Finding the Right Site

One would think that finding a small building site on a “recycled” lot near the urban center of a fairly large city wouldn’t be much of an issue. Yet, like every other aspect of this project, finding that site proved to be time consuming and a journey with many turns. … read more …

As the house was to serve as my family’s home and my professional office, I set about finding a suitable site. We started with an aerial photograph of downtown Greenville and concentric circles that reached out from Main Street in ¼ and 1/2 mile increments. The plan was to stay within one-mile of the center of town if at all possible. The idea was to provide something that would be easily accessible and visible to the downtown market and for my wife and I to experience new urban living. (I must admit here that the desire to move closer to the city, while accepted by my spouse, wasn’t something that she shared with bubbling enthusiasm. Her vision was more along the lines of a log cabin on 40 acres somewhere in the mountains).

We looked at Hampton-Pinkney, the Augusta Road area, Haynie-Sirrine and Stone Avenue – all older neighborhoods that were either experiencing or on the verge of revitalization. We finally set our sights on something that would abut or be very close to Cleveland Park – Greenville’s oldest and largest city park at more than 120 acres. (With walking my passion, to give-up the nearly five miles of jogging trails in River Walk near Simpsonville, I wanted to replace that with something in-kind).

We found ourselves learning a great deal about Greenville as we spent avialable evenings and afternoons just driving through various neighborhoods looking for a suitable open property or even a lot with a structure that could be removed.

Two sites topped the list – one an open lot on Ridgeland Drive (the owner wouldn’t sell) and another on Hope Street that contained a condemned house (even if the owner would sell, the price for the lot was almost one-half of what we had hoped to invest in the entire project -- lot AND house.) Finally, we came across a property on the lower end of Pettigru Street near its former intersection with Stone Avenue.

A Site That Had it All
The Pettigru Street site met not only our initial search criteria but it also offered the chance to build on several other attributes:

1. The lot was well within a mile of the heart of downtown;
2. It was on a “recycled lot” – one that had supported a home many years before;
3. It sat on a ridge overlooking Richland Creek, a major tributary to the Reedy River and a “finger” of Cleveland Park;
4. It adjoined an open lot – the only virgin lot in the entire Pettigru District;
5. The open lot adjoined a never-used city street easement that hosted a hidden and totally overgrown access trail to Cleveland Park and a footbridge crossing Richland Creek;
6. The City had just begun to cul-de-sac the lower end of Pettigru, drastically reducing the amount of truck and car traffic; and
7. While the Pettigru Historic District had seen many rehabilitation projects, this particular section was among the most needy for further positive investment.

With the help of Tommy Wyche and his not-for-profit, Naturaland Trust, we were able to purchase not only the planned building lot, but the adjacent open lot, as well. The vision (as it continued to evolve) was to build on the previously used lot – this would avoid new sewer impact fees and would take advantage of previous site work. Then we’d place a conservation easement on the open lot and turn it into a native plant woodland garden. These plans, along with rehabilitation of the trail access that would create a new auxiliary entrance to Cleveland Park, would add another jewel in the greenway corridor emerging along Upstate South Carolina's Reedy River.