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Garco Park to join Park Circle revitalization
By Kathleen Dayton
Staff Writer
The old administration building is empty, the laboratories are deserted and Friday night dances are no longer held in Garco Village, where Garco workers once raised their families.
North Charleston’s General Asbestos and Rubber Co., the mill whose initials became the acronym by which the area was known, closed long ago. But the former industrial quadrant where generations of North Charleston residents both lived and worked is about to be reborn.
Plans for Garco Park call for 350,000 square feet of new construction that will include neighborhood retail, commercial offices, a grocery store, light industrial facilities and possibly a loft condominium development. The Beach Co. plans to develop the 40-acre former industrial site near Park Circle around a pedestrian streetscape similar to the recently revitalized East Montague retail corridor and also wants to restore the old brick mill building on the site.
Kent Johnson, The Beach Co.’s vice president of development, said the 72,000-square-foot building could house as many as 80 condominium units.
“The old mill building may be a residential loft condominium or it may be an antiques mall,” Johnson said. “We don’t know yet. We just know we want to save that building.”
Reviving an economic engine
North Charleston City Council has formally approved The Beach Co.’s plans to bring a mixed-used development to the former manufacturing facility and the company is now moving around pieces of abandoned equipment prior to beginning a major demolition effort.
“This former industrial plant has always been an important part of the local economy, and these public approvals will allow us to provide a new economic engine for the Park Circle area,” Johnson said. “This is the first time we have bought an old industrial plant. This is a big urban revitalization initiative for us which is a little bit unusual.”
Johnson said his company was attracted to the Garco site because of its location.
“We identified the Park Circle area as a transitional area with great potential and it was an opportunity to participate in the revitalization of North Charleston,” Johnson said.
It is a revitalization that is already stirring up history.
“Garco literally built the majority of the housing around that Park Circle area and they sponsored all of the local sports teams,” Johnson said. “They were the major economic engine for that part of North Charleston. That’s why we decided to keep the name of Garco Park for this redevelopment activity.”
Supermarkets and memories
Gayle Frampton, president of the North East Park Circle Civic Club and a resident of North Charleston since 1943, said she is thrilled about the redevelopment plans, especially because a supermarket is in the mix.
The Beach Co. has been consulting with the civic group and had at first planned a rail-served industrial park for the property. Those plans were tweaked after company officials began talking to residents.
“We really do need a grocery store,” Frampton said. “That is so unusual for a developer to sincerely want input, and we were so pleased with what they came up with. They want to conserve and save that old brick building and we are tickled that that will be able to save at least the façade. So many people in the Lowcountry had their beginnings at Garco Mill. It was just a wonderful, wonderful place.”
Homes in Garco Village rented for between $1.50 and $3.75 a week and health insurance was 26 cents a week if you were single, said Betty McMillan Varner, who began working in the Garco payroll department just after her high school graduation in 1945. It was at Garco that she met her late husband, Lloyd Varner, when he began working summers at the mill during college.
“He worked in the rubber lab,” Varner said. “I don’t know what they made rubber for, but they made rubber.”
Garco also manufactured asbestos, a material that would later be found responsible for a highly lethal form of lung cancer, mesothelioma. At the time, no one suspected the danger that drifted on the air at Garco.
“We did not have air conditioning in our building and in the summertime we had fans,” Varner said. “We would raise the windows and you could look outside and see bits of asbestos in the air.”
Adding to revitalization
The Beach Co. bought the Garco site five years ago for about $1.3 million and cleanup of industrial waste at the site will be overseen by the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control.
“We know that this was an industrial plant and about 90% of the surface area is covered by either buildings or concrete,” Johnson said. “Until we tear the buildings down and tear up the concrete, we don’t know the extent of remediation that would be required.”
The company has also been able to recycle 11 of the 45 buildings on the site.
“We’ve given them to people that would agree to take them down and put them in other places, back to use,” Johnson said. “We have an individual who is in the plant salvaging all the various metal and piping that has been abandoned.”
North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey said the Garco Park project will compliment other new mixed-use and residential projects under way in the area, including The I’On Group’s Mixson project and Oak Terrace Preserve.
“I’m very excited about the ... mix of office and industrial and some flex space, and hopefully even a little residential,” Summey said. “I think it blends in with what else we’re doing in the area. We have a number of new residential projects and this is an opportunity for people to live and work in the same general area.”
Summey believes the development aids both potential and existing commerce.
“I think it’s all blending in to re-create a center of activity,” Summey said. “I see new business coming into the area, which is a benefit for everyone.”
Kathleen Dayton is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail her at kdayton@scbiznews.com.
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