Greenville, SC: Hurry And Visit Before They Chop It All Down
Written: Aug 17 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Natural beauty (for now), booming industry
Cons: Total disregard for natural beauty, hatred of Yankees
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| KaraHoo's Full Review: South Carolina |
This review is part of the gigantic Hometown Write-Off, hosted by IrishMa4 and featuring some really terrific writers. Be sure to check the web-link at the end of this review for a list of all the contributors, then check out their featured towns too!
On paper, Greenville, South Carolina is your regular Nirvana, a twenty-first century haven fit snugly between the rapidly-decaying metropolises of Charlotte and Atlanta. People first visiting the burgeoning burg notice how un-big city-like this big city is in comparison to its more unsightly neighbors.
Businesses in Greenville are booming. Schools are (ahem) improving (from the lower part of the bottom third of the nation’s ranking of state education programs to the upper part of the bottom third). Housing developments are popping up like so many old-timey magnolia trees. Even downtown Greenville is bustling with new, regenerated life, as seen in its many restaurants, chi-chi stores and galleries.
But the seamless exterior only partially hides the reality behind Greenville, and its sister city, nearby Spartanburg: the reality that these towns are growing too quickly, and on too weak an infrastructure, to be decent places to live.
Location
Depending on your viewpoint, Greenville’s location, in the heart of South Carolina’s Upstate, can be a boon or a tremendous bore. Let it be known to non-residents that Greenville is nowhere near the coast. In my 6 years of living there, I was asked by all my Midwesterner friends every summer whether I was in the path of that year’s Hurricane of the Century. In actuality, Greenville is about as far inland as you can get while still being in South Carolina, so if a hurricane ever did aim for us, it would die down to a mere rainshower by the time it reached us.
That was the good part. The unfortunate part is that Greenville has hardly a fraction of the rich history, culture and ol’-timey gentility of coastal cities like Charleston (SC) and Savannah (GA), and almost none of the light-hearted, overbaked fun of vacation favorites like Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head. Greenville is more of the business capital of this hardly-businesslike state, like the geeky cousin that nobody likes to visit. I mean, who do you know who crows "woooo! I went to South Carolina for vacation, and we par-tayed in the Upstate! Yeah, baby!"
Culture
Most of the culture in Greenville is based on the fact that its residents would always rather be somewhere else. There is a well-groomed upper class that aligns themselves with downtown Atlantans, trying desperately to boost the art and social appreciation of the Upstate. This is a fairly lost cause, considering the reduced funding for the arts in Upstate public schools and colleges, and the comparably low attendance to cultural events like the annual fall "Art In The Park" festival as opposed to the massive crowds at your typical Billy Ray Cyrus concert.
Which brings us, inevitably, to the Redneck Factor. No matter how hard Greenville denizens try to maintain a metropolitan facade, they have to reconcile themselves with the hard truth that very inch of South Carolina, including the Upstate, will always be the proud home of the Great American Redneck.
Before you automatically NR me for slamming South Carolina’s Good Ol’ Boys (and Gals), let me point out that South Carolina’s Rednecks are more than happy to admit—loudly—what they believe themselves to be. Every third pickup truck, it seems, boasts a bumper sticker professing the honor of the confederate flag. High-school boys wear baseball caps and t-shirts with "Redneck" emblazoned on it like a royal title.
The Redneck Factor helps to ensure that almost every cultural event in Greenville and neighboring communities has plenty of barbecued pork and Lynyrd Skynyrd music. Witness the annual "Bubbafest" in Woodruff every spring, Mountain Rest’s "Hillbilly Days" every summer, and the parade of country music performers that adorn the bill of every single county fair in the Upstate.
Greenville does have its own Symphony Orchestra, but the Redneck Factor assures anyone that they can be comfortable watching such a spectacle in their most treasured blue jeans and ball cap. I don’t hate Rednecks at all, but they sure make themselves easy to spot.
"You Ain’t From Around Here, Is Ya?"
I’ll never forget the first time I heard that phrase. After living as a stranger in several other cities without comment, a Greenville resident asked me that infamous question after hearing my Chicagoan accent, only a month after moving to South Carolina. "Hey, you ain’t from around here…" he accused, outing me forever from being a true resident. I might as well had been wearing Yankee blue.
South Carolina inhabitants are an insular sort, preferring the company of others who are born-and-bred southerners over "them foreigners" (pronounced "fer-ners"). Foreigners include anyone from outside the country, anyone who may have visited somewhere outside the country, people who sound like they’re from outside the country, and Yankees. You could’ve been living in the south for 45 years, be on the board of directors of the "Dukes of Hazzard" Appreciation Society, and have a confederate flag tattooed on your butt, but if you were born in Minneapolis, you’re still a Yankee and will never, ever truly fit in.
Speaking of the confederate flag, when the NAACP announced a boycott of South Carolina last year, it took the state almost a year to decide that a flag that stood for the right of whites to enslave African-Americans maybe wasn’t the most honorable symbol to be flying above the State House. Still, many of South Carolina’s Old Guard fought tooth and nail to preserve this heritage that had separated races for hundreds of years. Unfortunately, this kind of behavior is to be expected around here.
Natural Beauty…Going, Going, Gone
There is little doubt that the Upstate is one of the more beautiful areas of South Carolina. Nestled in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, Greenville boasts gorgeous mountaintop vistas and lush valleys accented by creeks, waterfalls, millions of trees and every kind of flora and fauna imaginable. In about a 50-mile radius around the city, one can find natural wonders galore, from lakeside beaches to breathtaking mountain trails to fertile, rolling farmland.
One problem, however: the geniuses in charge of growth in the Upstate are mowing it all down.
Population in Greenville and surrounding areas is literally exploding, with millions of people each clamoring for their "rightful" piece of nature. Every week, it seems, new patches of wooded and lakeside land are plowed over to make room for behemoth single-family homes (because the property value in South Carolina is so low, your average shmoe living in the north can easily sell their little house and move to the south, buying a house two or three times the size of their tiny cottage up north). Then these single families move into their new palatial residences—and plant two measly Bradford Pear trees in the front.
Natural resources are being destroyed to make room for commercial and industrial interests in the Upstate too, to be sure, but by far the biggest disgrace to the area is the greedy snatching of land by real-estate developers (who I am sure will occupy the very deepest levels of Hell). Where there is now a smattering of "For Sale" signs marking up the foothills and farmland, there will soon be sprawling housing developments, full of yuppie Greenvillians whose personal idea of natural beauty is the Thornblade Golf Course & Country Club.
So when we could at one time say "well, sure, the people in Greenville are either painfully snooty or uncontrollably Redneck, but at least the land is gorgeous, like God’s Country," soon we’ll only be able to say "sure, the natural beauty of God’s Country has been completely raped to make room for huge trailer parks, subdivisions and "Lil Cricket"s, but at least the citizens are so intolerable that they’ve already driven us into our homes to ignore the scenery and enjoy a good book."
Yep, Greenville on paper is a wonderful place. But until the city takes a good look at what it’s doing to itself and stops its inevitable degeneration, it’s not the Nirvana it seems to be. Quite the opposite, in fact.
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KaraHoo
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Member: Kara Who?
Location: Indiana (God's Country)
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So busy being Mom Of Two that I don't even write here anymore.
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