Bull City Rising

Preservation Durham revives "Renovators Network"

Preservation Durham has announced that they're restarting their popular "Renovators Network," a monthly series of workshops to help Durham residents learn some important hands-on skills to preserve and improve the beautiful but sometimes challenging older homes that comprise our historic urban neighborhoods.

Most workshops are held on the third Saturday of every month, with the first session kicking off this weekend with local architect Nathan Isley discussing kitchen renovations in an historic home.  The full series is listed below; more information will be available at the Preservation Durham web site.

• Kitchen Renovations with Nathan Isley (February 24)
• Pruning Workshop with Frank Hyman (March 24)
• Thinking Like a Designer with Nicole Baxter (April 21)
• Moisture Control & Mold Remediation with Francis Conlin (May 19)
• Painting (June 23)
• Researching Historic Properties with Victor Gordon (July 21)
• Historic Tax Credits with Derek Jones (August 18)
• Plaster Techniques with Edward Rokosz (September 22)
• Green Renovations with Trinity Design-Build (October 20)

Nifong's Appreciation Week: With friends like these...

OK, if there's one thing that BCR is not about, it's the Duke lacrosse menagerie.  Local politics are more than fair game, though, and in that light, I wanted to pass along one of the most bizarre scenes I could have ever hoped to imagine.  From this morning's Herald-Sun, a colorful tale of a luncheon held Monday to kick off "District Attorney Appreciation Week" here in Durham:

Two of those behind Monday's Nifong appreciation luncheon in the DA's Office in the Durham County Courthouse were Victoria Peterson, rebuked by City Council members last month for making an anti-Duke statement at a public meeting, and former school board member Jackie Wagstaff, who five years ago received a favorable plea bargain on charges that she used a nonprofit organization to falsify requests involving $1,452 of taxpayers' money.

The original felony charges against Wagstaff were downgraded to misdemeanors.   

Nifong was not chief prosecutor at the time, but was a veteran assistant district attorney. He reportedly had nothing to do with Wagstaff's deal.

Peterson, Wagstaff, Durham resident Minnie Brown [N.B.: not to be confused with the perfectly pleasant and professional School Board co-chair Minnie Forte-Brown.  -Ed.] and another woman were the only nonstaff Nifong supporters on hand when a Herald-Sun writer dropped by late into Monday's luncheon -- about 1:15 p.m. Peterson said other members of the public had been there and left. Roughly a dozen others still around the table at 1:15 work for Nifong.

Why Forbes picked Raleigh-Cary, not Raleigh-Durham

There's been a bit of discussion on mailing lists and message boards as to why "Raleigh-Cary" was chosen by Forbes as the #1 "Best City for Jobs" in the U.S., while Durham didn't get even a mention.  The N&O (never one to pass up an opportunity for a jibe at the Bull City) was so kind as to point the matter out--

Although the site points out that Raleigh is part of the "research triangle" with Durham and Chapel Hill, those cities did not make the list.

Reyn Bowman of the Durham CVB shed some light on the omission over on the ABCDurham list.  Turns out Forbes was looking at the 100 largest Census Bureau MSAs (Metropolitan Statistical Areas.)  The so-called Raleigh-Cary area, consisting of Wake, Johnston, and Franklin Counties, qualifies at #51.  Durham's MSA, which includes Durham, Orange, Chatham and Person Counties, just misses the century mark at #103.

Bowman claims Durham's MSA would have been at or near the top of the heap if it had been included in the evaluation, though there's nothing quantitiative to back that up.  All of this raises anew the occasional question as to why the Raleigh-Durham MSA was split up in the first place, but that's another story.

Word to the un-Wise: A pessimistic look at downtown

Doing a little bit of research on American Tobacco for an upcoming piece here on BCR, I ran into the following gem:

"We've heard local folk -- among them the late Jim McIntyre of the Durham Arts Council and American Dance Festival ramrod Charles Reinhart -- wax visionary downtown Durham as a place to wander from art gallery to theater to cafe, to linger over tea and baguette while listening to a strolling violinist. Nice image, but it's from a different place and time. These days, who's got time to linger over anything? ....

Nowadays, we do our interacting by telephone and e-mail. We may say we don't particularly like it this way, but we live and function from garage to parking lot. We don't particularly need downtowns, which is why we don't have them anymore....  The old downtown, down around the Loop, just doesn't serve much purpose any more. Maybe there is one for it; if so, you can bet it won't be a rerun."

-- Jim Wise, The Durham Herald-Sun, November 2, 1998

Interestingly enough, we're almost a decade on from Wise's column... and from the looks of investment downtown, and at its periphery (Brightleaf, American Tobacco, West Village, and so on), I'd say Wise got it wrong on this one.

Lakeview on Erwin Road gets... TGI Fridays?

Sunday's Herald-Sun reported that the developers of Pavilion East at Lakeview, a mixed-use development "nestled" between Hock Plaza and Erwin Terrace by Duke's medical center and West Campus, will be the home to a Chipotle mexican restaurant, a Firehouse Subs location,  an "upper-scale sports bar" (gotta love that thar' Herald-Sun copy editing) and ... a TGI Fridays.

I will admit to scratching my head a little bit at first on that last one.  TGI Fridays, king of the strip mall outparcel in comfy, suburban shopping centers with plenty of minivan parking... on Erwin Road?  And not in a standalone little box, but within a mixed-use development?  I would have expected them to look for a location such as the outparcel next to Tripps on Club Boulevard, or elsewhere in the city, before a dense mixed-use development on Erwin Road (where the traffic is often just gosh-awful.)

Of course, the answer lies in the neighborhood. There is a tremendously large base of employees at Duke (the medical center alone represents the Triangle's largest employer) coupled with close to 10,000 students resident on or near Duke's West Campus.

Of interest -- and some danger to the good folks on Ninth Street and the Northgate gang  -- is that places like TGI Fridays and Chipotle are exactly the strata of dining option that many Duke students are gravitating towards when they bustle past Durham's true fine dining options to drive to Southpoint every weekend.  Here, we have Southpoint-style quick-service and casual-dining options without the long drive.

This project seems to have sailed through with far less (any?) community opposition than Duke's Central Campus project, despite the developers' up-front assertion that they anticipated building as much retail on the space as currently exists on all of Ninth Street.  Depending on the mix of other retailers we see for Lakeview (and I'd be shocked if one head out of the caffeinated Cerberus that is Starbucks/Caribou/Barnie's didn't pop up here), this could have a big impact on the good folks at Ninth, even before the first buildings open up at the new Central.

Expect the new dining options come fall.

Branching out, then turning a new page?

Late last month, the Durham County Library's northern Durham branch opened up near Latta Drive. It follows last year's opening of an eastern regional branch (way out NC 98), and will be joined soon by a new, southern branch in the RTP area.

It's great to see the library expanding; the new branch out east looks terrific, and the northern addition follows the same design. The wife and I had a chance to visit yesterday and spent several hours studying and reading in what is a fantastic, modern new facility, with tremendous amounts of natural light and a backdrop of trees that make this a beautiful, relaxing place to visit.

The design of these new branches hew to a more modern interpretation of the mission and purpose of libraries and repositories of and access to information, as opposed to warehouses of books and periodicals.  For example, there's hardly any open tables for reading, but there are a large number of public computer workstations with Internet access; comfortable couches and chairs near the floor-to-ceiling glass windows; group study rooms and a community meeting room that seats 100+ people; and even a copy center.  There's wireless Internet access, too, making this a perfect free (and low-calorie!) alternative to taking work to the neighborhood coffeeshop.  The nature of my "day job" has allowed me to spend a lot of time around some top university libraries over the last few years, and I have to say that Durham's new branch libraries compare very favorably with some of the best design and planning I've seen in this kind of building.

While these new branches look great, they beg an important question: what do we do with the downtown central library?

Can downtown's re-development be connected?

A thread over at UrbanPlanet got me thinking about an excellent question: with Brightleaf, West Village, downtown, and American Tobacco all undergoing renovation, what can be done to help these pockets of renewal be connected to each other -- both literally (pedestrian access) and visually.

From my vantage point, the answer is complicated and requires some patience (and public investment) to help connect the dots.  Let's take a look at the pieces.

Downtown streetscape snark 'o the week

An amusing quote I wanted to share, from a post by Philip Semanchuk to the ABCDurham mailing list.  A great image, and some days seems close to the mark!

"[N]either does it help that the downtown construction which has torn up streets & sidewalks has been going on roughly as long as it took to build Cheops' pyramid. I think they've got a single Italian stonemason placing each brick by hand, and he commutes back to his home in Verona every night."

For what it's worth, the downtown streetscape work is supposed to be finished later this spring (though I'm not sure the City's March 2007 estimate isn't a couple of months too optimistic.)  Snarkiness aside, driving downtown -- especially with the new traffic lights going up at Chapel Hill St. and Corcoran/Foster Sts. in the last few days -- the end of the tunnel seems to be a fair sight closer than it was a few months ago.

Hopeful turn for the ATT pedestrian bridge?

The N&O's running an article this morning about the (slow) progress of the American Tobacco Trail in Chatham County, particularly the replacement of bridges over Panther Creek and Northeast Creek.  (Kudos to the N&O's Joe Miller for his ongoing coverage of trail and greenway issues in the Triangle.)

Is there at last good news about the equally-stalled ATT pedestrian bridge over I-40 in Durham -- the missing link between the completed NC 54-to-downtown stretch and the Streets at Southpoint and points south?  Buried at the article's end is an intriguing quote from Bill Bussey, president of the Triangle Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, the non-profit that envisioned and advocated for the ATT. 

"The Durham process is moving along," Bussey said with a note of optimism. Bussey says the span is expected to be discussed at a Durham City Council meeting this month.

Pressed for details on what might happen at that meeting, Bussey demurred, saying only, "Expect something good."

Currently, no agenda is posted for Monday night's City Council meeting or for the Thursday afternoon work session that follows on the 22nd.  We'll keep an eye out on the agendas (on the Durham City Council's web site) and post any updates.  It would be fantastic to see some progress; as we griped about here last month, trails and greenways haven't seemed to be high priorities over the last couple of years for the Bull City's leaders compared to Raleigh's increasingly-realized vision for a dense network of walkable greenway paths.

Score two for the good guys...

Though Durham's government and bad news go together like PB&J, tonight's news has not one but two pieces of good news.  In typical Bull City fashion, of course, both are the silver lining of otherwise darker parts of the city, but on a cold and rainy night, let's take what good news we can get, hmm?

First, Pennsylvania authorities have announced they have taken Vincent Brown into custody.  Brown was one of the, shall we say, less than stellar candidates for Durham's mayor back in 2005, and though he had no chance of being elected (heck, even the infamous "J-Dub," Jackie Wagstaff, trebled his meager 1.4% showing in the general election), the Raleigh media had some good guffaws that this character could run for mayor in the Bull City.  And, hey, why not?  He'd been charged and sometimes convicted of a range of charges, including passing worthless checks, driving with a revoked license, assault (well, "simple assault," which sounds so much better), felony forgery and -- one of his charged-but-never-tried beauties -- offering money for sex to a seventeen-year-old girl who attended the church where he preached.  Brown was arrested (this time) on charges of accepting $30,000 for a demolition project on Guess Road that purportedly never even started.

Irony of the day: Brown was arrested in Chester, Pa., Tom Wolfe's doppelganger for Durham in his quasi-expose of Duke, I Am Charlotte Simmons. 

In somewhat better good news, Durham announced today a proposal for a city-wide program to inspect all rental property city-wide for code violations and signs of substandard housing.  Gary Kueber's written extensively at Endangered Durham about the problems Durham's had with landlords who could care less about the community and its properties, like "Fireball" White (some of whose historic houses have been allowed to fall into disrepair, to the point of demolition courtesy of the city) and Diane and Ronnie Sturdivant, of the "Urban Merchant Center" and "We Want Oprah" building fame, or perhaps infamy.  Unfortunately, Durham is still littered with landlords who have literally made a fortune on other neighborhoods' slums.  I haven't read the proposed ordinance closely yet so I don't know if it's too little or too much intervention, but seeing the city move on an inspection program is a step in the right direction.  To learn more, take a look at the proposed ordinance (Download rental_property_inspection_programdraft_ord.pdf - PDF file, requires Adobe Acrobat) for yourself.