lights are incorporated into a unique fixture singular to the Greenville Main Street design. Construction documents describe these as: Mercury Vapor Area Light with Traffic Mast Arm and Traffic Signal Mercury Vapor Area Light with Two Traffic Mast Arms This contributes to the open air feel of the downtown corridor and also protects the urban canopy from trimming to protect wiring. The original signage has changed to graphically match the city s branding, but the original mast arms continues to be utilized.

Street Lighting The construction documents include five different kinds of light fixtures for the streetscape design. The two mentioned above and the following: High Pressure Sodium Area Light Mercury-Vapor Area Light Single Fixture Pedestrian Light In a LED streetlight program as part of Greening Greenville Initiative piloted 4 different LED pedestrian light styles the final block of the sequence terminated at Beattie Place. These included photocell technology to shut off during daylight hours.7 In the city began replacing some of the fishbowl-style lamps from the design with new energy-efficient LED lights. A news article from the same year explained that out of respect for the design, not all of the Halprin era 7 Lighting Design Guide (A Hubbell Company, MAIN STREET HALS NO.

PAGE 5 lights would be removed.8 The city considered options for retaining lights in clusters at intersections as well as adapting the design to modern lighting innovations. Streetscape Integration with Convention Center The original design was meant to culminate into the hotel convention center as part of the revitalization effort. From a design standpoint this was accomplished through breaking down the outdoor-indoor divide. A large portion of one of the hotel walls is glass and metal extending to the roof. The transparent fa ade encourages the pedestrian into the new convention center and hotel, which cascades with fountains reminiscent of Halprin s Ira Keller Forecourt Fountain part of the Portland Open Space Sequence.

The fountains and lush indoor planters housed in concrete terraced forms integrate with stairways to lead visitors from the street level down into the hotel. The transparent portions of the walls on two sides of the hotel bring the light and airiness of the street into the below ground space. The expansive glass walls also create a conservatory ambiance within the main hall of the center breaking down the outside inside divide and bringing the streetscape into the hotel.

Changes to the historic streetscape While much of the historic streetscape design is still intact as described above, the following blocks have undergone these significant changes moving from north to south: Beattie Place to North Street The plaza and portion of the streetscape in front of the Hyatt was renovated in The sidewalk was converted to pavers and new trees were planted. The remodeling of the hotel impacts the connection of the original design between the interior of the hotel and the streetscape. While much of the form remains of the interior fountains, terraced plantings, and stairs, the materiality has changed to soften the original concrete through wood grain facades and mosaic tiling. Bright street furniture has also been added to the plaza.

Opposite the convention center is a memorial to Max Heller, the mayor at the time of the design, who is credited with the revitalization of downtown. Max Heller Legacy Plaza was installed in through the Friends of Max on Main.10 A planting circumscribes one half. A circle of panels describes his life story. A statue of Heller stands in the sidewalk 8 Street Lighting (The Greenville News, 9 Downtown Reborn (City of Greenville, Date Unknown). 10 Max Heller Legacy Plaza (US Historical Marker Project, Date Unknown). MAIN STREET HALS NO. PAGE 6 elevated on a two-step plinth. North Street to Coffee Street Shortly after the redesign of Main Street in the the area where Coffee Street dead ends became Bergamo Plaza in the named in honor of Greenville s sister city in Italy.

In the plaza was redesigned as part of a larger project and renamed ONE City Plaza.11 While much of the street elements from the Halprin era design still remain, some minor changes were made. The installation of a Wi-Fi and bollards for increased security impacted historic elements. Coffee Street to Washington Street The northwest corner planting of the Washington and Main Street intersection was replaced in by a memorial to Sterling High School, an African American School that burned down in and was never rebuilt due to the integration of the Greenville County School District in Statues of school children, plaques in memory, and a low brick walk fill the space. Washington Street to McBee Street No significant changes were noted here.

McBee Street to Court Street In the historic Poinsett Hotel was renovated.13 The hotel sits at the corner of Main and Court Streets. With the renovation the street was also converted to brick pavers to match the red brick of the hotel. There is a marked break of the modernist aesthetic of the Halprin era design with and imitation of the early aesthetic of the hotel. While documentation was not identified, the sidewalk on a portion of the western side of the street also has plaques with various quotes integrated into the concrete squares of the design. History: Main Street has become, in effect, a mass of competing signs, each more eye-catching and blatant than the next, a nervous, jittery conglomeration of visual chaos.

If you add to this jumble the wires of overhead trolley buses, the scaleless brilliance of street lighting, the messy trash containers, the poles with traffic lights, directional signs, no-parking 11 Downtown Reborn. 12 Sterling High School History (The Piedmont Athletic Association Hall of Fame, Date Unknown). 13 Downtown Reborn. MAIN STREET HALS NO. PAGE 7 signals, mail boxes, fire hydrants, and other accouterments of the Public Works Department, the street can in fact become a veritable dumpheap for necessary objects, ill designed, carelessly place, and unpleasant. What architecture there is become obliterated, buildings are defaced and the street itself is a quagmire of confusion.

- Lawrence Halprin, Cities Halprin s description of Main Street, USA in his book Cities could function as a caption for the historical images of Greenville s Main Street before its streetscape design. The accumulation of traffic fits the stereotype of a quagmire of confusion and the lack of design for the pedestrian made it a veritable dumpheap for necessary objects .14 Business began to suffer from this lack of design and at the beginning of Max Heller s mayoral term efforts to revitalize the downtown became realized in two phases: an initial 5 block streetscape design, which culminated into a hotel- convention center.15 The most innovative element of the design for its time was a streetscape diet that gave preference to the pedestrian.

In Cities Halprin describes the city as a kaleidoscope of overlapping activities and people in motion. As the people eddy and move in a multifaceted series of actions, the furniture in the street becomes the fixed point, which can guide and enrich their movements.16 He also argues that attention to the detail and design of objects in its streets is as important as the qualities of a city s aesthetics as its buildings themselves .17 He acknowledges functional needs for furniture in specific places, but he emphasizes the role streets, urban plazas, parks and small squares play as stages for city people s activities. Halprin believed these spaces too need to be furnished with a whole range of well-designed incidental objects for public enjoyment.

18 While news clippings refer to Lawrence Halprin s firm as the chosen designers for the project, the final construction documents were stamped The Cultural Landscape Foundation s website explains this change, Lawrence Halprin and Associates was commissioned, in to create a streetscape plan to revitalize the downtown area. Completed by which was composed of former Halprin employees (and which, at the time of this work, still shared office space with Halprin s firm). 20 Greenville s Main Street is included with The 14 Lawrence Halprin, Cities (MIT Press, Cambridge, 15 Lyn Nabers, City s Revitalization Plans Began to Materialize in (The Piedmont, Greenville, 16 Halprin, Cities, 51. 17 Halprin, Cities, 51. 18 Halprin, Cities, 51. 19 Perry, Design Plan. 20 Main Street, Greenville.

MAIN STREET HALS NO. PAGE 8 Cultural Landscape Foundation s list of designs associated with Lawrence Halprin & Associates. In the forward of Halprin s autobiography A Life Spent Changing Places, renowned landscape Laurie Olin describes the impact of Halprin s civic work in century design. He also laments how Halprin s innovations became clich through copycats: At the time however, he and his staff were designing and building a new kind of public space, flowing free-form pedestrian ways between shops in the new marketplaces of America. 21 Olin goes on to describe how Halprin challenged the typology of the traditional street as it had evolved, choked with automobiles, in twentieth-century America.

22 Olin relates a more extreme design proposal in Minneapolis, which suggested a bus-way, shaped more like the wanderings of a river, creating varying and more generous widths alternately on either side for pedestrians instead of the habitual narrow straight sidewalks. 23 While the design for Greenville s Main Street was not this ambitious, the simple act of reclaiming the space for pedestrians has continued to be recognized. This change created an arrangement similar to the Minneapolis proposal, which allowed for streetscape amenities, such as art, fountains, plantings, and seating. Olin describes Halprin s book Cities as a survey and meditation on the character of both ordinary and outstanding furnishings of European civic spaces.

24 The book was the result of a summer trip in that Halprin took to Europe and Israel. Olin believed that the book and experience led to a series of commissions, which provided him the opportunity to experiment with these typologies. One that Olin mentions, the pedestrian mall in Charlottesville, Virginia, has similarities to Greenville in timing, scope, and scale. Much like Greenville, it was designed in the mid-1970s in an attempt to revitalize the downtown. This design went further than Greenville s narrowing of Main Street and devoted the entire street to pedestrians. The Cultural Landscape Foundation s describes This eight-block-long by 60-foot-wide street as Charlottesville s public living room.

25 It is easy to overlook the furniture in Greenville s public living room; some might even find it bulky or dated. However, the many festivals and events it houses every year are testimony to Halprin s understanding that in the urban 21 Lawrence Halprin, A Life Spent Changing Place (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, ix-x. 22 Halprin, A Life, xi. 23 Halprin, A Life, xi. 24 Halprin, A Life, x. 25 Charlottesville Mall (Cultural Landscape Foundation, Date Unknown). MAIN STREET HALS NO. PAGE 9 spaces between buildings is the paraphernalia of urban living the furniture which makes these spaces inhabitable. 26 The street diet was the initial cut or surgical move that made the design possible.

Halprin says himself, Space itself is only an envelope within which events happen the small scaled objects which we constantly use and see; they set the dominant quality of streets and plazas, and by their ubiquity, they become the street. 27

Source document Quoted word for word from HALS SC-21. Not written, edited or summarised by this site.

"Charlottesville Mall." The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Accessed June 28, "Downtown briefing set." The Greenville News, May 3, sec. B. Accessed June 28, Downtown Reborn. Accessed July 29, Foster, Jim. "Groundbreaking set Jan. The Greenville News, January 1, Halprin, Lawrence. A Life Spent Changing Places. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, Halprin, Lawrence. Cities. Revised ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, "Introducing the Greening of Greenville LED Streetlight Pilot." Progress Lighting Design Guide. July 11, Accessed July 15, streetlight-pilot/. "Lawrence Halprin & Associates. The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Accessed June 28, "Lawrence Halprin s Legacy: Main Street, Greenville." The Cultural Landscape Foundation.

October 8, Accessed June 28, "Main Street, Greenville." The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Accessed June 28, "Max Heller Legacy Plaza." US Historical Marker Project. Accessed July 15, 26 Halprin, Cities, 51. 27 Halprin, Cities, 51. MAIN STREET HALS NO. PAGE 10 Nabers, "City's Revitalization Plans Began to Materialize in The Piedmont (Greenville, December 27, Perry, Dale. "Design Plan Picked." The Greenville News, April 29, sec. D. Accessed June 28, Perry, Dale. "Complex Funds Pledged." The Greenville News, December 9, sec. A. Accessed June 28, Simon, Ellis. "Hotel-civic Center to 'boost Development'." The Greenville News, December 9, sec. A. Accessed June 28, Simon, Ellis. "Downtown revitalization gets study." The Greenville News, March 3, sec. C.

Accessed June 28, Sterling High School History. The Piedmont Athletic Association Hall of Fame. Accessed June 28,

Source document Quoted word for word from HALS SC-21. Not written, edited or summarised by this site.

Rebekah Lawrence July 20, Honorable Mention Recipient - HALS Challenge: Historic Streetscapes MAIN STREET HALS NO. PAGE 11 View of existing conditions from Main Street and Beattie Place intersection looking south. (Rebekah Lawrence, July 4, View of existing conditions from Main Street and East North Street intersection looking south. Note missing sign and temporary stoplight. Note damage to crosswalk and repair with asphalt versus concrete. (Rebekah Lawrence, July 4, MAIN STREET HALS NO. PAGE 12 View of existing conditions from Main Street and Coffee Street intersection looking south. Coffee Street terminates in plaza and differs from typical intersection. Way finding street level signage, bench, trash receptacles, and cigarette receptacle date after the design implementation.

(Rebekah Lawrence, July 4, View of existing conditions from Main Street and Washington Street intersection looking south. (Rebekah Lawrence, July 4, MAIN STREET HALS NO. PAGE 13 View of existing conditions from Main Street and McBee Street intersection looking south. (Rebekah Lawrence, July 4, View of existing conditions from Main Street and Court Street intersection looking north. Note change in materiality of road and sidewalk dating to Poinsett Hotel renovation in (Rebekah Lawrence, July 4, MAIN STREET HALS NO. PAGE 14 Side-by-side comparison of Halprin-era tri-globe lighting with LED fixture. (Rebekah Lawrence, July 4, View towards Hyatt Regency Hotel from the sidewalk. Note changes to paving and addition of non-period street furniture.

Glass fa ade of hotel integrated the former streetscape into the historic hotel space (Rebekah Lawrence, July 4, MAIN STREET HALS NO. PAGE 15 View south towards ONE Plaza at the end of Coffee Street. Note buffer planters with guardrails and curbing, period lighting, and square concrete paving. Ilex cornuta and Ulmus parvifolia replaced historic azaleas varieties and Acer rubrum (Rebekah Lawrence, July 4, Example of mid-block pedestrian crossing and seating area. Note distinct material difference between crossing and road. Also, note mature Quercus phellos in all four corners. Benches and trash receptacles are not from period of interest. (Rebekah Lawrence, July 4,