It might have prompted more than a few second takes when unsuspecting Greenville, S.C., was ranked the No. 7 U.S. city to visit – just behind Honolulu and one spot ahead of New York City – in the July issue of Travel + Leisure.
Even Greenville’s top public official can imagine the surprise.
“We’re definitely kind of the ‘What’s that?’ on the list,” the city’s long-time mayor, Knox White, said with an amused chuckle.
But the charming Southern city of 73,000 residents and countless magnolias might not have blossomed into such a hotspot if not for a number of revitalization initiatives that transformed the city’s downtown. One of those, a minor-league ballpark that opened there in 2006, helped turn a blighted, crime-infested area of downtown – the West End district — into a thriving showcase of mixed-use development.
“It was in an area of town that, at that time, was pretty much undeveloped,” said White, who also serves as a Strategic Advisor to The Euclid Group, a full-service land-use development and real estate consulting firm based in South Florida. “There were a lot of vacant buildings. And I remember there were syringes on the ground, a lot of drug paraphernalia.”
No more.
Today, Greenville is a nationally recognized symbol of urban development and renewal done well, thanks in part to its 5,700-seat ballpark that served as a catalyst to surrounding growth. What was once an urban eyesore is now a trendy district of condos, restaurants and retail shopping that has created jobs and pumped millions into the local economy.
Purely from economic and aesthetic standpoints, the story of Fluor Field is an example of “build it and they will come” – Greenville’s very own field of dreams, in a way – and one that even incorporates the life of baseball legend (and Greenville native) Shoeless Joe Jackson into the narrative.
As White put it: “This was a miracle. It probably won’t happen again.”
It all started taking form in the early 2000s when White began searching not just for a new ballpark for what was then a minor-league affiliate of the Atlanta Braves, but a way to transform the dilapidated West End district of downtown.
The plan was to use a new ballpark as the centerpiece.
“We had a suburban baseball stadium, which was typical of the era,” White said. “The city wanted to see it re-located downtown with a new stadium. We did an RFP (Request for Proposal).”
The city was willing to donate the land but reluctant to help pay for construction costs, which the Braves and other teams were demanding.
“Almost all of them said we would have to put $5 million on the table, or $10 million on the table,” White said.
That all changed when a family-owned group led by Craig Brown came forward and offered to pay all construction costs.
“This particular group of guys, they owned a handful of minor-league teams, including Chattanooga,” White said. “They had a formula on how to make money on these things. We were shocked and amazed when they said they would build the stadium at their expense. It was a big wow at the time. It would be a big wow now. It would be like a miracle.”
There was just one key condition.
“The thing we did that was ahead of its time was we put in the RFP that anybody who builds on the site, it had to be a mixed-used project,” White said. “In other words, you had to have office, retail, residential and restaurants built into the project. And we insisted. That’s now very popular wisdom.”
As the city soon discovered, teams understood how to design ballparks, right down to the concession stands and the 60-foot-six-inch distance from the pitching rubber to home plate, but nothing about mixed-use development to accompany them.
“We had teams that said, ‘Well, we do baseball but we don’t do mixed use, thank you very much’,” White said. “What (Brown’s) group did – they were surprised, too, because they only knew baseball — they said ‘How about if we partner with a different developer to do the condominiums and the office and the retail? Would that work?’ And we said, sure, we don’t care. And that’s what we built. It opened as a mixed-use project in a very bad neighborhood at the time, and early on it was apparent we had a winner on our hands.”
Fluor Field was built and became home to the Greenville Drive, a High-A affiliate of the Boston Red Sox, and was designed to look like Fenway Park, with its distinctive “Green Monster” and “Pesky Pole.”
But the ballpark didn’t stand alone. Condominiums were built. Hotels and restaurants opened. Retailers set up shop. Out of the rubble, the once forlorn West End district — with the ballpark as its anchor — sprang to life.
The boyhood home of Shoeless Joe Jackson, banned for life from baseball for his role in the infamous “Black Sox Scandal” of 1919 and a prominent figure in the movie “Field of Dreams,” was moved to a spot across the street from the ballpark and turned into a museum.
“It’s like a booming district now,” White said. “People actually wanted to buy condos to be next to the ballpark. It was more catalytic than it otherwise would be for the surrounding neighborhood, and today that once abandoned area is surrounded by high-rise condos hotels, restaurants and retail.”
According to a recent study, since the ballpark’s development in 2006, there have been 433 new business permits within a half mile of Fluor Field and $277M in estimated new business construction.
“It’s definitely one of our top catalytic projects, especially because it was an area that was so depressed at the time,” White said. “At the time, a lot of people didn’t understand it because the site we chose was kind of surprising. We chose a spot that, on the surface, did not look like the right spot. But we felt that our downtown development would come that way if given a little extra spur, and that’s exactly what happened.”
The Euclid Group is a full-service land-use development and real estate consulting firm based in South Florida, with offices in Miami, Tampa and West Palm Beach.