Church Street Park Phase Two a Pedestrian-Friendly Winner
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Church Street, the sloping cut-through historical park between Main Street and South McDuffie Street, has often felt a bit unfinished—marginally useful to drivers, occasionally claimed for festivals or other events, but never quite complete. Now the City of Anderson is preparing to remove that ambiguity altogether, turning the block into a permanent pedestrian plaza and, if all goes as planned, a new front porch for downtown.
The project, known as the Church Street Heritage Plaza pedestrian space and referenced in city documents as part of a broader streetscape effort, is less about expansion than about subtraction: taking away cars from Main Street for a more walking-friendly path. Several months ago, the city closed the street to vehicles on a trial basis, an experiment as modest as setting out a few extra chairs to see who sits down. Merchants along the corridor, accustomed to the episodic churn of events and pop-ups in the space, responded with something that sounds suspiciously like enthusiasm, and the city’s planning staff heard enough of it to move from improvisation to a formal plan.
Chris Darnell, the city’s senior planner, helped answer questions about the project to those who showed up on site at Tuesday’s drop-in informational meeting downtown. Main Street itself will be repaved in asphalt, the familiar black ribbon laid down for the benefit of tires and axles, but Church Street is slated for something different: a continuous pedestrian surface, stretching from curb to curb, then out toward the park, erasing the steps and edges that once signaled where people should and should not go. The point is not ornament, he suggests, but ease—one flat plane where no one has to watch for curbs or seams, where walkers, stroller-pushers, and people a little unsteady on their feet can drift without thinking about it too much.
City budget writers have already given the project a line in the fiscal year 2025–26 capital plan, grouping it with Main Street paving and new trail design work, a bureaucratic way of saying that the idea has passed from wishful thinking into the realm of funded obligations. Design and pre-construction work are underway—an invisible phase that lives mostly in drawings, estimates, and the patience of engineers—before crews arrive with saws and compactors to translate the concept into concrete
Darnell and his colleagues, having said that the “concept’s pretty much done,” still promised to take in comments and fold what they could into the construction drawings, the last set of lines before the survey stakes go into the ground.
Anderson’s planners talk about the Church Street project as part of a larger effort to coax more life, and more lingering, out of downtown. Closing a street is a small act of defiance against the long, car-heavy history of American main streets, but it is also, in this case, an act of faith: that if the city makes a place where people can walk without dodging bumpers, they will not only walk, but stay—ordering another coffee, browsing another rack of clothes, watching their children run the new length of pavement that no longer belongs to cars. Over time, the flat, uninterrupted plane from Main Street into the park may come to feel less like an intervention than a correction, as if the space had been waiting all along for the city to decide what it was for.
Opened in 2017, Church Street Heritage Plaza (often simply called Church Street Plaza) is a small downtown public space that commemorates the city’s historic African-American business and entertainment district along East and West Church Street. It sits just off South Main Street at approximately 115 East Church Street and serves both as a memorial plaza and as a pedestrian entrance into a city parking area and adjoining green space.
Church Street Plaza is a heritage-focused public art and gathering space developed by the City of Anderson to honor the African-American businesses, venues, and residents that flourished there from roughly 1907 through about 1980. The plaza includes sculpture, interpretive panels, and “story boxes” with artwork and quotes that evoke everyday life, commerce, and nightlife in the former district.
From the early 20th century until around 1980, Church Street was the heart of Black commerce and culture in Anderson, with groceries, hotels, repair shops, restaurants, clubs, and theaters lining the corridor. Locals sometimes compared it to a small “Bourbon Street,” reflecting its mix of daytime business activity and a lively after-hours entertainment scene.
Urban renewal, disinvestment, and changing patterns after the end of Jim Crow gradually led to the decline of the district, and by the 1980s most of the buildings were demolished or converted to parking. Efforts by former business owners and community advocates—often referred to as the “Black Pioneers”—pushed the city to formally recognize and interpret the site’s history.
The plaza features a prominent figurative sculpture group titled “We Were Here,” as well as benches, landscaping, and accessible walkways. The site is open to the public at all hours and is sometimes used for small events, heritage programs, and as a quiet cut-through between Main Street and adjacent parking and park space.
