As WSPA reported, Mary Duckett, president of Southernside Neighborhoods in Action, said on November 11, 2025, while standing near the base of a 125-foot tower that had just opened inside Unity Park: "This has been a dream. This has been a vision." Governor Henry McMaster was there. So was Mayor Knox White. So was Vivian Wong, the woman for whom the tower is named, who moved to Greenville from Hong Kong more than 60 years ago. The Thomas and Vivian A. Wong Honor Tower had been years in the making, and on that Tuesday it was finally something you could walk into.
Almost five months later, in April 2026, the city made a much quieter announcement. It had spent $420,000 to buy nearly 17 acres next door to the park, land that borders the Reedy River and sits across the railroad tracks from Unity Park itself. The city isn't planning to build anything on it. That decision, more than the tower's view, tells you something real about what's happening on this stretch of the Reedy.
The Line the Tower Stands On
Unity Park opened in May 2022 on 60 acres that once held two separate, segregated recreation grounds: Mayberry Park and Meadowbrook Park. The Honor Tower sits directly between where those two sites used to meet, on one of the few elevated points south of the river. The tower's position on that line can be read as a kind of reversal.
The idea for an observation tower goes back to Tom Keith, the landscape architect who designed Falls Park and first sketched Unity Park's concept in 2006. Keith died before construction began, but Mayor White has said the goal was always for the tower to do for Unity Park what the Liberty Bridge does for Falls Park: give it one signature image people associate with the whole space.
Getting there took a $11 million project, roughly half of it covered by private donations and the rest by local accommodations and hospitality tax revenue along with savings from the original Unity Park construction. Harper General Contractors built it. Paul Endres, a California-based architect with Endrestudio, designed it, drawing on the shape of old textile mill smokestacks that still define parts of Greenville's skyline. A base plaza named for Philip J. Carlton, funded in his memory by his family, now sits at the tower's foot and is meant to host memorial ceremonies for military veterans and first responders, the group the tower is built to honor.
What You Actually Climb
The tower is 125 feet tall, and the observation deck sits at the 99-foot level rather than the very top, a design choice that gave Endres room to wrap the upper section in a slatted aluminum and wood skin that changes color at night. Visitors reach that deck one of two ways: a glass-walled elevator, or 176 steps along a double-helix staircase built by The Heirloom Cos., a stair fabricator based in Gowensville. The design solves a simple problem. People climbing up and people climbing down never have to pass each other on the same run of stairs.
The deck itself carries a sponsor name, the Prisma Health Observation Deck, and from it you can see the downtown skyline to the east and the Blue Ridge Mountains to the west, along with the Swamp Rabbit Trail and Mayberry Field directly below.
If you're planning a visit, the tower keeps a tighter schedule than the park around it. It's open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. It closes Mondays, city holidays, and for an hour every day at lunch, from noon to 1 p.m. Unity Park itself stays open daily from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., with free parking and access from the Swamp Rabbit Trail, so you can walk or bike to the tower on a schedule that doesn't match the tower's own hours.
The Acres Next Door That Won't Be Built On
The land the city bought in April 2026, as The Post and Courier reported, sits just across the railroad tracks from Unity Park, near Reach and Willard streets, and it comprises mostly a grassy field surrounded by trees. It's also a floodplain for the Reedy River and Long Branch Creek, a tributary that runs through the property. City Attorney Leigh Paoletti told council that preserving it, rather than developing it, would help reduce local flooding along that stretch of the river.
The purchase came together from three sources: $100,000 from the South Carolina Conservation Bank, $100,000 from the Greenville County Historic and Natural Resources Trust, and $100,000 from an anonymous donor, covering most of the $420,000 price with city funds making up the difference. Councilmember Lillian Brock Flemming, who grew up in the area and still lives there, told council she remembers playing in that same field as a child.
What makes the purchase worth noticing is where it sits. The land borders Southernside and West Greenville, two neighborhoods the Post and Courier described in its coverage as fast-developing, in a city where officials have openly said land prices are making it harder to hit their own conservation targets. Greenville has a stated goal of preserving up to 35 percent of its vacant land as open space, and City Manager Shannon Lavrin told council the city intends to increase its budget for buying and preserving land again next year. Councilmember Dorothy Dowe called the purchase evidence of how seriously the city is taking that goal, but also said publicly that the city needs to do more.
This isn't the first small, deliberate non-development move the city has made this year either. At its March 2026 meeting, before the Salvation Army land deal closed, council approved buying 5.6 acres of forestland near the Greenville Downtown Airport for the same reason: to keep it undeveloped rather than sell it.
Why the Empty Lot Is the More Interesting Number
Unity Park already protects roughly 8 acres of wetland along a stretch where the Reedy River ran before city engineers diverted it in 1933 as a Depression-era project. That wetland has a boardwalk and interpretive kiosks now, and it's been part of the park since it opened. The 17 acres purchased in April 2026 more than doubles the amount of protected wetland tied to this stretch of river, and it does it on land that sits directly adjacent to some of the most actively developing blocks in the city.
That's the part worth sitting with. A city under real pressure to grow, in a real estate market where officials say rising land costs are working against their own open-space goals, chose to spend $420,000 keeping a 17-acre parcel exactly as it is. The tower a quarter mile away stands near land that used to divide people. The empty field next to it is now protected for a more practical reason: so the Reedy doesn't flood the neighborhoods on either side of it. The tower marks the history of this place; the land purchase addresses a present-day risk. On this particular bend of the river, the city has chosen to leave that field undeveloped.
For residents already living near Unity Park, that combination changes what you're looking at when you walk the Swamp Rabbit Trail past the tower. The view from 99 feet up shows a downtown skyline that keeps adding buildings and a stretch of green along the river that the city has now committed, twice in one year, to leaving alone.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of the Reedy is actually worth, that pattern of deliberate preservation is worth understanding alongside the market numbers. Brockelman Realty spends its time paying attention to exactly this kind of local detail, the difference between a neighborhood's price tag and what's actually shaping it. If you want a read on what's happening in the blocks around Unity Park, Brockelman Realty is a good place to start that conversation.
