The Julian Price House in Fisher Park – which was already famous and made much more famous when an episode of Hoarders was filmed there – will be open for tours in April. Julian Price was the president of Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Co. and was the father-in-law of the now much more famous Joe Bryan.
The general admission tours are $35 each and a guided tour is $75. To find out what days are available for what tour, go to https://preservationgreensboro.org/hillside/.
*****
Politics is nothing if not political. There was an unusually large crowd at the Guilford County Republican Party Executive Committee meeting on Monday, April 2, at Republican headquarters on High Point Road. The reason for the crowd was an election – but not that election. The Guilford County Republican Party elected Tina Forsberg as the new vice chair of the party. She ran against former Greensboro mayoral candidate John Brown and won by a two-to-one margin.
However, in elections like this it all depends on who shows up to vote.
Last month at the Guilford County Republican Party Convention, the party voted to grant a waiver to Party Chairman Troy Lawson, who has filed to run for the District 57 seat in the North Carolina House. Party rules call for a chairman to resign if he or she files to run for office. One of the issues the Republican Party ran into was that at the time there was no vice chair, so there was no one to step in and take over if Lawson had resigned.
So now the Guilford County Republican Party has a chair and a vice chair and can turn its attention back to the election this November.
*****
The Piedmont Triad Airport Authority made a mistake last year – it decided on its own to change the name of the airport. An elected body would be unlikely to make such a mistake because the members would be concerned about being reelected. But the Airport Authority is appointed and answers to no one. For the most part it operates in a bubble and hardly anybody pays much attention, unless they do something really misguided like the name change.
The truth is that the name of the airport doesn’t make much difference. The international code for the airport is GSO, and the airport is generally referred to as the Greensboro Airport because it is surrounded by Greensboro.
The idea that some corporation wouldn’t move here because they were confused about the location of the airport, or didn’t like the name of the airport, is silly. The Airport Authority should move on to an issue with substance.
*****
According to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, the plan by the North Carolina General Assembly to lower taxes to increase economic development is working. North Carolina had a 3.8 percent growth in personal income from 2016 to 2017, which ranked the state tied for eighth in the nation with Georgia and Florida. North Carolina beat all of its other neighboring states in personal income growth. South Carolina had 3.6, Tennessee had 3.2 and Virginia had 3.1.
*****
More good economic news is that HondaJet, headquartered in Greensboro, will receive the 2018 Foundation Award for Excellence from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics for 2018.
*****
Greensboro was rated as one of the best places to live for outdoor activities. One of the reasons given was the Downtown Greenway. Since the Downtown Greenway is a dream, not a reality, that either indicates that the people making the list didn’t do much research, or they place a really high value on dreams.
Last fall, Greensboro asked for public input on the design of the southern portion of the Greenway. So the city was asking for public input on the design of a Greenway that was first envisioned in 2001.
A lot of people question Greensboro’s lack of sidewalks, but looking at the Greenway, which is in reality a wide sidewalk, it’s easy to understand. It appears it’s going to take Greensboro over 20 years to build the four-mile Greenway. So at that rate, Greensboro can build about two-tenths of a mile a year. Evidently building sidewalks is far more complex than building things like interstate highways.
It will be a race, but it is possible that the 44-mile outer loop will be completed before the 4-mile Greenway, but that’s hardly fair because the outer loop is just a road; it doesn’t have sidewalks.
*****
I was a little shocked to read in the News & Record’s monthly magazine that the Southeastern Building on the corner of Market and Elm was being renovated. I had an office in the Southeastern Building in the 1980s, and The Rhinoceros Times was headquartered on the first floor until 2007, so I have particular fondness for the building.
The building was completely renovated, with the old offices converted to apartments, in 2015. It was hard to imagine that only three years later it was being renovated again, and of course it isn’t.
The problem is that the Southeastern Building is a full city block west of the News & Record building, and the news that the Southeastern Building had reopened for business three years earlier had not traveled that far.
So if you are one of the tenants in the beautiful and historic apartments in the Southeastern Building, you don’t have to worry about the building being renovated again. No doubt in another year or three the folks at the News & Record will get the news. If the Southeastern Building were only in Reidsville, Eden or Wentworth, the News & Record would know all about it.
*****
The April Schmoozefest is Thursday, April 26 from 6 to 8 p.m. at Loaded Grape at 2915 Battelground Ave. Free snacks, beer and wine will be provided to all business professionals who sign in and get a name tag.
