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GREENSBORO — The location of artistic benches, which were removed from the Downtown Greenway on Friday after neighbors complained, looked good on paper but ignored some basic urban topography.

Just a stone’s throw from where the benches were removed, amid complaints that they drew drunken and lewd behavior, sits “The Block.”

At the southwest corner of Eugene and Lee streets, at the entrance to HealthServe clinic and Greensboro Urban Ministry’s night shelter, this stretch of sidewalk has been a magnet for loitering, drugs and prostitution for 20 years.

“And it’s still The Block,” Dira Jones said indignantly Friday as she swept her neatly tended front yard on Bilbro Street. “It’s not about the benches at all. The benches are beautiful. It’s about that mess up on the corner. That is an eyesore.”

The intricate metal and wooden benches, privately commissioned and paid for by the nonprofit Action Greensboro, were a tribute to the Warnersville community, the city’s first community of freed slaves.

Friday’s dismantling came with its own bit of controversy. Two Greensboro police officers arrested Brian Higgins shortly after 9 a.m. when he refused to move from atop the lone remaining rock that was a piece of public art along the Downtown Greenway.

Higgins said he rode his bike past the benches daily as he traveled from his home in Glenwood to his job at a downtown restaurant. Higgins said he has seen no problems around the benches and opposed their removal. “I think public art belongs to the whole community,” Higgins said.

Neighbors were split on whether the monument posed a problem. Several whose property backs up directly to the part of the greenway where the benches were placed complained of public indecency, though a city webcam did not capture any such activity.

“If it makes the neighborhood look better, I say go for it. I thought it was cool,” said Nancy Donnell, who works with a neighborhood ministry in Warnersville. “There’s better things to be fighting about than a bench.”

Assistant City Manager Andy Scott said although there was no clear consensus among neighbors about whether the benches posed a nuisance, Warnersville residents do agree about The Block.

“That’s the larger problem. That’s something they all agreed on,” Scott said. “Anybody would realize that’s a problem that needs a solution. There tend to be large crowds of people loitering. That’s not healthy.”

With the adoption of a 10-year plan to end homelessness, and the opening of a day center on Bessemer Avenue, the Rev. Mike Aiken of Greensboro Urban Ministry said real steps had been taken to offer services to the chronically homeless for mental health and substance abuse problems.

Aiken noted that it will be another year before a more accessible day center opens downtown near the Depot, but he said an upcoming community meeting spurred by the bench controversy might open a constructive dialogue about the future of The Block.

“It’s not just a simple problem of people on benches,” he observed. “There is a solution out there if we really care about people. We want to see something good happen for the Warnersville community and for the people on the corner.”

Neighbors will meet Oct. 12 at Shiloh Baptist Church, 1210 S. Eugene St. Meanwhile, the benches are in storage, Scott said. The plan is to put them elsewhere on the greenway in Warnersville by year’s end.

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