
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 4, 1993                   TAG: 9308040050
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ED SHAMY
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

FAST-FOOD BULLDOZER SUBDUES TROUBLED HOBO JUNGLE

Used to be it was a lumberyard - and even then it was a troubled place - but that closed better than a decade ago. Locust trees and kudzu have, since then, slowly been reclaiming the lot at Franklin Road and Wonju Street in Roanoke.

You don't have enough fingers on both hands to count the fires that have been put out on the scabby lot that reaches back from Franklin to the embankment up to Interstate 581.

A seedy collection of wooden shacks was assembled on the lot, a railroad track cut through the weeds, Ore Branch gurgled over tires and wine bottles.

Along Franklin Road, behind the colorful modern billboards and in front of the towering stinkweed, is a smaller sign that still offers tomato stakes for sale - a generation after the place that sold them went under.

A man was murdered there last year, but he wasn't a member of high society, and his death didn't move our community to tears. Ervin Henry Lawrence was 64, a homeless vagrant who drank a lot.

His death exposed "Hobo Jungle," the not-so-quaint name applied to the rundown dungeon of property. All that it lacked in charm to most of us, it offered in amenities to the clutch of homeless people who gathered there. It had abandoned huts, privacy and access, a stream, shade and easy walking distance to the recycling center - where bags full of squashed aluminum cans could be swapped for quarters.

It was a place for hobos to hide, until Jeffrey D. Graybill strangled Ervin Lawrence. Graybill is serving a 30-year jail term.

Hobo Jungle was razed by a bulldozer and piled high in a thorny row of faded beams and twisted metal.

Cycle Systems spruced up with a sculpted new stainless steel fountain on the far side of Wonju Street, but the jungle's remains were left to be engulfed in vines.

It's been a long time since anyone had much good to say about the place. Cops, firefighters, building inspectors, neighborhood merchants - they all wished it would go away. It'd even become a source of chronic heartache for its owners, who for 20 years fielded edicts from the city to clean up the plot.

Comes now redemption of sorts for that Godforsaken tract.

Bland A. Painter III on Tuesday won approval from the Roanoke Board of Zoning Appeals to build a Rally's hamburger restaurant on the maligned vacant lot.

Walk-up window and outdoor tables, drive-through lanes and 17 parking spaces. Twenty-five employees working shifts from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Burgers, fries, colas.

Hobo jungle will be scrubbed and landscaped, homogenized and sanitized.

The hobos have moved on - nearly invisible now beneath tarps strung in patches of woods not far away from the jungle.

But soon there'll be a transient of another sort, a hungry driver too hurried to climb from the car, driving up to a window and sailing away with an aromatic sackful of fast food.

It'll be a poetic solution to one of the city's longest-running problems.

by CNB