by Henri Gendreau, The Roanoke Rambler
The yellow-brick Claytor Memorial Clinic sits at the heart of Gainsboro, resembling the neighborhood itself: stately, imbued with history, haunted by the past, in need of repair.
Roanoke was Gainsboro before it was Roanoke; the Town of Gainsborough was incorporated in 1835. Once a thriving part of the city and home to Roanoke’s “Black Wall Street,” in the early 20th-century, the neighborhood was decimated during urban renewal, or what the writer James Baldwin memorably termed “Negro removal.” Between 1955 and the 1980s, the city tore down 1,600 homes, 200 Black-owned businesses and two dozen churches in Gainsboro as part of a nationwide trend in which localities used eminent domain to take Black property for a pittance.
“I ask people this all the time,” Jordan Bell, a neighborhood advocate and historian, says one day at the Gainsboro Library on Patton Avenue. “Can you give me one reason why you would come to Gainsboro to buy something? Gainsboro, technically, is everything from Hotel Roanoke to Orange Avenue, and everything from Williamson Road where Domino’s Pizza is, to Fifth Street.” The correct answer, he says, is no.
“There’s no grocery store, there’s no hardware store, there’s no reason for anybody, business-wise, to come to Gainsboro,” Bell says. “Sixty years ago, you walk out this front door, it’s 200 businesses in this area before urban renewal. Literally, you walk out of this front door in Gainsboro Library and you look straight ahead, you will see 200 businesses. You can’t find one now. So that money could be used to start businesses.”
The money he’s talking about is part of the $64.5 million in federal coronavirus relief funds that the city will soon disperse. Funding a community hub in Gainsboro, focused on a business development center, is a major recommendation to come out of a city panel that made its final pitch to City Council on Monday. City Council adopted those recommendations wholesale at its meeting. City leaders are seeking to invest in a few “transformational” projects that could have long-lasting impact on Roanoke, particularly in low-income neighborhoods.
Across a cul-de-sac from the boarded-up Claytor Clinic sits the Lawson Building. There, Tommy Page has been running a company for almost nine years that has helped minority-owned businesses get launched. NuFocus Group which recently became a nonprofit as NuFocused X, runs an online radio station, magazine and digital media site that allows businesses to increase their visibility. Today, Page’s incubator boasts 10 businesses, including a clothing press, a builder and a cleaning company. Page, a self-described ex-military, former pastor, former Miami nightclub owner, gives a voluble and passionate sales pitch for the project.
Part of the plan for a Gainsboro hub, which is seeking an estimated $5-million in federal funds, includes a reimagining of the iconic Claytor Clinic into a working health center.
“We ultimately, from this new Gainsboro business corridor, want to bring the Claytor Clinic at some capacity back,” Page says. “It didn’t make sense like it does make sense now until COVID hit. When COVID and our community didn’t really have places for the testing, they didn’t actually have places to administer, so it was like, No, we need to do this and we need to get this going.”
The name Page has pitched to the city, the New Gainsboro Business Corridor, itself derives from a neighborhood revitalization plan, never realized, that residents developed decades ago.
“We want it to be what they said, what they had made plans for, we just want to show that we haven’t forgot about them and we want to see it come to fruition,” Page says. “We now have a moment we could see it come to fruition.”
The prospect that Gainsboro might be on the cusp of change does not always sit well with the neighborhood’s longest-serving residents. A decade of destruction, touted by city leaders as in the name of progress, has left the specter of one person’s revitalization as another’s urban renewal. Tensions over whether and how the neighborhood should change cross-generational, racial and class lines.
In recent years the city has made a more concerted effort to reach out to Gainsboro residents, some now in their 90s, who had lived through the trauma of urban renewal. Before the pandemic halted in-person meetings, City Manager Bob Cowell and Councilmen Joe Cobb and Bill Bestpitch listened to residents, affectionately termed “the elders” and discussed what Roanoke could do to acknowledge or atone for urban renewal, including a public apology. (Cowell said it was coincidental that the city’s emissaries ended up being three white men; City Council is majority Black.)
“For the elders, it’s clear that they continue to struggle with, really, trust, understandably, of the city, and really in some ways not quite sure how to actually move forward from this point,” Cowell says. “I think they spend a lot of time, rightfully so, talking about the damage done, and really questioning whether that damage can really be undone.”
While meeting with the elders, the city had also been meeting with leaders from younger generations hoping to revitalize a part of Roanoke that raised civil rights attorney Oliver Hill and Edward Dudley, the first Black U.S. ambassador. In Cowell’s view, younger residents want to respect the past while finding a path forward.
“There’s an acknowledgement and honoring of what took place there,” Cowell says. “But also, they want to see what they can build new. They don’t want the story to end at urban renewal.”
Part 2 of this article will be featured in The Roanoke Tribune 9/30/21 edition (next week) or acces the complete article at theroanoketribune.com or theroanokerambler.com.
