Let's all zoom in on Greensboro's ugliest spot
Someone made a video where they browsed Google Street View until they found a spot in North Carolina that was "ugly." Is there a lesson we can learn from this? Maybe?
Here’s an Instagram reel that I went back and watched, like, ten times:
I’ll save you some time: What you have here is a young woman who drags a cursor across a Google Earth map of North Carolina, drops it in a random spot, opens up Street View, looks at what’s there, and then declares it to be ugly or not ugly. In this reel, she first lands on a nice stretch of Mill Tail Creek out east in the Alligator River National Wildlife Reserve. Next, she ended up on the Carolina Beach Fishing Pier, then dropped a pin on the observation tower up on Wayah Bald (Side note: That’s not not how you pronounce “Nantahala”). After that, she goes to Uptown Charlotte at Christmastime before stating—sweetly but ominously—“let’s check out Greensboro.” She ends up at an abandoned gas station on Battleground Avenue, looks around for a moment, makes a McKayla Maroney “not impressed” face, and then dryly says “ugly.”
Where Is This, Exactly?
If you must know, this stretch of Battleground is located between downtown Greensboro and the water treatment plant, and this particular image was taken in May 2019. This wasn’t taken by the Google car, either. Someone intentionally pulled off the side of the road into an empty asphalt lot, took a 360-degree panoramic shot of … this, posted it, and then went on his way. The photographer appears to be a guy who had a side gig of taking drone videos and 360-degree images that end up in virtual tours, mostly for real estate purposes.
Does this area still look like this five years later? Yes? No? Kinda? Since 2019, a big car storage place has gone up across the street, and greenways are being expanded nearby. A new office building sits right at the corner of Battleground Avenue and Hill Street, and the Green Hill Cemetery is right up the road as well. Sure, there’s a big Duke Energy substation around the corner, and yes, there’s the aforementioned water treatment plant which, for a water treatment plant, actually looks kind of nice.
And yet, the abandoned gas station remains. It looks like it was originally built in 1980 but closed down sometime in the last decade. Its current owners are four businessmen who formed a company named, cleverly, “Hand Grecade LLC” (Grecade Street is nearby, get it). Last December, those new owners held a community meeting with neighbors to ask them what they should do. According to Triad City Beat, Hand Grecade doesn’t have any specific plans for that property, but its owners do say that those ugly-ass old buildings won’t be torn down. That’s because, for a variety of reasons, they’re not allowed to build new buildings on the site, which they stress is not contaminated. The owners all live nearby or drive past it every day. They all know how ugly it is and wanted to do something about it. Maybe the old service station will be turned into an ice cream shop! Or a brewery! Or a restaurant with a nice patio that overlooks the creek! Whatever happens, the owners said renovations on the property could possibly start this fall. Say! That’s now!
In short, Greensboro’s ugliest spot could soon be a lot less ugly.
But that’s not why you came here.
You came here to dunk on Greensboro.
Time to posterize the Gate City like you’re Michael Jordan
Look, I am not above this. Back in April 2013, I wrote what I felt was a nuanced and insightful blog for Charlotte magazine about this fair city. In order to get people to read it, I gave it this headline: “Yo Mama’s So Ugly, She’s Greensboro.” You know what happens when you do that? Karma gets you. Two years later, I got a new job. In Greensboro. Guess where I ended up going nearly every day for the next six-and-a-half-years? The bottom floor of an office building between a textile conglomerate and a tobacco company less than a mile away from the ugliest spot in town, that’s where. To be fair, our office’s next-door neighbor was a Ruth’s Chris Steak House.
I do feel like when a city gets big enough, it has to learn how to take a joke. Greensboro is low-key good at this? Things are slowly getting better and better here. When someone writes a mean tweet, the entire city doesn’t mobilize its tourism and economic development weaponry to carpet bomb them with messages like “OUR CITY IS ACTUALLY VERY NICE!” and “THE RESTAURANTS SERVE TASTY, REASONABLY-PRICED FOOD” and “THERE ARE MANY NIGHTLIFE OPTIONS,” and “WELL ACTUALLY NOT EVERY STREET CORNER IS HAUNTED.” Charlotte, I will say, will never be good at this. Charlotte has no chill. Last year, a 93-year-old New York Post columnist wrote a weird story about how a friend of hers wasn’t crazy about Charlotte because it’s not New York City. It was not well received:
Anyway, back to the Instagram reel that started all this. The woman who posted it has also done the same thing in other states. She, admittedly, is using the same formula as another creator named Natasha Gupta. That woman seems to be using roughly the same format as a guy who created a TikTok channel called “Shiddy Places,” which went viral for using Google Earth to view random spots in Baltimore before stating “bruh, it’s shiddy.” The joke here is in the setup, the delivery, the pregnant pauses, and then the punchline. It doesn’t matter, really, that the punchline is Greensboro.
And yet it is! I posted this reel on Twitter and (erp) it’s gotten a half-million views and hundreds of responses, which mostly break down like this:
I, like Stephen A. Smith, am a knower of North Carolina, and I declare this to be a spiritual representation of Greensboro.
No! Greensboro has many nice things and not every square foot of it resembles an abandoned Scooby Doo theme park.
Many other towns look like this! Why didn’t you land on Fayetteville/Capital Blvd. in Raleigh/Kinston/Lumberton and/or other towns that made the Rabbit Hole Ass-Whuppin’ Atlas?
So, um, what have we learned?
The biggest lesson here, I guess, is an axiom that’s been repeated for generations by our Internet elders: Don’t hate the player, hate the game. People do this online because they know it will get a response. Are those responses nuanced? No! Are there plenty of them? Yes! Is this social media catnip? Oh lawd, yes. I know this. That’s partly why I posted the reel on Twitter. If I asked people to deliver a measured and thoughtful dissertation on the true nature of Greensboro, I would have had one person take me up on it. If I post this reel, I can collect some interesting thoughts as long as I’m willing to wade through a sea of people who show up to say “lol wut”.
So, in that spirit, I’m thinking about giving this method a try without turning it into a Google Street View version of “Hot or Not.” I keep telling myself that maybe this is the modern version of Steve Hartman’s “Everybody Has A Story.” Every two weeks, Hardman would have someone throw a dart at a map of the United States. Hartman then opened a phone book for the town where the dart landed, chose a name at random, went to that person’s house, interviewed them to learn about their life, and then put their story on the CBS Evening News.
Maybe I’ll easily find something great to write about! Or maybe I’ll have to give some thought to what’s going on along a dead end street in Goldsboro, somewhere between Wilber’s Barbecue and the Seymour Johnson Air Force Base:
Hang on, folks. I promise you that this, at least, will not get ugly.
I am happy to hear about potential renovations! I appreciate you doing this article.
With love, from the creator of the video.
Jeremy, I still miss your voice. When will this get podcastable? Thanks for the Friday night with a glass of wine retreat.
Peace