Saturday, March 18, 2023
Greenville, SC: Industrial Resolution
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Saturday was a tale of thwarted ambition. Our plan was to head over to West Greenville Village, or possibly downtown, get something nice to eat at a place we'd never tried before, then hop on the Swamp Rabbit Trail and walk all the way from the new Unity Park west of downtown, through downtown along the river to Cleveland Park east of downtown, taking photos of all the public art and flowers as we went.
However, the first thing that went wrong was that we chose a place we'd heard a lot of good things about, but which was only serving a foo-foo little brunch for foo-foo little people who don't need to eat. Their business model is, apparently, charge high prices for tiny plates of food, make up for it with alcohol, and assume that everyone will pay for the atmosphere. It was, basically, a big city dining experience.
(Pro tip: This is how big city rich people stay so slim: They have the servants eat and get fat for them. Most rich people in large cities actually sustain themselves via photosynthesis.)
I really, really wanted to like this place. The atmosphere was awesome. However, when you serve me a burger, the only thing on the shrunken menu that wasn't some uppity, "elevated," take on the kind of garbage, like biscuits and gravy, that Southern farmers eat before a day in the pastures -- and that burger tastes like it came from Wendy's while simultaneously being smaller and costing twice as much -- I'm not going to like you no matter how atmospheric you are.
But the place looked cool:
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Thus fortified, we set out into West Greenville Village.
Once upon a time, West Greenville, now known as West Greenville Village or the Village of West Greenville, existed to serve the needs of workers at the crescent of textile mills and industrial operations that bracketed the western edge of Greenville. Greenville was a thoroughly industrial city and made its fortune in cotton and every textile you can make from it. There were enormous mills and warehouses, and many of them are still standing today. One or two even still host industrial operations while the rest have been converted into upscale housing and shopping. At its peak, Greenville boasted eighteen textile mills.
But back in the day, you'd spend your time off from your mill job, walking from your mill-owned housing over here to the commercial hub along Pendleton Street. Now it's all artists and hipster burgers.
This a fringe flower bush. I want some for my yard:
For several decades, as America decided the more economical thing to do would be to allow Vietnam and Bangladesh make all its textiles, West Greenville fell into a deep decline and became something of a no-go zone. There are still some scraps of grit in the revitalized areas, and some very gritty areas beyond those. We considered a house not terribly far away from this part of town when we were househunting, but got warned away from it by our realtor, and the county crime mapper also gave us pause. I'm glad other people are moving in though, and bringing things around. The entire west side is the new frontier for revitalization, renovation, and gentrification.
Note the Venezuelan food truck over to the right.
This is Greenville vernacular: the mill house. The big mills built these things by the hundreds for their workers. You'd work for the mill and rent your house from the mill, and live and die -- quite literally -- by the mill. Common problems faced by mill workers were "brown lung" a disease caused by inhaling cotton dust, and getting maimed by the machinery. Child labor was also an issue, as children were often the only ones small and nimble enough to get under the machinery as the looms passed back and forth overhead.
It bears considering that there were no safety precautions, no safety equipment, and no climate control either. Southern textile mills were hell on earth.
This is the Brandon Mill, established in 1901. By 1906 it employed 420 people and its mill village boasted 420 houses. By 1929 it employed more than 1200 people. During World War II it supplied the US government with medical gauze, tent canvas, and uniform cloth. It shut down in 1977.
The way a mill village works is that you have this enormous brick beast squatting in the middle of it, surrounded by streets upon streets of houses that look like this. The bigger the house, likely the higher up the chain at the mill the employee was, until you got to the owners, who lived in mansions over on the other side of downtown from here.
Brandon Mill is one of the mills that now hosts upscale housing... and probably the ghosts of a few dozen workers chewed up in the machinery. At least, that's kind of what I would expect. But I honestly couldn't look at this pool and not wonder what all those workers would have thought of it. I imagine them working away in the heat of a South Carolina summer, probably dreaming of being able to jump in some cool water, and now here we are.
This is wisteria, a beautiful pain in the ass. There are types of wisteria native to North America, but Asian wisteria like this is invasive. Like kudzu, it swallows entire groves whole so it's nothing for it to gobble up a single tree like this.
This is a warehouse complex now reborn as retail. If the signs are any indication, it served the Poe Mill, not the Brandon Mill.
This is black horsetail reed. I'm planting a Japanese garden at my house, and I want some of this. It's bamboo-ish, without the danger, when planting actual bamboo, of it going to visit the neighbors.
We stopped for coffee. I got a lavender cardamom latte that I highly recommend.
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Old and new. Over time houses get lost to fire or decay, but in places like West Greenville Village, you often get replacements that are hip and fresh and with-it, and new, and now.
For all your empanada and international dance needs.
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One of the two main hospitals that serve Greenville. This is St. Francis-Bon Secours. The other is Greenville Memorial Hospital-Prisma Health. Both Bon Secours and Prisma operate numerous smaller hospitals across the area, but for whatever reason they both like to keep their main hospitals close enough to keep an eye on each other. Greenville Memorial is just a few blocks away.
Another mill, the Piedmont Plush Mills, which used to make exactly what it said on the label: Plush fabric, including car upholstery, mohair, and velour. It also manufactured stage curtains. It was founded in 1925 and closed in 1983. The building now houses a coworking site, and there are plans to build office buildings on the rest of the campus.
Look at the map on the right and you'll see several of Greenville's mills and where they were, or are still, located. Of the mills on the list, from bottom to top the Dunean Mill, Franklin Mill, and Poinsett Mill are still operating industrial ventures (one of which still makes auditorium curtains), Mills Mill, Judson Mill, Brandon Mill, Woodside Mill, and Monaghan Mill are residential buildings, and the Riverdale Mill and American Spinning Mills are still abandoned. There are plans to redevelop the American Spinning Mills site, as well as the Poe Mill, which burned down except for its smokestacks. There's also a plan to redevelop the Union Bleachery in that same part of town, that would essentially create a new urbanist development around the ruins of the bleachery. Greenville would gain a second downtown if it all came to fruition. And speaking of, the shell of the Huguenot Mill in the heart of downtown is preserved as a unique event venue on the grounds of the performing arts center.
Now, you might ask yourself what sort of people worked in the mills of a Southern industrial city like Greenville. It was people like this. This is a photo of actual Piedmont Plush Mills workers from way back in the day, although you'll note those two on the far right still seem to know what's up even now.
After all this, our ambition was well and truly thwarted when we headed over to Unity Park, only to find it filled to capacity with some sort of special event. There were too many children running around and it made us nervous, so we tabled the plan to go take photos of public art.
And a few hours later, to make up for the burger, we went to my favorite restaurant, whose decor features a tile mural of perhaps the world's least threatening luchador.
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It's called Swad. 
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