Greenville, SC: Cool and Refreshing, Like a York Peppermint Pattie

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Once upon a time when I was but a boy, either our dogs got out or the neighbor's dogs got out as they were wont to do, and set about the task of slaughtering my family's chickens. It had snowed recently and the ground was still covered. My mother was taken by surprise by the dogs' sudden attack and went charging out of the trailer at them with the old broomstick we used to measure the level of kerosene in our tank. Her intention was to whack her the shit out of some dogs, and she ran out without taking the time to put on a coat or even to put on shoes, because every second you allow a dog to slaughter chickens unmolested is very likely another chicken lost. Along the way she lost first one, then the other of the ratty old pink bedroom slippers she had been wearing and after an indeterminate time spent beating the hell out of dogs she returned, gathering her slippers along the way.

I asked her how that had felt, to be running around in the snow beating dogs with a broomstick, barefoot.

"It was cool and refreshing," she snapped, "like a York Peppermint Pattie."

Cool and refreshing. That was the idea my husband and I had when we set out to take photos of downtown Greenville, where we're living these days. The problem with Greenville though, is that there are only three months of the year when you can reliably count on temperatures to be cool and refreshing, and July is not one of them. Most of the time, Greenville is recording temperatures between five and ten degrees warmer than Asheville, up in the mountains, and the higher humidity down here adds another five to ten to how it feels outside. It's quite common to check the temperature and find that what with one thing and another, a temperature of 80 feels like 92.

We thought we would beat Greenville at its game, and take pictures early in the morning, before it got "too hot." We thought to walk around in the morning might be cool and refreshing, like a York Peppermint Pattie.

Spoiler alert: It was not cool and refreshing.

But we got nice photos out of it.

As always, apologies for the bullshit YouTube wants you to watch before you can access appropriate theme music...

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...and it is quite appropriate. Greenville was a city of mills and remains a city of industry today.

The heart of downtown Greenville is Main Street.













Greenville's current tallest, the Landmark Tower, aka the Windstream Building:



Springwood Cemetery:

























A statue of Max Heller, the mayor who started downtown Greenville's turnaround from abandoned slum to an urban area that regularly garners national recognition:







Discussion question: What is a car with a license plate from Medellin, Colombia doing on West North Street?

Discussion question: Why is there a West North Street?













































Greenville is currently hosting an art exhibition by a notable Mexican artist, called Wings of the City. It's the first city east of the Mississippi to host it.















Greenville is a bit like San Antonio in that it has managed to make a middling little ditch of a river into a serious attraction. Part of that success is that Greenville is absolutely obsessed with celebrating that river with more fountains than you could shake a kerosene-stinking old broomstick at. Greenville could not be more pleased with the presence of water in the central business district.





Here's one of those old mills, the Huguenot Mill, which also housed the headquarters and production plant of the Duke's Mayonnaise company starting in 1917.





























Unlike San Antonio, part of what makes Greenville's middling river pretty special after all is the waterfall:































The Medusa Tree -- seriously. That's how it's even labeled on Google Maps.











There are at least two sets of old mill ruins in Falls Park, in the heart of the city. According to this historical marker for this set of ruins, a 27-acre mill village once surrounded the site of this textile mill. Residents rented their homes from the mill that employed them at a rate of $.50 per room per week. The village was destroyed in the 1950's.

That's the Grand Bohemian Hotel rising in the background, by the way.

















































This building on Spring Street is important because according to the Green Book, it used to house one of the only restaurants in Greenville where Black people were allowed to eat in the 1950's.





By early afternoon we were melting, and retreated home. We thought perhaps if we returned downtown even earlier the next day, perhaps we would find it cool and refreshing, like a York Peppermint Pattie. Imagine our delight when the next morning dawned overcast! Surely it would feel cool and refreshing!

Spoiler alert: It was not cool and refreshing.





This is Greenville's new federal courthouse.





















Christ Episcopal Church:



The cemetery behind Christ Episcopal Church. Two interesting things happened in this cemetery. The first was that I found a clump of probable relatives buried here, and the second was the gravestone of a woman named Vashti, who died in 1919. You have to wonder what sort of journey would bring an Indian woman to Greenville, South Carolina in that era, and how her life had been married to the man who was buried beside her. What sort of life would a woman like that have lived in a place like that, in a time like that?

That sort of thing is why I like to spend time in cemeteries.





















The Pettigru Historic District:































The Rock Quarry Garden, south of the Pettigru district, on the southeast edge of downtown. True to its name, this was indeed a rock quarry prior to the Civil War. After the war it lay abandoned until the Greenville Garden Club got itself in a snit in 1930 and turned it into a park. They did such a good job at that endeavor that they won second prize in a national competition held by Better Homes and Gardens magazine for best urban renewal project in America.

They were robbed. They easily deserved first prize.





























And then we walked back to where we'd parked by the new courthouse.