A PLAIN PARKING LOT

 

Sometimes a place just draws you back, the reason unsure. A parking lot on East Main in Rock Hill such a place. I parked there before taking in the quiet, hoping my camera would find a shot. Nothing special stood out, the lot gravel and broken payment, a few old cars oddly parked and unattached power poles. Still the place spoke of story.

It sat there like an unclaimed body just waiting to be tended to and remembered. Next to it the eight story Cobb Apartments stood iconically, away from the city center by itself, still somehow playing a part. It’s orderly bricks standing strongly against the randomness of the lot. It the only hint to the history of the place.

Curiosity tugs at you in these places and you begin to search for facts. At the turn of the century a 12 year old boy named Charles Cobb folded newspapers here. His father had died and he needed to turn efforts into cash. He soon had 20 other boys helping him deliver papers. The routes taught him about what the community needed, a source of income for the common worker. The lesson stuck with him along with a growing business talent for making things happen. At 22, he started a bank helping locals fund business ideas. Rock Hill needed industry. Cobb helped find it, attracting a large textile bleaching operation. Still Cobb took time out to aid Herbert Hoover’s efforts to provide loans to farmers to raise needed crops. Cobb arranged 138,000 such loans. At the same time bringing over 1,200 new factory jobs to the area. He never sought much credit for his work, but a 4,000 word article on him in The Saturday Evening brought brief frame. He pushed such attention away, saying he only sought to help the working man. His motto, “just think and do."

Cobb built a large elegant home, but after his death in 1953, it was torn down. The site rebuilt into the Cobb Apartments at his request. He saw the need for the common worker to have a  good place to live. Today, it remains a place for the working class to live.

So what can you learn from sitting in a plain parking lot. Maybe a bit of history that explains the place, how much events filled time and place, the impact of a life well lived, a legacy left in a building. Above all though, that things return to the same over time. How somehow you can feel one with it all, while sitting in a plain parking lot.