News-Record.com

GREENSBORO — City officials want to close the highway-style exit ramp from East Lee Street to Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, removing one of the last obstacles to rebuilding the surrounding neighborhood.

Getting rid of the ramp would clear a path for New Zion Missionary Baptist Church’s plan to build a housing development, a shopping and restaurant district, a new sanctuary, and an education and family-life center, said Dan Curry of the city’s housing and community development program.

The ramp blocks the development and doesn’t fit in with the urban neighborhood taking shape around it in the Ole Asheboro neighborhood, Curry said.

“It’s really kind of a suburban roadway design in the middle of downtown Greensboro,” he said.

That exit is the only hurdle before site plans and construction drawings can be completed for the $24 million church project, said David Black, chairman of New Zion’s building committee.

The church has its financing lined up and is ready to begin once it gets approval from the state Department of Transportation to remove the ramp, Black said.

“Our civil engineers can’t do anything further until they know whether the ramp will or won’t be there,” Black said of the project, just south of the city’s highly acclaimed Southside redevelopment area.

The ramp is state property, Curry said, and N.C. DOT is moving carefully before abandoning it.

City officials held a public meeting about the project and the ramp’s fate a few months ago, but DOT asked them to hold another more formal hearing, Curry said.

That hearing will take place Monday night at the New Zion Resource Center.

New Zion’s development will go ahead with or without the ramp’s removal, Black said.

But with the ramp gone, the church would have more room for its family life center, a YMCA-like building open to the public as well as to members of the church, he said.

With Black at the helm, the church is acting as a lead developer for the project north of East Bragg Street. An experienced commercial developer is working with parts of the project that involve retail space, including a number of restaurants.

Removing the ramp wouldn’t reduce public access between MLK and East Lee Street, said Chris Spencer of the city Department of Transportation.

Plans call for extending Vance Street across vacant land to Lee on the western side of the development, Spencer said.

On the other side of MLK, east of the New Zion project, a second new road would be built through another part of Ole Asheboro — through another, unrelated renewal project planned by a Durham developer.

“Really, we’re getting two connections with Lee Street and taking out one,” Curry said.

New Zion’s project should complement the Southside development next door.

Plans call for a commercial area facing MLK to include a grocery made up of small shops that range from produce to seafood vendors, plus several cafes and a large restaurant on upper floors.

In addition to office space, apartments and the various church buildings, Black said, New Zions expects to build 11 or 12 single-family houses nearby in a section bordered by the proposed Downtown Greenway.

“The greenway will go right in front,” Black said. “It’s going to be very nice.”

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com