Mayors debate town’s charm (The Chapel Hill News)
Letter ignites war of words
BY MARK SCHULTZ, Staff Writer
CHAPEL HILL – Gastonia Mayor Jennie Stultz was dining not long ago with then Chapel Hill Mayor Kevin Foy.
It was pouring down rain during fall break, but Trilussa La Trattoria, the Italian restaurant on West Franklin Street was jam-packed, she said.
So when Stultz heard another North Carolina mayor had described Chapel Hill’s downtown as “slowly declining” this week, she laughed.
“Whenever I’m in Raleigh I make a point to drive through Chapel Hill – just one of those soul-soothing rides – just to see what a vibrant downtown should really look like,” she said Friday.
That was not Mel Cohen’s experience.
Cohen is the mayor of Morganton, a town of 17,000 in Burke County in the central western part of the state.
Cohen visited Chapel Hill last weekend and had a great time – in Carrboro.
In a letter to The Chapel Hill News, the 1964 UNC graduate said he “was saddened to see the deterioration” of Franklin Street.
“Chapel Hill is slowly declining, and it seems to me there may be an attitude of the Chapel Hill Town Council that downtown is not their priority,” Cohen wrote.
In an interview, Cohen, a former traveling salesman, said he visited his daughter in Chapel Hill and ate breakfast at Ye Ole Waffle House. He said the streets weren’t clean and the empty storefronts were dirty.
“Chapel Hill, in my mind, should stand on its own, should be almost perfect really,” he said.
“Look at Carrboro” next door, whose farmers market Cohen had visited Saturday morning. “It’s full. It’s vibrant. I love it.”
‘The coolest place’
The state of downtown and Chapel Hill in general, perhaps because so many North Carolinians feel a connection to it, comes up a lot.
Last year, Ted Abernathy, executive director of the Southern Growth Policies Board and a former Orange County economic development officer, said Chapel Hill may have lost its edge as Durham and other cities reinvented themselves.
“You used to be the coolest place,” he told the leaders at a breakfast meeting at the Siena Hotel.
Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt shot back this week after The Chapel Hill News e-mailed him Cohen’s letter.
“I’m disappointed that Mayor Cohen had an experience that resulted in that kind of letter,” he said. “I think if he had spent more time in Chapel Hill, maybe he would learn many of his impressions are less than accurate.”
For one, Cohen might have learned Chapel Hill’s downtown has a 4.5 percent vacancy rate downtown, one-third of Morganton’s 13.5 percent rate.
“I think Chapel Hill’s doing a pretty darn good job,” Kleinschmidt said.
“Maybe he can get Southern Culture on the Skids to give a free concert in Morganton,” he added. “They just did in Chapel Hill last week.”
The Chapel Hill Town Council has taken steps to revitalize downtown. The town, university and downtown merchants helped form the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership, which works on issues such as cleanliness, parking and panhandling.
The first homeowners in the 10-story Greenbridge condominium and retail project in downtown’s West End will move in this summer. Plans are under way for an eight-story condominium and retail project at 140 West Franklin Street.
Cohen predicted downtown towers in Chapel Hill would be “a tremendous eyesore.” Downtown Morganton has a three-story height limit, he said.
“That’s just super for Morganton,” Kleinschmidt said.
Liz Parham is the director of the state’s Office of Urban Development and the N.C. Main Street Center, which works to promote economic development and historic preservation in towns under 50,000 people. She once ran the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership and said you can’t compare downtowns.
“Every downtown has its focus,” she said. “I think what’s important is every downtown focus its efforts to make it the most economically viable it can be.”
Stultz, the first woman mayor elected in Gastonia, agreed.
The city of 75,000 people in southwestern North Carolina has a six-story building and a seven-story building downtown – “what we call our skyscrapers” – with only one floor of tenants between them. “Every downtown is scrapping for residents and other kind of development downtown,” she said.
Despite Cohen’s letter, Kleinschmidt said, leaders like Stultz tell him all the time they wish they had a downtown like Chapel Hill’s.
“I hope he can come back so I can show him some of the things he missed.”
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