Greensboro

Greensboro never sustained enough gay bars at one time for any of them to specialise, so its venues are generally described as one-size-fits-all rooms serving the whole community at once. [Digital Greensboro (UNCG)] Greensboro police ran a sting at a rest area in 1983, part of a regional pattern that also took in a Raleigh mall in 1985 and a Charlotte park in 1987. [Digital Greensboro (UNCG)] It was owned and operated by a bartender known as Joyce the Bartender, ran seven days a week as a jukebox joint, and drew an older, more laid-back crowd and a notably larger lesbian clientele than the city's other gay bars. [Digital Greensboro (UNCG)] It opened at 2507 High Point Road, now West Gate City Boulevard, and later ran at 330 Bellemeade Street from 1986 to 1990, next to a local cruising area. The LGBTQ+ bar Time Out took the space afterwards; the building no longer stands. [Digital Greensboro (UNCG)] Several venues of the period were not gay bars but welcomed all orientations and drew substantial LGBTQ+ crowds, among them Babylon, The Edge and New York Pizza. [Digital Greensboro (UNCG)] Babylon, founded by local DJ Ed Bronson with Don Black, opened around 1993 and was arguably the city's most popular club of the early 1990s, known for its First Friday raves. [Digital Greensboro (UNCG)] It closed in 2000 after the murder of Ed LeBrun, a DJ associated with the club, drew public scrutiny to drug use inside it and its alcohol licence was seized. [Digital Greensboro (UNCG)] Its owner planned to close it after a decade. Matt Cozzi and Drew Wofford bought it instead in about February 2016 and renamed it Q Bar. [Triad City Beat] The single most visible change was opening up the blacked-out front window, a deliberate reversal of the concealment older gay bars had relied on. [Triad City Beat] The city's LGBT options had thinned in the years before 2016 with the closing of the Warehouse and of Time Out, a lesbian staple. [Triad City Beat] The Cone Mills Corporation was established in 1891, when the brothers Moses and Caesar Cone entered the textile business in the South after more than a decade as wholesale grocery and tobacco distributors. Their Cone Export and Commission Company was first headquartered in New York City and later moved to Greensboro for its communications facilities and proximity to producers; by the mid-1890s it was serving approximately 90 percent of the South's mill owners. [NCpedia (State Library of North Carolina)] During the decade between 1895 and 1905 the Cones entered direct manufacturing of denim — their giant White Oak plant near Greensboro opened in 1905 — and helped build the South's first cotton flannel mill, the Revolution Mill, which operated until 1982. They went on to diversify into printing and other textiles, buy controlling interest in several mills, and build several mill villages. [NCpedia (State Library of North Carolina)] The company went private in 1984 after threats of a hostile takeover and celebrated its centennial in 1991; by 2002 it remained one of the nation's largest manufacturers of textiles and a world leader in denim manufacture. It was purchased in 2004 by the New York financier Wilbur Ross and became, with Burlington Industries, part of the International Textile Group, headquartered in Greensboro. [NCpedia (State Library of North Carolina)] Proximity Cotton Mills, the Cone brothers' first mill, began weaving denim in 1895 in close "proximity" to the cotton fields, gins, warehouses and rail lines. [Cone Denim] White Oak Cotton Mill started producing denim in 1905 and became the largest denim mill in the world; by 1910 White Oak was supplying a third of the world's denim demand. [Cone Denim] Cone developed the Indigo Rope Dye Range at its White Oak plant and received a patent for the continuous rope indigo dyeing machine; in the same period Levi's began buying denim from Cone Mills, on a handshake agreement the company says has continued for over 100 years. [Cone Denim] In the run of years from 2017 Cone unveiled Natural Indigo Selvage Denim, produced exclusively at the historic White Oak mill for White Oak's 110th anniversary; in 2023 the company's Greensboro division office moved into the former flannel mill at Revolution Mill. [Cone Denim] Blandwood Mansion at 400 West Washington Street is believed to be the oldest extant example of the Italian Villa Style as promoted by the American architect Alexander Jackson Davis, and is Greensboro's oldest building on its original foundations. [SAH Archipedia (Society of Architectural Historians)] The house was built in three phases: Charles Bland erected a two-story, four-room Federal farmhouse in 1795; in 1822 the local businessman Henry Humphreys — who opened the first steam-powered textile mill in North Carolina — bought it and expanded it to six rooms; and in 1844 Governor John Motley Morehead hired Alexander Jackson Davis, then a contributing designer for the North Carolina State Capitol, to renovate and expand it. Davis made it a three-part mansion with flanking dependencies connected by arcades, completed in 1846, and its landscaped grounds were featured in Andrew Jackson Downing's 1844 Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening Adapted to North America. [SAH Archipedia (Society of Architectural Historians)] Blandwood operated as a local franchise of the Keeley Institute for drug and alcohol rehabilitation from 1897 until 1964, was saved from demolition in 1964 by Greensboro Preservation Incorporated, and opened as a museum in 1976 after a ten-year restoration. It is maintained by Preservation Greensboro Incorporated. [SAH Archipedia (Society of Architectural Historians)] The Jefferson Standard Building at 101 North Elm Street is one of the most prominent commercial landmarks in Greensboro and one of the few pre-Depression-era skyscrapers in North Carolina. The New York architect Charles Conrad Hartmann was then supervising the Sheraton Hotel in High Point and the O. Henry Hotel in Greensboro; Jefferson Standard's vice president Julian Price offered him the $2.5 million commission if he relocated to Greensboro, and Hartmann agreed, going on to design other significant projects in the area including the F. W. Woolworth Department Store. [SAH Archipedia (Society of Architectural Historians)] Construction began in 1922, and when the eighteen-story building was completed in 1923 it was the tallest office building in the South, containing 129 businesses with over 1,000 employees, shops at street level, and dining and entertainment in the seventeenth-floor penthouse. Built in the Beaux-Arts classical style, it is clad at the base in plain ashlar veneer of Mount Airy granite, with the verticality of its steel-framed towers expressed in alternating thin and thick piers of cream-colored terra-cotta. [SAH Archipedia (Society of Architectural Historians)] The Weatherspoon Art Museum was founded in 1941 by Gregory Ivy, the first chairperson of the Art Department at Woman's College, now UNC Greensboro, and has grown from a university teaching gallery into a fully professional institution; its collection numbers nearly 7,000 works and represents all major art movements from the beginning of the 20th century to the present. [Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNC Greensboro] Claribel and Etta Cone were two of thirteen children of German-Jewish immigrants whose sons developed the South's textile industry, and the profits from the family's textile business funded a lifetime of collecting. In her will dated 18 May 1949, Etta gifted the college sixty-seven prints and six bronzes by Henri Matisse together with a large number of modern prints and drawings including examples by Pablo Picasso, Felix Vallotton, Jacques Villon, Raoul Dufy and John Graham; the sisters gave 242 artworks to the Weatherspoon in all. [Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNC Greensboro] Since 1965 the Dillard Paper Company and its successors have supported the museum's Art on Paper exhibitions and the collection of works purchased from them, now close to 600 items; the Weatherspoon acquired from past Art on Paper exhibitions the first works by Eva Hesse, Robert Smithson and Amy Cutler to enter a museum collection. [Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNC Greensboro] Elsewhere occupies a three-story property at 606 South Elm Street in downtown Greensboro that was an army surplus business opened by Joe and Sylvia Gray in 1939. After Joe died in 1955 Sylvia kept expanding the inventory until 1997, shopping twice a day at the local Salvation Army and Goodwill and building a collection of upholstery, clothing, buttons, ribbons, furniture and knick-knacks. [Our State] Sylvia Gray's grandson George Scheer rediscovered the locked store in 2003 and began the Elsewhere residency programme in 2004, inviting artists from all over the world to use the materials already there. [Our State] Artists in residence may use only the materials that already exist in the space: nothing new is brought inside, nothing is removed, and nothing is for sale. Residencies run two to four weeks with four to six artists living and working together, and in a given year Elsewhere will host up to 50 different artists. [Our State] Greensboro goes by the nickname Jeansboro, a nod to the city's roots as the former denim capital of the world; its denim heritage is carried on today by local artisans and entrepreneurs, among them Hudson's Hill, which makes men's and women's denim, overalls, custom leather goods and accessories in the USA and displays artifacts of the city's textile history in its downtown store. [Visit Greensboro] East White Oak was established as a village for African American employees of Cone Mills, with three community spaces, two churches and a school; the school opened in 1916 to educate the children of those employees and the building, now the East White Oak Community Center, is on the National Register of Historic Places. [Visit Greensboro] Two of the Cone mill complexes have been given new uses: Revolution Mill now holds more than 100 businesses, meeting and conference facilities, apartments, outdoor performance spaces, public art galleries, restaurants and greenway trails, and the Proximity Print Works Mill — also known as the Cone Finishing Mill, and the first textile printer in the South — is remembered in the restaurant at the Proximity Hotel. [Visit Greensboro]

“Most of these bars are described as being 'one-size fits all', due to the fact that few co-exist simultaneously in Greensboro - the number of bars necessary for more specialization or demographic specification was never present.” [Digital Greensboro (UNCG)]

“Because of what Q offers the community, I couldn't see it close.” [Triad City Beat]

“The store had been locked up for six years, and we decided that nothing would be for sale and nothing would leave” [Our State]