Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9501310080
SECTION: STREET BY STREET PAGE: 7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Old people who had lived in their houses all or most of their lives stopped maintaining them because the housing authority said the houses soon would be torn down. The residents also were left in a quandary: Should they buy oil or coal for the next winter? Should they plant their gardens again?
By June 1974, City Manager Julian Hirst was saying this was not the kind of redevelopment he wanted, and the World-News editorialized that Gainsboro had turned into just another bulldozing project.
That October, a man named Daniel Jones came to a housing authority public hearing. He had lived at his home on Peach Road for 73 years.
He had been at one of the first meetings on the Gainsboro project, five or so years earlier.
At that first meeting, Jones was quoted in a hearing transcript, "They said they'd fix your home up if it didn't come up with the standard of the city. ... And if you're retired, they'd loan you money to fix your home up, and if they had to tear your house down they'd give you a grant to get you another home.
"That was the first meeting," Jones went on. "I remember that personally. And y'all got contrary, went plumb off of that. What I want to say, you've tore down homes that I remember. I'm 77 years old. You've tore down homes that I knowed that was built - built - good homes. And you left homes standing that had dry toilets and they didn't have no water or nothing in those homes.
"You've tore down some good homes that people could live in for the next 100 years or 75 years. ... My home, termites is eating the bottom out of it. Of course, I wanted to fix it up but you said y'all gonna take it, so I won't gonna spend no money on it."
Jones came to a meeting the next year, still pleading for answers for himself and his wife, Martha.
"This winter, I'm not aiming to buy that much coal," he said. "I ain't spending four or five hundred dollars putting in another furnace in that old house. I want to know what you going to do and when you going to come out and inspect and tell us when we got to move ... and that you going to build a house for us. I want to know, because five or six years from now, I don't expect to be living. ... I'm just actually tired. Lord, I'm not complaining, but I'm just tired. I got an old termite-eat-up home. Take my home. I thought that was the idea."
In 1976, five new houses were built in Gainsboro, and Daniel Jones got one of them. Housing authority transcripts show he came to a meeting that year to say he was happy.
A newspaper story said 600 houses had been torn down. Where Jones' house once stood is a fire hydrant in front of the Innkeeper motel on Gainsboro Road.
Daniel Jones, a retired railroad porter and a prizefighter in his youth, died almost a year ago - after 17 years in his home at 301 Madison Ave. N.W. He was 97.
by CNB