Morning, gang.
For the last few weeks, we’ve been sharing stories with you from The Assembly‘s new Greensboro bureau, from the choice of a new chancellor at N.C. A&T and a Juneteenth bike ride to the history and future of the city’s storied conservative weekly, The Rhino Times.
The feedback we’ve gotten so far lets us know we’re on the right track and you want more. You’ve got it.
This week, we’re officially launching The Thread as a weekly newsletter bringing you stories of place and power in the Gate City. Look for us in your inbox every Tuesday with news stories you won’t see anywhere else, features and profiles spotlighting the people of Greensboro, and investigative reporting on some of the toughest issues the city faces.
If you like what you see, please consider telling a friend to sign up.
We’re leading off with an election story.
No, not that election.
Not that one either.
While this year’s presidential and gubernatorial elections are taking up all the oxygen in the room, we’re looking past them to next year’s Greensboro City Council election. Why? Because at least four and possibly six seats on the nine-member council will change hands.
You’d have to go all the way back to 2009—when the continued popularity of skinny jeans was still making me look and feel ridiculous—to find the last election in which that many seats on the council shifted all at once.
“We have seen what happens when you get a council with a lot of new members,” Mayor Nancy Vaughan told us. “Sometimes they decide to plot a different course. And you know, the most recent example that we have of that was awful. Nothing got done.”
“We are giving this new council a gift,” Vaughan said. “The city is in a great place right now. We have lots of challenges, we’ve got a lot of things we have to work on. But we have to capitalize on these successes and not squander them.”
Read our full story here.
—Joe Killian
Read this newsletter online or contact The Thread team with tips and feedback at greensboro@theassemblync.com.
Black Magnolia’s Sweet Success
Standing in an empty lobby at Greensboro’s Revolution Mill development, Venée Pawlowski explains the rapid transformation that will take place in just a few weeks.
“We need seats for butts to sit in,” she said. “People get mad because they can’t sit down.”
Pawlowski, the owner and creative force behind the Triad’s popular Black Magnolia Southern Patisserie, is mapping out her expansion. In September, with some help from crowdfunding, she hopes to launch a coffee house next door to the current bakery.
She points to a wall that will soon become a coffee bar, a nearby nook that will be a seating area where people can take a break and relax. Left of the entrance will sit a large pastry case, with dozens of baked goods waiting to be snapped up.
Adjusting to meet customers’ needs is nothing new for Pawlowski, who has been coming into her own as one of Greensboro’s best-loved bakers for years. It was local demand for her cinnamon rolls that turned Black Magnolia from a pandemic-era passion project run out of Palowski’s house to a thriving business. That support continued in the roughly two years her shop officially opened at Revolution Mill. Now her beloved bakery is gearing up for its next big act.
When The Thread visited Black Magnolia recently, it was easy to see the need for more space.
The small shop has no tables or seating, just enough square footage at the front-of-house for customers to eagerly line up for Pawlowski’s salted chocolate chip cookies, blueberry cornmeal, or peach cobbler rolls.
And line up they do—even on a Tuesday afternoon.
While chatting with us, Pawlowski came out from the busy kitchen that occupies more than half the space to greet regular customers she knows by name, able to guess what they’re there for as soon as they come through the door.
And then the rush began, the small bakery filling up almost completely.
‘We’re going to need more,” an employee working the register shouted back to the kitchen. Pawlowski’s husband, Ian, assists as a baker and cashier and was trying to get another batch of rolls and pastries ready as another staffer kneaded, stirred, and scooped beside him.
Black Magnolia’s in high demand, something Pawlowski credits to her unique flavors and quality ingredients. And she’s always thinking about the customer, and what they might want to try next.
“I really want to be able to build flavors and be a place where people come in here, and they’re just like, ‘holy crap,’” she says. “I want to push the limits of what we’re seeing in Greensboro.”
Baking is both a job and a passion for Pawlowski, who came to Greensboro from Connecticut at 11, studied in GTCC’s Culinary Arts program, and made her name making breads and desserts for area restaurants and cafes like Blue Margarita, White and Wood, Table 16, and Maxie B’s.
But it wasn’t until the forced solitude of the pandemic—and a fierce, postpartum craving for the sold-out cinnamon rolls at Machete—that she decided to set out on her own, starting Black Magnolia from her kitchen during maternity leave. In 2022, the bakery opened its first storefront location in Revolution Mill, quickly developing a devoted cult following.
The bakery’s name, inspired by Pawlowski’s heritage and memories of the Magnolia tree in her grandmother’s yard, is just one of many fusions that the bakery, a combination of Southern and French techniques and a carousel of flavors, represents.
“I love the history of Southern food and Southern cooking and how it is passed down,” Pawlowski said, noting the cuisine’s deep roots in African cultures passed around the globe through slavery. “Our cooking came across the ocean with us and became, you know, what it is today.”
Black Magnolia has come a long way since the pandemic, but it hasn’t always been easy. The bakery has largely been funded with her own money, or in the case of serious emergencies, crowdfunding. Pawlowski tried for additional bank financing, but as a newer entrepreneur still working on her credit, she didn’t get very far. She’s had to keep things tightly budgeted and managed, and in the case of her inventive rotating pastry menu, a bit more focused on her best-selling cinnamon rolls.
Along the way, Pawlowski’s creativity has also helped fill the financial gaps. Her signature Bourbon Banoffee Pecan rolls earned her $5,000 from General Mills in 2020. A few years later, a last-minute creation called the Upside Down Apple Praline Biscuit, inspired by a classic tarte tatin and topped with homemade bourbon buttermilk biscuit ice cream, won an additional $20,000.
Those successes have been sweet, helping her fill gaps that more conventional business funding couldn’t. And they’ve kept the spotlight on what started it all—a craving for comforting baking married with new and exciting flavors.
“We always want to add a layer of flavor,” she said. “We want to take these traditional flavors, and we want to elevate them.”
—P.R. Lockhart
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Be sure to check out a powerful story from Triad City Beat and Next City that dives deep into the ongoing controversy over how the city will handle contamination at Bingham Park.
From the story:
“Between the 1920s and 1950s, the site served as an incinerator and landfill for waste from the US military and Guilford County. Landfills weren’t lined back then, allowing for a host of adverse compounds to leach into the site’s soil and groundwater. Then, in the 1970s, the city covered up the landfill and called it Bingham Park.
Until April of this year, the park was open—with precautions. Signs posted around the property warned visitors to not eat the dirt or drink from the stream that runs across the grounds. But once new guidance around acceptable lead levels in soil from the Environmental Protection Agency dropped in January, the city rushed to close down the park three months later and put up the fence.
‘They didn’t even tell us they were putting up the gate; that was a shocker,’ said longtime Bingham Park area resident Antwuan Tysor.”
City council is slated to make a decision on the future of Bingham Park this month.
Not a subscriber yet? Good journalism is expensive – and we need your support to do more of it. For just $5 a month or $50 a year, you’ll unlock full access to our archives and help us grow in 2023.
Already a subscriber? Consider giving the gift of The Assembly to a friend.
What We’re Reading
Making the Case: Last month, Cone Health announced it will join with Risant Health, a Kaiser Permanente-backed non-profit. Cone Health trustee Ed Cone penned a column for the News & Record advocating for the move.
A Hall of Fame Career: The North Carolina Music Hall of Fame will add six new inductees this fall. Among them: Greensboro’s own Clarence Avant, an A&T alumnus and behind-the-scenes power player some called “The Black Godfather.” Read about it here.
The VP Makes a Visit: Vice President Kamala Harris was in town last Thursday, visiting James B. Dudley High School as the 2024 race gets ever stranger and more terrifying. Check out the highlights at Triad City Beat.
Read this newsletter online or contact The Thread team with tips and feedback at greensboro@theassemblync.com.
Recent Greensboro Stories
Objects Can’t Lie
A Greensboro museum has been working to return artifacts taken from Japan during World War II.
North Carolina A&T Names Its Next Leader
The UNC System Board of Governors has named James R. Martin II the new leader of the country’s largest HBCU.
At A Crossroads
We took a road trip along one of the state’s oldest highways to probe what the “Carolina Core” means.
Around the State
How Blue-Collar Candidates Could Change Politics
An upstart effort to get more working-class people to run for political office takes root in Ashe and Alamance counties.
Shibumi Has Taken Over N.C. Beaches. Next, The World.
The ubiquitous sun shade is on a quest for coastal domination—and isn’t afraid to fight other companies for it.
The Wrong Side of Forever
The state and federal government are getting tougher on so-called forever chemicals. Residents of areas already hit with PFAS contamination think it’s too little, too late—and a new industrial boom is already underway.
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