[Durham INC] Sunny & 73 for Neighborhoods Hike on Saturday (April 13)

[John Schelp]

Weather looking great for a walk through some neighborhoods...



Neighborhoods Hike: West Durham, East Campus & beyond 


Saturday, April 13 at 10:00 AM 
Meet
 at Ninth
 & Green (free)

* Who wrote the Kenny Rogers song, "The Gambler," and lived a mill house on Ninth Street?

* Where did Elvis sleep incognito, in a caboose?

* Why wasn't Duke Chapel built in Walltown?

* Why do neighborhoods change so quickly in Durham?


* Where was Kevin Costner spotted in his boxer shorts, near East Campus?

* 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?

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
 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?


==


More history of Ninth Street, Erwin Mills, Duke, Downtown, etc... http://www.owdna.org/History/history.htm

Slide-show of recent walking tour...http://www.flickr.com/photos/dukedurham/sets/72157623837857952
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