Arts Feature: Creative Sparks

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Creative Sparks

Arts features

There is an aesthetic unique to Greenville—an emerging, eclectic vibe that pulses through downtown and extends into the gullets, great rooms, and general psyche of those of us who call it “home.”

And there are visionaries whose work and dedication helped bring Greenville to its current, cosmopolitan condition of arts-inflected living—from a multi-million dollar downtown recording studio and avant-garde arts education to the burgeoning fine dining scene and an innovative urban design that has governments across the nation referencing our city’s blueprint as they prepare to guide their own communities toward redevelopment.

The men and women responsible for this evolution were gifted with incredible foresight at a time the rest of us were still rubbing sleep from our eyes; they demonstrated extraordinary perseverance while others called their efforts cavalier, even foolish. Decades after each visionary embarked on his or her quest to pursue an artistically inspired dream, the result has been a marked rise in the quality of life we all enjoy today—whether taking in a live music performance at the Peace Center or simply spending an evening dining out.
They are the architects of a modern Greenville. And their efforts have laid the foundation for a generation of cultural progress. Here are their stories of trial, error, and eventual success.

Edwin McCain

From his choirboy days at Christ Church Episcopal to world tours, musician Edwin McCain has never forgotten who he is, or where he came from.

Powell, now the former Christ Church Episcopal organist and music director, recalls those years spent encouraging his protégé to sing choral solos, not knowing he would one day serve as the singer-songwriter’s professional role model. “He was very disciplined and very focused on music,” Powell recalls of those early days in his student’s burgeoning music career. “Even then, he set the example of how a musician should be.”

Fast-forward a decade: McCain’s big break hit in the 1990s, when his romantic ballad, “I’ll Be,” was played on the hit television program “Dawson’s Creek.” When the album the song appeared on, Misguided Roses, went gold, so did McCain’s career. He traveled the world with the Edwin McCain Band (and still does), making his distinctive brand of alternative rock music and entertaining audiences of all ages with new favorites like “Gramercy Park Hotel” and old hits, including “I Could Not Ask for More.”

More than twenty years after McCain first studied under Powell, the home-grown, platinum-selling recording artist is intent on paying his early gifts forward. The community’s less-than-prodigious music scene and its under-appreciated musicians stand to be the beneficiaries.

Today, McCain is a partner in Whitestone Studios, a downtown Greenville recording company where both big names and no-names are welcome, and continues to prosper in the business of making music. Chasen, a Powdersville-based Christian pop group which cut its first demos at Whitestone (formerly known as OMG), has already ascended the Christian recording charts.

Greenville-based The Williams Riley Band also has recorded there. Country artist Benton Blount and the southern rock band Parmalee have traveled to Greenville to create their albums at Whitestone, and a new release from the Southern California alternative rock band Smile Empty Soul was produced there. McCain, who owns all the equipment, has recorded his last two albums there.

He does say musicians are pleasantly surprised by what they find here. While most recording studios are found in industrial districts, Whitestone’s location allows clients to stroll in Falls Park or walk up the street for coffee or dinner. Technological advancements are making independent studios such as Whitestone a viable alternative for undiscovered talent. Where making records once required multi-million dollar analog equipment bankrolled by the major labels, today’s digital revolution has reduced production costs: at Whitestone, Greenville native Marcus Suarez serves as the studio’s engineer and producer while Andy White handles booking.

McCain contends that independent studios also represent social change as consumers reject the mass-produced, corporate-dominated product of the past in favor of a more direct and honest relationship with their favorite artists. With Greenville as a prime example of that movement, the community certainly stands to benefit.

Nancy whitworth

Throughout the evolution of downtown Greenville, the city’s economic development director has been there every step of the way.

On a rainy Saturday morning nearly two decades ago, Nancy Whitworth stood with a group of Charlotte investors, looking on in disbelief as water poured from the cracked ceiling of the Poinsett Hotel’s lobby. The day would come to mark a low point in her quest to save the historic structure from demolition.
But like downtown itself, the Poinsett would eventually make a four-star comeback. And Whitworth, the city of Greenville’s longtime economic development director, has been there every incremental step of the way. From a ribbon cutting at the Hyatt Regency Hotel to opening night at the Peace Center to the first pitch at West End Field, her career in public service closely parallels—and is deeply enmeshed in—the revitalization of Main Street, a corridor that, as the name suggests, is the community’s most vital and strategic.

“It doesn’t seem like it’s the same place,” she says from her ninth floor corner office in City Hall. “And here it doesn’t even seem like it’s the same job.” In 2003, Greenville received the prestigious Great American Street Award for its revitalization of downtown. The city is also now a regular destination for officials from distant communities—some fifteen in 2008 alone—determined to uncover the secrets to its renewal.

Yet just thirty years ago when Whitworth began her employment with the city, its urban core was in serious distress. As part of an ambitious plan to overhaul the downtown championed by former Mayor Max Heller, public funds were appropriated to narrow and landscape North Main Street to make it more pedestrian friendly. The Hyatt Corporation had also been persuaded to build a new hotel as an anchor for the troubled corridor. The project was a public/private partnership that would become the signature statement of the downtown revitalization effort. Each time City Council committed public funds to improve infrastructure, private investment seemed to follow.

But as Whitworth, fresh out of graduate school, settled into her new role as a city economic analyst, it still required some serious imagination to believe a sweeping transformation of downtown could succeed. North Main was a construction zone, and demolition was underway clearing the site for the new hotel. Over the years, she carved out a niche for herself by specializing in redevelopment projects in a state where restrictive annexation laws make it difficult for cities to grow their boundaries.

Aubrey Watts, the city manager who appointed Whitworth to the position of economic development director in 1994, now does economic development for the city of Charlottesville, Virginia. He says Whitworth was a perfect match for the job: “She worked incredibly hard—probably one of the hardest-working people I’ve ever known,” he says. And she possesses ample patience, an asset in a business famous for its slow, often fragile deals.

There’s the case of the West End. With Falls Park at one end and the new minor league baseball park at the other, it’s emerging as the city’s entertainment district. But redevelopment actually began there in the 1980s when it was mostly known for urban decay, homelessness, and crime. “Nancy was the one who had the vision of crossing over the river and pushing on into the West End,” says Watts. When no one could be found to redevelop the West End Market, Whitworth helped forge a plan for the city to buy the historic building as well as renovate and manage it. The project ultimately helped establish a beachhead in the troubled area.

Three decades later, Whitworth is still elbow-deep in redevelopment. Her next projects? Heritage Green, North Main Street, and whatever comes next, of course.

Gene Berger

Changing Greenville’s reputation from a conservative, uncool spot to a place where musicians work pure magic.

It’s the transcendent moment—what he calls “magic”—that first drew Gene Berger to music. And it’s the quest for that same sensation that keeps him in the sometimes disheartening, often risky business of promoting musicians over a more than three-decade career that spans vinyl records to iTunes. From bluegrass to Brahms, Berger’s taste in music is as vast as his knowledge is encyclopedic. “That’s the bottom line,” he admits. “I’m just obsessed.” Sitting in his cramped office at Horizon Records, enveloped by stacks of LPs, Berger ticks off the big-name artists whose local concerts he’s promoted: Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, John Prine, Buddy Guy, Wynton Marsalis, Alison Krause, Bela Fleck, Lyle Lovett, and the Indigo Girls.

And there are so many others, equally talented but perhaps less familiar, whose introduction to Greenville audiences is owed to his singular obsession. “Being 20 years old, I knew everything I needed to know,” Berger jests about the early years of his music career, after spending a year at Miami of Ohio University and then making the decision to drop out and open a record shop in Greenville. Horizon Records, named for a store in his college town, would become his platform: In the absence of live music venues, Horizon provided the opportunity for Berger to stage his first concerts. It began with a jazz seminar at Greenville Tech, featuring saxophonist Dewey Redman, a founding member of the Keith Jarrett Quartet.

When friends opened a roadhouse near Donaldson Center, Berger booked their acts, including a performance by the New Grass Revival. “If there had been some extraordinary venues in town, I’m not sure I would have been quite so motivated to do stuff,” he allows. As his reputation spread, he arranged concerts from Asheville to Clemson and for events as diverse as Jazz Brevard, RiverPlace Festival, and the International Chamber Music Series. He was challenged by conservative Greenville’s reputation for lacking “coolness.” Artists strategically leapfrogged the area as they moved from gigs in Atlanta and Athens to Asheville and Chapel Hill.

To compensate for the absence of a true music hall, he booked early concerts in virtually any available space, from the old Textile Hall to Greenville Little Theatre to pubs, restaurants, and warehouses. (When passing a vacant building, he still can’t suppress the urge to guess its seating capacity.) Still, there was the cold, hard reality of the small concert scene: Promoters only make money after all the bills are paid. And when the manager of a local venue bumped the legendary Doc Watson for female mud wrestling in the early-80s, an embarrassed and disheartened Berger surrendered. “I had to call Doc Watson’s people and say, ‘We’re out.’ And I just said (to myself), ‘That’s it.’”

For awhile it was. But after ground was broken on the Peace Center in the late-80s, the temptation proved too great. He convinced the facility’s first director to allow him to book musical acts, and he secured memorable performances by an African tribal singing group and horn-playing Tibetan monks and introduced popular acts like Grammy Award-winners Lovett and Fleck.

“Gene wanted to introduce people to good music,” says fellow Greenville promoter Pat Jones. With more local live-music venues, Berger is content these days to host small in-store concerts for guest artists. What remains unchanged is the savoring of those pure, fleeting moments when music carries him away. Recalling an especially sweet Peace Center duet of “Walls of Time” by Harris and Sam Bush, Berger leans back in his chair and says wistfully, “It was just magic.”

Virginia Uldrick

Overlooking Falls Park, the Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities is an enduring testament to the efficacy of one teacher’s irresistible vision.

Virginia Uldrick collects herself, searching her memory bank for the elusive phone number for campus security. We’re locked in the administrative building of the Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities following a two-hour interview. There’s a sweet irony to our key-less predicament. For this is, after all, the house Uldrick herself built over two decades. A portrait of her staring back at us from a nearby wall speaks to her persistence.

Ten years after its founding and nearly six years after her retirement as its first president, the Governor’s School, fashioned after an Italian village, occupies a prominent bluff overlooking Falls Park, an enduring testament to the effectiveness of an irresistible vision. The residential high school for hundreds of the state’s most gifted young writers, visual artists, dancers, actors, and musicians is an engine for state arts education just as BMW is for the local economy. The school’s graduates have generated college scholarships valued at more than $75 million and gone on to distinguish themselves in careers in the arts and many other professions.

“It’s just been a tremendous success,” says Richard Riley, a Greenville attorney who served as S.C. governor and later U.S. secretary of education in the Clinton administration. “And without Virginia’s leadership it would not have happened.”

Not bad for a local music teacher who, as a child, listened to the Metropolitan Opera and dreamed of becoming an opera star. At her mother’s urging, Uldrick followed a more practical path, earning a degree in music education and going on to work in area public schools. Now in her eightieth year, she recounts the unfolding of her plan to bring arts education to Greenville with clear, strong conviction: “I think it was providential, every single step of my professional career.”

The idea seemed simple enough when she approached then-superintendent Floyd Hall: create a special school to serve the county’s gifted performance and visual arts students. Of course it wasn’t exactly easy, but when the Greenville County Fine Arts Center opened its doors in 1974 it was the first school of its kind in South Carolina and one of only a few across the country. By the time Uldrick left her position as the center’s director five years later to become the school district’s director of fine arts, she was determined to make arts education a statewide initiative.

Proposal No. 2: The creation of a public high school specifically for young artists. Her idea was rejected by then-governor Jim Edwards before Riley, his successor, would sign off on it. But Riley backed the project, in part, because of his long-term association with Uldrick and respect for her as an educator. The annual, five-week residential program opened at Furman in the summer of 1981 with gifted arts students attending from across the state.

When the time came to make the pitch for a permanent arts school to yet another governor, Carroll Campbell, providence again smiled upon Uldrick’s plan. She had taught Campbell as a ninth grader and even introduced him to the Greenville Little Theatre, where he won an award for his acting.

Larry Wilson, an influential Columbia businessman, recommended a distance-learning component that would enable students across the state to receive instruction. The innovation, which remains an important part of the school’s curriculum today, along with the assistance of a strong, diverse coalition of community leaders, made the project more palatable to state legislators, who ultimately approved $12 million for its start-up.

A newly established private foundation raised $14.5 million to match those public funds, and the school opened in 1999 and graduated its first class two years later.

Wilson, now a venture capitalist, contends the Governor’s School remains a valuable tool for attracting and retaining talented people. And he, along with many others, credits it to Uldrick—and, more specifically, to her relentless pursuit of excellence.

Carl Sobocinski

Early efforts to reinvent the culinary landscape of downtown Greenville unexpectedly transformed its entire urban core.

In 1994, when Rodney Freidank first visited the restaurant 858 with his parents, his simple evening out quite unexpectedly altered the trajectory of his life, and the life of his eventual colleague, Carl Sobocinski. With its art deco-inspired ambiance and contemporary menu, the upscale eatery (long-since vanished) was causing a sensation in downtown Greenville, and it left an indelible impression on Freidank, who was working in food service in Wilmington, North Carolina at the time. “The quality of food and service kind of blew me away. I decided right then and there I had to move here and work at 858,” says Freidank, who today serves as executive chef of Restaurant O and is a partner in Table 301, a collection of five downtown restaurants under common ownership. 858 set a new standard of sophistication for fine dining in the community. Its appearance in 1993 also coincided with a major redevelopment plan culminating with the opening of the Peace Center that was transforming Greenville’s urban core from ghost town to hip destination.
858 was the inspiration of three young partners, Larry Grosshans, Todd King, and Sobocinski. But according to Freidank, Sobocinski was the perpetual driving force behind its success. “I always saw him as the guy who was making it happen, because of the relationships he had,” Freidank says.

Sobocinski migrated south from New England in the 1980s to attend Clemson. Studying architecture by day, serving food and drinks at a Lake Keowee country club by night, he “fell in love with the hospitality industry.” Over a beer at Greenville’s Downtown Alive one evening, King told Sobocinski, his college buddy, he had purchased a building around the corner. “I was 24 or 25,” Sobocinski recalls, “and had never heard anyone my age talk about buying a building.” King took his friend on a personal tour of the four-story structure on East North Street that was a former Elk’s Lodge. Shortly thereafter, the art deco look was conceived, and then chefs were recruited from the trendy Buckhead Grill in Atlanta known for its eclectic menu. The business partners raised $115,000 for start-up costs from a bank loan and small investors each chipping in $5,000. Personal credit cards and savings made up the balance.

The three entrepreneurs ignored warnings they were “crazy.” Redevelopment of North Main Street was still in its early stages, and they were novices in an industry known for high risk and small rewards. “We were dumb and naïve, and we just did it,” Sobocinski says. But soon enough, customers were clamoring for tables, eager to sample the Asian-influenced, California dishes and hip décor.

By 1996, Sobocinski peeled off in pursuit of a new challenge. He found it in the Cancellation Shoe Mart, a long, narrow expanse across Main Street from City Hall, cluttered with 10,000 boxes of factory over-runs. In that space, he set out to recreate on South Main what he had already accomplished a few blocks north. More than a year was devoted to gutting the interior of the 1880s-era building, and Freidank was among those who joined them as an assistant chef. “Why did you buy a bowling alley?” he playfully taunted Sobocinski. “What the hell is that?”

Yet the boss once again had a vision—and the confidence earned at 858 to carry it out. A Lowcountry-inspired cuisine was devised to complement the space’s sixty-foot oak beams and brick walls, and Sobocinski and his partner, David Williams, called it Soby’s. Once more, the combination dazzled local palates and triggered a rash of downtown restaurants catering to—as well as cultivating—a clientele willing to pay for a real dining experience.

Seated in the Soby’s bar before the evening rush begins, Sobocinski recalls his early days of working on Lake Keowee—both waiting tables and selling real estate, which he did for a short while after graduating Clemson—saying they formed the basis of his approach to food service: “For me, the greatest satisfaction is giving someone a respite or a place to come and forget about what’s bothering them at home, at work, or in any situation.”

The Table 301 brand has seen its struggles—Restaurant O is temporarily closed as he and Freidank redesign the menu and décor. But undeterred and unafraid of reinvention, Sobocinski is still tinkering. On this particular Wednesday night—just weeks before Restaurant O closes—he’s had another novel idea. He is running a special promotion where guests pay, not what their server tabulates, but instead, whatever they believe their meal is worth.