Hendley Homes reunion: Day for memories
By: By JOHN MONK
Published: Mon, 11/09 @ 12:00AM
Bobo was long gone.
"We used to be scared of Bobo. He was a big, big guy," said Charlene Pryor, 39, who lived at one of Columbia's biggest and best-known low-income housing projects from the age of about 3 to 17 before leaving in 1988.
Pryor was one of about 20 former Hendley Homes residents who returned to their childhood home Sunday afternoon for a tour.
Bobo didn't show. In fact, no one knew what had happened to him. That didn't stop the reminiscing.
"It was just like a big family here. If a child got lost, we would take them back home to their parents," said Glenda Smith, 52.
Besides Bobo, another person whom residents had lost track of was Miss Margaret. She was - no one remembered her last name - a kindly school crossing guard at nearby A.C. Moore Elementary School. She not only made sure Hendley Homes children got safely across the street, but she kissed and hugged them too.
In 2000, the 300 apartments at Hendley Homes, then almost 50 years old and beyond repair, were torn down. A new neighborhood, Rosewood Hills, also a project of the Columbia Housing Authority, was built atop the dirt and memories.
The upscale-looking complex of 187 homes and apartments in no way resembles the old. It cost $35 million and has solar-powered Wi-Fi and numerous energy-saving features. Its pastel buildings, wide streets, and trees are far removed from the low-swung, low-rent red brick tenements with bare ground, outside laundry lines and no parking spaces for cars.
Sunday's visitors marveled at something else - the bathrooms.
At one house, Thomas Ladson, 49, was astonished at a spacious upstairs bathroom, with a gigantic bathtub, sparkling clean commode, two sinks and four wall lights.
"We only had one light. Everyone only had one bathroom light." Ladson shook his head. "This is better. A lot better."
Only the hills are the same. Hendley Homes and its successor were built on some of the steepest hills in Columbia.
Ruth Mitchell, 62, pointed at one of them, now a grassy slope. A smile crossed her face.
"In the big snow, I went all the way down there on a cardboard box." She laughed. That was in 1973, the year of one of the biggest snows in her lifetime.
There was disbelief at what had vanished.
"Our building doesn't exist anymore," said Deborah Marshall-Haynes, 59, pointing at a patch of air. "That street goes directly through where it was."
Also gone was the basketball court where hundreds of Hendley Homes and neighborhood youths played, hoping to make the big time.
One of the few who played on the Hendley court and attained superstar status was Xavier McDaniel. In the 1980s, he became a college superstar and was a first-rounder in the 1985 NBA draft. He made millions playing for six pro basketball teams from 1986 to 1998.
McDaniel wasn't a true Hendley Homes resident, but he lived down the street and played at the project often as a youth, former residents said.
Former residents' memories of Hendley Homes were uniformly positive Sunday. But another reality is revealed in old news stories. The project was also a magnet for crime and controversy, marked over the years by stabbings, shootings, drugs, undercover operations and food stamp fraud.
In 1989, then-Richland County Sheriff Allen Sloan took credit for getting a local bus company to change its routes so Henley residents, who were mostly black and didn't own cars, would have a difficult time getting to a popular shopping mall.
In 1990, city police opened a substation in Hendley Homes, reducing assault and robbery calls to police about 20 percent.
At its best, Hendley Homes had a special kind of community, former residents said.
Children congregated after school to do homework and play games at the Homes community center. People took care of one another, even though apartments were crowded and not as luxurious as the mansions in white neighborhoods less than a mile away.
"We had four bedrooms, and it was me, my mother and father, two sisters, three brothers and my grandmother," said Linda Breeland Ramsey, 50, who left Hendley Homes in 1984.
She savored the memories.
"The good old days," she said. "That's what it was."
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