Five Points set to celebrate end of streetscaping

By DAWN HINSHAW - dhinshaw@thestate.com

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Five Points merchants will hold a party Friday to celebrate the end of a massive, three-year streetscaping project that tested the limits of shopkeepers and customers alike.

“I’m just glad it’s about over,” said Bill Hitchcock, a “regular” who was reading and drinking an afternoon beer at a sidewalk table one day last week.

The city’s $35.3 million improvement project is attracting new development to this historic village. But the focus for Five Points is building back business.

One view of Five Points.

- FILE PHOTOGRAPH/THE STATE

PDF: Five Points | Looking back, looking ahead (pdf)
NEXT UP
Restoration of Maxcy Gregg Park
In the next two months, park officials will resurrect a plan to restore Maxcy Gregg Park.
The use of the park as a storage area for big equipment during the Five Points project delayed improvements planned for the cancer survivors park installed in 2001.
Marjorie Stands Wallace, chairwoman of a city parks foundation, said planned additions include new trails, a fragrance garden and a statue garden of “little critters” for children.
“We’ve got to bring in the children,” Wallace said. “We’re also going to have a small place for picnics.”
She said the park, remarkable for its huge old live-oak trees, will remain a passive place where people simply meander and enjoy a variety of flowers that garden clubs are donating — camellias, iris and day lilies among them.
Some $420,000 has been set aside for the project, said assistant city manager Allison Baker. He said the design, by landscape architects Grimball-Cotterill & Associates, may need to be updated.
“We need to save and improve all that we have,” Baker said. “We do have to do the landscaping, and we do need to create some parking. But beyond that, I’m not really sure what we’ll do.”
Whatever is done, City Council will have the final say.
— Dawn Hinshaw

TALLIES
The Five Points project
Construction costs
Projected: $30.5 million (1)
Budgeted: $35.3 million
Actual: Not available
Trees
Trees before project: 130
Trees removed: 101
New trees planted: 319
Total today: 348
Business
• Among the businesses that moved or closed since August 2004, when the project broke ground, include: Parthenon restaurant, Rising High restaurant, Artist Basement gallery, Gibson’s gift shop (moved)
• Among new businesses that opened: Sophie’s Shoes, Congaree Grill, 20!20 Vision, Sid and Nancy’s
(1) — Did not include design and engineering costs

WHAT’S LEFT
Like any good party, there are a slew of details left undone as the hosts prepare for Friday’s End of Construction Celebration. Most will wait until after the party, but here’s the punch list:
In coming weeks, Norfolk Southern will erect crossing arms at the railroad tracks at Greene and Laurens streets. Then the city will finish the sidewalk, lighting and landscaping at the intersection.
A half-dozen dead trees must be replaced; that will wait until November, when the weather is more conducive to planting. Dead shrubs, here and there in the medians, will be replaced.
A second Five Points fountain is being installed along Saluda Avenue at Blossom Street, a project of the Five Points Association. Work started about two weeks ago and should be complete in late November. The contractor is Gregory Electric, with a cost of $315,450.
Maxcy Gregg Park, used as an equipment staging area during the project, will be restored later.
Finally, new pavement throughout Five Points will be striped. Markings on the asphalt now are temporary.
SOURCES: Ken Wells, construction superintendent; Merritt Brewer, Five Points Association director; Allison Baker, assistant city manager

PROJECT CHALLENGES
The Five Points project proved more difficult than anyone predicted because of soupy soil and crumbling waterlines. To keep work moving, construction managers were forced to switch from a minimum impact approach — finishing one block before starting the next — to excavating in multiple spots at once. Some of the trials:
Crews digging beside Yesterday’s restaurant came upon a buried drainage culvert that dated to the 1890s. Working around it cost nearly six months and required closing the street, something planners hoped to avoid.
A 100-year flood in July 2005 revealed the worst that Mother Nature had to offer: Four inches of rain in 45 minutes. The storm flooded some buildings that had never before flooded.
While digging in front of China Garden on Harden Street, crews discovered the front wall was perched on the sidewalk without a foundation underneath. They had to drive pilings 48 feet deep to jack up the wall.
Gobs of grease, accumulated from an era when restaurants weren’t required to collect cooking waste in traps, blew a 30-foot gusher in the middle of Devine Street one morning, destroying a manhole in the process.
— Dawn Hinshaw

IF YOU GO
Five Points End of Construction Celebration
When: 5-10 p.m. Friday, with parade at 6 p.m.
Where: Five Points
Highlights: Merchant sales and specials, street performers, live music on two stages, activity booths, bulldozer and dump truck pinatas
Worth noting: “Open containers” will be allowed on the street during the event, but aluminum and plastic only

At least 17 businesses moved or closed during the project, though all but a couple of their storefronts have been filled by new shops, bars and restaurants.

“We had a couple of struggling years. Borrowed money to pay taxes one year because business was so slow,” said Scottie MacRae, an owner of Yesterday’s restaurant, a cornerstone of Five Points.

But those days are behind him.

“Things are picking up,” he said Thursday morning. “We had a waiting line last night for dinner.”

THE PROJECT

The nearly complete beautification project, started in August 2004, sank utilities underground and aimed to make the village more pleasant for walking with new trees and streetlights.

But the main objective was to improve drainage in the 1920s neighborhood built on a swamp and notorious for flooding during summer storms.

Originally, the city planned to be finished in two years. But unexpected problems — soupy soil, crumbling water lines and the need to shore up at least one building — pushed the project to three years.

The project doubled the number of grates that allow water to run from streets into underground tunnels. Crews also added a 54-inch drainage pipe under Blossom Street, providing floodwater an alternate route into the Rocky Branch creek through one of the largest pipes available.

Still, Ken Wells, the city’s construction administrator, said there’s no way to guarantee Five Points will never flood. “I’d like to think it’s solved,” he said, “but I don’t think anyone can predict that.”

Wells, who has been involved since the beginning, said the streetscaping project was one of the largest of its kind on the East Coast.

What was the biggest surprise? Wells paused, thinking a moment.

“That we finished it?” he responded. “That I’m still alive?”

PARKING

Many agree the parking meters the city brought to Five Points aren’t helping businesses regain their footing.

Debbie Edens opened Three Dog Bakery on Harden Street this past summer, attracted by the eclectic mix of businesses and the neighborhood foot traffic that feeds her doggie-treat shop.

But for shoppers who drive, Edens is convinced the no-nonsense level of parking enforcement is a deterrent. She offers to run out and re-feed meters for customers who say they have to hurry to avoid a ticket.

Five Points is beautiful now, Edens said, and she has found a welcoming atmosphere.

But she would like to see that welcome extend to new chain stores — she mentioned Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma and Restoration Hardware — which she said would be a sign that Five Points has “arrived.”

“There’s a group down here that have been here 20-plus years and they’re just opposed to anything that’s not a one-story, mom-and-pop kind of thing,” she said.

Others, including customers like Hitchcock, say they want the city to preserve the one- and two-story buildings that provide an atmosphere of uncluttered history.

Edens said she’s pleased the city is doing a retail survey, bent on attracting new businesses to Columbia. She also would like to see some marketing — for Columbia as a whole — to attract people from nearby cities, such as Charlotte.

‘IT LOOKS BEAUTIFUL’

Nyna Dalbec, who grew up in nearby Shandon and now works in Five Points, finds the project “a little bit of a flop.”

“It has not been worth it,” Dalbec said, admitting, though, that she does like one new touch — the bricks along the sidewalks.

But Kelly Tabor, the owner of Good for the Sole, said he’s heard nothing but compliments.

“People come down here who haven’t been here in a year-and-a-half or two and they say, ‘My God, it looks beautiful.’”

He and others hope Friday’s celebration will bring even more of them back.

Reach Hinshaw at (803) 771-8641.

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