[Durham INC] Save the date -- Neighborhoods Hike: West Durham, East Campus & beyond (Sat, April 13)
John Schelp
bwatu at yahoo.com
Mon Mar 4 07:30:28 EST 2013
Neighborhoods Hike: West Durham, East Campus & beyond
Saturday, April 13 at 10:00 AM
Meet
at Ninth
& Green (free)
* Why do neighborhoods change so quickly in Durham?
* Why wasn't Duke Chapel built in Walltown?
* Where did Madonna take early dance lessons?
* Why is Ninth Street called Ninth Street?
* What Pulitzer Prize winner attended EK Powe school?
* What song writer for Lou Rawls and Norah Jones was "born on a kitchen table" near Broad Street?
* Where was Kevin Costner spotted in his boxer shorts, near East Campus?
Come along and find out...
Three-mile loop starts at Ninth &
Green -- next to EK Powe School & White Star.
We'll start with the South Ellerbe Creek Nature Area and continue through an old mill village. We'll see an old liquor house, Buck Dean's bungalow, a parsonage ordered from a Sears catalog and a quiet urban garden in Old West Durham.
We'll continue into the Watts-Hillandale neighborhood and walk past Oval Park and the old Watts Hospital.
We'll go down a
hidden alley and see where a songwriter for Norah Jones, Lou Rawls and Jefferson Airplane was born. We'll head over to Walltown and hear about Duke's original plans to build here. Then we'll go by Richard Nixon's house in Trinity Heights and continue past the homes of Duke's famous faculty and coaches on Buchanan -- including Cap Card, the father of Duke basketball -- and Wallace Wade, whose bowl games paid for Cameron Indoor Stadium.
We'll go down Watts Street, past Trinity Park park, and see where Mr. Costner was filmed in his boxers. Then we'll head across East Campus to Ninth Street, past Erwin Cotton Mills and back to where we started.
You'll see a little nature and learn some Durham history on the route. We might even get into current events in the Bull City.
Local history lover John Schelp will narrate along the way. No need to register. Parking is available on streets near Ninth & Green. (Bike racks are also
nearby.)
Optional post-tour gathering at Dain's Place at 754 Ninth Street -- for a cold drink and further conversation.
Co-sponsored by Sierra Club, Clean Energy Durham and the Old West Durham Neighborhood Association. Rain or shine.
More history & old street map... http://www.owdna.org/selfguidedtourOWD.htm
Slide-show of recent walking tour...http://www.flickr.com/photos/dukedurham/sets/72157623837857952
More background...
Best of the Triangle: Wedded to a city
By Kevin Davis, Independent Weekly, June
2011
For
a guy who loves Durham, it was a long path from flirtation to going
steady to the altar when I and a thousand friends took our "Marry
Durham" vows.
Before we were even engaged, though, there was
plenty of dating. And like most relationships, there are those times
together that are just unforgettable. One of them in particular was my
best Bull City moment.
It came a few years back, when I heard
that Old West Durham's John Schelp was leading a history walk of the
neighborhoods around Duke's East Campus.
I lived in one of those
neighborhoods at the time, and being a visual person, I tended to
imagine everything in the color-coded blocks cartographers use to
differentiate areas. Those simple monikers ("Watts-Hillandale,"
"Walltown," "Trinity Park") are just zones on a map, sure; but they also
create mental barriers between areas.
Us and them; yours and mine.
As
we started walking from the corner of Ninth and Green, our crowd of
dozens following John, I was fascinated to see my own home in a way that
would never stand out on a two-dimensional rendering.
We saw how
higher elevations provided refuge from the bottoms, where effluent and
poverty and persons of color flowed. We saw how Durham and West Durham,
formerly separate municipalities, merged into one, leading to the
renaming of the ordinal letters and numbers that had marked the latter's
streets. We saw the home of the principal in the Bassett Affair on one
side of Buchanan, and the early dancing home of Madonna on the other.
It
was a best moment for me for having the chance to meet so many of what
were still new neighbors to me, and to see, in one very large crowd, the
interest and passion so many had for a largely adopted hometown.
Most
importantly, though, John walked us through Durham, as he is wont to
do, in a way that crossed lines of our normal clustering. We'd wander up
this street, down this street, duck through an alleyway for a sermon at
the temple of Schelp songwriter fave John D. Loudermilk, wander through
the grassy East Campus.
At first, something seemed wrong, even
if just at an instinctual level; we weren't sticking to our lines on the
map, but were instead taking our own, wandering path together through
all of Durham.
But I guess that was the point, then, wasn't it?
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