A Need For Vision
Salisbury's downtown preservation, planning praised by Charleston Mayor Joe Riley

BY MARK WINEKA
SALISBURY POST

To say that Charleston, S.C., mayor Joe Riley energized Salisburians when he visited here Feb. 10 would be a gross understatement.

Riley, a nationally recognized authority on city issues, inspired a crowd of about 250 people at Salisbury’s Meroney Theater with his simple slide presentation, showing how Charleston has tackled issues such as downtown revitalization, parking, landscaping, public housing, parks and historic preservation.

With Riley’s advice and praise still ringing in their ears, Salisbury city officials took off the following day for their annual planning retreat in Southern Pines. Throughout the retreat, Riley’s name and some of his comments were repeated as the Salisburians talked about their city’s own future.

Mayor of Charleston since December 1975, Riley was the first speaker in a four-month educational phase of the Salisbury 2020 Comprehensive Plan, which will serve as the city’s growth and development tool in coming years.

The 16-member Salisbury 2020 Vision Committee has initiated an educational series as a means of encouraging public participation in its planning process.

Future topics in coming weeks and months will include development, growth, historic preservation, regionalism and neighborhoods. Speakers will include architects, planners, developers, environmentalists and marketers.

Riley is credited with improving racial harmony in Charleston and guiding a decrease in crime, a revitalization of the historic downtown business district, the creation and growth of Spoleto Festival USA, the building of Charleston’s Waterfront Park and development of a nationally acclaimed affordable housing program.

Newsweek recently named Riley as one of the 25 most dynamic mayors in America. He is a founder of the Mayor’s Institute for City Design, now housed at Harvard University.

Riley is a Charleston native and graduate of The Citadel and the University of South Carolina School of Law. He was a six-year member of the S.C. House before becoming Charleston mayor.

City Hall reporter Mark Wineka interviewed Riley before his public appearance at the Meroney. Here’s an edited transcript of their conversation:

Q: Is this your first trip to Salisbury?

A: Yes, it is.

Q: What have you noticed, just driving around?

A: Well, the first thing that struck me is how intact the downtown is. That’s remarkable. That’s very unusual for any American city, and it speaks well of your economy having remained reasonably stable and then, obviously, a real sense of pride that the citizens have in their urban environment. That’s a real treasure. When I think of towns and cities in this part of the country, I can’t think of many – maybe any – of the size and scale of Salisbury where the downtown is so substantially intact. And you have so many handsome buildings. That is important now and will only grow in importance, because so few places have that much of the public realm remaining. It’s a treasure now, but two generations from now, it will be even more dear.

Q: Are we right to ask taxpayers to put so much investment in the downtown?

A: Absolutely. The downtown is something that everybody shares. In a city, you want the average citizen to have a richer experience in what they own together. A downtown belongs to everyone. It shapes a sense of pride that one has in a community. It forms the public spaces. In our culture in America, we’re at risk of losing so much of that in so many towns. And we sentence the people, basically, to the malls. Malls were a very convenient and wonderful mid-20th-century development, but downtown is a public zone. The city is not only correct, but Salisbury should really be commended for the investment it is making. Generations to come will revere those city mothers and fathers that made that decision to save and invest in the downtown.

Q: Any other quick impressions of Salisbury?

A: Your historic districts, to me, are very impressive. The number of them – you have, I guess, 10, which is unusual – and the fine state of maintenance and restoration is very impressive. And this part of the South is so pretty: the slight roll and the beginning roll of the hills and the hardwoods are so pretty. It really is a beautiful part of America.

Q: Are there any disadvantages we have to deal with? We’ve done a good job in preserving a lot of our history, but is there anything that stands out as a glaring omission to you? Something that we have to address?

A: No, to me what stands out is what you’re addressing and this process. That is, shaping the growth that is here and is going to come. That’s what is so commendable about the 2020 plan. I’ve studied communities and I view these things as a practitioner and as a mayor, and the comprehensivity of the Salisbury 2020 Vision Plan is so commendable. It’s so thorough. It’s so inclusive. And it’s so involved. That’s wonderful and what this is all about.

That’s the biggest challenge of a place like Salisbury. The growth is now coming. A generation ago, the question was, ‘‘Will we grow?’’ And of our future, ‘‘Will there be some place for our children to come back to?’’ The growth is coming, so the real challenge is to have it come on your terms and to have the self-confidence that you can shape the growth to be on Salisbury’s terms and at Salisbury’s standards. You can do that. In fact, the successful communities of the future are going to be the communities which have the highest standards and the most lofty goals and work the hardest to organize, control, shape and manage their growth. And, you know, Salisbury – the scale of this town – America’s moving to this. There’s a sense of history. There’s a style. The scale of it is such that you’re not overwhelmed and you can feel a real part of the community. There’s a sense of individuality. Here, the quality of life is good. It’s a great place to raise your children. You’re 45 minutes from two large metropolitan areas for things that bigger cities provide, but you can return to a quiet place.

I think the future is bright, and this is the challenge: to have the vision to be strategic. That’s what you have. Each action is part of a strategy that leverages in the direction of where you want to go.

Q: Where do cities go wrong? When they don’t plan?

A: It’s when they don’t have a vision. They go wrong when they say, ‘‘I wonder what Acme Corp. thinks would be good for us,’’ or ‘‘I wonder what that developer would like to do,’’ or ‘‘I wish we could get somebody to do something,’’ or ‘‘Any growth is good,’’ or ‘‘The more the better.’’ Those are all the mistakes. I think it has taken our culture a while. After World War II, we had the ability to do great things. We could build Levittowns or big shopping centers or shopping malls, big things. That might have been an extension of automation. Before, Mr. Jones would build a building, and Mr. Brown would build a building and all of that. So we had this ability to build lots of stuff, and we lost the civic vision part of it. That was because of our commitment to property rights and to free enterprise. So Acme Corp. could come and do this big development. And this is America – they bought the land and they’d do it. We forgot that the higher right in a democracy is the right of the community to have a vision of where it wants to be. That’s where cities went wrong, when they were lazy and abdicated their responsibilities to have that collective vision.

That’s the hardest part. People say to me, ‘‘That was hard. You all fought a long time, and I know that was difficult to get that done.’’ And I say, if you do the right thing, after it’s done it looks obvious. But before, it wasn’t obvious. You had to get the minds together. You had to collectively create a vision. You had to have a strategy on how to get there. Where cities went wrong is where they didn’t do that. They were either too lazy, or they didn’t want to do it.

Q: What was the first right thing Charleston did during your time as mayor?

A: Of course, I am mayor of a city that’s been doing a lot of right things for a long time. There are great leaders alive – and many are dead – who had the wisdom to preserve buildings and parts of our city. So I was fortunate to inherit a city where there was that ethic – an ethic of citizens understanding that they had a right. For us, it was doing a strategic plan when our downtown was dead and sticking to it – a strategic plan that had a very lofty set of goals and then stick with it and not back down. Understand that it is strategic. We, for example, didn’t build hotels on the waterfront. A lot of people wanted to build big hotels on the waterfront. We don’t have any. We will never put big hotels on the waterfront because we knew, strategically, that energy wasn’t needed on the waterfront. It was needed on our main Street. It was dead.

The old way would have been for the developer to come and say, ‘‘I’ll build this big hotel on the waterfront. I’ll create all this tax base for you. That’s what you need.’’ No, we said, ‘‘You’re not going to build a hotel on the waterfront. Put it right here, on an empty, vacant lot in our downtown, because that can be the catalytic agent to get our commercial core going.’’