(Sense of Place by Jim Wise, Herald-Sun, 24 April 2003)
John Schelp is one of the guiding lights of the Old West Durham neighborhood, which has a Web site that´s just about the niftiest thing around in terms of presenting Durham, or one part of it, the way it used to be. Some of the warts and all.
And along that line, Schelp has devised something our town-gown relation has needed: a guide to the world beyond the East Campus wall for the inmates of Duke University.
"I recently spoke with a senior at Duke who told me her main regret after four years was not learning more about the communities near campus," Schelp says. "To that end, I´ve prepared a self-guided walking tour."
Schelp was so kind as to share his tour script with us, and we found it filled with engaging local lore. For instance: Elvis Presley once lived in Trinity Park.
According to Schelp´s research, tradition holds that the King resided in a big brick house at Minerva and Watts streets while undergoing drug rehab.
Now, the tale we´d heard is that the King once came to Durham for the Rice Diet, and lived in a caboose on a sidetrack near Erwin Mills. If that´s true, Schelp pointed out when we mentioned it to him, it makes a neat West Durham pop-musical package, because songwriters Don Schlitz ("The Gambler") and John D. Loudermilk ("Tobacco Road") are both natives of the neighborhood.
And those are hardly the only claims to celebrity for the district around Duke´s rim, for president-to-be Richard Nixon resided just off campus, at 814 Clarendon, as a struggling law student in 1934.
Such illuminating tidbits fill the walking tour, which begins and ends on Broad Street where a row of cedar trees marks the spot where once stood brick ticket windows for the Trinity College football games played on Hanes Field.
Moving counter-clockwise along the wall, Schelp points out the gray houses that were originally home to managers at the Erwin cotton mill; beyond them, the site of the black community of Hickstown; and farther on, the grounds that were once the brickyard of Richard Fitzgerald, a black tycoon of a century ago.
The route moves from the campus out to points a block or two off, introducing the Trinity Park, Trinity Heights, Walltown and West Durham neighborhoods. There are 20 stops in all, including:
-- The Ann Roney Fountain, built about 1901 as a tribute to Washington Duke´s sister-in-law, who looked after his young sons Ben and Buck after their mother, Artelia Roney, died in 1858.
-- Durham´s first Kentucky Fried Chicken, on Ninth Street, a small stand-alone building that has also served as liquor store and artist´s studio and is about to be torn down.
-- The corner of Green and Iredell, where the air once smelled like a laundromat from the soapy water discharged from the neighborhood cotton mills into nearby South Ellerbe Creek.
According to Schelp, the tour route is going to be posted on the Web and probably printed as an illustrated brochure. How far it will go to counteract Duke´s venerable tradition that Durham is merely a sooty and inimical backwater -- "Here be dragons," as the old mapmakers used to indicate at the edge of the world -- remains for time to tell, but for the rest of us it´s a good excuse to take a walk and reacquaint with our 150-year-old Bull City.
