For the stated purpose of adding public parking spaces, the city of Statesboro recently bought a small office building and its corner lot that long displayed gravestones at the West Main Street and North and South College Streets intersection.

By a 4-0 vote on April 15, City Council approved the $325,000 purchase of Clark & Shaw Monument Company’s former Statesboro office and display yard, identified as 45 West Main St. and 6 North College St., from Chuck Shaw. The last headstones were removed from the site a few weeks ago. The combined lot measures 18,218 square feet, or about two-fifths of an acre. The sedate little building covers 560 square feet. The city’s funding source is Transportation-Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax, or T-SPLOST, which is also a source for funding the larger West Main Street streetscaping project.

This corner area, mostly unpaved and partially grassed, sits across the intersection diagonal from the Statesboro Post Office and directly across West Main from the city-owned parking lot where the Statesboro Area Transit route transfer bus stop is located. The newly city-acquired property is beside a leather repair shop and the Averitt Center for the Arts’ building that houses the Whitaker Black Box Theater.

Those first two blocks of West Main Street are on a hill, and along portions of the south edge of the street, three steps rise steeply from the parallel parking lane. The newly purchased lot was not part of the West Main Streetscape project plan as presented during a public information meeting in November. But concerns raised about what will become of the parallel parking, both during the streetscape construction and after, spurred the city’s interest in adding a parking area, said City Manager Charles Penny and Assistant City Manager Jason Boyles.

The opportunity to buy the property came after a death in the owners’ family and because of the heir’s desire to no longer maintain it as a business location, Penny said. According to an online obituary, William N. “Billy” Clark of Lyons, longtime owner of Vidalia Monument Company and founder with his son-in-law Chuck Shaw of Clark and Shaw Monument Company, died Feb. 21, 2024 at age 86.

“It was an opportunity for the city to secure that piece of property and we really need it right now because when we start doing the work on the West Main streetscape, it’s going to disrupt, dislocate parking,” Penny said Thursday. “So that piece of property is valuable to us to be able to provide parking. We still want people to come downtown and patronize the  businesses while we are upgrading and improving the sidewalks and all.”

That doesn’t mean that the parking lot will be temporary. It can continue to be used for parking “as we get more businesses downtown,” he said.

“But we always have to be thinking for the future, and as I told council, going down the road, someone might decide that they want to put a building on that corner,” Penny added. “There’s a small building there now, but at some point there could be a nicer building,  a taller building for future development.”

The city’s plans for the space are not definite yet, but leaving the little office building there is not part of them. In the near future the lot will probably all be used for parking, Penny said.

West Main Streetscape

Plans for West Main’s streetscape are intended to resemble the extensive streetscaping work done more than a decade ago on East Main Street, which passes by the Emma Kelly Theater and City Hall. West Main has a few elements of this, such as  decorative streetlamp or two, and decorative poles with arms for the traffic signals were also installed at the West Main-College Street intersection as part  of a previous phase of work.

But West Main streetscape concept drawn by the Cranston firm – which the city contracted last year for the design and engineering work – shows varying-width sidewalks and more extensive use of brick pavers and lamps. Where there are more parallel parking spaces now, including on the southwestern block where early 20th-century sidewalk-length steps rise steeply, the number of parking spaces would be reduced. New paver-topped ramps will run at a shallow angle to corners or mid-block curb cuts.

“Some of the initial concepts that the engineering firm developed showed that in order to address some concerns regarding grades, elevations, steep sidewalk just west of Bull & Barrel on the southside of West Main Street, we would have to pull in some of the roadway width …,” Boyles said. “In doing that and trying to improve the traffic flow and create additional pedestrian safety features, especially around the Walnut Street intersection, some of the parallel parking spaces may be impacted.”

So the new parking on the corner will replace lost parallel spaces, he said.

The city currently has $2.3 million earmarked in its capital improvement projects budget for the West Main streetscape, but that number was created before detailed cost estimates have been calculated, Boyles noted.