From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

Downtown New South

Downtown New South Greenville, South Carolina, is a surprisingly large southern town with a stated population of 71,000. Apparently South Carolina has stringent laws concerning annexation, so a lot of development has occurred outside of Greenville proper. Greenville’s population figures don’t really reflect its metropolitan area or character. The metro area is estimated to be over 600,000. Neither of these population figures prepared me for the sight of downtown Greenville on a late winter Saturday night. So let me set it up. I was ten or twelve miles away from downtown Greenville a few minutes before 8:00 on an early spring Saturday evening. Tired and hungry, I made a strategic decision to push onto the Hotel Poinsett where I had a room reserved for the night. I figured that it would take less than fifteen minutes to arrive at the hotel. After a quick checkin , I would find something to eat. In a town of 71,000, what could go wrong? I was less than a mile from my destination when my GPS directed me to turn left onto Main Street. I couldn’t make the turn onto Main Street because it was barricaded and closed to vehicular traffic. As I drove past Main Street, I noticed that stores were open and groups of people walked down the middle of the street. I didn’t think too much about the situation until I tried to make two left turns to return to Main Street. Traffic toward Main Street was snarled, so I continued on in the dark, looking for a way to get back on Main with the GPS voice repeating “recalculating” every thirty seconds. 99 One problem was that I was in a strange city after dark. The oneway streets were a compounding problem. I knew I was only a few blocks from the hotel. But every time I found a one-way street taking me back to Main Street, it was completely backed up—gridlocked in downtown Greenville on a Saturday evening. After waiting through one light, I finally pushed my way onto the cross street and traveled two blocks back to Main where I faced an even bigger line of traffic. It took almost thirty minutes to negotiate the last few blocks to the hotel. Despite my hunger, I was now curious about the downtown crowd. At the check-in desk, I inquired about the special event causing the traffic jam. The nice receptionist looked surprised at my question and said that nothing special was going on but surmised, “It’s just the first nice weekend evening in a while and people are out to enjoy it.” I found later that her statement was slightly inaccurate because the University of South Carolina Gamecocks and the Clemson Tigers had their annual rivalry baseball game at nearby Fluor Field. (Fluor Field is a great minor league baseball park, a smaller version of Fenway Park complete with its own “Green Monster.”) But the game didn’t explain the traffic problem because the ball park is located a few miles on the other side of downtown from where I was, and, more importantly, it was being played as I arrived. I hit Main Street to see what was happening. At 9:00 on a Saturday night, there were people everywhere—families with children, groups of young people hanging around outside of some stores, old people shopping —but there didn’t seem to be anything special happening. A few blocks later, I arrived at a public park, Falls Park on the Reedy River. I couldn’t say when I last went into a public park after dark, but it’s been a long time. I saw fairly regular-looking people making the turn into the park right in front of me, so I decided to follow them. After I turned, I saw a sign that I’d never seen before. I must admit that my initial thought was not a good one. The sign was there either to hassle bored, young Greenvillians with nothing better to do, or there was a gang problem. Either prospect made me leery of walking through a public park in a strange place after dark. But I continued into the park. I soon saw old people strolling through the park, and moments later families with young children in strollers, even families 100 with teenagers. Can you imagine a father with...