By Jim Bissett
Parry Petroplus isn't given to making brash predictions, but that doesn't mean the Morgantown developer still can't have halftime—to imagine a West Virginia University Mountaineer football moment that could very well come to be sometime in the near future.
"I'm telling you I can see it," he says, chuckling. "It's crystal clear in my head. Just like I was watching it on TV in my living room. Would that be good for the Wharf, or what?"
Petroplus is the WVU Board of Governors member (and 1973 business and economics graduate) who cofounded Platinum Properties, the Morgantown development firm that is quickly changing the face of the University City.
"The Wharf" is Morgantown's Wharf District, a once-dilapidated collection of boarded-up warehouses bumping up against the Monongahela River on the city's south side.
With Petroplus' company leading the charge and other city and University leaders following suit, the Wharf in recent years has morphed into an attractive, upscale mecca of development for Morgantown. Used-up buildings that were once cornerstones of a long-gone industrial age are now finding new lives as luxury housing and homes to new (and already established) city businesses.
Restaurants and high-end bicycle shops have sprouted along the Wharf and its adjoining rail-trail system. A gleaming WVU administration building towers over the Wharf, right next to a spacious new luxury hotel that's already becoming a landmark. Streets of dirt and gravel are quickly being layered with cobblestones that are illuminated at night by light fixtures that are both contemporary and period in style—giving a unique nod to a noble, hardworking past.
When it's all done, development on the
Wharf will top out at $35 million, including a soon-to-be built
marina and new home for the West Virginia Public Theatre.
Even the topography tells the tale. People sitting on the aluminum
benches at Hazel Ruby McQuain Riverfront Park—the popular
venue for outdoor concerts and weddings was named for the late,
longtime benefactor of the city and University—can look
up to see the clock tower of WVU's 1870s-era Woodburn Hall peeking
over the trees.
Call it a social, architectural reminder of a city that happily embraces its history while moving in high-gear toward new days ahead. All of which has inspired Petroplus' vision of what he hopes will be during that Mountaineer halftime sometime in the not-so-distant future.
Petroplus warmed to that vision on a hot day last June in his offices on the second floor of the Jackson & Kelly building, a marquee building of the new Wharf.
Here's what he sees: It's halftime in Morgantown during a game at Mylan Puskar Stadium, Home of Mountaineer Field. "It's a national telecast of a big game—say, Pitt", Petroplus muses—"or Virginia Tech," he says, "if they're still playing us."
It's time for the "live shot" of the region at halftime, like those aerial shots of Pittsburgh's famed Golden Triangle during Steelers contests, or the sailboats and surfers in San Diego when the Chargers call time-out. Petroplus' imagined shot, though, is something different than the way Morgantown is normally shown on the small screen during big games.
He's not picturing pastoral West Virginia hills ablaze with autumn foliage. He's not seeing the Ruby Memorial Hospital parking lot transformed into Tailgate Central by a streaming caravan of motor homes carting the Mountaineer faithful to town on game day.
No, what he's seeing in that shot is a sweeping, bird's-eye view of the burgeoning Wharf District, all lit up at night, with bikers and joggers on the trail and patrons coming out of restaurants and the Public Theatre complex.
"Can you imagine what a recruiting tool that would be for future students and their parents?" Petroplus asks. "People already know what a good school we are. But we do have to sell people on Morgantown."
Petroplus, understandably, is excited about the Wharf doings, because the development for him shows a comfortable, and maybe even unprecedented coexistence between Morgantown, Monongalia County, and WVU.
"This is the best we've gotten along since I've been in town," he says.
It'll be even better when he gets that live shot, he says.
"I'll give myself an 'A' when that happens," he says. "That's when I'll know that we've finally arrived. That's when we'll be considered to be a true symbol of Morgantown and the University."
As Petroplus was making his points, John Willis was pedaling his mountain bike on the rail-trail that runs along the Mon and the Wharf's buildings that are blossoming forth.
Willis gripped and grinned his bike's handlebars as he peered through the haze of heat and humidity that was wrapped like gauze around the Wharf on this sweltering, hair dryer of a day.
As far as Willis is concerned, the Wharf is already getting more than a passing grade. The avid biker regularly makes cycling sojourns through the district. He's enjoying watching what it will eventually be, since he knows what it definitely once was.
"It's funny," says Willis, who, as a youngster, would occasionally accompany his father on warehouse delivery trips to the Wharf back in its blue-collar days. "It used to be dirty and grimy. You weren't even sure if you wanted to come down here sometimes."
That wasn't the case on this day, and Willis smiled as construction workers worked through the heat (and their lunch hour) to transform the Wharf. In that best Morgantown melting pot fashion, people sharing the trail with Willis were dressed in everything from biker shorts to Brooks Brothers suits.
Willis took it all in, and summed it all up in a way that is music to the ears of any city planner taking on big-time renewal projects. The development is bold and exciting, he said, but it has also been seamless and unobtrusive.
"What's going on is all so new," he says, "but when you look at it now, it just seems like it's always been here. This is going to make all the difference in the world for Morgantown."
