This $61M SC park is among the nicest in the US, Reader’s Digest says. Here’s why

Greenville’s 60-acre Unity Park is beginning to get national recognition a year after opening.

This week, it was cited by Reader’s Digest in its annual The Nicest Places in America list, described as a “search for places where people are kind, differences are celebrated and neighbors work together to make their communities better.”

Buffalo, New York’s response to a blizzard that closed the city received the top prize.

Earlier this year, Unity Park was cited as Best Innovation in Park Design by The National Recreation and Park Association, which will be presented in October.

The organization said Unity Park transformed a brownfield into public recreation space that also mitigates flooding and improves water quality in the Reedy River.

In addition, the city set aside 8 acres for affordable housing.

The city learned its lesson, Mayor Knox White has said, when it developed Falls Park on the Reedy downtown. Ever rising property values followed the development of the 32 acre park, whose signature feature is Reedy River Falls. Condominiums in the area sell for as much as $2.9 million.

Reader’s Digest called Unity Park a “marvel of landscape architecture.”

“But the true transformation isn’t one of Greenville’s facilities — it’s of Greenville’s spirit,” the magazine said.

Through the years, the area was all but forgotten, once home to a stockade, a public incinerator, a landfill and finally a maintenance shed for garbage trucks and other city vehicles in the majority-Black southern-side neighborhood.

City Council member Lillian Brock Flemming, who represents the area, calls Unity Park long delayed justice.

“Eighty-two years we waited for the park,” Flemming told Reader’s Digest “The little children don’t know the history, but they know they’ll have a good time when they get there.”

Once, segregated Mayberry Park and Meadowbrook Park were located there, but through the years the city took a chunk of land here, another there for the other uses.

“I’ve heard people describe it as the community’s junkyard,” Greenville Housing Fund President Bryan Brown told Reader’s Digest.

In 1939, E.B. Holloway, Greenville’s first Black mail carrier, asked the city to build a park there.

The city agreed yet did nothing.

The park includes a restored half-mile section of the Reedy River and adjacent wetlands, hundreds of native trees, playgrounds, splash pads, a walking/biking trai and a huge grassy expanse.

It cost $61 million in public and private funds.