A group of leaders both public and private cut ribbon on the new, 110-foot Spinks Bridge over the Reedy River in Unity Park in the heart of the Southernside community the morning of Aug. 11. The bridge is named for the Spinks family, whose foundation gave a quarter-million dollars to the effort.
Mayor Knox White and Spinx founder Stewart Spinks both addressed those who’d come — some media, others not. Both pointed out the bridge represents the best of all that is Greenville: a city that likes fixing things that are broken; taking what’s been left behind and finding a new life for it, redeveloping it, renewing it.
“That’s what we’ve done throughout the city and that’s what the core of Unity Park is about,” White said. Polite applause followed many of the remarks as joggers, walkers, bicyclists and morning exercisers slipped by on the Swamp Rabbit Trail.
Longtime Southernside community leader Mary Duckett and city council member Lillian Brock Flemming lingered for a while after the ribbon-cutting. They’re not family but their shared histories made it seem like they are, their arms around one another’s waists as they gave brief interviews to television crews.
There will eventually be three bridges spanning the Reedy River within Unity Park and for these women, these bridges offer mobility. For one thing, kids can finally get across the river without worrying about falling in, something neither Duckett nor Brock Flemming take for granted.
“We used to walk the pipe,” Brock Flemming told The Journal of the utility pipe, now gone, that once spanned the river right where the Spinks Bridge now sits.
It wasn’t a safe option — most of the area that is now becoming Unity Park wasn’t considered a safe option at the time. But it was a way through, a way over, a shortcut between the Oscar Street School Brock Flemming attended on one side of the river and her childhood home on Echols Street, on the other.
“My brother would say, ‘Just don’t look down,'” she remembered.
Duckett, who grew up on West Washington Street and is now president of the Southernside Neighborhoods in Action, said she never “walked the pipe” the way Brock Flemming did. “I was too chicken. There’s always a chicken in the group,” she joked.
Instead, she’d take the only safe option — the Hudson Street bridge — about a half-mile to the south. She could’ve paid a dime to ride the bus but mostly, she walked. “You didn’t have a dime most of the time,” she said.
She said many may not realize that the area once was home to a women’s prison, a junkyard, even a waste incinerator.
“I’m just giving you an idea of what we were living with, you understand,” she said. “That’s the good, the bad and the ugly of it.”
But the bridge means more than mobility, more than development, more than connecting two halves of a community long separated by a river, she said.
“It’s bridging a gap … things are going to come to fruition,” Duckett said, looking over the river at Mayberry Park where they played as children. “When you look back at what was once over there and you see what’s coming now, you’re going to say ‘All praises … all praises …’ … one day, we knew things had to be better. You just had to keep on praying.”
"had" - Google News
August 12, 2021 at 01:42AM
https://ift.tt/3AwHYeo
'You just had to keep on praying' - More than mobility, Unity Park's bridges offer hope, leaders say - Greenville Journal
"had" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2KUBsq7
https://ift.tt/3c5pd6c
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "'You just had to keep on praying' - More than mobility, Unity Park's bridges offer hope, leaders say - Greenville Journal"
Post a Comment