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GREENSBORO — About 40 years ago, developer Joe Koury got wind of a new twist that promised to revolutionize the nation’s retail landscape: the enclosed mall.

The late entrepreneur and a colleague, local real estate lawyer Fred Williams, scouted a few of the malls then existing in such places as Kansas City — and the rest is local history, writ large: Four Seasons Mall debuted in 1975, launching the already lucrative High Point Road commercial corridor to new heights.

“It was immediate. It just pulled people from all over Greensboro,” Williams, 95, recalled recently.

For the next two decades, High Point Road reigned supreme as the Gate City’s mecca for shopping and dining, a money magnet led by the mall and further electrified by Koury’s adjoining Holiday Inn and by big-time sports and entertainment at the Greensboro Coliseum.

But lo, how the mighty have fallen. These days, swaths of High Point Road struggle for survival. Although the mall, Koury Convention Center and the coliseum remain viable, elsewhere many of the major retailers are long gone, replaced by less prestigious tenants that include an influx of pawn shops and sweepstakes gambling parlors.

Entire blocks look seedy and timeworn. Several well-publicized killings and assaults shattered the peace in recent years. Drug deals go down in parking lots.

“What do I see?” says car dealer Jim Griffin from his office in the 3800 block near Oakwood Drive. “Businesses going out of business, vacancies everywhere, buildings for rent, buildings for sale. That restaurant down the street that used to be Shoney’s when I moved here in ’96? I think it’s been four other things since then.”

Can this be the same street that once hosted the Plantation Supper Club, nationally known as a night spot frequented by megawatt performers such as crooner Mel Torme, actress Jayne Mansfield, Andy Griffith, and band leaders Duke Ellington and Harry James?

Is this the same thoroughfare that lured generations of teens to cruise local institutions, from Bob Petty’s Oakwood Drive-in to the South Drive-in Theater and McClure’s Sky Castle, where WCOG disc jockey Al Troxler spun hits from a tower overlooking the early 1960s tableau?

“You could go up there and he’d play what you wanted on the radio,” remembers Fred Perdue, now a retiree but back then the proud owner of a ’51 Chevy. “It just wasn’t as dangerous as it is today. You didn’t have the drugs and the crime.”

Now, city officials hope to restore the lost luster along what planners dub the Central Gateway Corridor that includes High Point Road and West Lee Street.

In time, urban blight could disappear under wide sidewalks shaded by arching trees and lined with attractive new businesses or parking garages under multistory apartments –– even in what’s now the Greensboro Coliseum’s parking lot.

But the plan remains in its infancy. It will be several years before the city can begin making even basic improvements.
Meanwhile, a tug of war ensues between the forces of improvement and further decline. On the side of the angels are residents of nearby neighborhoods, police, city planners and the corridor’s ethnically diverse merchants.
Sadly, there are no guarantees. Often, these restorative efforts work beautifully, says Randall Gross, a Washington consultant who helped assemble the plan.

On the other hand, Gross acknowledges, “there are some places around the country where they put in some pretty fancy changes and it really hasn’t affected the downfall of a particular area.”

A long, hard climb back

High Point Road hit what could be its ultimate low point the night of Dec. 8, 2007, because of Alejandro Enrique Ramirez “Wizard” Umana. Then 23 and an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, he came to town representing the notorious La Mara Salvatrucha gang on a mission to streamline its drug network.

As Umana dined at Las Jarochitas Mexican restaurant on High Point Road with some fellow thugs, they got into a quarrel with Stokesdale resident Manuel Garcia Salinas, 42, owner of a local masonry company, and his younger brother, Ruben.

After the two brothers “ 'disrespected’ his gang signs (tattoos) by calling them 'fake,’ Umana pulled out a .45 and shot Ruben fatally in the chest and Manuel in the head,” Western District U.S. Attorney Anne M. Tompkins said in a press release in the spring.

“Umana fired three more shots as restaurant patrons scurried for cover, with one witness running to protect her infant child,” Tompkins said. “One other individual was injured by gunfire.”

In April, a federal jury in Charlotte sentenced Umana to the death penalty. But his actions also signaled a kind of doom for High Point Road –– one more nail in the coffin, solidifying its reputation for violent crime.

How do you come back from such oblivion? Slowly and purposefully, says Marcos Medina, who should know because he has succeeded in resurrecting what used to be Las Jarochitas.

He and his wife, Maria, bought the place a few months after the murders and slowly nursed it back to life, the same fate they hope awaits the rest of High Point Road.

“The first year we were here, we saw slow business because people had doubts,” said Medina, who renamed the restaurant Villa Del Mar.

“People said it was not a good atmosphere here. We had a vision to change everything, to make it more family-friendly. So we did.”

Low rents equal profit

Medina represents what may be the only good thing about High Point Road’s fall from grace.

The large supply of empty storefronts and resulting lower rents transformed the once-pricey street into an incubator for start-ups by people of diverse ethnic backgrounds.

They run their fledgling businesses on a shoestring in the time-honored American tradition, building customer loyalty with products that mainstream retailers don’t carry.

Vietnam-born Hoa Byerly knows all about that, patiently slicing plantains in the Oriental market she runs two doors up from Medina’s restaurant.

“I don’t have money to pay someone to cut this at $7 an hour, is why I do it myself,” she says, expertly paring the fruit for banana flour.

Indeed, High Point Road now boasts businesses of Lebanese, Thai, Japanese, Vietnamese, East Indian, Chinese, Italian, Korean, Latino and African American origin.

“We should put up a United Nations sign,” said Dick Hails, city planning director.

Getting a handle on crime

Although crime remains an issue in the public mind, a full-court press by police several months after the Las Jarochitas murders helped.

Merchants along High Point Road bought into the concept of “community policing.” They began holding monthly meetings with police to share information and now communicate more regularly among themselves, said Capt. Christopher Walker.

The merchants really gelled after another homicide in early 2008, outside another restaurant after a drug deal went bad, Walker said.

“Once we got together, crime plummeted because we were communicating,” he said, noting that the police crackdown two years ago cut serious crime 30 percent. “And crime has remained pretty much what it was when we reduced it.”

Even so, High Point Road seems a lightning rod for violent crime. Within the past month, a woman reported being sexually assaulted in a restroom inside Big Lots during store hours. And a week later, a reveler at the coliseum’s annual SuperJam concert was shot to death outside a nearby night spot.

Rolling the dice online

Many residents are fed up with the continuing decline of High Point Road and the neighborhoods clustered around it.

“Everybody around me has been broken into. Years back, you wouldn’t even think of such a thing here,” said Ruth Primm, a retired school teacher who has lived in the Hillsdale Park neighborhood near I-40 since 1963.

“We need to move quickly (redeveloping High Point Road) because things like pawn shops are just standing there, gasping, ready to take advantage of everything that’s available.”

Video sweepstakes parlors, recently outlawed by the General Assembly, are the latest controversial craze along High Point Road, which even in its heyday had a gritty side that included topless bars and adult bookstores.

Just swing open the door to the Pots O’ Gold parlor in Kelly’s Plaza shopping center and enter what looks like an Atlantic City casino. Men and women sit at several dozen computer screens playing online poker in a cool, dark room supervised by a burly “greeter.”

Pawn shops, gambling parlors and sports bars often take root in older commercial districts, experts say.

“We just had to learn to digest a lesser-credit tenant, so to speak,” said William Daniel, a Winston-Salem property manager who supervises leasing for Kelly’s Plaza. “It’s not the mall. It’s not Wendover.”

The small, U-shaped center once had a dream tenant for its anchor: a large appliance store belonging to the now-defunct Ed Kelly’s chain.

But those days are a memory now. And Pots O’ Gold is “a traffic generator,” Daniel said. “We need that. ... They pay their rent. They pay their rent on time.”

So far, Four Seasons Town Centre has escaped any readily apparent sign of decay. Its owner, General Growth Properties, says the mall is doing well considering the economy.

GGP itself is going through Chapter 11 bankruptcy but says Four Seasons is among its properties already released from those proceedings.

The next interchange

High Point Road of yesteryear fell victim to its own success. After the mall’s fabulous debut and early years, the road leading to it developed in a haphazard way.

Strip shopping centers, fast-food joints, night clubs and standalone stores lined up from west of Patterson Street all the way to Hilltop Road. Each had at least one driveway opening onto four and, later, six lanes of traffic.

Motorized chaos ensued. A 1995 News & Record analysis found that Greensboro’s top three intersections for car wrecks were all on High Point Road.

Residents in blue-collar and middle-class neighborhoods surrounding it rebelled. They joined forces in 1989 to defeat a shopping center proposed on nearby Vanstory Street across from Smith High School.

The rejection sent developers a clear message: They would face an uphill fight expanding the shopping district beyond already congested High Point Road, said City Council member Robbie Perkins, a commercial real-estate broker.

So the big money simply detoured one interchange west along I-40, Perkins said, to Wendover Avenue, then just beginning to develop.

Meanwhile, shoppers’ fickle tastes took a dramatic turn toward the “big box” stores opening at the newly emerging interchange. And fresh competition came later in the 1990s when Friendly Shopping Center got a makeover.

The air went hissing from High Point Road like a punctured tire. Circuit City joined the exodus and closed its location near Merritt Drive in 1996. About the same time, Hechinger’s, a large hardware store, folded just up the street, joining a parade that included Ed Kelly’s, Brendle’s catalog store, the La-Z-Boy showroom and many more.

Business took a nosedive for merchants that remained. At Ghassan’s restaurant near the coliseum, the local chain’s flagship restaurant lost its role as the most profitable of the company’s three locations, owner Ziad Fleihan said.

Now, its earnings consistently bring up the rear, said Fleihan, whose Lebanese-immigrant father opened his first restaurant there in 1975.

Fleihan attributes the problem partly to the decrepit Coliseum Inn, bought and razed recently by city government. Who wanted to dine across the street from that place?

“You would see prostitutes walking up and down, between the buildings and along the street,” Fleihan said.

Fighting to stay afloat

Nearby residents and business owners say the city’s decision in late 2008 to buy and level the floundering hotel had an immediate effect.

“It’s one of the biggest blessings we’ve ever had in this neighborhood,” said Elsie Nall, who has lived minutes away on Ellington Street for 54 years. “There’s not nearly as much trash thrown on the ground or the street ladies walking up and down or the drugs.”

City planners hope the spot once occupied by the inn can be redeveloped privately as part of their renewal plan, possibly as a restaurant or hotel.

Those hopes could get a boost next year when the coliseum unveils both the ACC Hall of Champions and the city’s $19 million aquatic center.

But city government’s good intentions have yet to stem the bleeding.

Just within the past year or so, High Point Road lost two of its last upscale men’s clothiers, Barry Better Menswear and S&K Menswear.

One vacated building became the Second Hand Cash thrift shop, the other Fast Cash Pawn.

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