Folks who have not had occasion to frequent downtown in a while will notice that the city’s original artery, Main Street, pulses with new life—nowhere more so than in its 400 block. Joining a handsome retail flower shop with eclectic antiques and decorative accessories next door is downtown’s newest furniture showroom, which opened its doors at 413 Main Street just last month.

Virginia Furniture Gallery occupies a striking refurbished interior set behind a renewed facade sporting much of its original neoclassical detail popular when this building was completed for Efird’s Department Store, presumably after a design by the Danville architect J. Bryant Heard. The building and its facade date from the early 1920s, following the inferno which destroyed this entire block when the second Masonic Temple burned to the ground in January of 1920. 

This project is just one of a rising tide calculated to lift “all the boats” downtown. In the past year, 27 downtown businesses have completed facade upgrades, with 24 enhancing their interiors—work estimated by Downtown Danville director Liz Sater to be valued, in public and private dollars, at well over $1 million.

Even so, the project at 413 Main Street—a building last used by Butler Shoes and vacant for years—is a prototype which anticipates the goal of enlarging and retaining downtown’s retail base. Its the first in a creative public/private partnership in which the DDA begins by renting a target building for $1 a month. 

Then, drawing from a trust fund dedicated only to downtown, the City picks up the tab for a quality rehab of its facade and the interior of the first floor—using adult detention labor for tearing out and simple repairs, with professionals performing skilled tasks. Next, a sublease is structured to recover the rehab costs of labor and materials within the time frame of the lease to a reliable tenant, whose rent returns monthly to the trust fund. The tenant must agree to use the space for retail only. At the end of the lease, the building, vastly-improved, reverts to its owner, complete with tenant!