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Now and then, Laura Strickland can’t help climbing the front porch steps and peeking in the window of the big 1920s house, remembering summers with her grandmother, picturing her grandfather sitting in his easy chair and reading the paper.

The house at 211 S. Edgeworth is one of the last remnants of the old neighborhood in the shadow of Blandwood Mansion, but not for long. As staff writer Gerald Witt reported last week, the downtown Greensboro jail expansion needs the land, and the now empty house will have to go.

Though Preservation Greensboro saw no obvious historical significance attached to this house, or two shotgun-style houses behind it, the view from the inside out is different.

“It was just a time when everything was so close and connected,” recalled Strickland’s aunt, Helen Stanback, 87, whose parents bought the house in the 1940s. “We just kind of gathered together during World War II, and that house was the place.”

Strickland, today a nurse in Asheboro, spent her summer vacations at the house with her grandparents, Robert and Helen Porter. With the neighborhood children, she made mud pies in the yard, played in gigantic boxwoods, followed the creek through a secret tunnel that went all the way to the college.

“It’s all associated around that house, and when I look in the window, I want to cry, but not out of sadness,” Strickland said. “It’s just a time lost. My grandfather would walk us all around downtown, walk us to the train station.”

And of course it all comes down to money — the $100,000 or so the county estimates it would cost to move the house. But it’s ironic to think how the center city became an after-sunset ghost town in the first place, and took decades to revive.

It was partly the result of white flight, and partly the blunt instrument of government. This second influence is harder to reverse — public architecture such as the courthouse, the jail and the governmental complex that has as much aesthetic style as the long-term parking lot at the airport.

“After the governmental center was built, it took 20 years for people to come back downtown,” said Ginia Zenke, whose family is trying with no success to save the three houses behind the old Porter house.

“For a town that is struggling to come back, another developmental dead zone is not what we need.”

Though organic mushroom farmer Randy Bettini expressed interest in the shotgun houses, Zenke said, moving costs appear to be prohibitive. As for Strickland, the nurse who still peeks in the window of her grandparents’ old house, she is hoping to salvage a planter, or perhaps some light fixtures before it’s torn down.

“If I can’t do that, I’d love to walk through one time,” she said. “Just to feel the memories.”

A Cove Creek afternoon

Not everything gets trodden underfoot. Despite development at the city’s northeast line, for instance, Cove Creek Gardens flourish.

The teaching garden at 4504 Summit Ave. is holding a fundraiser Sept. 27 for the annual Conservator Award.

At the garden, profiled recently by staff writer Taft Wireback and photographer Nelson Kepley, coffee, wine and hors d’oeuvres will be served from 4 to 6 p.m. that Saturday. RSVP: call 621-0611.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com