One of Aiken’s more vexing modern myths is the idea that, before the advent of high-stakes, public-private economic development partnerships — with the AMDC, the Aiken Corporation, public officials, private industry and investors wheeling and dealing multi-million dollar deals behind closed doors — our downtown was practically a ghost town inhabited by a small scattering of businesses wheezing on life support.

A few recent samples of the myth:

During the 1970s and 1980s Aiken was a quiet, underdeveloped town with very few attractions. The downtown area and City as a whole were growing at a slow pace and without any impressive economic stimulus. There were only a few businesses in downtown and some in the City as a whole.  — Aiken Corporation website, August 2022

”I hope some of you remember the 1980s. You could shoot a cannon down Laurens Street, and you wouldn’t hit a car. You didn’t have to worry about parking. There was parking everywhere.” — Councilwoman Kay Brohl, May 9, 2022

The fact of the matter is that, during the 1970s-80s, downtown Aiken was a vibrant place — home to at least 13 clothing stores, 12 restaurants, 5 furniture stores, 5 jewelry stores, 5 shoe stores, 3 hardware stores, 3 dry cleaners, 3 printing shops, 2 pool halls, 2 office supply/book stores, 1 five-and-dime, 1 sporting goods store, 2 movie theaters, 1 bicycle shop, 2 dance studios, 3 record shops, 2 music stores, 2 frame shops/art galleries, 2 arts & crafts supply stores, 2 drug stores, 2 grocery stores, a Greyhound bus station, 1 garden store, 3 florists, numerous antique shops and gift stores, a half-dozen or more service stations, a hotel, an inn, and numerous realtors, attorneys, insurance agencies, banks, barbers, and beauty shops.

The above accounting is prefaced with the words, “at least” because there are no doubt more businesses than one person can recall. As someone who shopped downtown for all of those years, worked downtown for ten of those years, and lived downtown for one of those years, I can attest to a different story than the one being conveyed today by the City and its corporate partners.

These downtown businesses were not figments. They were the bedrock of a thriving downtown throughout the 1970 and 1980s:

All of the above-listed businesses existed in the central downtown area, (highlighted in yellow below),, except for six businesses represented by the blue dots, which were, (working west to east): Cannon House Florist, Design House, The Willcox Inn, The Carousel + Crest Travel Agency, and the C.C. Johnson Drug Store (located at the corner of Fairfield & Park from the 40s-80s). There were, of course, many other thriving downtown businesses outside the yellow-highlighted area.

Yes, times change, people come and go, economies ebb and flow, and businesses open and close, but no one in the 1970s-80s was talking about the demise of Aiken’s downtown. It wasn’t until 1990, shortly after the grand opening of the 500,000 square-foot Aiken Mall, (Aiken’s answer to Regency and Augusta Mall), plus the construction of several strip shopping centers on the southside, that downtown businesses began to suffer in earnest and fall like so many dominoes. The cause and effect was almost immediate.

Those who speak today of shooting a cannon down Laurens Street would do well to revisit the outpouring of citizen complaints made to city council members about the onset of frustrating traffic congestion on the southside — yet another instant consequence of the unplanned, short-sighted brand of development that overtook the southside during those years. Today’s seemingly irredeemable mess of southside traffic is our inheritance from that era.

Back to the Future

If we endeavor to learn from this history, we could begin with a realistic understanding of developers. Developers, just like any salesmen, sell products. The development industry’s products du jour in the 1970s-1980s were shopping malls and strip shopping centers, which were developed in cities and counties across the country with promises of the economic prosperity and jobs that would surely follow. Aiken’s own Weldon Wyatt was one such developer in the 1980s and even built a few strip shopping centers on Aiken’s southside.

Today’s products du jour are parking garages, stadiums, conference centers, mixed-retail apartments and hotels. Unlike the malls of the 1970s-80s, which took a few years to die on the vine, today’s products are all too often not even making it to fruition. A basic internet search for any of these products du jour + the term “development project bankrupt” produces a roster of stalled, delayed, and failed development projects in cities and towns of all sizes across the country — each one a convoluted tale of public-private deals that failed to deliver on their promises, leaving cities on the hook for millions of dollars, their dream projects too often reduced to half-built white elephants.

Anchors and Chains

Plans for Aiken Mall were announced in 1985 with a projected opening date of 1987. The developer said they would open with 5 anchor stores plus 65-70 shops. By 1987, the ground had yet to be broken for the mall. “Nothing good ever comes easy,” the developer explained. “To build a mall takes a lot of planning… a lot of advanced work.” (1)

Behind the scenes, the developer was still scrambling to get even a single anchor store to commit. Over the next year, one anchor store, Sears, was secured, and ground finally broke in June 1988. When the mall opened in October 1989, there were 2 anchor stores and 22 shops. At this point, the developer’s explanation became, “We fast -tracked this mall, you know, built it rather quickly, and our leasing has not caught up with our construction, unfortunately. But that is typical of everywhere we go.”

In the same breath, the developer assured that, when fully occupied, the mall would produce “yearly sales of $80 million” and “create an additional 800 jobs.” (2)

As anyone who worked at the mall could attest, rumors of closings were a constant among both anchors and chains from the early 1990s onward. Keeping the mall viable, or lending appearances to that effect, was a challenge for most of the mall’s history. The mall was foreclosed in 1998, then again in 2013, with the mall owner $28.5 million in debt. (3)

The history today repeats. Since 2016, the mall property redeveloper’s search for chains and anchors has repeatedly turned up empty, save Belk and Books-a-Million, two pre-existing mall tenants who have said all along that they hoped to continue in that location. The redeveloper’s most recent plan calls for a 100-room luxury hotel, 256 apartments, and 146,000 sq.ft of retail. Several projected dates for broken ground and completed projects have come and gone without fanfare.

These products du jour echo into Aiken’s downtown — the 2017 Renaissance plan, the 2019 Weldon Wyatt plan for the old Aiken County Hospital, and the 2021-2022 Project Pascalis — each of which also prominently included plans for a conference center and parking garage.

Are these developers looking to lay ground for the independent, local businesses that comprise most of the downtown tenants today, just as it did in the 1970s-80s? Or are they looking to replace them with high-rent anchors and chains?

Fields of Dreams

According to the sale pitch, a 5-story apartment complex is the vehicle for encouraging more young people to live, work and play downtown. “Live, work, and play” and “shop, work, and play” are a few of the pitches used by developers to promote various renaissance projects across the country. The live-work- play concept is an old idea and a good one — in the right measure. Using the slogan as a sales pitch for shoehorning as many apartments as can be stacked into a city lot is an insult to a town the size and scale of Aiken.

According to the sales pitch, Aiken will be revitalized by demolishing nearly half of Aiken’s historic central block and replacing it with that 5-story apartment complex plus a big chain hotel, conference center and parking garage. We are told that razing historic buildings and raising rents is the way to prosperity. And it will, but only for the select few who enjoy membership in the developer’s club, where a day’s work spent planning the demolition of the downtown might be capped off with an evening of fine-dining on steaks and top shelf whiskey on the taxpayer’s dime.

Those who profit from the business of demolishing and developing property will, of course, find ways to market the demolition of successful businesses, historic buildings, and entire downtown blocks as the road to prosperity and jobs. The bigger the project, the bigger the promises. But, as downtown Aiken proved in the 1970s and 1980s — and has continued to prove over all these years as it’s adapted, grown and prospered with the times — sometimes less is more.

We already have a vibrant, livable city where people enjoy shopping and spending time. We can thank Andrew Dexter and Cyril Pascalis for envisioning such a place and putting a plan to paper in 1834. We can thank every generation since for being good stewards and caretakers of that plan. History has shown that, given the right planning and care, the rest will take care of itself.

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(1) “Mall Builders Send $91,000 Check for Sewer Extension,” Aiken Standard, January 11, 1987, pg 1

(2) “Mall Developer’s Dream Comes True,” Aiken Standard, October 11, 1989, pg 1 and 10A

(3) “Shoppers Respond to Foreclosure on Mall Property,” Aiken Standard, May 19, 2013, pg 3A.