Tag: Durham (Page 1 of 2)

A Queer People’s Atlas of Bull City: Exploring the History and Movement of Queer Bars in Durham, North Carolina (Part 2)

August 2, 2022 / odrozd

This post is part 2 of a series that chronicles the history of prominent LGBTQ+ bars and nightclubs in Durham, NC, through an intersectional lens. Part 1 is available here.

By Mad Bankson & Duncan Dodson

To the 80s, and BEYOND!

As the eighties rolled around, gay people around the world were forced to become more visible. The AIDS crisis and increasing attacks from the Christian right led people to advocate for their right to exist and survive, necessitating more of a public presence. [1] This increased visibility led to a significant shift in queer culture, especially when it came to bar and club life. Though discretion was still preferred by many, there was more social space for gay establishments, and secret bars and informal gay spaces became less central in queer life. Though Durham was still a small Southern town, the changes of the eighties allowed it to expand into something radically beautiful.

The Power Company

Opened in the early 1980s, the Power Company was known as “the best gay club between DC and Atlanta .” [2] Jeff Inman, a DJ there from 1984 to 1988 said of the club, “The Power Company was a gay force. It was Grand [sic] period, packed with the who’s who.” [3] Located on Main Street in the building that is now occupied by Teasers strip club, the Power Company was expansive in size, sporting a multi-level layout with several bars, a mezzanine lounge, a dance floor lined with humongous speakers, artful lighting, and several disco balls. There was also a conspicuous staircase that served as a kind of unofficial stage for people to walk up and down under the gaze of fellow clubgoers. [4] In addition, the top floor hosted several “don’t ask don’t tell” dressing rooms that presumably offered privacy for more intimate encounters.

The Power Company provided a rare space of reprieve for people to truly let loose and be themselves without homophobic harassment. One former attendee said of their first trip to the club, “‘So this is what it’s like to be gay and open and not have to be beat-up or worried.” While it was explicitly named as a gay club, like many gay spaces in this time period in Durham, like-minded allies were also welcomed. The club was famous for having a large and loyal body of regulars as well as for being visited by many kinds of people, including Duke professors.

Furthermore, the relative openness afforded by the space went beyond just sexual orientation and gender identity. According to late Durham queer leader Mignon Cooper, the Power Company was also known as a place where interracial couples, immigrants, older people, and even straight couples would come to enjoy a welcoming and joyful club environment with a wide variety of people. [5]

Unfortunately, the club shut down in 2000, marking the end of an era for queer Durham. This came after a period of controversy surrounding the club in the late 1990s, during which the club’s downtown neighbors were highly agitated by the noise level, resulting in frequent police visits. According to the WRAL article, Durham ponders whether nightclub is a public nuisance; the Power Company began to draw negative attention from police and city officials after these disturbances at the club culminated in a person being murdered outside. [6]

One former club attendee noted that the club closed “after the crowd gradually changed from gay to ‘urban’ and people got shot in the parking lot.” [7] While this comment about shifting demographics may simply speak to the eventual popularity of the club among all kinds of audiences, it resonates strongly with other racially coded negative discourse about the character of downtown Durham in the late 1990s and early 2000s. To this day, the Power Company is still a frequent subject of conversation in Durham, much beloved by gays and their allies who used to attend. [8]

Ringside

In 2000, Boxer’s Ringside Bar opened for business. Ringside was a four-story artist club and music venue located at 308 West Main Street, a building that is now occupied by startup offices. “An amazing dive of a firetrap,” the club was famous for its funky, eclectic vibe, with a library, a large, speakeasy style sitting area, and dance floor/stage space. [9] By all accounts, it lacked a coherent theme or aesthetic.

Ringside was never marketed as a gay bar, though it seems that it functionally operated as the primary queer hangout space in town at the time. The club’s owner, a gay man named Michael Penny, had previously owned Boxer’s, a smaller explicitly gay bar. Boxer’s, which opened in 1989, was located in “a flying saucer shaped building off 15-501.” When he decided to open Ringside, Penny said “I never wanted it to be a gay bar. I never wanted it to be anything.” He later remarked that it was “a gay bar for straight people.”

The primary goal of Ringside was to create an anchor for the Durham music scene, which despite its many talented acts mostly performed in Chapel Hill. Alongside Duke Coffeehouse, the club succeeded at this goal and hosted many local acts during its lifespan. Unfortunately, the queer/art scene in Durham still lacks a solid anchor even today.

Ringside was the type of weird and wonderful artsy bar that could never compete with today’s high rent downtown Durham environment. After looking for the space for two years, Penny chose the building specifically because of Durham’s dense urban feel and low rents. Even in 2002 when Ringside’s owners and operators were interviewed by Indy Week, there were already concerns about how urban development might impact the space. While the long-term vision was to create a sort of multidisciplinary art space “not just for white hipsters,” Penny and his counterparts were concerned that the owners of the building would soon realize its value and opt to “turn the area into a big RTP.” The exact reasons for Ringside’s closing are not easily clear in the public record, but it seems likely that the image of the future they feared likely came true. Wild and wonderful, it seems by all accounts that Ringside was indeed “too sketchy” to attract high traffic consistently in a city that was undergoing rapid change as tech and medicine money flooded the city. [10]

In contrast to highly beloved venues like Pinhook and Power Company, Ringside’s gritty underground history seems to have faded more from the popular consciousness in Durham. Though its strange, multipurpose artistic vision does remain in the digital journalistic record, the extent of the gay happenings and events that likely occurred there is not well known. However, one remnant of the bar is still with us. Ringside’s old sign is posted on the wall above the doorway at the Pinhook, Durham’s only surviving gay bar today.

The next post focuses on 711 Rigsbee Avenue, another important gathering spot for queer communities from across the Triangle.

[1] Hull, B. (2001, June 21). Documenting the American South, interview by Chris McGinnis.

[2] Delgo, T. (2020, June 3). Power Company’s former patrons remember nightclub’s legacy. The Chronicle.

[3] Inman, Jeff. “Durham Nostalgia, Anyone? (Raleigh, Fayetteville, Jacksonville: Appointed, Houses, Schools) – Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary – North Carolina (NC) -The Triangle Area.” City Data, January 21, 2010.

[4] Delgo 2020

[5] Delgo 2020

[6] WRAL. (1998, December 28). Durham Ponders Whether Nightclub is a Public Nuisance

[7] Francois. “Durham Nostalgia, Anyone? (Raleigh, Fayetteville, Jacksonville: Appointed, Houses, Schools) – Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary – North Carolina (NC) -The Triangle Area.” City Data, June 27, 2008.

[8] Delgo 2020

[9] Mandel, A. (2018, February 1). Twenty Years of Bars in Durham. Clarion Content.

[10] Clarion Content 2018

Mad Bankson is a planner and critical geographer based in Durham, NC. Their interdisciplinary research brings together housing, land justice, urban history, and data analysis. Mad graduated from DCRP with a concentration in Land Use and Environmental Planning in 2022.

Duncan Dodson is a queer planner and researcher from Oklahoma. Community engagement efforts, disaster-relief administration, and data-driven conservation in Durham and DC brought Duncan to Carolina. He graduated from DCRP and explored the mitigation of climate change impacts on low-income and marginalized communities. He is most interested in strategies designed and driven by community members and organizations, and those that center on climate justice.

Featured Image: 2019 Durham Pride. Photo Credit: Jo Kwon

From the Archives) A Queer People’s Atlas of Bull City: Exploring the History and Movement of Queer Bars in Durham, North Carolina (Part 1)

June 15, 2022 / odrozd

This post was originally published on September 17, 2021. As we celebrate Pride month, we go back to one of the archives.

By Mad Bankson & Duncan Dodson

Introduction

A 2019 Durham-based advertising campaign asserted that “Durham is the most diverse, proud and vibrant destination in North Carolina.”[i] For those outside the state, Durham is most well-known for housing Duke University and for its large research industry. However, the Bull City’s history is defined by the presence of vibrant Black communities like Hayti, Walltown, and Bragtown, Civil Rights demonstrations and activism, burgeoning immigrant enclaves, labor struggles in the textile and tobacco mills, and much, much more.

Interwoven throughout these narratives, less visible but no less central, is a diverse queer history. Durham has long been a location of queer celebration and activism and features a somewhat quieter history as a lesbian and transgender stronghold in North Carolina.[ii] In qualifying the City’s assertion of diversity, this series traces Durham’s LGBTQ+ community from the 1960s through the present by examining the history of the primary gathering spaces for its community members: bars and nightclubs. Historic and modern accounts of queer representation in the city affirm a queer community centered around safety, expression, and activism, much of which was cultivated by bars and similar queer enclaves.

This series chronicles the history of prominent bars and nightclubs in the area, with some discussion of such spaces in connection with other marginalized groups along lines of race and class. It draws much of its fact basis from the archival work of the Love and Liberation Durham LGBTQ+ History Project assembled by the Durham Public Library, online forums, oral histories, and alternative newspapers.

No comprehensive research project of this sort exists, therefore this series aims for breadth over depth, addressing the reality that much of queer history is challenging or impossible to recover. As Durham continues to rapidly grow and bring new interests, it still stands to be seen what will come of queer bars and meeting spaces in an area with exacerbating economic issues, soaring rent, redevelopment pressures, and growing divides among people of color and white communities in space. Tracing gay bars and inclusive spaces through space and place offers some insight into these divides and helps identify what has been lost and which vacuums remain to be filled in Durham’s queer nightlife spaces.

This series is broken up into three parts. Part I tells the story of some of the first queer spaces in the Research Triangle through from the 1960’s through the 1970’s. The second part chronicles queer spaces from the 1980’s to more recently, focusing on notable spaces such as The Power Company and Ringside. The last section of this series focuses on Durham’s current queer bars and night clubs.

Pre-1970s

In attempting to create a historic archive of Durham’s LGBTQ+ community, researchers at Durham County Library remarked that “Little documentation about LGBTQ life prior to the 1970s exists, especially for trans people and people of color.”[iii] Because queerness was considered a vice, gay happenings were rarely put into the written record. Much of what we know from this period comes from oral history, particularly an interview with Bill Hull, a white gay man born in 1947 who lived in the area his whole life. Hull describes the Durham-Chapel Hill gay community prior to 1970 as “insular, but friendly — centered mostly around small, underground gay bars, close friends and private parties.”[iv] Though they were far from accepted by mainstream society in a conservative Southern state, available accounts suggest that gay people during this time were mostly left alone as long as they were not publicly visible or flamboyant.

The most famous bar location from the 1960s is the Ponderosa. Located in a “nice little colonial house” near the entrance of the Hope Valley subdivision between Chapel Hill and suburban Durham (“the boonies” according to Hull), the Ponderosa was a private club that required a secret passphrase to enter. The property had a small diner with a drive-in grill setup. Behind the diner was a large concrete building where people would party and dance, an extremely rare type of establishment for the time. Both men and women attended the well-known queer parties here. In addition, one visitor recalled that the Ponderosa was almost always attended by at least a few black people even in the 1960s.[v]

The Ponderosa attracted little outside attention. Though some attendees experienced gay-bashing from Marines (who Hull speculated were likely closeted themselves), the club amazingly had few police interactions. The city authorities were aware of the illegal land use and gay meetings, but “as long as there was no trouble there, as long as people are discreet and don’t break traffic laws and don’t do it in the street and scare the horses, there would be no problem.”[vi] In keeping with the general theme of queerness being allowed to exist in Durham so long as it was not hyper visible, Ponderosa never experienced a raid in its almost decades-long lifespan. When or why it closed is not well known.

Chapel Hill and Raleigh had more active queer scenes during the1970’s. While Durham gays gathered unofficially in places such as the Washington Duke Hotel bar (now Jack Tar restaurant), both cities had official established gay bars. Chapel Hill, home to a very large and connected queer community, was generally much more open than Durham (at least for white gay men). Bill Hull spoke of the cruising scene of UNC’s Wilson Library and several residence and academic buildings. There is less information about Raleigh, but it did have at least one gay bar called The Anchorage that opened in the early 1950s. It should be noted that gay men and lesbians did not interact much very much at these places. Many gay Durhamites made the drive to these places as well, just as today there is significant interchange among the various queer nightlife locations in all three cities.[vii]

The next post continues this narrative into the 1980’s and beyond.

[i] Strahm, A. (2019, June 20). LGBTQ Pride in Durham, North Carolina. Discover Durham.

[ii] City Data. (2008). [AfAm LGBT in the Triangle? (Raleigh, Durham: Chapel, Home, Neighborhood)] Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary – North Carolina (NC) -The Triangle Area – City-Data Forum.

[iii] Durham County Library (2016). “Before the 1970s.” Love + Liberation: A History of LGBTQ+ Durham.

[iv] QNotes Staff. (2011, July 8). Durham bar to close, reopen under new management. goqnotes.com.

[v] Hull, B. (2001, June 21). Documenting the American South, interview by Chris McGinnis.

[vi] Hull 2001

[vii] Hull 2001

Mad Bankson is a queer planner and geographer raised in the South. In their capacity as a researcher at DataWorks NC, Mad focuses on issues related to property ownership, gentrification, and eviction in their current home city of Durham, North Carolina. A recent graduate of the Master’s in City and Regional Planning concentrating in land use and environmental planning, Mad is most interested in planning practice that centers land justice, climate resiliency, and community self-governance.

Duncan Dodson is a queer planner and researcher from Oklahoma. Community engagement efforts, disaster-relief administration, and data-driven conservation in Durham and DC brought Duncan to Carolina. He was a second-year Master’s student in City and Regional Planning, exploring mitigation of climate change impacts on low-income and marginalized communities. He is most interested in strategies designed and driven by community members and organizations, and those that center on climate justice.

Edited by Eve Lettau

Featured image courtesy of Durham County Library, Meredith Emmitt Papers

Restructuring the Bull City: Urban Form Change in Downtown Durham, North Carolina from 1914 to 2020

November 5, 2021 / odrozd

By Rahi Patel

Intro

The City of Durham is growing. Over the last decade, Durham’s population grew by 22%.[1] With the continued migration of technology firms, biotech startups, and other businesses to the Triangle, Durham is poised to continue its rapid growth for the foreseeable future. As cities like Durham continue growing, governments and citizens will have to contend with changes to the built environment. An analysis of Durham’s historic urban form can help us understand why Durham looks the way it does today and what lessons we should take about the creation, destruction, and revitalization of our cities as we move forward.

Measuring Urban Form

For my senior honors thesis, I sought to measure Durham’s urban form from the beginning of the 20^th century to the present. I used four metrics of urban form for this analysis: direct building frontage, block area, block frontage, and off-street parking. Direct building frontage is the percentage of a block’s perimeter that has buildings abutting the property line. More direct building frontage is desirable because it creates a stronger relationship between buildings and people walking on sidewalks compared to buildings set back from the sidewalk.

Figure 1: Direct building frontage measurement. Source: Rahi Patel

Smaller block sizes and greater amounts of street frontage are desirable because they increase the permeability of the urban fabric, making it easier for people outside vehicles to access destinations throughout downtown.

A limited amount of off-street parking is desirable because off-street parking tends to degrade the experience of street life, creating lots and parking structures that do not encourage people to linger. The space required by off-street parking also pushes homes, businesses, parks, and other destinations further away from each other, eliminating the churn of people that makes urban street life engaging.

Figure 2: Parking decks in downtown Durham, 2020. Source: Rahi Patel

To analyze the historic urban fabric, I used historic maps and satellite images imported into AutoCAD to recreate and measure the buildings, blocks, and streets of Durham throughout the 20^th century.

How Durham’s Urban Fabric Changed

The results of the urban form analysis revealed a loss of cohesive, dense, permeable urban fabric from the beginning of the 20^th century to the present. Most of the change occurred from the 1950s through the 1970s. Average block size increased by 45% between 1950 and 1972. Total street frontage decreased by 10%.

Figures 3 and 4: Building footprints and streets of downtown Durham, 1950 vs. 1972. Source: Rahi Patel

The total amount of land area used for off-street parking increased from just 5 acres in 1950 to 111 acres in 1972. Direct building frontage only decreased slightly, though maps of downtown Durham reveal swaths of building demolition in some areas of downtown.

Figure 5: Change in land area used for off-street parking in downtown Durham, 1914-2020. Source: Rahi Patel

Planning documents published between 1950 and 1972 point us to the causes of these large-scale changes in downtown Durham. The federal government funneled money to American cities to acquire, demolish, and redevelop areas considered to be “blighted” under a program known as urban renewal. In reality, urban renewal programs across the U.S. targeted communities of color for demolition and displacement. Black communities situated close to central business districts were specifically targeted because of their valuable proximity to downtown. Durham was no exception. The Durham Redevelopment Commission displaced 4,057 homes and 502 businesses in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Hayti during the period of urban renewal (not included in the study area but located just southeast of downtown Durham). Plans drawn up by graduate students from UNC’s Department of City and Regional Planning in 1957 reveal the policy and design decisions that planners believed would help revitalize “blighted” areas. These included disconnected and hierarchical roads, separated land uses, building setbacks, and vast open spaces. In Hayti, little redevelopment followed the large-scale demolition of homes and businesses. Downtown also experienced demolition from urban renewal, and much of the destruction was not replaced with new development by 1972.

Figure 6: Existing and proposed land use maps for Hayti, 1957. Source: Durham City Planning Department

In addition to urban renewal, federal homeownership policies pushed planners to substantially restructure the form of downtown Durham’s streets and public spaces. Federal mortgage subsidies allowed white city dwellers to purchase homes in the suburbs. The spread of indoor shopping malls further enticed white suburbanites to avoid downtown businesses. This development pattern impacted Durham’s finances, because significant levels of tax revenue was generated by commercial buildings in downtown. City planners responded to the pressures of suburbanization by attempting to lure suburban shoppers back to downtown businesses. Planners proposed street widenings and the creation of a loop road through downtown to increase ease of access for suburban shoppers. Planners were also concerned with providing large amounts of clearly visible parking throughout downtown to assure suburban shoppers that they would have a place to park. However, it is not clear that any amount of road widening, parking construction, or urban renewal demolition could have competed with the larger political and economic forces that threatened downtown Durham’s future.

Tomorrow’s Bull City

Looking ahead, we have much to learn from the restructuring of Durham’s downtown. The decisions made by a complex web of planners, public officials, and private interests still shape the downtown we know today. 88 acres of downtown Durham’s land area is still devoted to off-street parking (decreased from 111 acres in 1972). A study conducted in 2018 found an excess parking capacity of over 5,000 parking spaces throughout downtown. The Downtown Loop cuts through Durham, creating a hazardous and uninviting environment for people outside vehicles. The Durham Freeway funnels pollution and noise through downtown and Hayti.

Figure 7: A pedestrian crosses Roxbury St. in downtown Durham, 2020. Source: Rahi Patel

Figure 8: Five lanes of one-way traffic converge on Roxbury St. in downtown Durham, 2020. Source: Rahi Patel

As the Bull City’s growth continues to provide new opportunities for redevelopment, Durham residents, city officials, and other stakeholders must decide how, where, when, and for whom that redevelopment will occur. The questions of urban form ultimately influence the daily lives of all a city’s residents: where we live, work, shop, play, relax, and celebrate. Hopefully, an understanding of how we got here will give us the tools to continue moving forward.

[1] Durham City-County Planning Department. https://durhamnc.gov/386/Demographics

Rahi Patel graduated from UNC in May 2021 with majors in Urban Planning (through the Interdisciplinary Studies Program) and Economics. He has interests in sustainable transportation, urban design, and architecture. He is currently a planner in the Transportation Planning Division at the U.S. Department of Transportation Volpe National Transportation Systems Center.

Edited by Eve Lettau

Featured image: Ground Diagram of Downtown Durham, 1950. Courtesy of Rahi Patel.

A Queer People’s Atlas of Bull City: Exploring the History and Movement of Queer Bars in Durham, North Carolina (Part 1)

September 17, 2021 / odrozd

By Mad Bankson & Duncan Dodson

Introduction

Pre-1970s

The next post continues this narrative into the 1980’s and beyond.

[i] Strahm, A. (2019, June 20). LGBTQ Pride in Durham, North Carolina. Discover Durham.

[ii] City Data. (2008). [AfAm LGBT in the Triangle? (Raleigh, Durham: Chapel, Home, Neighborhood)] Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary – North Carolina (NC) -The Triangle Area – City-Data Forum.

[iii] Durham County Library (2016). “Before the 1970s.” Love + Liberation: A History of LGBTQ+ Durham.

[iv] QNotes Staff. (2011, July 8). Durham bar to close, reopen under new management. goqnotes.com.

[v] Hull, B. (2001, June 21). Documenting the American South, interview by Chris McGinnis.

[vi] Hull 2001

[vii] Hull 2001

Mad Bankson is a queer planner and geographer raised in the South. In their capacity as a researcher at DataWorks NC, Mad focuses on issues related to property ownership, gentrification, and eviction in their current home city of Durham, North Carolina. A second-year Master’s student in City and Regional Planning concentrating in land use and environmental planning, Mad is most interested in planning practice that centers land justice, climate resiliency, and community self-governance.

Duncan Dodson is a queer planner and researcher from Oklahoma. Community engagement efforts, disaster-relief administration, and data-driven conservation in Durham and DC brought Duncan to Carolina. He is a second-year Master’s student in City and Regional Planning, exploring mitigation of climate change impacts on low-income and marginalized communities. He is most interested in strategies designed and driven by community members and organizations, and those that center on climate justice.

Edited by Eve Lettau

Featured image courtesy of Durham County Library, Meredith Emmitt Papers

A Passion for Preservation: A Conversation with April Johnson

January 24, 2019 / odrozd

DCRP’s Lucia Constantine recently sat down with April Johnson, the new Executive Director of Preservation Durham. In her interview, Johnson shares her vision for Preservation Durham and her passion for preservation.

Why is historic preservation important?

We believe buildings are important – they are our communal artifacts and the city doesn’t have to be a museum but buildings tell the story of where we were and where we’re going. And in many cases, they are very beautiful so they add to the aesthetic value of a place and therefore should be preserved.

Did you grow up in a place with a lot of historic buildings?

I did. I grew up in a small city called Goldsboro, North Carolina. And growing up our downtown wasn’t it wasn’t as vibrant as it is now. It’s kind of more vibrant now. But around the downtown there would be these big huge Victorian beautiful houses and a lot of them will be dilapidated or vacant, and I just always dreamed about them I always dreamed of what it would look like if they were just fixed up and repainted. I dreamed about those buildings – I wanted to own them, I wanted to live in them and I wanted to take care of them but didn’t see that as a career and my siblings or friends thought I was crazy to look at this old building that was rundown and think it was beautiful.

April Johnson, Executive Director of Preservation Durham, Photo Credit: Preservation Durham

Can you describe what Preservation Durham does?

We are a local historic preservation nonprofit organization and our mission is to advocate, educate and take action around preserving Durham’s historic assets whether it’s buildings or culture.

What is unique about Durham’s historical assets?

For Durham, what makes it unique is that it had the tobacco industry and we also had a thriving Black economic community at the time. We were one of the nation’s Black Wall Streets and the African Americans during the Jim Crow era were able to build big business for themselves. They built their own insurance companies, their banks and to the point here in Durham were almost every business was that they needed was owned by an African Americans, so they didn’t have to experience a lot of racial misconduct from other stores. They were motivated enough to be able to build that for themselves.

Could you talk a little bit about the work you did to document all the African American heritage sites?

So in 2009, Preservation Durham submitted a grant application to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to identify and document African American History resources that have been overlooked or that people felt wasn’t widely known.

That process was long but it was it was interesting and fun. I got to talk to a lot of different people, be introduced to community leaders and their family members to help me tell stories and to find information to figure out where are the missing stories, who are the people that we haven’t talked to and what are the communities that they haven’t been documented. So I wanted to find those other heroes that continue the legacy of black Wall Street and talk about those people

What came out of that project?

One of the things that came out of it was documenting the College Heights neighborhood. That neighborhood has been assigned a specialist to do the National Register nomination for the project for that particular neighborhood. And now it will be listed on the National Register for Historic Places. So that was a great outcome of that project.

Could you tell me what’s significant about that neighborhood?

College Heights is a community built around North Carolina State University, which is a historic African American black college. And so that neighborhood developed around the university. A lot of movers and shakers and lawmakers and professors and teachers and business people came out of that community. So it gained its historic, its significance based on its architecture of that time based on the people and events and the culture.

I know that historic preservation is sometimes pitted against affordable housing, particularly when people are looking to create historical districts. How do you navigate that tension?

That’s a tough one. Because I don’t know if we have that much control, the market kind of tells you how much they want to pay. And if a community is growing and higher income people are moving in, it’s even more difficult. But there are ways and tools that we try to apply by subsidizing rehabilitation projects in a way that it can be done affordably. I think those are the questions I want to answer; I want to figure out how we allow people to remain in historic homes in an affordable way.

Are there any models of cities that are doing that successfully?

There are models but again it’s about how do you find funding to help offset some of the costs that it takes to rehab a historic building.

We’re working on a project called Preservation Equity. And what that project aims to do is help people who are living in a historic house that needs repair work done or rehabilitation to their property but they can’t afford to do it. A lot of times they’re getting calls and being contacted by speculative buyer and they may be tempted sell and relieve themselves of the trouble but many people want to stay in their homes. And so we provide some funding to help with rehab costs to maintain a house.

And what role do you see historic preservation playing in creating an inclusive and diverse city?

Historic preservation already plays that role. It’s about telling the story of the building. So in this building [Liggett Myers] we can think about who owned the building – they were the industry giants here and they typically white men, but what happened to black men? Were they able to build a huge industrial company that passed down from generation to generation to generation? Typically black people were just just the labors and they didn’t get paid as much as the other white laborers so you can talk about the socioeconomic differences between people who worked in one building. You can talk about all kinds of things that went on in a building that give you a sense of the wider history.

What are some other ways you might signal the history for people who don’t already know it?

Sometimes the buildings have plaques or markers around him. Sometimes there’s art with some type of sculpture art around with some type of message about a specific event. Other than that, I think it’s going to take people being inquisitive. We also have a website called Open Durham where you can look at old buildings and see see their evolution and then see their stories written in blog form. And we now allow people to upload photos and tell the story of your family’s house or a building in town. We also do tours every Saturday – they’re free and open to the public. There are lots of ways for people to learn more about what’s around them.

What are you hoping to accomplish as Executive Director?

I hope to continue spreading the message that preservation is relevant today and to help people understand that you love historic buildings whether you know it or not because everyone loves interesting buildings. This is why we travel to other countries, because we love the culture we love the richness and we love the buildings because they provide all of that richness that we’re looking for. So my goal is to figure out how do we continue to make our communities interesting and unique? I hope people will want to work with us to protect our buildings.

Featured Image: The former Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company building in downtown Durham. Photo credit: Preservation Durham

April Johnson is the new Executive Director of Preservation Durham, a local nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting Durham’s historic assets through action, advocacy and education. Johnson grew up in Goldsboro, North Carolina and has always been interested in old buildings but didn’t know she could make a career out of it until a fateful conversation with an economics professor who encouraged her to explore urban planning. Before coming to Preservation Durham, Johnson worked as a historic preservation planner in Winston-Salem and Charlottesville.

About the Author: Lucia Constantine is a second-year master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Her planning interests include immigrant integration into cities and inclusive economic development. Prior to coming to UNC, Lucia worked in higher education and nonprofits. She likes listening to podcasts, baking with alternative grains, and taking unreasonable walks.

Racial Inequality, Gentrification, and Poverty: The History and Context of Durham’s Affordability Crisis

November 27, 2018 / odrozd

On any given night in Durham, young people mill about on Rigsbee Avenue, ducking into the bars and restaurants that have cropped up there. Liberty Warehouse, an upscale condominium complex that once was a tobacco auction warehouse, looms farther up the street. The transformation of this street is emblematic of Durham’s transition from a working-class tobacco town to a hip city known for its food scene. But along with the economic revitalization of downtown has come an increase in rents and housing prices in nearby neighborhoods, pushing longtime black residents out.

A recent study from the North Carolina Poverty Research Fund identified three downtown neighborhoods – East Durham, Old North Durham and Southside – as particularly susceptible to gentrification, a term describing the influx of higher income residents into underinvested and predominantly poor communities. According to this study, median housing prices in the downtown area have nearly doubled, from $180,000 in 2012 to $350,000 in 2016. The location, affordability and diversity make these neighborhoods appealing to home buyers, while poverty and high rents make them prone to gentrification. Many neighborhoods that were home to long-time black residents are now seeing a demographic shift; the study found that the majority of home loan applicants in 2016 were white.

The transitional nature of gentrification. Source: North Carolina Poverty Research Fund

As one interviewee in the study put it, “Yuppies are living next to low-income families. They have fixed up a house to be worth $300,000 right next to a house worth $20,000. Buyers are also squatting on houses—buying them up and then sitting on them until the black folks leave.”

To understand how and why gentrification is happening, the authors of the study, Heather Hunt and Allison De Marco, looked to the past at the effects of redlining and urban renewal. In the 1930s, the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation evaluated the creditworthiness of neighborhoods using race as one of the criteria. Thus, neighborhoods that were majority black or poor were graded red and consider “hazardous” for lending. This practice prevented many African American residents from borrowing money and becoming homeowners, which meant they were unable to build wealth and establish financial security. Red-lined neighborhoods were systematically disinvested, receiving fewer services and resources than wealthier, white neighborhoods.

In spite of redlining, the African American community in Durham thrived in neighborhoods like Hayti and the West End. Earning the moniker “Capital of the Black Middle Class,” Durham was nationally recognized for its black businesses, particularly the North Carolina Mutual Insurance Company. However, by the 1950s, Hayti and other African American neighborhoods became targets for urban renewal, part of a federally subsidized program to clear areas designated as “slums,” which in practice meant neighborhoods that were majority black. According to the study, more than 4,000 households and 500 businesses were forced to relocate to make way for Highway 147, and promises made to restore the community went largely unfulfilled.

White flight and gentrification in Durham, NC, 1970-2016. Source: North Carolina Poverty Research Fund

By the 70 and 80s, downtown Durham had been largely abandoned due white flight and disinvestment, which set the stage for developers and investors to capitalize on cheap properties when the city started to turn around in 2010. The same neighborhoods that were previously subject to redlining and urban renewal are now experiencing gentrification. “The search for the next up and coming neighborhoods has pushed developers and prospective home buyers toward formerly overlooked neighborhoods bordering downtown,” the study says.

In the case of Southside, which was formerly part of the Hayti neighborhood, gentrification was a “self-fulfilling prophesy” according to Hunt. The city invested millions to subsidize construction, renovation and purchase of homes with the intent of making them affordable to existing residents. That did not happen. Instead, median sale price rose from $20,000 in 2012 to $216,000 in 2016, with private market construction homes selling for $450,000 or more. As the study puts it, “the revitalization and subsequent gentrification shows how tricky it can be to break the bonds of history and race.”

Soaring housing prices and demand in Durham, NC from 2012-2016. Source: North Carolina Poverty Research Fund

Growing by an estimated 10,000 new inhabitants each year, Durham faces soaring demand and a limited housing supply that has created an affordability crisis. Local officials are aware of the issues but unsure how to address it. Unlike other cities, Durham doesn’t have tenant protections or inclusionary zoning laws, which would require developers to dedicate a portion of new construction or rehabilitation to affordable units. Local housing organizations like Habitat for Humanity and the Durham Community Land Trust help low-income residents become homeowners but they can’t keep up with the need.

The report does not offer any policy solutions but Hunt recognizes that city officials are “wrestling with the idea that it’s hard to do economic development without exacerbating inequalities that exist in the place already. Even in a place like Durham which prides itself on diversity and inclusivity, it’s still really struggling with these issues.”

Featured Image: A redlining map of Durham, NC, 1937. Source: Mapping Inequality

Advocating for Bicycle Boulevards: A Process in Durham, NC

September 7, 2017 / odrozd

How do community groups participate in transportation planning? Durham Bicycle Boulevards, an advocacy organization based in Durham, North Carolina, seeks to raise awareness for better bicycle infrastructure in the Bull City. Working in collaboration with Durham Area Designers, the group hosted a design charrette. The event brought together city planners, community members, and design professionals to create an outline for how Bicycle Boulevards could make Durham the most bikeable city in the South.

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Durham Bicycle Boulevards Concept from Brian Vaughn on Vimeo.

In late August, the City of Durham announced that it won a grant to implement Bicycle Boulevards from the North Carolina Department of Transportation. The city is matching the state expenditure with local funds.

If you would like to learn more about Bicycle Boulevards, consider attending the next Street Design Series meeting on Tuesday, September 12, 2017.

About the Author: Brian Vaughn is an undergraduate and minors in Urban Studies and Planning. This summer, he spent three weeks in South Florida, Charlotte, and Atlanta conducting a public life study around transit stations. His favorite transit oriented development is Union Station in Washington, DC.

Video Source: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Featured Image: Photo via Visual Hunt

A Brief Guide to Durham’s Alleyways

March 20, 2017 / odrozd

Alley. A narrow passage between or behind buildings.

This definition is too vague. I prefer (my own):

Alley. A narrow passage between or behind buildings that provides auxiliary access.

With this definition in mind, what follows is a list of Durham’s alleys. This list is by no means exhaustive; we’d love to hear about those you’ve explored that didn’t make it on this list.

Alley 26. Photo Credit: Rachel Wexler.

Right at the nexus of downtown, this beaut is hard to miss. This repurposed and highly intentional spot is so quaint that you kind of hate it.

Between 101 W. Chapel Hill Street and 353 W. Main Street. Photo Credit: Rachel Wexler.

Take a trip down this brand new red brick road to your downtown delights, or your parked car (depending on the direction you’re heading). Connecting a large parking complex to downtown amenities, this auto-to-foot gateway primes you for your culinary, commercial, banking, musical, or pharmaceutical adventures in Durham.

At the corner of Fuller and W. Corporation. Photo Credit: Rachel Wexler.

While not technically an alley, this botanically-endowed stretch of train tracks is where you’ll find the next pony express to Narnia. So it is indeed an alternative route considering that one would generally look to a wardrobe to reach such a destination.

8 Alley. Photo Credit: Rachel Wexler.

Minimal yet whimsical. Ignore the dumpsters to your right and the crunch of gravel beneath your feet will transport you to pre-pavement yesteryear. This alternative route gives you access to the bustling Ninth Street commercial corridor or the wacky businesses tucked behind the street-front stores.

Extension of 2 Alley. Photo Credit: Rachel Wexler.

The grand finale!

What!? Yes. Though not on public property, this Peter Pan dream is free for the looking. A mini ropes course that ends in the best club house around is located off of an unpresuming alley in Trinity Park. While not legitimized by Google maps, this alley is an extension of “2 Alley.” Access this focal point behind White Star Laundry.

What have we missed and what have you urban wanderers found?

About the Author: Rachel Wexler is the co-editor of the Carolina Planning Journal and pursuing her master’s degree in City and Regional Planning. Her bachelor’s is in english from UC Berkeley; prior to beginning her master’s she worked as an editor, cook, and musician. Her academic work focuses on economic development, neighborhood revitalization, and placemaking. Her non-academic work focuses on playing in general and playing cello in particular. She also thinks frequently about Oakland, California and Berlin, Germany, both of which she calls home. These are also the urban spaces that brought her to this charming small town to study planning.

Historic Stagville: This Place Matters

November 23, 2016 / odrozd

The largest plantation in North Carolina stretched for 30,000 acres across the boundaries of present-day Orange, Durham, Wake, and Granville counties. Established in 1787, more than nine hundred enslaved people lived and worked on the plantation by 1860.

Today, the remains of the plantation cover 175 acres in northern Durham County amid a forest of slender trees, which during the plantation’s zenith would have been exposed fields of tobacco, wheat, corn, and potatoes. The preserved site, Historic Stagville, has the only surviving two-story slave cabins in North Carolina, and focuses on the lives of the thousands of enslaved individuals who lived here over the course of the plantation’s history.

“The Great Barn” was constructed by enslaved people at Stagville in the summer of 1860.

Plan for All organized an early November trip to Stagville for a group of Department of City And Regional Planning students. Plan for All is a student group dedicated to making planning more inclusive. A newcomer to North Carolina, I participated in the trip to learn more about the state’s history. On our minds were questions such as:

What is the importance of this site?
What is the value of preserving and visiting such a site, particularly from a planning perspective?
How can its buildings help us to understand the past, and what role do they play in shaping the future?

As a profession, planning has not always recognized or prioritized the importance of places occupied by the disenfranchised. Our history is full of painful actions that disrupted places – preventing people from living in certain neighborhoods, destroying communities through urban renewal, and creating a built environment that is bad for our health and the environment. We have a lot to learn from our history.

Much of the land surrounding the Historic Stagville site, which previously belonged to the Cameron-Bennehan family, has been sold, incorporated into new towns, and slowly redeveloped (we passed a pharmaceutical building and a few secluded office parks on our drive to the site). The houses at Horton Grove remain as part of Historic Stagville, which has been on the National Register of Historic Places since the 1970s. The houses in Horton Grove are the only two-story slave cabins still standing in North Carolina. Built in 1850, they depart from the typical slave cabins of the time.

stagvilletwostoryslavecabin_karlajimenez2016

A two story slave cabin at Horton Grove, which enslaved people constructed between 1851 and 1860.

The circumstances of their construction adds depth to our understanding of Horton Grove: they are unusual for slave houses, both in the construction material and stature. What was the landowner’s motivation for having these structures built? There are two theories: one, that recent outbreaks of disease compelled the construction of better and more sanitary living conditions. The second is that these were “showpieces” intended to defend the institution of slavery and impress (or appease) visitors to the plantation.

Under much different circumstances, motivations of appeasement and keeping up appearances still plague planning and design today. City beautification programs, debates about affordable housing, and NIMBYism represent our ongoing societal struggles with place: who it is meant for, who benefits from it and gets to use it, and who has control over it.

The buildings in Horton Grove were continuously occupied nearly a century after emancipation by formerly enslaved people and their descendants. Its application for the National Register of Historic Places noted it as a residence until the 1970s, despite a large migration from the community to Durham that occurred in the 1930s–possibly due to the Great Depression, agricultural decline, and new farm ownership resulting in changing working conditions. The decision to continue living in slave quarters might have been unimaginably complex for the freed people. The opportunities for resettlement in nearby Durham and the options for work as a freed black person in the South must have played a role. So too must the uncertainty of finding separated family members and remaining where there was shared history. While a few families are known through the historical record (such as the Hart and Holman families) and genealogical research, we unfortunately do not definitively know about their decisions to stay or leave.

Because these structures have been preserved, Horton Grove brings these big questions into the present day. What do we really know about our places? How does the history of a building shape our understanding of history, and whose story gets to be told (and by whom)? What do buildings constructed today say about power dynamics and motivations of those involved? What makes a place important, worth preserving, and why? How can buildings help us to understand the past, and what role do they play in shaping the future?

stagvillemainhousekitchenoutbuilding_karlajimenez2016

A kitchen outbuilding behind the Horton Home.

Historic Stagville tells this story of buildings and the history of enslaved people prominently, in contrast to many other preserved and historic plantation sites around the nation. A sign in the visitor’s center attests to why these places, and the places of enslaved people in particular, deserve to be preserved, and the significance of witness:

“Still standing: why slave dwellings matter. Enslaved workers built the United States from before the founding of the nation to emancipation, but many of the places they called home are now gone. Some still stand. From coast to coast, in every shape and size, these structures bore witness to the lives of enslaved people. What stories can these buildings tell us today?”

A poster inside of the Stagville State Historical Site Welcome Center. Photo: Brian Vaughn

Credit to all photos unless otherwise noted: Karla Jimenez

About the author:
Katy Lang is a Masters student in the Department of City & Regional Planning specializing in transportation and land use. She spent seven years in the Washington, DC area and as a result, she has a love-love relationship with DC’s Metrorail and all things urban. She is passionate about pedestrian safety and the pedestrian’s right to the city and the street. Prior to coming to UNC, Katy worked in change management. She likes long runs on Carrboro’s short bike trails and eating popcorn.

Injecting Social Justice into Local Government

October 7, 2016 / odrozd

On September 28th, Durham City Councilwoman Jillian Johnson and Mel Norton of Duke University’s Cook Center on Social Equity visited UNC’s Department of City and Regional Planning to discuss with students and faculty the work of balancing social justice advocacy while serving in local government. Since Jillian was elected to City Council in November 2015, and sworn in the next month, she has focused on intervening in gentrification in East Durham and the neighborhoods ringing downtown, and maintaining and developing new affordable housing. Mel, who graduated from DCRP with a specialization in housing and community development in 2008, and who was a member of Jillian’s campaign team, has a background in economic development and affordable housing development in Durham and is currently on the board of the Durham People’s Alliance.

In this Plan for All Brown Bag session, the two shared lessons from their work in community development, citizen engagement, and grassroots organizing, all of which have practical applications for planning students and practitioners. Some takeaways include:

1. Community meetings must include the trifecta: food, childcare, and translation services. Mel and Jillian emphasized the importance of the trifecta in removing as many barriers as possible for community members to get involved. They also discussed what Mel described as a “slower and more organic process of relationship-building than endless community meetings,” through less-formal community events like block parties and through identifying and working with people who are well-connected and already politically-engaged (who Mel called community “evangelicals”).

2. Social justice advocacy within a political framework requires community-led work, or what Mel described as a “multi-level strategic approach to elevate voices that have been left out.” Jillian and Mel cited participatory budgeting (PB) as an example of bottom-up community engagement, where the community is involved first in asking the City Council for money to fund the participatory budgeting process, and then a wide swath of the community votes on what goes into the budget. Mel noted that voting through PB engages a wider group of people than local elections, since the voting age is lower and people who are undocumented or who have felony convictions can vote.

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3. In gentrifying neighborhoods like those in central Durham, neighborhood stabilization should be a major priority to prevent displacement. Professor Mai Nguyen asked Jillian and Mel for specific tools they use as community advocates, and Jillian noted that through housing surveys, she’s learned that two major issues for low- to moderate-income (LMI) homeowners are the high cost of repairs and utilities, and the rise in property taxes following a 2015 tax property reassessment in Durham. To address those two issues, the City Council funds an emergency repair program for LMI community members, and Jillian has supported a proposal to give grants to homeowners to offset the tax increase. Mel also noted that community land trusts, through which permanently affordable housing can be built, are a powerful tool for neighborhood stabilization.

4. Get involved! For students who might be interested in Jillian and Mel’s community-engagement work, Mel suggested volunteering with the Cook Center on Social Equity and Durham for All. Jillian strongly recommended that students and faculty take racial equity training, and get involved in small area planning, which encourages community input. She also suggested that students contact her at Jillian.Johnson@DurhamNC.gov for opportunities to get involved.

Plan for All Brown Bag Flyer

Featured Image: Jillian Johnson and her campaign team during her campaign for Durham City Council. Photo Credit: Jillian Johnson

About the Author: Carly Hoffmann is a co-editor of the Carolina Planning Journal and a first year master’s student in the Department of City and Regional Planning, focusing on housing and community development. Prior to UNC, she worked as a book editor for Amazon.com. Carly graduated from Columbia University in 2010 with a degree in Urban Studies.

Tag: Durham (Page 1 of 2)

A Queer People’s Atlas of Bull City: Exploring the History and Movement of Queer Bars in Durham, North Carolina (Part 2)

By Mad Bankson & Duncan Dodson

From the Archives) A Queer People’s Atlas of Bull City: Exploring the History and Movement of Queer Bars in Durham, North Carolina (Part 1)

By Mad Bankson & Duncan Dodson

Restructuring the Bull City: Urban Form Change in Downtown Durham, North Carolina from 1914 to 2020

By Rahi Patel

Intro

Measuring Urban Form

How Durham’s Urban Fabric Changed

Tomorrow’s Bull City

A Queer People’s Atlas of Bull City: Exploring the History and Movement of Queer Bars in Durham, North Carolina (Part 1)

By Mad Bankson & Duncan Dodson

A Passion for Preservation: A Conversation with April Johnson

Racial Inequality, Gentrification, and Poverty: The History and Context of Durham’s Affordability Crisis

Advocating for Bicycle Boulevards: A Process in Durham, NC

A Brief Guide to Durham’s Alleyways

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