Parks, Road Diets, Downtown Development Highlight City of Anderson Growth
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
Spring is a season of growth for the City of Anderson. A newly renovated park, innovative road work, and progress on new retail business and housing projects downtown are all sprouting up, according to Mayor Terence Roberts.
The overhaul of the city’s 100-year-old park at Cater’s Lake one of the most visible recent blooms in that arrangement. Compressed between road and water, Cater’s Lake, though a favorite quiet spot to take your lunch, tended to flicker past in the periphery of a driver’s vision—a scrap of green, a flash of water, nothing you slowed down to see. Now, he noted, people were pulling in, getting out of their cars, taking pictures.
On Tuesday at 10 a.m., there will be a ceremonial groundbreaking there, but in a sense the work has already been done. The lake has been dredged back to its proper depth; stormwater controls, the unglamorous backbone of modern public works, have been rethought to last decades rather than years. The city’s engineers have tried to accommodate the wildlife in a small habitat near the water, to the point that a local elementary-school student recently suggested a name for it—"Goose Island”—that, to the mayor’s ear, “made sense.” A new ornamental bridge has gone in and has already drawn its share of compliments.
The effect, Roberts said, is not just cosmetic. “The park opened up,” said Roberts. “Where once you could almost miss it from the road, it now pops right up.”
The corridor has been calmed: a cut-through street is now a cul-de-sac, and a new traffic signal at Greenville Street and Mauldin is expected to slow the rush of cars that once treated the lakefront as a high-speed bypass. What emerges is a more deliberate space, a place to walk, to sit with a sandwich at lunch, to hold a picnic. In a county where some measure civic progress in lane miles and rooftops, the mayor talked about this small lake as a pleasant entryway to the city.
A few blocks away, another familiar piece of infrastructure is being reimagined in similarly human terms. The phrase of art is “road diet,” a term the South Carolina Department of Transportation has lately taken to using with some regularity. Along the edge of the newly renovated Linley Park, a broad, four-lane road is slated to be slimmed to two travel lanes with turn lanes, and one of the freed-up lanes is to become a protected passage for people not encased in steel: walkers, cyclists, parents with strollers.
Roberts lives a couple of blocks from Lindley Park and has become an informal ethnographer of its daily life. He talks about the playground alive with children, a mother and son throwing a baseball on the former baseball diamond, a soccer ball being lofted across what used to be an outfield. The paved loop around the park serves as a democratic track: some people walk fast enough to record an 18-minute mile; others stroll, gossip, and stop to catch their breath. What matters, in his telling, is not the pace but the fact of movement. The road diet, which will run from Bleckeley to Clemson Boulevard (at Harbor Freight), extends that logic into the street grid, tightening the flow of automobiles, adding a visible, linear promise that you can move under your own power and feel reasonably safe while doing so.
If Bellview Road is any indication, residents may adjust quickly to the new regime. Bellview, another state-maintained route reworked with city and county input, now serves as a kind of proof of concept. One senior member of the city’s leadership team, Roberts said, has called it the best thing the city has done in that part of town. The traffic is calmer; the ride is smoother; the route has become a favored way to move east-west toward Greenville Street without the white-knuckled urgency that is one of the silent taxes of growth.
Anderson’s roads are not only about asphalt and striping. On Clemson Boulevard, the four-lane commercial artery that threads past big-box retail and the mall, the city is working with the state and regional transportation planners to introduce adaptive traffic signals. The technology, which relies on fiber optics and real-time traffic data, promises to spare drivers a familiar indignity: sitting at a red light, waiting out a pre-set cycle while no cross traffic appears. Clemson Boulevard carries some of the county’s heaviest traffic, rivaled only by the U.S. 28 bypass and Highway 81 out toward the interstate. For Anderson, the problem is oddly luxurious—too many people want to be here—and peculiarly modern: the frustration is not the distance itself but the inefficiency of moving a few miles in what feels like the longest possible way.
If the streets tell one version of Anderson’s story, the brick and mortar of downtown tell another. At the corner of Church Street and Main, three aging commercial buildings known locally as the Big John buildings had been languishing, their upper stories dark and their ground floors boarded and underused. Roberts, who has been in office long enough to recall a downtown filled with vacancies, describes them now as a test case for a policy instrument with a Whiggish title: the Bailey Bill.
The tool, used in cities like Columbia, Greenville, and Florence and championed by the Municipal Association of South Carolina, allows cities to freeze property taxes at a building’s current assessed value for a period of years—here, seven—for owners willing to invest in significant rehabilitation. In Anderson, the Big John buildings are assessed at $252,000; the planned renovation, which will yield three apartments and three ground-floor retail spaces, is expected to push the total investment to a little over $2 million. The gap between what the buildings are and what they could be is bridged partly by the tax freeze, which functions as a local subsidy to the idea of bringing abandoned structures back into circulation.
Roberts speaks about this not as an abstraction of economic development but as a lived change in the city’s daily pulse. A longtime downtown law office has been sold and is likely to make use of the same program. Stephen and Linda Krause, are expanding a building next to Maki’s, a restaurant, and have restored its façade to something close to its original train station appearance; the mayor mentions running into them as they came out to admire the work.
The Grand, a mixed-use project beside Sullivan’s, has officially opened, bringing new tenants into a building that had sat empty for years. A tech company has taken space next door, and a new law firm, Brayley Richardson, has opened downtown. Each of these moves augments the pedestrian tide: more office workers walking to lunch, more lawyers drifting to coffee shops between hearings, more people on the sidewalks after dark.
There are, inevitably, stubborn pockets of absence. The basement level of the downtown hotel has remained empty, its cement floors and blank windows offering a kind of inadvertent exhibition of potential deferred. Roberts says the owner has considered several options and is waiting for “the right thing,” whether a single tenant to take the whole space or a subdivision into smaller units.
Asked if the city might at least cloak the vacant frontage in posters or temporary seating, he allowed that such an intervention would, in fact, “look nice.” In a city whose main street was literally raised to clear railroad tracks—a decision that left a labyrinth of pipes and passageways beneath the current surface—there is a sense that every seemingly simple change sits atop layers of improvisation and compromise.
That buried complexity has been on vivid display as Anderson has prepared to repave its historic downtown core. Before new asphalt can go down, crews have been peeling back successive generations of pavement, exposing infrastructure that no one in city hall had seen in decades
“When you kind of peel back the look of that onion,” Roberts said, “there are always things that you can’t anticipate.” The aim is to do the disruptive work now, in a single concentrated campaign, rather than lay a smooth new surface only to gouge it later.
The annual Soirée, which returns in April, has evolved into a kind of barometer of Anderson’s self-confidence. Each year, organizers add a small twist: more tables for people to sit and eat in the streets, for instance, or this year’s experiment, a “kid entrepreneur” program run out of the economic-development office, encouraging children as young as nine to make and sell goods in a designated zone. The festival is run by a core group of volunteers who tinker with its format annually, in conversation with downtown merchants wary of anything that might disrupt their own fragile economies. The result is an event that feels less like a municipal performance and more like an expression of accumulated habit: a place where the weather, the music, and the foot traffic together provide a verdict on whether the city has kept its promises to itself.
Beyond Main Street, the city’s boundaries—and its sense of obligation—have been expanding. Roberts can recall a time when the subdivisions at Blakely and Glenwood were among the first new residential construction inside the city limits in decades. Now, he reels off a list of sites where new houses are rising: along Shockley Ferry Road, out the Belton Highway, in the Midway Road area. The question is no longer whether the city can attract new residents but how it can absorb them without losing what drew them in the first place.
In the near term, at least, that calculus has led Anderson to take a more cautious approach to annexation. There is no active push to pull large new tracts into the city; instead, officials are concentrating on infill—building on empty lots within existing neighborhoods—and on strategic additions that serve specific purposes. A recent annexation along the U.S. 28 bypass, fronting the lower half of the bypass and Clemson Boulevard, was undertaken in part to allow for new apartment housing in an area already accustomed to traffic and commercial activity. But annexation, the mayor stressed, is not just about development opportunities; it also requires the city to extend police patrols, sanitation routes, and, crucially, fire protection.
Fire Station 4, a planned facility on the East-West Parkway is intended to serve a rapidly growing quadrant of the city, which has become a central preoccupation at city hall. Anderson currently holds a Class 1 fire rating, a distinction that carries both symbolic and financial weight: insurance companies use response times and staffing levels to calculate homeowners’ premiums, and a slip in rating can translate into higher monthly bills for thousands of residents. Designing the new station requires a series of nested decisions—how many stories, how much room to allow for future growth, what equipment to house there—that reflect not just present needs but the city’s projected footprint a generation from now. Fire trucks themselves can take up to five years to arrive after being ordered, and the city has had to plan accordingly, purchasing apparatus before the station is complete and staffing up with firefighters and officers who will occupy the building once it opens.
On the law-enforcement side, the city’s growth has so far not triggered a comparable hiring surge. Roberts said that the police department, under Chief Stewart, had recently added officers and worked through a period of vacancies, bringing new recruits through the state academy and out onto the streets. For now, he believes, the department is adequately staffed, though he acknowledged that, as the city’s patrol area expands and infill densifies existing neighborhoods, the question will have to be revisited.
If there is a unifying thread in these projects, it may be the city’s efforts to stitch together a more continuous, human-scaled network of movement. The trail at Lindley Park, which already loops through the trees and around the fields, is the starting point for a more ambitious plan. A consulting firm is working with the city to map a path along Whitner Creek—past the recreation center on Blakely Street, across Blakely itself, and downstream toward Tribble Street and, ultimately, Orr Street, near the cluster of restaurants that includes McGee’s Scot-Irish Pub and Earl Street Kitchen and Bar. The idea is to create a continuous, creekside corridor that would allow a person to begin walking or biking in downtown Anderson and make their way along the water all the way to the upper end of Lindley Park, near the Anderson Civic Center.
From there, the network would tie into the East West Parkway, a limited-access road that arcs around part of the city, and a spur would connect across Greenville Street and back toward AnMed, the local hospital complex. Planning a trail system in an urban environment is, in Roberts’s words, “more difficult” than in a rural one; property lines, existing streets, and utilities together create a jagged puzzle. But the prospect of being able to traverse the city under a canopy of trees, alongside a creek that for years few people saw except from their car windows, clearly appeals to him. He admits that he is always pushing for these projects to be finished “six months before” the official timelines.
Housing is the other half of that equation. On the corner of Murray Avenue and Franklin Street, a three-story building has begun to rise where, for years, there was mostly bare earth. The project—eighty apartments in a tax-credit development known locally as Murray Franklin—is designed as “attainable housing,” with rents pegged to residents’ incomes rather than to the open market. The foundation work is under way; the developers are under pressure to bring the building online by late this year to meet the requirements of their financing. The site is a short walk—three or four blocks—from downtown, close enough for residents to reach Main Street on foot but far enough to exist as its own small neighborhood.
Farther out, the long-delayed redevelopment of the old Chemtex property, near the farmers’ market and the former City Seed site, appears to be inching toward reality. The owners, Roberts said, have secured financing and indicated that they hope to begin work “within the quarter,” though that quarter, he conceded, is nearly over. The proposal, which has been in circulation long enough that some residents have forgotten its specifics, calls for more than a hundred housing units alongside new retail space—a self-contained district stitched into the existing urban fabric.
Taken together, Cater’s Lake dredged back to health, the road narrowed to make room for walkers, the fiber-optic traffic signals, the restored buildings on Main Street, the trail plotted along Whitner Creek, and the new fire station designed for emergencies not yet imagined amount to a particular vision of what it means for a Anderson to grow up without abandoning itself.
Roberts is quick to remind that “we don’t live in a vacuum”—that city, county, school districts, hospitals, and legacy institutions like AnMed are all, in their various ways, co-authors of Anderson’s future. The people who already live here, he likes to say, “aren’t moving,” which means the city has to figure out how to accommodate those who are arriving for the climate, the cost of living, and the amenities that did not exist a generation ago.
The work of such a place, in early 2026, is about making a hundred small decisions that accumulate into a different way of moving through the day: a shorter wait at a red light on Clemson Boulevard, a new bench by a newly visible lake, a child learning to sell homemade goods in a festival booth, an elderly couple strolling on a newly calmed street. By Roberts account, the measure of progress is not only in the numbers but in how often, and how willingly, people choose to be out in the city they have made together.
