Downtown Durham is rising, seriously. I’ve lived here since 1981 and have seen downtown go through several stages of false-start renewals, managing to survive somehow the wacky ideas of urban saviors of one kind or another. Does anyone remember the pastel fish hanging in the empty storefronts on Chapel Hill Street? That was supposed to disguise the lack of actual businesses downtown but it simply brought attention to it.
City workers are frantically trying to get things ready for tomorrow’s “Durham is Rising” celebration. I was downtown yesterday to see how things were going and it looks like they’ll make it. Workers were cleaning the new stamped concrete, some still cutting brick pavers in front of Tony Gurley’s pharmacy, and there was some brick work that still needed to be done on the site of the old Jack Tar Hotel, which has been called “bare square” for a couple of decades now. Yesterday, with newly laid turf and all of the paving pretty much completed, it looked, well, elegant.
All of this surely makes people like Downtown Durham Inc.‘s Bill Kalkhof and the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau’s Reyn Bowman happy, but it didn’t come cheaply. City Councilman Eugene Brown estimated the bill at between $14 and $15 million when I spoke to him last night at the Mike Pressler book signing at The Regulator.
I’m a long-time Durham-o-phile with a love-hate relationship with this place. I know from talking to others that this is not unusual. Durham can be exasperating, frustrating and outrageous (like the banner downtown that might as well say “Whitey, stay out?”) but we love it nonetheless. It is already the entertainment mecca of the Triangle, with the Brightleaf district on Saturday night feeling like Key West’s Duval Street. When downtown reaches that point (which, this time, I think it will), we’ll have the Durham we always thought we could have. And that $14-$15 million will be recouped in property, business and sales taxes in no time as visitors from Chapel Hill and Raleigh flock here to enjoy themselves.
Workers cutting brick in front of Gurley’s Pharmacy:
The stamped concrete streets and crosswalks:
“Bare Square” is no longer bare. That’s the old Herald-Sun building in the background. You can still see the last edition of the paper published on that site on the press display on the Chapel Hill side of the building:
