The City of Greenville is one step closer to a downtown park.

At its Sept. 26 meeting, the Greenville City Council approved the purchase of the building adjacent to the Petty Building, which was demolished May 19.

The building will be purchased for $57,000.

According to McLendon, when the Petty Building was demolished, city officials discovered that the adjacent building also had structural issues that could be a safety hazard.

“We knew all along it could be a problem, and we had a structural engineer come look at it, and we made a decision it was better off to buy several more of those buildings to turn it into something very nice downtown,” McLendon said.

After this building is purchased, the hope is to purchase other buildings along that downtown segment, McLendon said.

“Hopefully, there will be a couple of buildings next to it and work it out with their owners to hopefully buy them all the way to the Goodwill building to turn it into a nice place where we can have some outings,” McLendon said.

McLendon said the city knew at the beginning of this project that there might be more purchasing of buildings since they are old buildings and close to one another.

The city has not planned on tearing anything else down or physically working with those buildings until it has put in a plan of what to put in that location.

“It’s going to a green area and not a parking place,” McLendon said. “It’s been a way of cleaning up.”