Snapshots of Old West Durham
This is a growing archive of shots submitted by residents of the neighborhood.
Visit it often!
This
is upper Ninth Street, the main business district in the neighborhood.
Our district fire house is here, as well as an elementary school. The
street features an interesting mix of eclectic shops, cozy cafes and
popular restaurants.
The Old West Durham sign welcomes you to the neighborhood.
Change comes to
Ninth Street, between Hillsborough and Green. This site's construction
began in 2001 (above) and is now complete (below).
Ninth Street North extends the pedestrian-friendly atmosphere of Ninth Street through the 800 block. The old-fashioned red brick architecture blends with nearby mills and elementary school, bringing continuity to the entire street.
A popular
neighborhood eatery, the Elmo's Diner building used to house the famous
Ninth Street Bakery. Earlier the building served as both the Atlantic
Beauty College and an auto repair garage.
Barnes Supply (was Atlantic Ice & Coal Company in the 1930s)
Cozy fabric shop
was once a filling station owned by Ralph Dennis. To the east was the
IH Hill Moving Company which ran several large moving vans. Owner Ike
Hill lived next door in a house with a large porch that was a popular
gathering spot for people to talk.
Durham's first
Kentucky Fried Chicken. Owner Pete Renaldi asked Col Sanders if he could
call his franchise, "Pete Renaldi's Kentucky Fried Chicken." The colonel
agreed -- making the Ninth Street restaurant the only KFC in the nation
to carry its owner's name. Today, Nancy Tuttle May's studio occupies
this little corner of neighborhood history.
White Star Laundromat is the second-oldest business on Ninth
Street. Only McDonald's Drug Store, est. 1922, has been here longer.
According to Tom Miller, the oldest part of White Star was once a neighborhood
ice house. Before electric refrigerators, neighbors kept food chilled
in iceboxes and came here to replenish their ice. Since ice boxes and
hot kitchen wood stoves didn't mix, folks kept their dripping ice boxes
on the "cold porch" (a small porch on the back of the house).
The ice house also became an ideal place to store winter clothes. The
ice houses started offering to clean customers' clothes after a season
in a storage room full of melting ice in sawdust. Hence, many of Durham's
older dry cleaners began as ice houses.
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White Star ad from E.K. Powe's Clarion paper, in 1944.
E.K. Powe Elementary School, 9th Street, between Green and Knox. When walking to West Durham High School on Ninth Street, OWD resident Joe Berini would avoid the mud in Hillsborough Road by following the raised wooden boardwalks that lined the street. During the Depression, Durham's high schools were consolidated and the students who attended classes on Ninth (where E.K. Powe Elementary is today) had to go downtown to Durham High (now Durham School of the Arts).
Durham
Fire Station No.2, viewed from corner of 9th Street and Knox. Back
when Wayne Smith was a student at E.K. Powe in the early 1950's, he
still remembers how the sirens and loud noises from the fire engines
would disrupt the classes. All the students would stand up and some
go to the windows of the school to watch as the trucks passed by. During
these brief moments, the teachers were unable to control their classes.
Smith went on to serve 30 years in the Durham Fire Department and whenever
he drove his fire engine past E.K. Powe, he often wondered if the students
were still watching. According to John McDonald, fire fighters used
to cross Knox Street to the school and select one student to jump from
an upper window into a net held by firemen -- to train for fire escapes.
Station No 2 in the early 1970s. Photo courtesy of Tim Nash.
Magnolia Grill (the
original Wellspring Grocery location). For years, Floyd Wright operated
a grocery on this corner (in the small frame building that now stands
behind the Magnolia Grill -- facing West Knox Street). According to
Tom Walker, long-time County Commissioner Dewey Scarboro built the existing
brick building in 1947. Across the street from EK Powe School, Scarboro
Grocery was a favorite stop for children for some 40 years. Mr. Scarboro
closed his store in 1978 and an Old West Durham institution, Wellspring
Grocery, sold its first produce through these doors. Today, this old
neighborhood grocery store is home to one of the South's most acclaimed
restaurants -- Magnolia Grill.
A community can be more than a place where people live. It can be a place where people live well. We are committed to a community where all basic needs are met and each individual has the opportunity for a life of accomplishment, dignity, and pride. We envision our community, from local to global, as one which follows these principles: Guarantee of basic needs. Celebration of diversity. Stewardship. Local decision-making.
People open shops in order to sell things, they hope to become busy so that they will have to enlarge the shop, then to sell more things, and grow rich, and eventually not have to come into the shop at all. Isn't that true? But are there other people who open a shop with the hope of being sheltered there, among such things as they most value -- the yarn or the teacups or the books -- and with the idea of making a comfortable assertion? They will become a part of the block, a part of the street, part of everybody's map of the town, and eventually of everybody's memories. They will sit and drink coffee in the middle of the morning, they will get out the familiar bits of tinsel at Christmas, they will wash the windows in spring before spreading out the new stock. Shops, to these people, are what a cabin in the woods might be to somebody else -- a refuge and a justification.
-Alice Munro, The Albanian Virgin
If anyone else has pictures of other OWD homes or landmarks, email me and either attach the scans, or arrange to drop off the pictures to me and I'll scan them and put them on the site.
Thanks,
Tom Clark, webmaster