Salisbury stake: the Rowan County seat wants to add an alluring center-city park, with a big assist from a rich, philanthropic native son.

• Author: Rakestraw, Emory
• Position: TOWN SQUARE

Every town should be so lucky to have a billionaire backer. Salisbury has the requisite hotels, shopping centers, fast-food restaurants and convenience stores that dot this stretch of Interstate 85 between Greensboro and Charlotte. But the rest don't have Julian Robertson Jr. The son of a textile-industry executive, Robertson was raised in this town with a transportation, textile and tobacco past. Now 84, the hedge-fund pioneer is nearly as famous for giving away his money as he once was for making it. A breast-cancer surgery center at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York bears his late wife's name. In Salisbury, the foundation named for his late parents has given millions to the city. In July, the Blanche & Julian Robertson Family Foundation paid $1.75 million for a downtown city block with plans to turn it into a park.

Downtown Salisbury already has some momentum. Once a major railroad hub, it's perhaps best known as the home of Carolina Beverage Corp.'s Cheerwine cherry soda and Food Lion, started in 1957 by Wilson Smith and brothers Ralph and Brown Ketner. The grocery chain went from startup to more than $13 billion in annual sales, turning early investors, or "regular people," as Mayor Karen Alexander calls them, into millionaires. Belgium's Ahold Delhaize now owns the company.

Alexander wants to turn downtown into a place "where you can go from having a cup of coffee to having a five-star meal." And a beer. Salisbury in September checked another box as a sign of a city on the rise: Morgan Ridge RailWalk Brewery opened in downtown's Rail Walk district, serving craft beer, small plates and burgers made with beef sourced from local cows. Founder Amie Baudoin, who is optimistic about the city's potential, also owns Morgan Ridge Vineyards in southeast Rowan County with her husband, Tommy.

One thing Salisbury can't change is its proximity to the state's fast-growing, large urban areas. The population of neighboring Cabarrus County, which borders Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, increased by about 65,000 over the last 15 years, six times faster than Rowan. Some developers view the city as isolated from the bigger areas, says Robert Van Geons, executive director of RowanWORKS, the county's economic-development group.

But Salisbury has a big-city amenity Charlotte doesn't--the city-owned Fibrant network rolled out 10-gigabit internet service last year, making it the first U.S. city to offer service that is about 1,000 times faster than the...