Watts-Hillandale the focus of weekend's Old Durham Home Tour

The first weekend of May brings Preservation Durham's Old Durham Home Tour back for your chance to see inside historic structures in some of the Bull City's most venerable neighborhoods. The annual tour and fundraiser -- which in recent years has explored Trinity Park, Forest Hills, Old North Durham, and downtown residences and tobacco warehouses -- turns its attention this year to Watts-Hillandale.

This year's tour is set for Saturday, May 3 from 10 a.m. until 6 p.m. Tickets are $20 and are available from Morgan Imports, the Regulator, or Broad Street Cafe here in Durham; they can also be purchased online at the Preservation Durham web site.

Thirteen homes will be on display on the tour, as will portions of the old Watts Hospital, the community stalwart that transformed into the N.C. School of Science & Math after the hospital's displacement by Durham Regional Hospital in the 1970s. As the Preservation Durham web site puts it:

Watts Hospital's move... to a 25-acre tract at the intersection of Broad Street and West Club Blvd. invited the development of the surrounding area.... Around the hospital, homes sprang up for doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals who wanted to live near their workplace. Many of these early houses have the regular, boxey form and restrained decoration suggestive of the Colonial Revival style, with details like wrap-around porches with box posts.

Meanwhile, growth was spurred by the extension of Durham's trolley system to the intersection of W. Club and Broad Street. The lake at the Durham Water Works, built in 1917; Hillandale Country Club's 18-hole golf course, opened in 1923; and Oval Park were popular amenities of the new streetcar suburb.

Contractors built dozens of bungalows throughout the neighborhood in the 1920s and 1930s on W. Club Blvd and intersecting streets. Although no architect-designed houses have been identified in the neighborhood, the popular stylishness and detailing of so many of the houses indicate that they probably used plans published in builders' guides and magazines such as Better Homes & Gardens.

For the folks in W-H, the selection as the site of this year's home tour is doubly special as it marks the neighborhood's kickoff of its Centennial Celebration, marked by the groundbreaking for the hospital in May 1908. The good folks at the WHHNA will be recognizing their neighborhood's longevity throughout the next 20 months, culminating in December 2009 -- the centennial of the dedication of the facility.

Few neighborhoods in Durham, or the Triangle for that matter, have had the century's good run that Watts-Hillandale has. From the days of trolleys heading up the neighborhood (a mass transit forerunner to today's highway-generated development) to generations of parents and children playing in Oval Park, W-H has been an integral part of life in Durham for decades. Come out this weekend to tour the homes to learn why.

Comments

[Tad DeBerry]

Historic Hope Valley has also been a subject of the Preservation Durham Old Homes Tour, and indeed is one of Durham's "venerable" neighboroods. In fact, I believe, it was the highest grossing of the fundraisers, to date.

[seth vidal]

Wow, a trolley from ncssm to downtown would be fantastic. Can we get that back? :)

[John Schelp]

Here's a street map with the old trolley line...

http://www.owdna.org/1920map.htm

The trolley first ended at Erwin Mills on Ninth Street. The line was later extended up 7th Street and west along E Street -- ending at the golf course club house.

E Street was later re-named West Club Blvd.

Happy birthday to Watts Hospital and the neighborhood.

[seth vidal]

John,
Thanks for the map. That would be fantastic if a trolley existed than ran that route today.

[Ellen Ciompi]

The Preservation Durham tours are uniformly fantastic. I've attended almost every one for the past 8 years or so and enjoyed them thoroughly! The booklets they produce to go with the tour are really wonderful, full of great historic info about each house, each neighborhood, and Durham in general. We've lived in W-H since 1985 and am very excited about the public coming to see some of our great old houses and walking down our shady streets. Bravo to Preservation Durham for their hard work in making this event happen every year, and thanks to the homeowners who roll out the red carpet to all of us whose preferred form of voyeurism is taking house tours.