“Find Your Falls”: Greenville, South Carolina, and the return to human scale
Greenville, SC and the return to human scale
Part One: The River and the Machine
The Cradle of Greenville
The Reedy River drops about forty feet over a shelf of rock in the middle of downtown Greenville. Main Street crosses it at what was once a shallow ford. A marker at the falls calls them “The Cradle of Greenville,” and the title is literal. The first settler built a trading post and a grist mill here before the Revolution. The town takes its founding date, 1812, from a grist mill at the head of the falls. For the next sixty years the river turned the wheels of the sawmill, the ironworks, the paper mill and the carriage works that gave the town its living. The river did the work, and the town grew up around the work.
The falls on the Reedy, 1907 postcard, the year Kelsey & Guild asked the city to redeem the river. American News Co., Public domain.
For a century the river gave life to one industry after another. Then it gave life to the one that would define the city. In 1874 two Boston mill men, carrying insurance money from the great Boston fire of 1872, leased the old mill below the falls and filled it with spindles. Two years later they built a second mill across the river and a village of 119 houses to go with it. Camperdown was Greenville’s first textile mill and its first mill village.
!Image 2: Camperdown Mill and Reedy River Falls, c.1910 postcard
Camperdown Mill and Reedy River Falls, c.1910 postcard. H. G. Zimmerman & Co., Public domain.
Mill Fever
The 1890s brought what one history calls “mill fever.” One mill opened with 400 workers recruited off farms in three states; its founder called his village his “little New York.” Another grew from 66 houses to 420 in five years. Within thirty years sixteen mills and two bleacheries ringed the city, and by the 1920s the Piedmont had passed New England as the world’s leading producer of yarn and cloth.
!Image 3: Poe Mill, 1905 postcard. Its founder called the village his little New York
Left: Poe Mill, 1905 postcard. Its founder called the village his little New York. Raphael Tuck & Sons, Public domain. Right: Woodside Cotton Mills, c.1913 postcard, the largest cotton mill under one roof in the country. Unknown publisher, Public domain.
The mills were designed as a system. Boston engineers drew them by the dozen, and a single Greenville firm designed sixty-four mills and 1,600 village houses. Owners sat on each other’s boards. The villages came as a standard package: rows of identical company houses, a company store, two churches, a school, a baseball team. The ring of mills made a shape locals still call the Textile Crescent, and Greenville called itself the Textile Capital of the World.
There was a sign, early, of what the system would cost. In 1907 the Municipal League hired the Boston landscape architects Kelsey & Guild to plan the city’s improvement. Their report called the falls “the most distinctive feature in the topography and landscape of Greenville,” said the view of them was “rapidly being destroyed and wasted,” and recommended “redeeming the Reedy River” with a lake and a park. The plan was shelved. One account puts it plainly: industrialization ruined the idea. The National Register nomination for the falls, written decades later, says Camperdown’s construction was “responsible for the decline of the falls and the eventual erosion of the banks below the mill outlets.” The machine was efficient. It was also indifferent to the thing that had made the place.
Vienna, 1937
Max Heller was born in Vienna on May 28, 1919, to Polish-born Jewish parents who ran a sales business. He finished gymnasium, apprenticed with a novelty store owner, became a buyer and took business classes part-time. The Austria he grew up in was built at the pace of people on foot: cafes and squares, streets that followed the land, and villages outside the city that had grown a house at a time over centuries, each with a church and a market at its middle. He would later say of Vienna before the war: “Jewish people were about 10 percent of the population. And it was a very rich life.” In the summer of 1937, at eighteen, he met a girl named Trude Schönthal at a resort outside Vienna and told her that day he would marry her.
!Image 5: The Graben, Vienna, photochrom print c.1890 to 1900
!Image 6: Hallstatt, Upper Austria, photochrom print c.1890 to 1900
Left: The Graben, Vienna, photochrom print c.1890 to 1900. Photochrom Print Collection, Library of Congress, Public domain. Right: Hallstatt, Upper Austria, photochrom print c.1890 to 1900. Photochrom Print Collection, Library of Congress, Public domain.
On March 11, 1938, German troops entered Austria. What followed was order imposed from above at a speed and scale no one had seen: a whole society reorganized by a single plan, its people sorted into categories and processed. The Hellers lost their business. Max lost his job. The family’s bank account was confiscated and they lived by selling the silver. Looking back sixty years later, he said of those first days: “We kidded ourselves.” His father’s refrain was “don’t worry, God’ll help.” Max would say later that the family lost ninety people in the Holocaust.
!Image 7: German troops enter Vienna, March 1938
German troops enter Vienna, March 1938. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1987-0922-503, CC BY-SA 3.0 de.
The Letter
There was one way out, and it ran through a stranger’s signature. An American willing to vouch for you and put you to work could get you in. In the spring of 1938 Max remembered an American girl he had met the summer before, on a night out dancing in Vienna. Mary Mills had been on a graduation trip. They had talked through the English-German dictionary he had just bought, and they had traded addresses. He wrote to her. Her reply, as he quoted it for the rest of his life, was four words: “I have not forgotten you.”
Mary Mills took his letter and convinced Shepard Saltzman, the owner of a shirt factory in her hometown, to sponsor him.
That hometown was Greenville, South Carolina.
!Image 8: Greetings from Greenville, 1939 postcard
Greetings from Greenville, 1939 postcard. Curt Teich & Co. for Asheville Post Card Co., Public domain.
Nine Dollars and Ninety Cents
In late July 1938 Max and his sister Paula left Vienna. In August they arrived in Greenville, a city ringed by sixteen cotton mills.
He went to work at Saltzman’s factory the day he arrived. “There was freedom,” he said of that first day. “Freedom. Unbelievable feeling. I never had that feeling, ever.” Called to the office, he assumed he was being sent back. Instead a man introduced himself: “I am Judge Plyler, I have come to welcome you.” John Plyler, the president of Furman University, had read about him in the newspaper and offered to tutor him in English. “A simple act of kindness can undo bitter things,” Heller said later. “Just reaching out.”
His first paycheck was $9.90, with ten cents taken out for Social Security. He worked seventy to eighty hours a week and paid $7 of it to board with a Jewish family. “I was so concerned not to take charity,” he said. “I wanted to be on my own.”
Rainbow Reedy
The city he had landed in was the machine at full run. More than two thousand mill houses stood within three miles of Main Street, in rows, identical, company-owned. Pay came in an envelope with rent and store debt already subtracted; an empty envelope was called “drawing the worm,” and the local historian Don Koonce has called the company store “a very cruel system.” The villages had a reputation in the rest of town for “crime, disorder, drunkenness,” and their people were called lintheads. Four years before Heller arrived, during the General Textile Strike of 1934, the National Guard had defended Poe Mill with machine guns, and a captain in Greenville had told his men “to shoot to kill” if necessary. The streetcars that carried workers out Pendleton Street to the mills stopped running in October 1937, ten months before he arrived.
Spinners and doffers at Lancaster Cotton Mills, Lancaster, South Carolina, 1908. Not Greenville, but the same Piedmont mill world. Lewis Hine, National Archives, Public domain.
The river showed it first. Five mills emptied their dye vats into the Reedy, and the water changed color with the day’s run. People called it the Rainbow Reedy. Twelve mills and villages and the city itself discharged their sewage into it. In 1925 a mill seven miles downstream had sued the city, saying the water that reached it was “so foul and contaminated as to be a source of disease.” In the 1930s a railroad dug a channel and moved the river itself; as a Greenville mayor would put it decades later, “the railroad dug a ditch and relocated the Reedy River basically, and it wasn’t done very well.”
Mills on the Reedy, c.1920 postcard. The brick building at left is McBee's original grist mill. E. C. Kropp Co., Public domain.
Along that moved stretch of river, in the neighborhood called Southernside, the same logic ran through the city’s own plans. In 1924 voters had approved a $110,000 park bond. Most of it built the 120-acre Cleveland Park on the white side of town. Fifteen thousand dollars bought fifteen marshy acres by the river for a park for Black children, who were barred from every other park in the city. It was called Mayberry Park. “It was all we had,” a woman named Mary Duckett said of it decades later. In 1938, the year Heller arrived, the city leased half of Mayberry, free of charge, to a Baltimore businessman to build a stadium for an all-white minor league team. Black fans could not sit in its stands. A schoolteacher and mail carrier named Elias Holloway went before the city council to protest, and in March 1939 he put it in writing: “We want the park because we need it.” The city promised him one.
This was the city Heller had come to: one that had organized itself around efficiency, and a river, a workforce and a neighborhood that showed what efficiency cost.
Part Two: Starting Small
Max and Trude
Trude and her mother were turned back again and again trying to get out of Europe; once a German soldier pressed a gun to her ribs. They reached New York in 1940. Max took a bus north to see her, and a telegram from her father reading “I am alive” arrived at the door as he did. On August 2, 1942, they married at Ensor’s on Main Street, then the only air-conditioned restaurant in Greenville. The air conditioning broke during the ceremony. “He always kept his word,” Trude said.
Main Street and the Poinsett Hotel, 1942, the year Max and Trude married at Ensor's on Main. William B. Coxe, Public domain.
At Piedmont Shirt Company he went from sweeping floors in the shipping department to foreman, to sales manager, to vice president. In 1946 he founded his own company, Williamston Shirt, and sold it two years later. Then he founded Maxon Shirt and built it until 1962, when he sold it at forty-two to give his time to the city. Along the way he took the segregation signs down in his own factory.
Heller’s answer to the mills was not a bigger mill. It was a small company of his own, built by hand, that worked. He had seen what scale did to people and to a river. He had now seen what a human-sized enterprise could do for the people inside it. The next question was whether the same idea could work for a city.
A City Turns Its Back
By the time the question was asked, Greenville was at its lowest. County textile employment had peaked in 1950 at 18,964 jobs and had been sliding since. Camperdown, the mill at the falls, closed in 1956 and was demolished in 1959. Furman moved its campus off the bluff above the falls in 1958. In 1960 the state built a four-lane highway bridge, more than four hundred feet long and nearly six million pounds of concrete and steel, directly over the waterfall. The road that fed it took dozens of mill-village houses with it. Within a generation most people in Greenville had forgotten there was a waterfall downtown at all.
!Image 12: Downtown Greenville from the air, c.1968
Downtown Greenville from the air, c.1968. Asheville Post Card Co., Public domain.
The city’s own marker says that after industry declined, the town “turned its back on the Reedy River.” In the 1960s the water over the falls ran dark brown through kudzu and debris. By the 1970s, in the words of the Friends of the Reedy River, “no one wanted any association with it.” The first enclosed mall in South Carolina opened across town in 1968. A second mall opened on Furman’s old campus in 1970. Nancy Whitworth, who would spend decades as the city’s economic development director, remembers a Main Street that had gone “dull.” The city’s Angie Prosser put it this way: “You either worked here and left, or you didn’t come at all.” Then the mills themselves began to close. Brandon and Poe shut their doors in 1977, Poe with a $7 million payroll.
!Image 13: The view from the top of the Poinsett Hotel, c.1970
!Image 14: Downtown Greenville, November 1985
Left: The view from the top of the Poinsett Hotel, c.1970. Unknown publisher, Public domain. Right: Downtown Greenville, November 1985. Photo: drtreypennington, CC BY 2.0.
A People’s Place
Heller joined the city council in 1968, the year a downtown plan first proposed Main Street as “a pedestrian friendly environment.” He became mayor in 1971, the first elected to a four-year term, having learned of his own candidacy from a newspaper while on vacation. His first hire was the first African American woman to work in City Hall. He desegregated the city’s departments and commissions. “I was very open that I was for integration,” he said. “Totally open.”
> _“I always wanted a people’s place.”_
That was his phrase for what he wanted downtown to be, and it came from where he had grown up. His daughter Susan says he “brought with him a European vision of downtown, pedestrian friendly and green.” Trude said the cafes and trees reminded them both of an Austrian village. In the mid-1970s he and other city leaders flew to San Francisco to meet the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. Halprin’s 1974 report proposed cutting Main Street from four lanes to two, planting it, and adding parks and plazas. It also said the falls and the riverbanks should become a city park: “the thing which is important is that something dramatic should be done.”
The merchants were not persuaded. One developer’s reaction to the plan was “Way too hairy.” Heller met with the store owners one at a time and, as Pat Haskell-Robinson recalled, “he made it clear we were going ahead with it.” Work began in August 1978. Four lanes became two. The outer lanes became free angled parking. Sidewalks widened to eighteen feet. Hundreds of trees went in. Unlike the cities that had closed their main streets to cars, Greenville kept the traffic and slowed it down. Whitworth remembers that the young trees screened the vacant storefronts long enough for new tenants to arrive. The street was done by 1979 and extended into the West End in 1981. Heller had left office by then. “I get credit,” he said years later, “for having a rebirth of downtown.”
The Condition
The decision that mattered most was not about trees. **In 1975, pressed to run for a second term, Heller agreed on one condition: the business community had to support and match federal money for the redevelopment of downtown.** The city then landed one of the first Urban Development Action Grants in the country, $7.4 million, and the Hyatt Regency opened at Main and College in 1982, “the first of many anchor projects on Main that involved both public funding and private development,” as Haskell-Robinson put it. Heller’s partners in it were the attorney Tommy Wyche and the builder Buck Mickel; the city manager John Dullea carried the deals for twenty years. Whitworth describes the arrangement that grew out of it in one sentence: the public sector is the spark plug and the private sector is the engine.
The Precedent
Heller left the mayor’s office in 1979 to chair the State Development Board, where he is credited with 67,000 jobs in five years and the recruitment of Michelin North America. Michelin’s first tire had come off the line in Greenville in March 1975, while he was mayor. “A lot of our first-generation employees at Michelin in the Upstate came from the textile industry,” the company’s North American president said forty years later, and that “laid the groundwork for all the future investments.” When BMW chose the Upstate in 1992, its planners “rode around in the neighborhoods” and looked at how people lived. They saw houses and cars kept neat. “If you take skill and pride,” said Bobby Hitt, who later ran the state’s commerce department, “you can build a BMW.”
The precedent Heller set was that the large companies the city courted were expected to invest in the place, not just occupy it. It has held. When Greenville built its second river park forty years later, Michelin, BMW, Duke Energy and the region’s hospital system were among the private donors. Heller died on June 13, 2011, at ninety-two. The city calls him the Father of Modern Greenville. His statue on Main Street strides forward with one arm out and a finger pointing down the street.
Part Three: Uncovering
The Lineage
Knox White was born in Greenville in 1954 and chaired the city’s youth commission under Mayor Heller. He has said Heller gave him his first example of what community leadership looked like. He joined the city council in June 1983 and became mayor on December 11, 1995, with a stated goal: “the most beautiful and livable city in America.” He is finishing his eighth term, the most in the city’s history, and retires in 2027.
White came to the office with Jane Jacobs in his head. Her first book, in 1961, opened with a sentence that could serve as the city’s own: “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” She argued that a city is not a machine to be designed from above but a living system that grows by many hands, and that every concession to cars wears the city away a little more. In a later book she set two English cities side by side. In the 1840s Manchester, the efficient, specialized cotton-mill city, looked like the future. Birmingham, a jumble of small, inefficient workshops, looked like the past. Manchester stagnated. Birmingham kept producing new work, because small and varied enterprises are where new work comes from. Greenville had been Manchester. The question in front of White was whether it could learn to be Birmingham.
!Image 15: Cotton factories on Union Street, Manchester, 1835
Cotton factories on Union Street, Manchester, 1835. Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture, Public domain.
Six Million Pounds
> _“People who lived in Greenville all their lives had never seen the waterfall.”_
The bridge over the falls was the machine’s last monument, and it was still standing. It carried about 5,600 cars a day into downtown over a waterfall that most of the city had never seen. Under it, by White’s account, was “a haven where thieves and robbers would flee after committing a crime.”
Left: Reedy River Falls in winter, 1912 postcard. The waterfall a later generation forgot was there. Unknown publisher, Public domain. Right: The falls under the Camperdown Way bridge, 2001, the year the council voted to take it down. Josh Patterson, Greenville County Library System, Used by permission (pending).
Not everyone had turned their back. In 1967 the Carolina Foothills Garden Club had asked Furman to deed six acres at the falls to the city and had restored them largely by hand under a campaign slogan, “Free the Falls.” Harriet Wyche, Tommy Wyche’s wife, chaired the park committee. The club got the falls onto the National Register in 1973, raised money through the 1980s, and in 1986 hired a Washington landscape architect named Andrea Mains, who found the site covered in kudzu with sewer pipes running exposed across it.
A Trial Balloon
In 1989 a downtown study concluded the bridge “needed to come down.” White, then a councilman, remembers the first public airing as “a trial balloon that popped.” The next year a traffic study did the arithmetic. Removing the bridge would cost drivers $204,447 in delay in the first year and more than $3.28 million a year by 2005. The study called removal not viable. In 1991 the U.S. Department of Transportation warned that the city might have to repay the federal money that had built it. The idea stalled for seven years.
It never became popular. The people who wanted the bridge gone called it the concrete monster. The people who wanted it kept called it a perfectly good bridge, and at public meetings they asked the question every mayor dreads: “Why tear down something that works?” By the city’s own later admission, support for the park idea never reached fifty percent. Every argument for efficiency sat on one side of the ledger. On the other side was a waterfall nobody could see and a garden club’s drawing of a footbridge.
Three Thousand Tons
What changed it was a series of small, human moves. In 1997 the city’s planning consultants called the bridge a “mistake” in a report card on downtown. In 1998 White began promoting the park in earnest. A 1999 plan said the bridge “obscures and insults” the falls. The state’s highway director, Betty Mabry, was a former president of the Columbia Garden Club; Harriet Wyche made a phone call, Mabry came to Greenville, stood at the site and agreed on the spot to hand the bridge over to the city. The former parks director Paul Ellis drew a curved footbridge on a postcard, and the postcard won over skeptics the reports had not. The bridge passed to the city in 2000. In February 2001 the council voted unanimously to demolish it. In July 2002 three thousand tons of concrete came out of the gorge. The traffic problems the study had predicted never arrived.
!Image 18: The Liberty Bridge from the west, 2016
The Liberty Bridge from the west, 2016. Photo: DXR, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The park cost $13,445,000, most of it paid from a two percent hospitality tax. “We spent $13 million on the park,” White told an audience in Savannah years later, “and, yes, people thought we were crazy.” The footbridge was designed by Miguel Rosales of Boston, who said that “the first time I saw the site, it was like love at first sight.” It is 345 feet long and twelve feet wide, hung from two ninety-foot masts on one side only, the first curved suspension bridge of its kind in the country. It was budgeted at $2.5 million and bid at $4.5 million, and they built it anyway.
Falls Park and the Liberty Bridge were dedicated on September 10, 2004. The falls, White said that day, “have regained their rightful place of prominence in our city.” The river itself had been getting cleaner for twenty years; the last major industrial discharge had ended in 1982, as the mills that made it closed. But the city had kept the falls under a highway for forty years, and nearly a century after Kelsey & Guild first asked it to redeem the river, the uncovering was the act that mattered. “Greenville never had an iconic image,” White says. “The bridge became that.” The park, in his words, “raised the bar for the community’s self-identity and sense of pride.” By 2015 the city counted about $586 million in private development around it, some forty dollars for every public dollar. More than 1,700 delegates from other cities have been walked across the bridge since, and the lesson Greenville gives them is three words long: Find your falls.
!Image 19: Falls Park during the solar eclipse, August 21, 2017
!Image 20: The riverwalk at RiverPlace, 2011
Left: Falls Park during the solar eclipse, August 21, 2017. Photo: Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0. Right: The riverwalk at RiverPlace, 2011. Photo: Tim, Atlanta, CC BY 2.0.
The Promise Kept
Downstream, the city’s own back lot waited. The land along the river that had been promised to Elias Holloway in 1939 had held a stockade, a dog pound, a police shooting range, a trash incinerator, two dumps, an animal crematory, the Public Works yard and a field of junk cars. The shooting range “shared the only area where local children played.” The head of the Greenville Housing Fund says people describe it as “the community’s junkyard.” White calls it, for most of the twentieth century, “the city’s dumping ground.”
White began pursuing a park there in 2004, the year Falls Park opened. The city moved Public Works out in 2014 and in 2016 hired the design firm MKSK with a brief that included an affordable housing strategy and a citizen advisory committee. Residents shaped the plan for three years. The one thing they insisted on keeping was the ballfield, the last piece of Mayberry Park. The name, Unity Park, was announced in May 2018. Ground broke in July 2020, in the pandemic, and the first twelve months were nothing but grading and hauling out soil.
It opened on May 19, 2022. A half mile of the Reedy had been dug out of the railroad’s ditch, its banks laid back to gentle slopes, with 750 new trees, two and a half miles of trail and three footbridges. “In 1939, a commitment was made to this community,” White said at the ceremony. Councilwoman Lillian Brock Flemming, whose mother had moved to Southernside the year the city took half of Mayberry, said: “Folks, we’ve been waiting since 1939.” Mary Duckett, who had played in the river as a child, stood in the park the day before it opened and said, “I think this is what heaven looks like.” A month later the city dedicated a mural on the welcome center at its Juneteenth celebration: Elias and Hattie Holloway, side by side, under the words A Promise Fulfilled.
!Image 21: The UNITY letters on the lawn at Unity Park
The UNITY letters on the lawn at Unity Park. Supplied by the author; credit to be confirmed.
The rest came in pieces. The rebuilt Mayberry Field opened in August 2025. A Sterling High School alumnus named James Bailey spoke at the ribbon cutting: “Even though it’s only 70 years late, but I feel good for the future.” That November the city dedicated a 125-foot tower built to recall the mill smokestacks, on the spot where the Black park and the white stadium had met. Mary Duckett rode to the top with the governor. She died five days later, at eighty-five.
The two smokestacks that survive at Poe Mill, December 2024. The tower at Unity Park was built to recall them. Photo: BPJP-Geography, CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Village
Pendleton Street runs southwest out of downtown for a mile and a half to the neighborhood that grew up around Brandon Mill. It was built as the mill’s service street: a general store, storefronts, a streetcar. After Brandon closed in 1977 it was, in the words of Garden & Gun, “the wrong side of the tracks.” Nobody planned its return.
!Image 23: Pendleton Street, c.1915 postcard, with the streetcar tracks to the mills
!Image 24: The 1200 block of Pendleton Street, 2025
Left: Pendleton Street, c.1915 postcard, with the streetcar tracks to the mills. Unknown publisher, Public domain. Right: The 1200 block of Pendleton Street, 2025. Photo: P. Hughes, CC BY 4.0.
Around 2001 a painter named Diane Kilgore Condon, priced out of the downtown that Heller’s trees had revived, bought the old Brandon Mill general store at 1320 Pendleton for $75,000 with a nonprofit loan and a year of volunteer labor. Twelve artists signed on before she closed. She rented studios for about $150 a month, to “provide affordable studio space for anyone who was really serious about creating great work.” Galleries, a restaurant and a salon followed over the next decade. White has called the Village of West Greenville’s renaissance entirely private-sector led. The city’s contribution came later: sidewalks, a streetscape, a parking lot, about a million dollars by 2019.
In 2012 a Furman graduate named Dan Weidenbenner planted a vegetable garden in a mill neighborhood. It became Mill Village Ministries: a farm, a bike shop that repaired 1,442 bikes in a year, an entrepreneurship program that has trained more than a hundred people. In 2024 the organization moved all of it into a former ice plant, skating rink and gas station at 1186 Pendleton, a $6.5 million hub paid for with a $5.5 million campaign and a million in bank debt. The programs came first. The building followed.
The Mill Village Hub at 1186 Pendleton Street, a former ice plant, skating rink and gas station. Supplied by the author; credit to be confirmed.
In 2014 a developer bought Brandon Mill itself and opened lofts in 2016, donating one building to an arts center. In 2020 Katie and Eric Skoloff paid $925,000 for the triangular building at Pendleton and Burdette where, in 1928, twenty-eight seamstresses had sewn fabric from the Piedmont Plush Mill upstairs and sold the goods in five storefronts below. Rain came under its doors and the second floor had been empty for decades. They restored it with historic tax credits and a property-tax freeze and leased it to creative tenants only, fully, within a month of announcing the plan. Poe Hardware’s 1946 warehouses became Poe West, anchored by a culinary school; the 1924 Borden ice cream plant became offices; an old auto-repair lot became twenty-eight houses. And before Unity Park existed, a developer bet on a food hall in the warehouse strip beside it.
!Image 26: Brandon Mill, 2025. Lofts since 2016
!Image 27: Flatiron Studios at Pendleton and Burdette, restored in 2021
Left: Brandon Mill, 2025. Lofts since 2016. Photo: P. Hughes, CC BY 4.0. Right: Flatiron Studios at Pendleton and Burdette, restored in 2021. Supplied by the author; credit to be confirmed.
Then the big money came. Woven, at 1279 Pendleton, arrived as a proposal for more than 250 apartments and left the council, in January 2023, on a four-to-three vote, as 214 units with 44 of them affordable, a public plaza, below-market retail for local owners, and a restored mill house on the site. Woven raised the question every small place that succeeds eventually faces: how to add people without erasing the grain that drew them.
!Image 28: Woven at 1279 Pendleton Street, rendering of the approved project
Woven at 1279 Pendleton Street, rendering of the approved project. Supplied by the author; credit to be confirmed.
The Spur
In June 2026 the city manager announced a proposed trail spur from Unity Park to the Village along the rail line, a feasibility study only, “not a guaranteed plan.” The Village is already built. The corridor that would connect it to the river is still a study. At Falls Park the city built the public realm first and the private money followed. On Pendleton Street the private money moved first, for twenty years, and the public realm is still catching up.
Find Your Falls
The imbalance Greenville corrected took a century to build. A river became a sewer and a dump; a workforce became hands; a neighborhood’s park became a junkyard. The correction did not come from a bigger plan. It came from a shirtmaker who had seen what top-down order does to people, and who believed a city could be built the way he had built a company, at a human size, one piece at a time, with the people who lived there in mind. It came from a mayor who learned from him and spent his own political capital tearing out a road to reveal a waterfall. And it came from a painter with a $75,000 building, a gardener with thirty raised beds, and a designer who fell in love with a triangle of brick before she knew its story.
Building Small’s phrase for this is building community, not commodity. The projects on Pendleton Street and the park on the Reedy show what the phrase means in practice. Start before you build: the programs preceded the capital investment, and the people who kept the ballfield shaped the park. Curate, don’t lease: Flatiron turned away every tenant that did not fit. Make gumbo, not TV dinners: the Village is a mix, not a program. Big needs small: Woven can work only because the small things around it worked first. And build and hold for the long term: the downtown took forty years, Knox White’s part of it thirty-one, and the people who did it say you never declare victory.
Every town has something it covered over for the sake of efficiency. Greenville’s lesson to the cities that come to see it is that the way back begins with uncovering it, and that what grows afterward is smaller, slower, more varied and more durable than the machine that came before. Find your falls.
!Image 29: Falls Park from the Liberty Bridge, 2026
Falls Park from the Liberty Bridge, 2026. Photo: DCAllStar, CC0.
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Image credits
Public domain images are reproduced from Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress. Creative Commons images are reproduced under the licenses shown, with the photographers’ names as given on Wikimedia Commons; images marked BY-SA remain under their licenses. The photograph of the old bridge is held by the Greenville County Library System and is shown pending permission. Quotations in the text come from oral histories, historical markers, planning studies, award applications and press coverage.
Reedy River Falls and the Liberty Bridge, 2021. Photo: HurricaneIcy. CC BY-SA 4.0. Source
The falls on the Reedy, 1907 postcard, the year Kelsey & Guild asked the city to redeem the river. American News Co.. Public domain. Source
Camperdown Mill and Reedy River Falls, c.1910 postcard. H. G. Zimmerman & Co.. Public domain. Source
Poe Mill, 1905 postcard. Its founder called the village his little New York. Raphael Tuck & Sons. Public domain. Source
Woodside Cotton Mills, c.1913 postcard, the largest cotton mill under one roof in the country. Unknown publisher. Public domain. Source
The Graben, Vienna, photochrom print c.1890 to 1900. Photochrom Print Collection, Library of Congress. Public domain. Source
Hallstatt, Upper Austria, photochrom print c.1890 to 1900. Photochrom Print Collection, Library of Congress. Public domain. Source
German troops enter Vienna, March 1938. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1987-0922-503. CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Source
Greetings from Greenville, 1939 postcard. Curt Teich & Co. for Asheville Post Card Co.. Public domain. Source
Spinners and doffers at Lancaster Cotton Mills, Lancaster, South Carolina, 1908. Not Greenville, but the same Piedmont mill world. Lewis Hine, National Archives. Public domain. Source
Mills on the Reedy, c.1920 postcard. The brick building at left is McBee's original grist mill. E. C. Kropp Co.. Public domain. Source
Main Street and the Poinsett Hotel, 1942, the year Max and Trude married at Ensor's on Main. William B. Coxe. Public domain. Source
Downtown Greenville from the air, c.1968. Asheville Post Card Co.. Public domain. Source
The view from the top of the Poinsett Hotel, c.1970. Unknown publisher. Public domain. Source
Downtown Greenville, November 1985. Photo: drtreypennington. CC BY 2.0. Source
Cotton factories on Union Street, Manchester, 1835. Edward Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture. Public domain. Source
Reedy River Falls in winter, 1912 postcard. The waterfall a later generation forgot was there. Unknown publisher. Public domain. Source
The falls under the Camperdown Way bridge, 2001, the year the council voted to take it down. Josh Patterson, Greenville County Library System. Used by permission (pending). Source
The Liberty Bridge from the west, 2016. Photo: DXR. CC BY-SA 4.0. Source
Falls Park during the solar eclipse, August 21, 2017. Photo: Antony-22. CC BY-SA 4.0. Source
The riverwalk at RiverPlace, 2011. Photo: Tim, Atlanta. CC BY 2.0. Source
The UNITY letters on the lawn at Unity Park. Supplied by the author; credit to be confirmed.
The two smokestacks that survive at Poe Mill, December 2024. The tower at Unity Park was built to recall them. Photo: BPJP-Geography. CC BY-SA 4.0. Source
Pendleton Street, c.1915 postcard, with the streetcar tracks to the mills. Unknown publisher. Public domain. Source
The 1200 block of Pendleton Street, 2025. Photo: P. Hughes. CC BY 4.0. Source
The Mill Village Hub at 1186 Pendleton Street, a former ice plant, skating rink and gas station. Supplied by the author; credit to be confirmed.
Brandon Mill, 2025. Lofts since 2016. Photo: P. Hughes. CC BY 4.0. Source
Flatiron Studios at Pendleton and Burdette, restored in 2021. Supplied by the author; credit to be confirmed.
Woven at 1279 Pendleton Street, rendering of the approved project. Supplied by the author; credit to be confirmed.
Falls Park from the Liberty Bridge, 2026. Photo: DCAllStar. CC0. Source
