Blandwood, a 19th Century mansion designed by famed New York architect Alexander Jackson Davis for Gov. John M. Morehead, became a landmark in 1988, the only one in Greensboro.

About 2,000 sites in America have been declared National Historic Landmarks, compared to more than 50,000 on the National Register of Historic Places, a notch below national landmark status. The landmark honor isn't reserved just for sites where positive history happened. History's dark side also is represented. Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, became a landmark in 1993.

Sit-in Movement Inc., chaired by County Commissioner Skip Alston and co-chaired by City Council member Earl Jones, hired Greensboro architectural historian Kaye Graybeal to survey the Woolworth building and prepare the landmark nomination.

Her work has been completed and presented to the National Park Service. The final decision will be made, perhaps as early as this spring by Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt, based on a recommendation from an advisory committee on landmark nominations.

"I was told that the nomination looks good and that the secretary's advisory board will approve it," Graybeal says.

Landmark status would give the Woolworth Building - Sit-in Movement Inc. hopes to make it a national civil rights museum - a higher priority for federal grants.

The nomination includes Graybeal's detailed report of the building's characteristics. The building is considered an excellent example of the Art Deco architecture, a flamboyant, streamlined style popular in the 1920s and 1930s. The nomination also includes a lengthy article about the sit-ins, "Legacy of the Five and Dime, The Woolworth Store in Greensboro, N.C., " by Jerry Cross of the N.C. Division of Archives and History.

Many people in Greensboro assume the Woolworth building, situated in the 100 block of South Elm Street, was built especially for the dime store chain. Graybeal's research, however, shows the structure was erected in 1929 as speculative office/retail space in a then-booming downtown. The architect was Charles Hartmann, who designed the Jefferson Standard Building, the Guilford Building, Grimsley and Dudley high schools and many other significant buildings in the 1920s and 1930s in the Greensboro area.

The structure was first known as the Whelan Building, after the owner, Whelan Drug. Co., which had opened a pharmacy in a corner of the building. That spot was latter taken over by The Jewel Box. Today, Lucas Jewelers occupies the location.

The rest of the building was rented out to retail businesses, most of them women's wear shops, including well-known but now defunct Prago-Guys, which later moved across the street.

The upper floor was reserved for rental office space and storage. It looks today much as it did in 1929, Graybeal says.

"It's dark and cavernous and kind of eerie," she says. Bare light bulbs illuminate the storage area. The original hardwood floors remain.

Woolworth took over most of the building in 1939. Before that, the chain had a store at 218 S. Elm St.

In its new quarters, Woolworth built a wide stairwell in the middle of the first floor so customers could get to a sales floor in the basement. In the early 1960s, the store installed escalators. They were among the first moving stairs in the city, according to Graybeal.

The store had a lunch counter from the start. L-shaped, it extended along the north and west walls of the first floor. Only white customers could sit and eat at the counter. Black people had to stand at a separate counter elsewhere in the store.

That policy prompted four N.C. A&T State University freshmen to occupy seats at the counter on Feb. 1, 1960 and demand service. When the management refused, the students refused to leave. The next day other A&T students showed up at the store. Eventually students from Bennett College and some from UNCG and other colleges joined the protest. The counter was finally integrated about six months later.

From then on until the counter closed in late 1993, black and white patrons sat side by side each day drinking coffee and enjoying the blue plate specials.

After the rest of the store closed in January 1994, four counter stools were sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington where they are now on display. Four other stools are part of a display at the Greensboro Historical Museum. No one knows exactly which stools the four A&T freshman occupied that February day in 1960. Two years later, the counter was remodeled and all the stools were removed to be re-upholstered. They weren't put back in the same order.

Graybeal believes the familiar red and gold F.W. Woolworth signs across the store's South and Sycamore Street (now Feb. 1 Place) entrances went unchanged from the time the store opened until it closed. The Woolworth chain removed the signs last year "but we are going to see if we can get them back," Graybeal says.

A candidate at UNCG for a master's degree with a concentration in historic preservation, Graybeal has has done five nominations for the National Register of Historic Places, including Union Cemetery, a black burial ground on South Elm Street. She has done architectural research work in Oak Ridge, Fisher Park and the ole Asheboro neighborhoods. She just recently completed research on the Dixie Building, across the street from the old Woolworth store.

But this is her first landmark nomination. It may have been the most satisfying.

"I think so because of the significance of the event that took place there," she says. "It has an aura about the place. You can envision what happened there."

And it didn't happen that long ago.

"Woolworth is a business I patronized in my lifetime. This was an event that took place in my lifetime," she says. "That is what makes it more significant."