Month: July 2014

Fifteen years of Groceteria

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Groceteria.com was born fifteen years ago today with this post on Planet SOMA. It eventually eclipsed its parent site in traffic and attention and (I like to think) contributed to the growth of retail history studies online. It’s been fun despite the fact that the site was not as active over the past few years. I’m rectifying that situation, though.

So happy birthday to me. Sort of.

In which I nag about Greensboro history

This is a really great post and I love anything that will push locals to know more about the history of there they live. That’s always been important to me wherever I’ve lived. But there are a couple of factual issues I must address because I’m OCD that way. I’m posting this here where a maximum of twelve people will ever read it because there doesn’t seem to be a comments option on the article (EDIT: There actually is a comments option but it doesn’t show up in the mobile version and also involves Facebook platform apps).

It’s kind of a stretch to suggest that Glenwood was ever the “center” of high-end shopping and social activity in Greensboro and to compare it to Friendly Center. Glenwood was, at best, a nice streetcar suburb with a small neighborhood shopping area, most of which still stands (albeit in some disrepair) along Grove Street. Similar districts still exist on Tate Street by UNCG, at Walker and Elam Avenues, and other areas. It was more analogous to today’s small shopping center with a grocery store and a drug store (think Golden Gate, for example) than to a major shopping area like Friendly Center. There was, I believe, a popular recreational area in Glenwood as well.

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Also, the downtown bypass was not really a precursor to the Greensboro beltway; they were both planned around the same time and were to have coexisted. The one downtown just got funded and constructed several decades earlier. If I’m not mistaken, most of it was built more or less as planned, with Murrow Boulevard feeding into paired one-way streets (Fisher and Smith, then Edgeworth and Spring) to create a surface-level “loop” bypass. The part that was not constructed (and it’s probably a good thing) was the southern leg that was to be built as a major expressway, running parallel to Lee Street all the way to the Coliseum area. This part was scrapped for lack of demand and funds in the 1970s. The big mound of dirt and awkward traffic pattern at Lee Street and Murrow Boulevard live on as a reminder of the interchange that would have been there.

Last but not least, it’s “O. Henry”, not “O’Henry”.

So ends my unsolicited history lesson for the day…

More new photos

So while I’m at it, after posting the Richmond photos, I figured it was time I started catching up on some older photo posts. I’m about a year behind.

When I got started this afternoon, I realized that my flickr plugins on both sites had stopped working. Apparently, the flickr API switched to SSL-only just a couple of days ago, breaking lots of people’s plugins and apps. After panicking, I decided to be bold and try something stupid–changing all the “http://” references in the PHP files for my plugin to “https://”–and damned if it didn’t work!

So here are some more pretty pictures. Even more to come, including more DC, maybe more NYC, Virginia Beach, and (of course) lovely Florence SC: