Middletown group hopes to learn Carolina magic

A Middletown community improvement corporation hopes to learn the secrets behind the successes of a city in South Carolina.

Members of Middletown Moving Forward, a partnership between government and business leaders, are hoping to tour Greenville, S.C., over three days in April, meet with city officials and business owners and bring back what they learned to see if they can rekindle the Middletown magic.

Middletown Mayor Lawrence Mulligan Jr. said he envisions a trip similar to the one that was taken to Paducah, Ky., in 2008, which planted the seed to the growth of the downtown arts community.

“We need to see what works compared to our needs and get rolling on some stuff,” Mulligan said. “It’s worth exploring.”

Rick Pearce, president of the Chamber of Commerce Serving Middletown, Monroe and Trenton, said he hopes to “learn from what worked there and emulate them.” He said it’s important to identify any community that’s successful if its fingerprint is similar to Middletown’s.

“We need to find out how they did it,” he said.

Calista Smith, interim director of Middletown Moving Forward, said the group needs to concentrate on economic development and see how Greenville officials “pulled it together with the resources and strategies.”

The retail center of the region, Greenville’s downtown district, began to languish in the 1960s as shopping centers lured the retailers and customers to the suburbs.

Marion Mann, senior marketing director for Greenville’s chamber of commerce, grew up in the city, and said when she was in high school, downtown was “not the place to go” because of limited attractions and a high crime rate. Now, she said, the only reason to avoid downtown: the crowds.

Middletown leaders said they’d love to have that problem. When the Towne Mall opened in the East End in 1977, it attracted major retailers, and some say, was the beginning of the death of downtown. Now even the mall, under new ownership and with a new name, is struggling to fill its empty retail space.

Once vibrant, Middletown’s downtown is dominated by empty buildings and “for lease” signs despite a significant investment by the city. The Manchester Inn, former “gem” of downtown, has been closed for more than three years and is being sold by the city.

There have been downtown successes: the Pendleton Art Center, the Broad Street Bash, a summer concert series, the opening of Cincinnati State Middletown, BeauVerre Riordan Stained Glass Studio and new restaurants and bars.

But nothing like the economic development seen in Greenville.

In the 1980s, Greenville turned to laying the foundation for its downtown vision and providing an example of business potential to encourage business relocation to downtown, Mann said. She said the biggest news: the opening of the Greenville Commons/Hyatt Regency hotel.

The city worked with consultants to develop and implement a downtown master plan and facilitated public-private investment partnerships that resulted in the city’s first luxury convention hotel on Main Street, Mann said.

She said through the 1990s Greenville continued to strengthen its public/private partnerships to create strong anchors throughout downtown. The city redeveloped a languishing industrial area adjacent to the West End Historic District into a thriving performing arts complex that incorporated historically significant buildings. It then stabilized the stagnant historic district with the transformation of an abandoned cotton warehouse into the West End Market, a mixed-use project of shops, restaurants, and offices, which in turn encouraged adaptive reuse of several other historic buildings throughout downtown, she said.

The city’s initiative to invest in its blighted urban center at a time when such revitalization was unpopular, not only successfully encouraged private investment, but also eventually garnered recognition from municipalities across the United States.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation awarded Greenville with the Great American Main Street Award in 2003 and 2009. Since then it has been featured in numerous publications, including Southern Living Magazine.

Mann said about 12 representatives from cities around the United States tour Greenville yearly. On Friday, city officials from Statesboro, Ga., were there, she said.