RFP Staff
♦The skies are rapidly darkening over Salisbury’s ill-conceived and tottering master plan. So far it’s glorious convention center struck out several years ago and more recently the 10 million dollar downtown Central Office was soundly rejected by the county commissioners. Now the Empire Hotel, a rotting and empty Jules Verne style architectural “masterpiece”, popularly called “the South Main Bat Castle”, has become the object of public ridicule for both its lack of buyers and its overt ugliness. Many call for its demolition. Typically we hear: “Make a parking lot out of it and be done with it. It was shut down as a flophouse back in 1963. Nobody is interested in it as a hotel. This town doesn’t require another hotel especially a dump that’s closed for over 50 years. Local hotel occupancy runs around 50% as it is. Who would be chumped into buying the Empire? Imagine the expense of gutting it? Where would they find parking for anyone bothering to check in? Not happening. Not even if they made the hotel space a single floor and remainder a high end condominium. Zero market.”
The RFP staff has witnessed sows ears turned into silk purses before. Elsewhere. Nothing is impossible. Hold off on the bulldozers. The RFP takes a neutral position on the continued life of this homage to 1850′s excess. Maybe some tortured Daddy Warbucks, on a manic fling, may dig deep for this monstrosity. Coins may rain from the heavens on Downtown Salisbury Inc. and the master plan might be briefly hauled off of life supports. The strange and the miraculous happen. Salisbury is long overdue.
The RFP staff kicked some ideas around Editor’s desk yesterday and eyed lurid photographs of the Empire’s rotting interior. Pictures of bowed and rotten ceilings. Chancy floors waiting to collapse. Flophouse rooms who haven’t seen a paying customer for over 50 years. A ballroom whose ceiling emits beams of light like a Flash Gordon ray-gun. Toilets, once a teaming ecological system, now dried ochre and green. Nocturnal flying rodents mummified and resting in magic circles. If you thought the Empire’s exterior looks forlorn–tiptoe through its unwelcoming hallways and rooms.
What can be done with the South Main Bat Castle? Here are a few ideas the staff considered:
•Turn it into a privately operated prison similar to the infamous Krome North Immigration Center in Miami. Could make Salisbury a hotbed of human rights violations. Don’t kick free publicity in the teeth. As someone once wrote: “Even bad publicity is good publicity. Name recognition is name recognition. Al Capone and Raid are negative names, yet well-known.”
•Keep only the front of the Empire–a false front and build a multi-tiered parking garage behind it. That would fit in well for the city’s “build it and they will come” theology.
•Urge the existing local shops or force them to relocate in Empire. A bric-a-brac and junktique ghetto. This would clear Main Street of its grab bag shops to make the streets ready for a super block or two of small corporate retail. Time to bring in what people truly want. A city council edict would bring some semblance of retail to the downtown area. It’s not like they haven’t forced things on their citizenry before. Stores that will attract actual customers. Trader Joe’s. A boutique style Best Buys. Earth Fare. A Joseph A. Bank. Perhaps a Super G International Store like Greensboro’s. In utilizing the Empire as a shop “relocation ghetto”, Main street could become more consumer attractive. Make the downtown area a “duty free port”, extremely low taxes, and sand down the codes and regulations to attract smaller corporate retailers who might fit in. The city needs to do something pronto–the Summit Project, just outside the city’s talons, is coming and the probability is high a shopping mecca might appear in South Rowan when the I-85 exchange is built.
Readers are welcome to send ideas about what you might do to save the Empire or level it and build something useful in its place. Hopefully years of bat guano doesn’t contaminate the soil or groundwater. Or should our city let nature take its course and let the Empire drift into foreclosure. Sometimes bad dice rolls go that way. The better ideas will be included in a poll for our readership to vote upon sometime within the later part of this coming week.
