Mill Site On Their Minds
February 17, 2012
By CHRIS TRAINER
Index-Journal
Greenwood, SC - Though the City of Greenwood is working to clean it up, the old Greenwood Mill No. 5 site currently leaves much to be desired.
However, on Thursday night, residents of the Greenwood Mill Village got a glimpse of what the site could one day become.
Though six were presented Thursday, there were a total of 24 master plans for the site created by Clemson students.
After receiving input from residents at the meeting, Clemson graduate student Katie Lloyd is now set to take that input and use different ideas from the various student plans to create one cohesive suggested master plan for the site. That final plan should be finished this spring.
The Clemson project on the mill site was funded with a grant from the Self Family Foundation. That grant was administered by the City of Greenwood.
The Clemson project is just one part of the city's plans to cleanup and revitalize the old mill site. The former Greenwood Mill No. 5 was sold by Greenwood Mills in 1995 to medical textile company Facemate. Facemate declared bankruptcy in 2003. The old mill was eventually obtained by Timberworks LLC, which had planned to salvage or recycle the material used to construct the mill.
While some demolition and salvage was done at the Kitson Street site, that work eventually stopped.
The mill site currently is, by almost any standard, an eyesore, with numerous unkempt rubble piles and jagged metal scattered throughout the property. Residents in the bordering Greenwood Mill Village have complained about the condition of the site for quite some time.
The city recently received a $500,000 community enrichment grant from the Community Development Block Grant program which will help fun the cleanup process at the site.
The city has entered into a contract with Concurrent Technologies Corp. to develop a work plan for the debris removal process. Concurrent Technologies has extensive experience in the cleanup and redevelopment of former mill and commercial sites.
As for the Clemson project, students worked with the City of Greenwood to develop a vision for redevelopment for the Greenwood Mill Village and mill site. A concurrent objective was to provide a valuable "real world" educational experience to Clemson University landscape architecture students. The project was used to demonstrate how design principles and theories are used to create public spaces in the context of a small city.
Clemson professor Mary Beth McCubbin discussed the project.
"We have been working with the folks from the City of Greenwood to create a vision for the mill site and the mill village," McCubbin said. "It's an exercise for our students to learn the principles of good community design. But, more than that, we want to interact with the community and find out what their needs are. Then the City of Greenwood is going to take the ideas that come from the community and from the student ideas and hopefully that will become the vision for the mill site and mill village and that will give us something to work with in the future."
Though there were 24 student master plans created for the mill site, McCubbin said the six presented Thursday were selected for display because they represented a wide variety of land uses and ideas.
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