urban bicycle journeys

I keep coming back to bicycle around Danville VA, only fifty-five miles straight north of my home in Chapel Hill NC. Danville’s city limits abut the North Carolina / Virginia line. Unlike the booming Research Triangle area of North Carolina, Danville has for many years been left behind. A hundred years ago Danville (current population 42,000) was a city on par with nearby Raleigh, Durham, and Greensboro. No longer.

A casino can fix things, some would claim. Danville’s economy was dependent on two dying industries; bulk leaf tobacco and textile manufacturing. The Schoolfield neighborhood of Danville was the site of one of the largest textile mill complexes in America, even the world. One company Dan River Mills used to employ fifteen thousand people. I had heard that a casino is now being built on the site of the Schoolfield mill. On a sunny and pleasantly cool Sunday morning I drove up to Danville in our Ford Escape Hybrid with my Bike Friday in the back.

I parked just over the Virginia line in a Food Lion lot.

Danville’s downtown sits on a high bluff above the Dan River. Cycling the couple of miles from the Food Lion to downtown involved serious hills. I eventually found a street paralleling the railroad tracks that led into Danville’s formerly tobacco warehouse district, which the city now promotes as the River District. They have been somewhat successful in converting these warehouse buildings into condos, offices, and restaurants. While there are still empty buildings, there is progress.

The River District abuts Danville’s downtown. I found modern architecture including a brutalist structure built as a bank headquarters; now nominally occupied by school district offices.

I turned uphill on Main Street.

Several blocks further on Main Street sits this pocket park. (The 1920’s skyscraper in the background is mostly empty.)

I still grieve Mid-Century Modern losses. That park was the site of the Downtowner Motor Inn. Before the year 2012 the local Powers-That-Be were convinced a mostly empty hotel was blighting downtown, and they paid to have it destroyed. While biking Danville back in 2012 by happenstance I witnessed some of the hotel’s destruction.

That hotel back in the day.

Progress! I continued to bicycle west on Main Street. In a neighborhood called Old West End there were impressive Victorian houses, the occasional one for sale at affordable prices. In nearby Durham or Raleigh houses like these are unavailable, or costing millions if they are.

In rural areas on the outskirts of Danville all the yard signs were for Trump. In central Danville many signs were for Harris / Walz, but I also saw this homemade creation.

I cycled onward down Main Street towards the casino site, passing Averett University and 1920’s-60’s upscale neighborhoods. About three miles from central Danville is the formerly separate town of Schoolfields VA which was the site of the giant Dan River textile mill. Back in the day it looked like this.

The mill closed for good in 2008. There is a market for used brick. Someone tore down almost the whole complex for its bricks except the triad of smokestacks seen in center left of the post card view above. You can see the smokestacks now, next to a high rise hotel being built for the casino.

The Powers-That-Be got approval from the State of Virginia for a casino and chose this Schoolfield site, rather than one that would have boosted Danville’s downtown. The new casino, under construction, looks like a shopping mall.

Someone has erected a giant tent to serve as a temporary casino until the new one is ready.

I locked my bicycle to a post at the tent’s entrance and walked inside. The guy checked my ID carefully. Perhaps I am a prude but I would have thought the populace of Danville VA at 11:00 AM on a Sunday morning would have been in church. Instead, the casino seemed hopping. People were gambling, drinking alcohol, and smoking cigarettes.

Personal preference: I do not like gambling. I walked around for ten minutes then returned to my bicycle. On a side street I looked back at that former textile mill site.

I cycled downhill toward the Dan River, passing by this delightful 1960’s dry cleaners sitting on US-58.

Danville has a lovely bike path that follows the floodplain of the Dan River for six or seven miles. I cycled downstream.

Looking across the river from downtown Danville another former textile mill awaits repurposing.

I bicycled through the wooded path along the river all the way to the end, then turned around and cycled back. A refurbished rail bridge crosses the Dan River into downtown and the River District. It is now a bike path.

A claim to fame of Danville is it supposedly was the Last Capital of the Confederacy. At the end of the Civil War the “government” of Jefferson Davis fled south from Richmond VA after that city’s fall. They installed themselves for about a week in the Danville home of a supporter, just uphill from downtown Danville in that neighborhood now called Old West End. Directly across the street from that historic house, in a repurposed 1950’s gas station, is a delightful coffee house/bar called Crema and Vine. I munched on a roast beef sandwich while sitting outside reading The New York Times on my cell phone.

My car was parked about two miles away at the Food Lion. After lunch I cycled to it through south Danville.

I loaded the bicycle in my car and drove back to Crema and Vine where I ordered an oat milk latte, to-go, sixteen ounce, with two packs sugar. I needed something to slurp on during the one hour drive home to Chapel Hill NC.