INC NEWS - Trains, Trolleys & Cars: How Transportation Affected Durham's Neighborhoods

[John Schelp]

[more about old roads in the area - http://www.owdna.org/History/history24.htm]

Luncheon reprises historic transit
By Matthew Milliken, Herald-Sun, 25 Sept 2008 

As it was in the past, so it shall be in the future. 

That was the intriguing inference that a listener could draw Wednesday after hearing "Trains, Trolleys and Cars: How Transportation Affected Durham's Neighborhoods," the first installment in Preservation Durham's 2008-09 "Lunch and Learn" series. 

Community activist John Schelp traced how Durham's earliest trails, including centuries-old trading paths, prefigured the construction of modern roads such as Interstate 85 and Hillsborough Road. 

Durham City Transit Administrator Steve Mancuso said that current trends signal a decline in suburban sprawl and a return to denser inner-city neighborhoods. 

UNC Chapel Hill environmentalist Tony Reevy predicted that possible future regulation of carbon emissions and other environmental reforms will likely make a major mode of 19th century transportation once again become a major mode of transportation in the 21st transportation: railroads. 

The rich once built estates alongside the iron rails. 

"That was kind of considered the best address in town, was to be near the railroad tracks," Schelp said. 

"The next generation did not like living near the railroad tracks," Schelp said. 

"They didn't like the noise and the grit. It scared the horses. They wanted it a little bit quieter," he said. "So the next generation moved into nearby neighborhoods like Trinity Park, where you're away from the railroad tracks, away from the noise, not so close to the factories." 

Afterward, streetcars created their own suburbs in places such as Watts Hospital-Hillandale and Lakewood. Later, cars created yet more distant residential areas in Forest Hills and Hope Valley. 

Rougemont and Bahama were both essentially created by the Norfolk and Western railroad that came south into Durham from Clarksburg, Va., around 1890. 

"This really opened up North Durham," Reevy said. "You could easily get to the national rail system to the north or the south, or locally you could get from Bahama and Rougemont, Lendover, places like that, to downtown Durham." 

Streetcars changed cities around the U.S., Mancuso said. 

"What they did was they extended the distance that people could live from where they worked, and still make it relatively convenient and inexpensive to get to work," he said. "It was the beginning of suburbanization -- [but] by no means the suburbanization or the sprawl that took place under the wheels of the automobile." 

Early streetcar suburbs were very dense, Mancuso said. Houses were built in narrow lots on gridlike streets, with spacious porches but no driveways or garages. Residential neighborhoods often had commerce at street corners, so many goods and services were within easy walking distance.