The True Bellwethers of Revitalization

At the conclusion of my last post, I promised to delve further into the DNA of my adopted home town Durham, NC’s emergence as a foodie powerhouse and the bellwether revitalization role of locally-owned chef driven restaurants.

It is a movement rooted here in the 1970s and 1980s, that along with a sense of place revolt, deserves primary credit for Durham’s resurgence, including downtown’s, and helping make it one of the most acclaimed communities anywhere.

But the fingerprints of this movement stretch back nearly 70 years or more.

First, as an aside, it is too bad that communities don’t follow the lead of tiny rural towns such as Ashton, Idaho (pop. 1,000) - the closest place to the ancestral ranch of my birth and early years.

There, the local chamber of commerce is different from others across the nation which have long since deserted sense of place or wisely surrendered it when destination marketing organizations are established for that purpose.

Small rural towns without the resources for specialization are often sources of best practice nuggets.

An example is that Ashton’s volunteer business organization makes an effort to include in the profiles of each member, where possible, the DNA of each location often going back to when the community was established.

One example from my youth traces the heritage of a row of 1920s log cabins as part of a motel that I fondly recall behind the grade school I attended.

I wish I had thought to build this capacity into the DMO inventories and databases for the three communities I represented over the years.

Durham is so extremely fortunate to have Open Durham, a local website created and populated by a friend and physician-turned-developer.

It drills down location by location into the heritage of Durham’s built environment including occupants.

It was interesting to note recently in a Durham News Service post that a local native-returned-home chef plans to open a diner in the storefronts below a mid-century motel under renovation in Downtown Durham.

It happens that when when I was being recruited to come here in the spring of 1989, I ate at another diner in that very location, kitty-corner from the newly opened hotel where I was put up, called the Plaza.

But Open Durham reminds us that it was also the 1910 location of the Plaza Café at the base of the Hackney Building that preceded the classic 1960s motel now under restoration.

I’ve written previously that today’s colony of Durham chef-owner-driven restaurants dates to at least the first half of the 1980’s well before I was I was recruited here to start up and lead the community's official destination marketing organization.

That’s when these locally owned restaurants also became a force for revitalization of districts such as Ninth Street and Downtown.

But their finger prints extend even further back.

Nearly a decade before he opened Café Parizade in the Ninth Street District and Taverna Nikos Downtown, in 1981 Georgios Bakatsias (Bok-i-shaw) who has now concepted and opened restaurants in many cities, opened his first restaurant in Durham.

He was 19 years old when his persistence persuaded a local banker to place trust in him.  One day Durham will recognize that no one has done more than the unpretentious Georgios over so many decades to inspire its culinary prowess.

The former Bakatsias Cuisine was where the restaurant Blue Olive thrives today but while it wasn’t the first of its caliber in Durham including Downtown or the Ninth Street districts, Bakatsias quickly drew attention to Durham’s culinary potential.

Nineteen eighty one (1981) is also the year that Mary Bacon opened the former and soon-to-be-acclaimed Anotherthyme in downtown just as two dilapidated tobacco warehouses nearby were adaptively renovated as Brightleaf Square.

Both were a nod to the awakening brought about by the mid-1970s sense of place revolt that first ignited Downtown Durham’s turnaround.

As I noted in my last essay, it is chef-driven and -owned restaurants that first inhabit areas where the bones of sense of place remain well after their decline, inspiring adaptive reuse developers behind them.

All of what I have outlined so far predated the opening of arguably Durham’s most nationally famous restaurant, the former Magnolia Grill in the Ninth Street District, which chefs Ben and Karen Barker opened in November 1986.

In the early 1980s, it was the Barkers who were one of the very earliest pioneers of what is now known as farm-to-table by sourcing ingredients from local farms.

But the contributions of locally-owned, chef-driven restaurants to Downtown Durham’s revitalization was also nearly a decade before Nana’s and Foster’s Market, both in the Rockwood District, would add to Durham’s acclaim in 1990, while reinvigorating that area.

This was also the year Durham native and Magnolia Grill-alumnus chef Walter Royal, along with partner Don Wexell, opened the former Delta cuisine-themed Crescent Café in the fall of 1990 deep into in the very heart of Downtown.

Royal wasn’t alone.  Chef Mark Day had left Fowler’s Gourmet in 1987 to open a highly acclaimed Bistro a few doors away called Mark’s at Five Points, next to the former Ghirardelli Ravioli Factory (wholesale/retail) which had opened two years earlier.

Both were located where Bull McCabe’s is today and where the former Joe & Jo’s and the indomitable but unpretentious JoAnne Worthington made such an impact on the continued resurgence of downtown between 2002 and 2006 by being, well, Durham.

The Crescent Café opened just as lofts were being created above it in historic buildings along Main Street and just over a year after DCVB had been founded, in part to capitalize on national acclaim such as the Crescent would bring to Durham and downtown by mid-1991.

This was years before Downtown Durham Inc. came to life as an advocate for that area of Durham, fostering economic development from the supply-side as a complement to DCVB’s demand-side approach community wide.

This was also decades before building owners and developers would come to understand how important having truly locally-owned chef-driven restaurants is to not only property values but authenticity and identity.

But the DNA of Durham’s emergence as a foodie town also stretches back long before 1973 when Mary had opened an earlier restaurant in the Ninth Street District called Somethyme.

In many ways, it traces back at least to 1949 which is the first year that Mayola’s Grill opened in what is now the Brightleaf District of Downtown Durham.

It was through the block from what would open as the former Ivy Room later known for “chicken in the rough,” similar to a favorite place on Spokane’s South Hill while I was in law school.

Beverly Osborne who devised “chicken in the rough” in the late 1930s is famous for stating that;

“in business, the product is the vehicle that is used to implement a strategy for creating a good idea.”

No one grasps that genius more than locally-owned, chef-driven restaurants.

I miss Mary Bacon’s “AT chicken” at Anotherthyme and the stories she would regale me with about Mayola’s.  In part, it was the sparkle with which she articulated that heritage before her restaurant came about that helped make the DNA connection.

Mayola Nance’s restaurant morphed over the years from grill to grill and fountain to grill, fountain and pool parlor, to chili house, but Mayola’s was always a mainstay of Durham hospitality for breakfast, lunch and dinner from 6 a.m. to midnight.

The clientele, too, was like Durham, a blend of blue collar factory workers and university students, researchers and professors as well as bankers and lawyers.

The fun thing about scouring old phone directories such as the one linked from 1949 is that you not only get a sense of businesses at the time such as Mayola’s but you can actually see noted next to various names in the listings exactly who worked there back then.

Playing under Mayola’s feet in the 1940s was a young boy better known today for his weightlifting prowess even at age 76, something he has studied and perfected over more than 60 years now into what is known as Maitland’s Method.

Maitland Nance and personal trainers groomed in his controlled-movement method use it to strengthen clients of all ages in his small boutique studio where we go in the Ninth Street District twice each week across from Duke East Campus.

But in his twenties, Maitland took was he had learned from his Mom growing up in Mayola’s and soon developed or acquired dozens of restaurants in Durham and beyond including some still famous with Duke alumni who often regale them on basketball listservs.

It is a tough business.  Thirty percent of all restaurants fail in their first year and another 30% fail within two years of opening.  The local chefs and restaurants I acknowledge in this post are not only pioneers in sense of place, they were courageous.

Maitland’s included perpetuating the former Turnage’s out on Morreene Road as well as the former A.B. Morris Café across from American Tobacco.  Renamed Nance’s, it was still there when I arrived, although the Lucky Strike factory had abandoned it two years before.

It was virtually all that remained of what has now been resurrected as the American Tobacco District.

It was located near where friends whose DNA traces back decades in Durham’s foodie heritage will open NanaSteak next year at a corner of the just-opened ALoft Durham Downtown hotel, one of four to recently open in downtown alone.

Restaurants lead the way to revitalization while hotels mostly follow it.

Locally-owned, chef-driven restaurants were among the first to grasp that economic development, in the words of Ed McMahon, is “about what you have, not what you don’t have.”

Maitland’s first restaurant was the former Top Hat Bar Grill in the Ninth Street District across from where the acclaimed Watts Grocery is today, near where the famous Green Room is, having been renamed to reflect its role in the movie Bull Durham.

Still in his twenties, that was eight years before Mary Bacon opened Somethyme there.

Sometime in the mid to late 1970s, Maitland opened Maitland’s, a fine dining restaurant in Downtown Durham in Mayola’s location.

It was just after a sense of place revolt had halted the wanton destruction of Urban Renewal eventually drawing the attention of adaptive reuse developers instead.

It is from trolling Maitland’s that Georgios found some of his kitchen staff for Bakatsias Cuisine, some of whom joined him a decade later at Parizade and Taverna Nikos in downtown.

Robert Adams, another Durham native and the longtime executive chef of Parizade, had joined Maitland out of chef school.

It is from kitchens such as Parizade, Anotherthyme, Magnolia Grill, Fosters and Nana’s that a host of new Durham restaurants found their beginnings, including many being spawned today.

In 1981, Maitland, who was more comfortable with basic southern food, sold the site of Maitland’s to Mary Bacon for Anotherthyme, the year Brightleaf Square opened in two wonderfully restored historic tobacco warehouses nearby forging the template other developers have followed for decades now.

Little did he know that a few years later, Magnolia Grill and the Barkers would take basic southern flavors and recipes to the height of acclaim in the food world.

Restaurants are the bellwethers for resurrecting downtowns and forging other even more organic districts in a community, such as Durham’s Ninth Street.

Chef-driven and owned restaurants are at the epicenter for bringing settings back to life while preserving sense of place.

This is not meant to take anything away from economic developers, such as I was, or development advocacy associations or financial backers, including governments granting incentives, or the development community.

But all of these and more are merely cogs when viewed strategically.

Today as noted in the SlideShare document linked to the image above, huge national developers, such as North American Properties, have identified locally-owned chef driven and owned restaurants as “the secret sauce,” to “establishing an identity.”

Nearly 40 years ago, Durham became a pioneer not only in North Carolina but nationwide in the realization that locally-owned chef-driven restaurants are one of the first and most important ingredients to revitalization. 

Any recognition of the revitalization we see here today is grossly remiss if that heritage is not prominently recognized.

New Discoveries Related to An Excursion 26 Years Ago

It crossed my mind recently as I commuted the short distance from a lakeside retreat in northeastern Person County back down to Durham, NC which has been my home since 1989, that it was horses and a good steak that caused me to first make the journey up there 26 years ago.

I wanted to see a pasture full of Percheron, a breed of draft horses.  Back then these teams spent a good deal of time on the road, pulling an old 1900s farm wagon through small town parades on behalf of Southern States, a farmer’s coop.

By the time I was born, a fifth generation Idaho horse and beef cattle rancher, the bottom was falling out of the market for horses.

When my great grandparents had homesteaded and assembled that spread along the Henry’s Fork in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, there were more than 22 million horses in the United States.

By the time I came along four decades later the number had dropped from nearly 12 million at the end of World War II to just 7.6 million in the late 1940’s.  By the time I turned 12 years old there were barely 3 million nationwide including our three working saddle horses.

My paternal grandfather who had bred and trained draft horses back when there was a market for them also had a reputation earned as a trainer for saddle horses.

He kept three teams of draft animals for nostalgia while I was coming up playing among them and my favorite had been a beautiful, black and gray speckled, purebred Percheron named Dolly.

By the time I arrived in Durham in mid-1989, recruited to establish my fifth community destination marketing startup (two from scratch) in my now long concluded career, the community was already well on its way to earning a national reputation for great restaurants.

In fact, most people where were here by then agree with Dr. Nathan Vandergrift, the head of Duke University’s Biostatistics and Bioinformatics Center, who once noted regarding that era”:

"…what's put Durham back on track is food…"

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble but Durham’s re-emergence including the resurrection of Downtown began in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

My subsequent arrival and the founding of DCVB to distill Durham’s personality and manage the community’s reputation as well as foster and leverage Durham’s sense of place, including its food scene, into demand-side economic development certainly played a role.

But revitalization was firmly underway more than two decades before the founding of Downtown Durham Inc. to champion the supply-side and three decades before tax incentives spawned newer developments often credited today.

I definitely wasn’t the second coming for Durham, nor was anyone who followed.  That designation belongs to sense of place preservationists including the late 1970s DNA that spawned its reputation for great chefs.

So what was I doing at a steak place clear up in Person County so soon after my arrival?  Northern Durham County and much of adjacent Person County remind me of my rural roots.

Anywhere I’ve lived, it is settings such as this that still ground me when I gravitate to them.  It may be why I am also so intrigued by Person County’s Sunset Ridge Buffalo Farm and the fact that as late as 1728, Buffalo still inhabited the bottoms of what is today’s Hyco Lake. across the from our retreat on Lake Mayo.

On the way back from seeing those Percheron back in 1990, we stopped at a restaurant in outer Timberlake that had been opened by the Cash’s three years earlier now called the Homestead Steakhouse and Country Store, one of two notable steakhouses in Person County.

By the time I arrived or soon after, the Cash’s had also opened a great breakfast diner I frequented in uptown Roxboro called Farmers Supply which, unfortunately, a subsequent owner took under by not remitting sales taxes.

Our lakeside retreat is in Holloway Township but it is within a nice drive through countryside to Roxboro, a town of between 8,000 and 9,000 or a fifth of  Person County’s population.

Yanni, a chef-friend of ours in Durham recently put us onto a great new restaurant up in little ‘ole Roxboro named Brookland Eats.

It was recently founded by two Northern Durham High School classmates after returning to North Carolina, one with roots up there, who opened in a restaurant space in a restored 113-year-old building at the intersection of Old Durham and Allensville roads.

They lured a well-known chef with them back to his native Person County.

Technically, Brookland Eats is in Brooksdale, a township of Person County that is incorporated into the Roxboro town limits.  The old building used to be a Fox & Co. general merchandise store back in the day.

The proprietor, G.M. Fox, married a Brooks, the family for whom the now neighborhood is named.  The name Brookland Eats is a nod to Brooksdale I suspect and sense of place.

Good restaurants understand the monetary value of accenting authentic sense of place.

Designations, including postal and statutory, but not authentic sense of place.

More in the next post on the earlier DNA of Durham’s 1980s era culinary reputation that is so evident in its chef driven restaurants of today.

Choice Architecture–Changing Defaults

A flashback on this, America Recycles Day, has me wondering if recycling may offer a possibility for the eventual home of a full-fledged Museum of Durham History, once it moves beyond the current avatar.

When I first visited Union Square in San Francisco, it was late September 1981.  A friend with Alaska Airlines, which had begun service to San Francisco two years earlier, had arranged for a group of us to fly from Alaska down to Oakland to see the Seahawks play the Raiders (Raiders won.)

On the way back to the airport, I asked if we could stop a few blocks west of the Square to see what was the late Bill Kimpton’s first boutique hotel, the Clarion Bedford, which six months earlier had launched a movement that is still revolutionizing lodging today.

Bill created a collection of very distinct properties, each with its own personality and its own chef-driven restaurant.  The Clarion had been a hotel owned by Lord Wedgewood (China) but essentially Bill took the idea of adaptively reusing old buildings to a new level, which is a form of recycling.

Union Square was originally just a park developed in the 1850s on the site of a huge sand dune.  But after the earthquake of 1906 there was talk of turning it into a parking lot, which then morphed into excavating an underground parking deck below the park and plaza, a form of recycling.

That idea didn’t win over voters until the late 1930s after San Franciscans had bet their homes to finance the Golden Gate Bridge.  When I visited, just as the 1980s got ready to economically boom, Union Square was being surrounded by high-end luxury stores.

A luxury hotel, now rebranded a J.W. Marriott, was erected by John Portman seven years after my visit, midway between the Square and the Kimpton’s Clarion Bedford.  That it marked the end of one era and the beginning of another was emerging during a stint there during a several months between gigs in  my field of community marketing.

Portman had started his career in the 1960s by ingeniously making adaptive reuse (a form of recycling) of a parking deck in Atlanta to create a Merchandise Mart.  In the 1970s and 1980s he made his name in hotels during the “brass and glass” era.

First it was by setting a new standard with the design of Hyatt Regencies and then in the 1980s, Marriott Marquis’, one of which kick started adaptive reuse of Times Square in New York while, regretfully, demolishing five historic theaters in the process.

Emerging out of controversy, the hotel was ultimately required to incorporate a new theater on the third floor.

It is clear in hindsight that the 1980s were bookended by the beginning of the boutique movement and the end of the era of huge atrium lobbies and rooftop restaurants.

Lodging began a transition, which is still underway, to Kimpton’s infinitely more distinctive and genuine community-connected approach now being emulated by chains.

Parking decks have evolved too.  Long viewed as uninspiring if not downright ugly necessities, many today are hidden inside retail and residential complexes or wrapped in disguise by developments like hotels or facades.

But old and new public decks are now are being adapted to feature retail or or restaurants or cultural facilities such as museums and galleries on the ground floor with rooftop residential and public spaces.

There is no reason a future new or renovated deck in Durham, North Carolina where I live can’t incorporate, on the ground floor, the 20,000 to 30,000 square feet typically needed by a local community history museum, which come to think of it is itself a form of recycling.

A good example is the State Street deck being built by local government in Sarasota, Florida as part of an agreement with a developer and rendered in the image in this blog.

A big part of getting institutions and individuals to recycle is a behavior called “choice architecture” in the book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, written by Dr. Richard H. Thaler, a behavioral economics researcher at the University of Chicago and Cass Sunstein a professor of law at Harvard.

Getting people to recycle or adaptively reuse involves changing defaults.

One example is called “reverse recycling” which means switching up trash receptacles so trash goes in the little saddle bags once meant for recyclables and recyclables go in the much larger basket usually used for garbage.

A few years ago, I persuaded our sanitation department in Durham to replace my broken trash cart with a much smaller one since I was rarely filling the larger one after the city distributed much larger roll out carts for recycling.

Persistence paid off but I realized the department was stuck with the huge cart being the default.

But there is evidence that if the city gave every one the choice of a smaller cart along with a reduced fee, people would switch defaults and think recycling first and garbage second.  Here is a Nudge blog post showing how changing that ratio works and explaining why.

Studies show the same is true of grocery shopping carts.  Researchers at New Mexico State University found that people made healthier choices about food when carts were marked with tape showing where to put fruits and vegetables.

I love the smaller carts at Kroger and Food Lion but there are only a handful available, and usually none at Harris Teeter where I shop.  It is probably not coincidence that the smaller carts are the default at the more sustainability-focused Whole Foods in Durham.

The second call to action in the recycling slogan is “reduce.”  I bet the choices would be healthier if all stores made the smaller carts the default and the larger carts the exception.

All of these stores need to follow Whole Foods’ lead and at least reverse the ratio of large to small carts.  The first word in the slogan for recycling is “reduce.”

The Calculus of Trees and Parking Lots

I selected my favorite grocery store based on its produce section, particularly its apples.  Even though it was built in 1995, the parking lot there seems nearly devoid of trees.

Shoppers vie for the 6 tree-shaded parking spots that aren’t reserved for customers who are disabled.  There are five other trees toward the back of the lot where no one parks.  Making this amenity even more precious is that these are small trees that don’t provide much shade.

For several months of the year, it gets very hot in Durham, North Carolina where I live.  Studies dating back nearly to when that facility was built have shown that trees reduce asphalt temperatures by 36 degrees and interior vehicle cabin temperatures by 47 degrees.

Parking lot trees also reduce emissions from fuel tanks, hosing, belts and vinyl car parts while vehicles sit in hot parking lots. They also capture and cleanse storm run off that otherwise passes pollutants on to unsuspecting taxpayers who may never park there.

Parking lots across the country have nearly 700 million parking spaces alone.  That’s about three for every car, SUV, pickup and motorcycle in the United States. This doesn’t count the 1.3 billion parking spaces that are not in parking lots.

Good developers understand the economic value of trees, e.g. they preserve parking lot surfaces by 40-60% longer.  Unfortunately, there are far too few good developers and even fewer who understand and use “full-cost” accounting.

Communities are left to defend themselves with ordinances which, judging by where I live, are still very inadequate.

Durham doesn’t keep track of parking lots, but it should.  Since 1976, the increase in impervious surface in Durham, which includes parking lots, has outpaced population growth by 8-to-1.

So Durham most likely has far more than the national average of eight parking spaces for every registered vehicle, a number far too high even when allowances are made for visitors and commuters who work but do not live here.

Developers who scrimp on parking lot amenities such as trees fail to grasp that barren lots stamp a brand not only on their developments but on the brands of their tenants.

There are now numerous “best practices” when it comes to creating tree canopy over parking lots.  One I saw recently near downtown Salt Lake City has a large specimen tree for every two or three parking spaces vs. one for every 14 spaces in the lot where I buy apples.

A portion of a road trip last year took a friend and I down the Hudson River.  On a bluff overlooking a park across the river from where we stopped for the night is an old Nabisco box printing factory that has been adaptively reused as Dia:Beacon.

It is a museum featuring contemporary, including minimalist, artworks. It opened only eight years after my grocery story in Durham did.  But there is nothing minimalist about the trees in its parking lot, where there is one tree for each space.

On a related subject, I am a fan of Formula 1 racing and Ferrari in particular.  On my one visit to Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in western Europe, I didn’t have time to continue down the Alps into northern Italy.

If I ever make it that way again, I want to visit three places. First, the Museo Ferrari in Maranello and then the bridge at Susegna where my first cousin once removed died in 1944 when his B-26 was was shot down during WWII.

The third place I want to visit is a historic Fiat factory in the Lingotto district of Turin.  When the Ferrari-red, Pininfarina-designed Fiat 124 Spider I owned in the early 1970s rolled off the assembly line there, it was on the fifth floor of the massive 1920s facility.

It was possibly one of the last to be rolled out onto a test track atop the factory including high banked curves at each end and 500-yard straightaways.  The old factory has been transformed into a complex of concert halls, shopping arcades, a convention center and a hotel.

The roof-top test track is still there but that isn’t why I want to see it.

Renzo Piano, the architect of the transformation not only put plenty of trees in the parking lot but added forested entrances to the huge facility.  He not only believes in green roof tops such as this one at the California Academy of Sciences but nature-sculpted entrances and parking areas.

Development is driven by developers, individuals and families who want their private property to be made more valuable, but the free market has yet to require them to cover the full cost.  Much of it is pushed off on tax-payer funded governments.

If all costs were accounted, those who seek to develop property would factor in the costs resulting from “churn,” when supply outpaces demand, the costs of cleaning storm water polluted by impervious surface, the costs of reforestation, the costs of other infrastructure to name just a few.

In the mid-1800s, towns would often develop, be deserted, be re-populated, be deserted again and again be re-populated, sometimes repeating this cycle many times before becoming stabilized and permanent.

The churn back then was generated by unrealistic promises by private land and water companies and/or corporations exploiting resources until eventually, by populist demand, federal, state and local governments stepped in to create a basic level of stability.

But the costs were never shouldered by those who caused them, nor are they today.  If they were, we would all suffer “sticker-shock,” so we shoulder the cost in taxes instead.

Regulation and public resource management are blunt instruments at best, but because the free market hasn’t evolved to hold developers fully accountable nor fully rewarded “best practice” standards of stewardship, despite the best efforts of associations to “raise the bar,” government has stepped up as the only viable alternative.

Often, what is expressed as anti-government and anti-tax sentiments are really an even more deeply felt strain of populist angst among working and middle class Americans, including the 30% who are conservatives, at having to shoulder the costs of unsustainable business practices.

Government is a more convenient scapegoat, I guess.