College Park vs. College Hill: What's the Difference?

Well, another day and another blog comes around. This time, we will be looking at the neighborhood College Park and how it compares to College Hill. To begin, we need to know more about College Park to make our comparison more credible. College Park is a neighborhood that is right outside UNCG. It starts at Spring Garden St. and goes around S. Elam St., and of course, Walker Ave. So, here we go!

Let's start with Spring Garden St. Spring Garden is the big street for this area because of its location to the university and its developments. As you walk right across campus, it seems to look nice (around Jack's and Walgreens), but as you move further out, the appearance goes downsome (around the apartments). Spring Garden St. is a big street due to the fact that Spring Garden developed very quickly after its construction. You can see that near the university, the area looks quite taken care of (Walgreens, restaurants). We believe that this part of Spring Garden was developed more recently and it is more taken care of due to the fact that it is near a big landmark, UNCG. As you go down the street, you see more of the residential part of Spring Garden St. There are more apartments down this way and some residential areas. This could show that these apartments are used by college students. More likely, these students want a safer environment near the university. As for the residential areas, the areas here are weird though because as you can see from the picture below this one, the buildings do not face the street. It faces the other houses on the street. This could have been a style of the times when Spring Garden was made. They could be infills for lots that had been down this area. All we know is that they are not like College Hill, where the houses face the streets.

Next, we will talk about the residential areas of College Park like S. Elam St., Mayflower St., and even parts of Walker Ave. The College Park neighborhood obviously is a residential area. The homes in do not vary tremendously, although a few styles are seen as you walk the streets. Larger apartment complexes were found along with the average size we have been seeing in recent weeks. On the side streets in the core of the neighborhood we found craftsman style houses, and some more boring looking ones. I would guess they were built in the 1960's because of the boxy feel they have. The houses along Spring Garden St. were situated very close to the road, where the houses farther in the neighborhood had bigger yards in some instances. We noticed more retaining walls in front of houses. We did not ever come to a conclusion to what that signifies exactly, but more houses were above the road. Maybe a value of housing is what is to be learned from the walls. Even though the land was not perfectly convenient for building, the need exceeded that inconvenience. We also noticed a creek that went under the road and did not come out on the other side, I would consider this another sign of the importance of housing for the same reason as the retention walls.

Along with this we noticed that each residential house was pretty big and full of space. They looked more like permanent homes. We believe that these houses on S. Elam St. and the the other small roads are family homes, not the student homes we saw on College Hill. Therefore, we could tell that these buildings were around to add more space for the families of Greensboro at the time. Besides, it was right beside a strong part of campus. It was beside Walker Ave., the first strong street, the Spring Graden St. Before we move on to the next part, just a quick observation we found. We saw that the sidewalks in the back roads were lined with brick as we went on. It was tough to decide what these bricks were for. Were the for looks? Probably not, due to the fact that there's a use for mostly everything in Greensboro. What about a drainage system? It's tough to decide because we found no particular use for the brick beside the siewalks.

Finally, we came to our cut-up street, Walker Ave. Walker Ave. is a street that is used mostly for residential purposes now. We have seen many houses along the way and these are very nice houses as well. We see the bungalow type mostly from this street, so we can see that these houses were filled in for something else. Now, Walker Ave. looks like it used to be a dominant street for this area and the proof is there. Back at the part of Walker Ave. we came on, we saw many developments and old time buildings. For instance, we saw an old bar called The Blind Tiger. This bar was very special due to the fact that we looked at the sign and saw that it had been around since the 1920s. Maybe earlier than that. Also, we saw other developments like Fishbones, Walker Bar, and The Property Source. Also, we saw a ton of infills, but we also saw another piece of evidence. Lots. Lots were all around Walker Ave. whether they were used or not. Something must have been there before and had been taken down for the sake of the infill of houses. Now, we move on and see that two churches had been placed along Walker Ave. These churches looked pretty well kept so the may have been placed in for the houses so no one would have to walk to the churches around College Hill.

Now, the fun part. College Hill turned out to be mostly a residential district for college students and some bachelors and bachelorettes with a job. It had its own strip right beside Tate St. and it was near two of the colleges in Greensboro. It was not developed as well. and you could tell that these buildings were older and more useful towards livng purposes. The only development we saw was around Mendenhall St. and Tate St. There were infills, but not as many as College Park.

College Park, on the other hand, is a more developed area of Greensboro. It has more businesses and restaurants than College Hill. The residential part of the area is more for families than for students, though there were a few areas with student housing. College Park is based around two strong streets, Spring Garden St. and Walker Ave. compared to College Hill. There is more of a contemporary style with this area and it doesn't follow the old style of College Hill. Therer are more bungalows compared to the Queen Anne style houses. There are definitely more infills in this area due to the developments. All in all, this area was developed quickly compared to the historic style of College Hill. So, you can see that College Park is very different from the oder and more historic College Hill.