INC NEWS - Column: City's real movers are its citizens (Durham News)

[John Schelp]

Column: City's real movers are its citizens  
By Jim Wise, News & Observer, 26 Jan 2008

Hizzonner Bill Bell, in his state of the city speech
the other night, commended the Uplift East Durham
folks for their bottom-up endeavor at turning around a
long-troubled part of town.

A point well taken -- coming, as it did, after a
litany of public-sector projects to do the same sort
of thing.

After some years of clean-up and watch-out and
spread-the-word projects, Uplift East Durham is
holding a tour of homes this weekend to interest
buyers and sellers of real estate in investing in the
historic but high-crime Driver Street-Angier Avenue
section.

That's all in the Bull City tradition. East Durham may
be a district of ill repute nowadays, but, hard as it
may be to believe, even tony Trinity Park was, a
generation or so back, a neighborhood on the way down.

That was before one 1972 morning when residents were
roused by the sound of buzzsaws -- and learned that
the city, in its infinite wisdom, was out to connect
Hillsborough Road to downtown with a thoroughfare by
way of Buchanan Boulevard and West Trinity Avenue --
in the process taking down the stately oaks standing
in the way of progress.

The peasants marched with scythes and pitchforks
(figurative, of course) on City Hall. One old vet of
the City Council grumped that Durham couldn't just
stay "a sleepy little college town," but the point was
won. The trees remain and the peasants learned they
could fight City Hall, after all -- in a city long
reputed to do its real governing off the record and
out of sight.

So began the neighborhood organizing and
politics-as-participant sport that now seems
hard-wired into Durham's civic culture. But it wasn't
the first time citizens succeeded with pushing their
own agendas.

In the 1920s, the city grudgingly formed a recreation
department after pressuring from a playground
commission from seven civic clubs. Poor kids got
school lunches in Durham by way of a civic club, which
also made loans to keep teenagers in school. As the
historian Jean Anderson put it in her book "Durham
County," "They took the lead because local government
defaulted."

And then there is the Eno River, destined in the '60s
by powers on high to become Lake Eno, rimmed with a
scenic drive and high-rise apartments and office
buildings -- until, that is, Margaret Nygard and her
eco-stalwarts dragged a city of smokestacks into the
Age of Aquarius. Rather than a reservoir Durham got a
woodsy park for all to frolic about.

Citizen activism doesn't always succeed -- think
Southpoint -- and excessive zeal can lead to
backfires.

Still, Durham and its citizens are the better for it.
Uplift East Durham may or may not make Angier Avenue
into the next Club Boulevard, but local experience is
encouraging when homefolks get on the job.

Cleaning up East Durham, that is -- a job the city has
said it was meaning to do since only 1993. Power to
the people, no?