GREENVILLE MALL
So off to Greenville we went to the Apple Store. I read recently that when the artificial intelligence industry gets into full swing the hubs which will gaing to attract this new business are not the huge cities like San Francisco or New York but will be moderate sized cities where the living costs will allow hiring educated but lower cost workers. Greenville, SC, was mentioned in the New York Times as one of the 15 cities that would be attractive to companies focusing on artificial intelligence.
As we drove into Greenville, an hour from Asheville, I was struck by the all American look of Greenville compared to Asheville. Asheville has its suburban sprawl to the south, and its strip mall look on Patton Avenue and Hendersonville Road. But the Asheville Mall, which once threatened to destroy downtown Asheville is dying and down town Asheville with its older building converted into boutique shops and restaurants is thriving. Tourists flock to Asheville for the mountains and rivers and the beauty of the place.
Because Asheville is so beautiful, and Helene was so destructive of this beauty in the River Arts District and Biltmore Village, both river side and flooded, was traumatic for Asheville, but Asheville will recover and be even more beautiful and livable.
But Greenville seemed to us was all strip malls and chain stores and chain restaurants in flimsy buildings with fake facades and acres of parking. We ate in Pita, a marvelous Middle East restaurant run by a Palestinian family, but in a banal strip of stores. Greenville fits the American mode of high powered merchandising in the least attractive way, big box stores or strip malls which may be great for the lifting the so-called standard of living through glittering merchandising and advertising but taking place in the most banal of settings. Unlike Marshall where there is a real downtown with everything one needs withing walking distance (now all wiped out by flooding but about to return) where the proximity of people makes a sense of community, the car culture of Greenville with everything spread out so that there are no neighborhoods where people feel community but a sense of total anonymity in which people move from parking lot to parking lot spread across the city without connecting to anyone.
And the center of this spread out disconnection with people is the Greenville Mall. Unlike the Asheville Mall, which is dying with many empty stores with others taken over by sellers of cheap uninteresting stuff, the Greenville Mall was jammed and the Apple Store was almost frenetic with activity but without human contact. We bought the iPhone and got our data transferred from iPhone to iPhone. And then back through town we went past acres of cookie cutter rows of townhouses reachable only by car where people lived disconnected from each other. Up into the mountains we went and began to breathe again.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 