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HIGH POINT — During a blast-oven afternoon, when a large fan kept his barbershop cool, Robert Hayes flashed his gold-tooth grin and recalled the East Washington Drive he saw in his mind.

Back then, black businesses thrived along every inch of the street. There was a hotel, a theater, a doctor, a dentist, a drugstore and enough churches so that anyone could find religion.

East Washington Drive was the Harlem of High Point. Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald stayed in the Kilby Hotel, John Coltrane grew up down the street and Hayes was, in his words, a "fighter for freedom."

It must've been 1963 , as Hayes remembered, when he marched past his barbershop. He was heading toward South Main because, like everyone on his street, he wanted better jobs and the promise of no more segregation.

Today, Hayes is 74 , a father of five and a grandfather of 26 . He has operated his barber shop for 47 years. He can look out his storefront window and see a street of empty storefronts and little activity, with boarded-up buildings around the corner.

The East Washington Drive that Hayes remembers is still there. Coltrane's boyhood home is a few blocks away, and a small marble plaque celebrates the history of the Kilby, a hotel that's nearly a century old.

But on this hot August afternoon, the Kilby is just another empty building along a desolate avenue bordering High Point's desolate downtown.

Yet, Hayes has faith. East Washington Drive will revive.

"Good is gonna come,'' Hayes said repeatedly. "Good is gonna come.''

City officials and community leaders have singled out East Washington Drive as a big-time priority for the most ambitious land-use plan High Point has ever undertaken.

The High Point City Council approved the plan in February. It cost $150,000, took two years of study and promised to make the city — particularly its downtown and older neighborhoods — a better place to live, work and play.

Now the hard work begins.

City officials will begin setting priorities later this month and consider how to spend the $187,000 set aside this year to hire a consultant.

You can expect the plan to become a budget line item for years to come. And yeah, it'll require money when money is becoming increasingly tough.

But High Point, North Carolina's Furniture City, needs to follow through — and convince businesses and non-profit foundations to pony up — or face a dismal future. Potential needs to turn into opportunity.

And there's no better place to start than East Washington Drive, the Harlem of High Point, the boyhood home of a brilliant saxophonist, nicknamed "Country John,'' who continues to influence millions.

Spend some time inside Hayes' one-chair barber shop or step across the street to see Joseph "Butch'' McCollum at B-Wear Screen Printing . Potential hangs in the air like summer humidity.

"Let me tell you something,'' said McCollum, who owns B-Wear. "All the cities you go to have a downtown area. Well, High Point has no downtown. When the furniture market is gone, downtown is dead. And we need something.

"People are coming into this town to make million-dollar deals one block up the street, and on the way out they see this,'' he says. "I think it's — what's the word? — distasteful. This place needs to have a face-lift."

Twice a year, during the High Point Market, some of the best-dressed people you'll ever see come here to hammer out deals that'll affect furniture and furniture design for years to come.

Their impact is huge. Just run the numbers.

Two weeks every year, the market draws 140,000 furniture-minded folks and drops $1.2 billion into our local cash registers.

But that impact also has crippled High Point's core. The market has engulfed downtown.

Humongous, often beautiful showrooms are everywhere. But once the market ends and showrooms turn into floors of empty space, the idea of a dynamic downtown vanishes.

High Point needs that core-city vibrancy to thrive.

McCollum knows that; so does Tom Terrell. He should. He chaired the committee that spent two years drafting the plan.

"If all of our energy and all of our non-work life is at the Palladium theater,'' he said, "then we're nothing but a bedroom community to Greensboro.''

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or rowe@news-record.com