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GREENSBORO -- Barbara Goff was 6 years old when her family moved to a new suburban home near Friendly Road.

It was the early 1950s, and Friendly rambled through rural land just outside the city limits. Residents along the two-lane road kept chickens and cows. People hunted rabbits. Goff hoped her parents might buy her a horse.

"At that time, we were in the country," says Goff, who is 60 and still lives in Greensboro. "And there was really nothing there."

Not for long.

Four years after Goff and her family moved to the emerging suburbs, retail followed. Two dozen merchants opened stores just off Friendly on a steamy morning in August 1957, heralding a new era in shopping that would shape the city for decades to come.

The story of Friendly Center is a story of change. As the center celebrates its 50th anniversary, Friendly's shoppers and retailers face what might be the most dramatic shift yet: The potential sale of Friendly by its longtime family owners to an unknown buyer.

The president of Starmount Co., which developed and owns Friendly, sees this sale as just another change for the center to weather. In the past 50 years, Friendly poached stores and shoppers from the center city. It withstood industry trends and fought off advances by other retail developments.

No matter who buys it, Coolidge Porterfield says, in another 50 years, Friendly still will be here.

"Obviously, I've spent a lot of my career working on it," says Porterfield, a longtime Starmount executive who took the helm there in 1992 and supervised Friendly through a series of expansions.

"But I also believe that whoever buys it will take it to bigger and better things."

Shopping, suburban style

"Bigger and better" might be an apt title for Friendly's history. From a few mostly local merchants, the center has grown to more than 1 million square feet of shopping and has become a center for retail in Greensboro.

Combined with the neighboring Shops at Friendly Center, which opened in October, the open-air mall spans more than 100 acres and comprises upward of 100 stores.

Only three original merchants — Belk, Jay's Deli and Leon's Style Salon — remain.

"It's kind of interesting to watch things progress and kind of ebb and flow and ebb again and accelerate," says Parker Washburn, who owns the local Leon's chain. "But the one thing that Friendly has been for us, of all our locations, is probably the most consistent."

Yet Leon's took a risk, opening a salon in an untested, suburban center.

In the late 1950s, downtowns still dominated retail. Major stores like Thalhimers, Montaldo's and Meyer's lured shoppers, dressed to the nines, to the Gate City's center.

Families like Goff's, though, were moving to new suburban neighborhoods such as the ones Starmount President Edward Benjamin built near the future site of Friendly. People had good jobs, money to spend and, most important, cars. After World War II, shoppers no longer needed to take a bus downtown. The family car could carry them anywhere in Greensboro.

To serve these newly mobile shoppers, strips of stores, including Summit and Lawndale shopping centers and Irving Park Plaza, sprang up outside the central business district. The state's first major retail center, Cameron Village in Raleigh, proved that shoppers liked driving up and parking right at a merchant's door.

Those centers already were thriving when Benjamin began looking for ways to serve shoppers in the affluent, growing northwest area of Greensboro.

"He said that he wanted to smell the fresh air as he walked from store to store," says Elvin R. Parks, a former Starmount president who retired in 1992. "He wanted it open."

Benjamin first hoped to build the village-style retail center on Madison Avenue, in what is now part of Starmount Forest.

But a consultant told him that Friendly needed to sit on a major thoroughfare.

"There was room to expand," Parks says of choosing what was then Friendly Road. "But it's also on what was thought would be a major artery between Greensboro and Guilford College."

Starmount cut lease rates and lured tenants including Woolworth's, Belk and the Colonial Stores supermarket for Friendly's opening. On Aug. 1, 1957, Benjamin's wife, Starmount co-founder Blanche Sternberger Benjamin, cut a tulle ribbon and welcomed shoppers. By 10 a.m. that day, all 1,300 parking spaces were full.

More than 25,000 people stopped by that first day.

Traffic later fell off a bit, but residents of nearby neighborhoods helped to keep the merchants going. Goff and her friends walked a mile to Friendly every Saturday.

"I loved Woolworth's because I got like, probably, 50 cents a week allowance," Goff recalls. "You could go there, and you would feel like you'd come out of there with so much stuff for just 50 cents."

Goff and her family still visited the Carolina Theatre and shopped at stores downtown. But the center city's days of retail grandeur were numbered.

Scott Seed Co. left downtown in 1965. Gate City Pharmacy bade farewell to Elm Street in 1967. Over the years, retailers including Montaldo's, Younts-DeBoe, Prago-Guyes and Sears followed.

It isn't a stretch to say the rise of retail at Friendly helped kill major shopping downtown.

"But," Parks says in Starmount's defense, "if it hadn't been Friendly, it would have been something else."

By the mid-1970s, that something else came along, sealing downtown's fate for decades to come and pushing Starmount to experiment. That something else was the heyday of the enclosed mall in Greensboro. Starmount's answer to it was the Forum VI at Friendly, a project that would be a rare miss for the company.

Slow failure at the Forum

From the start, Starmount's take on the enclosed mall might have been doomed.

Ask company officials, former retailers and shoppers for the reasons why the Forum VI failed, and you'll get a list: Recession. Inflation. The wrong contractors. The wrong stores. Too high-end.

Starmount President Porterfield sums it up with two words: "The concept."

Forum VI, named after the Roman marketplace, was intended to be a small, upscale mall at Northline Avenue and Pembroke Road.

Actress and socialite Zsa Zsa Gabor appeared on the center's opening weekend in September 1976. Starmount welcomed longtime Greensboro clothiers, pricey boutiques and exclusive restaurants. No one welcomed shoppers, who were notably absent at the Forum during its 19-year existence.

"We poured our heart and soul into it," Porterfield says of the Forum, which opened about a year after Four Seasons Town Centre and barely weeks after the now-defunct Carolina Circle Mall.

In the midst of the mall fad in the late '80s, Starmount even considered turning Friendly into an enclosed mall. Officials dropped the plan when they realized how costly it might be.

Looking back on the Forum, that probably was a good move. After years of squeezing red ink from the project, Starmount decided to default on its mortgage, letting the six story mall be foreclosed. It passed through several owners before being remodeled into the Signature Place office building.

Few shoppers missed it.

Susan Mitchell Payne visited the Forum for haircuts and ate at the food court. But her loyalty remained with the original Friendly.

In fact, when Payne, who is 50 and lives in Greensboro, went into labor with her only child in 1988, she had to stop at Friendly for a milkshake and some quick shopping before going to the hospital.

"I packed a suitcase and called my husband, Jeff, at work, and he left to come home and get me," Payne says. "He came screeching in the driveway and was all excited, and I calmly said 'We need to run by Friendly Center first.'"

Building a better Friendly

After the Forum flopped, Starmount focused on strengthening Friendly to keep shoppers such as Payne coming back.

Chain retail was booming at Wendover Avenue and Interstate 40. Four Seasons was going strong. Friendly needed to upgrade and bring more national tenants into the mix.

So Starmount redid the parking lots and launched Friendly's first major expansion since the center grew to accommodate Sears in the 1970s.

Harris Teeter moved to a new building. Belk and Hecht's grew. Chains including Barnes & Noble, Eddie Bauer and Old Navy replaced familiar names such as Scott Seed and Atticus Books.

In 2000, a new 16-screen theater called The Grande moved in and crowded out the six-screen Terrace Theater, which was later replaced by Romano's Macaroni Grill.

In just a few years, Friendly has transformed from the place where Jeanie Yount-Bivona used to trick-or-treat as a child and play while her parents worked at Sears. Yount-Bivona, who is 27 and lives in Greensboro, had her first date at Friendly — at Swensen's ice cream shop — with the man she would later marry.

He also took her there on their last date before proposing.

But the loss of treasured longtime shops hasn't stopped Yount-Bivona from coming.

"I guess because I've grown up over there, it's almost like a second home," she says.

With last year's opening of the Shops at Friendly Center in place of the landmark Burlington Industries headquarters nearby, "everywhere I need to shop is right over there," Yount-Bivona says.

Even as Starmount tries to sell its shopping centers, the developer is finishing the Shops, which include yet another incarnation of Harris Teeter and upscale stores such as Coldwater Creek and Brooks Brothers. The final portions, including 100 condos, should open by the end of next year.

The new shops brought more style to Friendly Avenue, and Starmount officials say they've increased traffic and sales.

Longtime shoppers like Barbara Goff, though, will always think Friendly Center first.

Whomever Friendly sells to, Goff is hoping that it won't lose the magic it has had for her since childhood.

"It's hard to describe how a shopping center can be part of your family," Goff says. "But that really is how it was."

Contact Michelle Jarboe at 373-7075 or mjarboe@news-record.com