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rank Slate Brooks and Brad Newton have chosen to cruise through life, moored but not anchored to their spectacular Lindley Park home, a retro-pop sanctuary where elegance and eccentricity collide. Frank was raised in High Point, Brad in Burlington. They’ll have been a couple for 23 years this August. “We found out a couple of years into our relationship that our grandparents had been best friends,” Frank tells me. “We don’t know if we met each other as kids or not, but it was meant to be somehow.” If their names sound familiar, it may be due to a blizzard of publicity that erupted in 2014 after they became the first gay couple to marry in Guilford County. “I didn’t realize that the media might be there,” Frank recalls. With that in mind, their first thought was — would their parents be OK with this being public? “My father is very conservative,” Frank says. “My mother had already passed and my dad was out at River Landing. Someone had left him a copy of the newspaper next to his bed and wrote ‘Congratulations’ on it. I walked in and Dad said, ‘So what have you been up to?’ He was all good.” And so was the community at large. “We really thought there would be some kind of backlash or something nasty but it was the opposite,” Brad says.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
“At the baseball stadium the Saturday after, there was a chili cookout thing going on and people of all ages were coming up to us giving us hugs, it was just great.” Frank Slate Brooks, now with Tyler Redhead & McAlister Real Estate, has sold well over 100 homes in and around Lindley Park since 2006. “In 2001, I started out flipping homes with my then partner [interior designer] Laurie Lanier,” Frank tells me. “She staged a house for me and it sold in less than half a day. We did about 12 houses here in Lindley Park before we priced ourselves out of the market because when we started, Lindley Park was not what it is today. Everything that we sold raised the prices for all the properties around them.” After his experience flipping houses, Frank realized he needed to get his real estate license, “I really think we [Stephanie and I] were responsible for the renaissance of Lindley Park.” Graced with tree-lined streets, eclectic architecture and neighborhood schools, Lindley Park was ripe for a revival once people began moving in from the suburbs. It was originally the site of an amusement park designed by the Greensboro Electric Company in 1902 to generate interest in the city’s new trolley line. That 3-mile trolley ride down Spring Garden from the center of town took around an hour and a half. (You could walk in half the time, but the muddy terrain wasn’t exactly pedestrian-friendly.) July 2019
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