As an on-going construction project continues in the downtown Greenville area, small business owners and employees begin to feel the negative impacts of closed roads and new parking ordinances.
Drew Cheshire, The General Manager at Uptown Brewing Company on Evans St. in Downtown Greenville said, “Businesses all over downtown, especially us, took a downturn. Business slowed down a lot; foot-traffic slowed down. Potential customers were dissuaded from coming down here because the first time they couldn’t reach the turn they wanted, they would just give up and go home.”
Uptown Brewing Company is not the only downtown business that says it is struggling for business because of the construction, but it seems that the construction will not be finished for a few months.
The street blockages set up for the construction to take place have made it much harder for people wanting to come down to the affected restaurants, shops, and in Cheshire’s case, the brewery.
Not only is it difficult to navigate around the zones of torn-up roads, the city’s new parking protocols pose an even greater threat to businesses in the affected areas, Cheshire said.
“No communication at all from the city,” Cheshire said. “The only updates I see are what I catch in the news or if another business owner or manager happens to spread stuff around. That’s when I’ll see it, but I never get anything from the city.”
At the beginning of the construction, Cheshire said the transparency between the city and the local businesses was great. City officials communicated well, he said. However, as the project has continued now for a year, less and less information about parking and road-closures has been dispersed.
Even just requesting information from the city regarding construction and parking updates seems to be a challenge, Cheshire said.
“I had to reach out to them. They weren’t rude to me,” Chesire said. “They were a little more curt than I would have liked. It took me reaching out directly to the department head before I got any sort of transparency.”
Brock Letchworth, the city’s communication manager, said that the roadwork construction will wrap up at the beginning of 2026. He said city officials are expecting all roads to be operable by Jan.
There are some aspects of the city’s project that do not just include the road work in the downtown area, but also greenways and sidewalks that will help better connect ECU’s Main Campus to its Medical Campus, Letchworth said.
Even with the prospects of newer, safer and prettier streetscapes, businesses downtown are having difficulty keeping their doors open as the construction continues despite the city’s efforts to draw business to those storefronts.
“I think it important to point out that the city has spent thousands of dollars on either signage to help with promoting those businesses or through loan programs for those impacted to promotion through city media channels,” Letchworth explained.
He said the efforts by the city to help draw attention of patrons to the private businesses downtown is somewhat uncommon for municipal governments.
“I will say that going through (social) media and complaining about the construction is not helping whatsoever with that,” Letchworth said.
With the construction ongoing for well over a year, downtown businesses are beginning to wonder if they will be able to recover from the project that the city took on.
The city applied for the US Department of Transportation’s Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development project grant or the BUILD project back in July 2019. The city was notified that it had received the federal grant four months later.
The BUILD Project’s purpose is to create safer traffic patterns for cars, bikes and pedestrians in the Downtown area, Medical District, western part of the city and the university area according to the city’s website.
The project consists of eight phases of construction in various places along Fifth Street. The construction started on April 1, 2024–now a year later, the project is in phase 7 of 8 and is taking place on Evans street in the heart of the downtown area off of the Five Points parking lot.
(A screenshot from the City of Greenville’s Website showing the phases and the areas in which the construction affects)
The street where the Greenville Christmas Parade route goes through, the place of Doggy Jams in the Spring and the lot that hosts each Freeboot Friday in the Fall is now leveled down to the dirt as of March 24, 2025.
Downtown businesses were notified via flyer of the ongoing project and start of phase seven about two weeks prior to the start of demolition of the intersection of 5th Street and Evans Street according to Cheshire.
In addition to the construction of the roads and sidewalks, the building of the new Hilton Garden Inn on Evans Street did the downtown business owners no favors.
The groundbreaking for Greenville’s latest high-rise hotel happened in 2022 with plans to open in the summer 2023. Instead, three years after the start of construction, the first guests were welcome on Feb. 26 .
A group chat on Instagram’s Direct Messages called “Downtown Merchants” includes many of the local businesses such as The Scullery, State Theater, The Sojourner Whole Earth Provisions, Uptown Brewing Company, Purple Blossom Yoga Studio, Club519 and others.
“The silence from the city is deafening,” wrote the manager at The Sojourner Whole Earth Provisions. “10 years ago they came around to get signatures and consent for every street closure and event that might impact our street. I’ve felt completely disregarded for a long time now.”
The hotel’s contract included parking spots in the Fourth Street Parking Garage to accommodate guests. However, nearly a month ago, reserved “20-minute” unloading spots for hotel guests took the place of available street spots on Evans Street.
Businesses in the Downtown Merchants group chat were quick to add that they had not been told about the hotel unloading spots, which took up four of the available spots along that strip.
Someone in the chat from Purple Blossom Yoga Studio wrote, “Given the lack of spots along Evans St compared to the number of businesses plus the construction terribly affecting business, no one should be losing parking spots in any capacity.”
The chat discussion wrote that over 70 citations have been issued to shoppers and diners for walking through poorly posted construction zones–areas that lead directly to the front doors to these local businesses.
Letchworth said that he did not know the number of citations the city police have issued to those who cross into the construction zones. He said stronger enforcement of the citations for pedestrians came from when a few college students caused about $20,000 worth of damage to a newly-poured concrete curb.
Given that incident, Letchworth said, “I don’t understand any kind of sympathy or empathy for anyone who received a citation for crossing into a construction zone.”
With businesses still angry about the lack of communication and the steady decrease in sales due to lack of foot traffic downtown, organizing might be the next step for them.
Someone from The Sojourner Whole Earth Provisions shared the shop’s consistent drop in sales in the group chat.
“Sojourner sales dropped another 40% in 2024, 30% down in 2023. This city seems to be working overtime to shut down the little guys,” one message from Sojourner Whole Earth Provisions said.
Downtown Greenville Partnership’s Instagram account is also a member of the group chat, and responded to the grievances by saying that the organization does not have much control over what the city chooses to do regarding the BUILD project, parking and the new hotel. The message said that the Partnership was also taken by surprise by the hotel check-in parking on Evans, calling it “not-ideal.”
Matt Scully, the owner of The Scullery Cafe and Creamery on the corner of Evans and Fifth, is also a city councilman elected in 2023, which has put him in an interesting position as a middleman between downtown businesses and the city.
Scully said both the road construction and the hotel closing the one-way section of Evans Street has been a pain not only for employees, but also for sales. He added that a lot of businesses downtown are losing a great deal of business to people simply not wanting to have to navigate around the roadwork.
“This is a huge project. It’s not just resurfacing, it’s all the way down to the dirt, new drainage, new utility infrastructure. It’s going to be a totally new streetscape,” Scully said.
He said he thinks the city has done a fairly good job at keeping up with the construction and being as transparent as it can be during what has been a long period of uncertainty for businesses.
Due to the state of construction last Spring, the city did away with the pay-to-park app that it was using and it suspended the two hour time allotment, allowing unlimited parking time in and around the downtown area.
As of March, now there is a two hour time limit on all parking spots downtown. Tickets have been issued to those who keep their vehicles in city spots past their two-hour time limit.
A few businesses in the “Downtown Merchants” group chat wrote that they are worried about having to close because of the lack of sales partly due to the consistent road closures and reroutes that cut off foot and street traffic to their business’s doors.
King’s Deli on Fifth Street announced on its social media pages that it was closing its doors later this month. It is uncertain at this time if the reason for their closing is primarily due to the loss in sales caused by the construction, but their storefront has been affected by several stages of the BUILD project.
Scully said the city understands the inconvenience that the construction and the change in parking protocol has put on downtown businesses and their patrons. With businesses in mind, he added that the city was in the beginning process of adopting a business loan program to compensate for the losses that the ongoing construction has caused.
“They (the city) have started a loan program for businesses, which is a $10,000 no interest loan,” Scully said. “I really wish it was a grant.”
Scully said a hardship loan is now available for downtown businesses that are struggling with sales during the BUILD project. However, Drew Cheshire said he has not heard anything about such loans.