[HSVTiger]

Hey Greenville

Huntsville leaders headed your way to check out your beautiful city..

Mayor Tommy Battle and about 40 other civic leaders will climb aboard a bus bound for Greenville, S.C.

Their mission: Find out how the former textile manufacturing hub managed to create one of the nation's livelier downtown shopping, dining and entertainment scenes.

Big Spring Partners, the nonprofit agency spearheading Huntsville's downtown revitalization efforts, organized the three-day Greenville trip as a sort of case study in how to remake a center city.

"We don't want to replicate any city -- that's not our intention," Big Spring Partners Executive Director Mary Jane Caylor said Wednesday. "We just want to take their best practices and successes and see how they can be applied to Huntsville."

In the 1970s, downtown Greenville was like a lot of other Southern towns: listless, creaky, dead after 5 p.m.

When Battle and the others step off the bus this afternoon, they'll find a downtown brimming with restaurants -- 99 at last count -- and people.


Downtown Greenville is home to 99 restaurants -- many of them with patio dining. (Photo courtesy Greenville Chamber of Commerce)
They can walk across a 345-foot-long suspension bridge over the Reedy River, take in a show at the Peace Center for the Performing Arts or visit Fluor Field, a minor-league baseball stadium modeled after Fenway Park in Boston.

Hank Hyatt, vice president of economic development at the Greenville Chamber of Commerce, said the downtown renaissance began in the 1980s with construction of a Hyatt Regency hotel on city owned land.

Other crowd-pleasing projects followed: the 2,100-seat Peace Concert Hall; Falls Park, a pretty urban oasis on the Reedy River anchored by the $4.5 million Liberty Bridge; Fluor Field, named America's best new ballpark in 2006.

"The city's been really methodical and committed to a vision," Hyatt said Wednesday. "They've worked with the private sector and provided the necessary platform for these partnerships to take place."

The Huntsville delegation will hear Greenville's success story firsthand from Hyatt, Mayor Knox White, City Manager John Castile and others, tour the area and check out the Artisphere Arts Festival --Greenville's version of Panoply.

"They have a lot of energy in their downtown, and I think everyone across the Southeast is trying to figure out how to follow their best practices," Huntsville Economic Development Director Michelle Jordan said Wednesday.