Take a walk down nearly any street in downtown Spartanburg these days and you’re likely to see something in transition.
New streetscaping is improving downtown walkability, new buildings rise and are quickly filled with businesses and residents eager to take advantage of what our community offers, and older structures find new life after renovation. As we move into summer of 2015, downtown Spartanburg is moving forward at a pace that would’ve been unrecognizable in years past.
What if we were to take that same walk through downtown in 1996? How stark would the difference be between the downtown Spartanburg we know today and the one that exists now only in the minds of long-time residents?
Imagine a downtown Spartanburg without the beautiful community showcase that Morgan Square has become, without the Chapman Cultural Center, without the investments made by USC-Upstate and Spartanburg Community College in their respective downtown campuses. Imagine a downtown Spartanburg without its rapidly growing small business community, and without the people who go home at night to its 300 residential units. To say we’ve come a long way is a massive understatement, but sometimes it can be a little difficult to gain perspective on downtown Spartanburg’s years-long story of renewal, a story that continues today and will continue to unfold well into our community’s future.
Absent the ability to transport ourselves back in time to see how far we’ve come, we’ve done the next best thing, creating a tool to help visually tell the story of downtown to residents, business owners, visitors, and others well beyond our borders.
That tool is a website called seespartanburgrise.com, a new way to literally map the progress that continues in downtown Spartanburg. On the site, users are presented with a map showing downtown and a timeline. As users move through the timeline, pins appear in the map, highlighting parcels that have received significant investment each year. Click on one of those pins and information the property appears including capital investment, a short description, and whether the project was a renovation or new construction, with many entries also including a photo gallery offering a street level view of how the property appears today.
As downtown Spartanburg’s progress continues, new projects will be added, allowing us to use seespartanburgrise.com to dynamically show our growth well into the future. So now we’re inviting you, the people who call our community home, to take a look at how far your downtown has come, and to get an idea of where it’s headed.
Visit seespartanburgrise.com, play around with the timeline, take a look at a few properties, and let us know what you think.