The 1980s - Durham’s Pivotal Sense-of-Place Decade

In 1984 then-Durham Chamber of Commerce exec Bob Booth was inspired to hire Jeff Downin, who had just earned a Master’s degree from Duke Divinity School, to head up a new Chamber division, then called government affairs.

The roster of those who went on to head public policy for this business-advocacy organization in Durham, NC, where I live, is stellar and none more so than John White, who currently holds that post.

Maybe it was divine influence or maybe it was the timely board leadership of the legendary Travis Porter, a friend whose image is shown in this blog and who passed away a few years before I retired after having served as an ex-officio on the Chamber’s board for nearly two decades.

Together in 1984, Porter, Booth and Downin, who would move on a couple of years later, can be credited with the Chamber’s wise assent to Durham’s decision nearly thirty years ago to ban and remove billboards along its roadsides in defense of the community’s scenic character and I believe, in an effort to preserve the sanctity of its signature trees.

Porter was a gravel-voiced lawyer, a tough former Marine and a practical, old-school North Carolina progressive who blended business community concerns with larger-community concerns.  He understood that a chamber’s role is as much to advocate on behalf of the community to businesses, many owned or managed by non-residents, as it is to advocate on behalf of those businesses to the community.

Forward-thinking chambers back then were already eschewing the antiquated notion that nothing noteworthy happened in their communities unless the chamber was a convener.  Instead they had begun to grasp that is far better to focus on being included at the table as equals with other strategic partners in the community.

These were also the days before so many chambers began to be neutralized by billboard representatives (or their surrogates) who began, as well documented by internal correspondence, to strategically infiltrate committees and even boards of directors banking on the hope that cronyism could protect them from revealing conflict of interest and serve to divide chambers from the best interests of their communities.

Also in 1984, the Durham Chamber nodded approval as community leaders germinated two other actions that have proven equally pivotal to fostering and promoting Durham’s sense-of-place.  One of these was the formation of a committee charged with shaping community consensus for a zoning overlay to protect I-40 along its path through this community which including prohibition of billboards as well as a wide range of actions to preserve and plant trees along that roadway.

Durham also laid the groundwork back then for the 1986 passage of state legislation including a provision for formation of the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau (DCVB) as the community’s official destination marketing organization, envisioned, in part, as the “defender of Durham’s image and brand and guardian of its unique sense of place” and the start-up of which brought me to Durham in 1989.

Coupled with the 1981 and 1985 emergence of Durham’s first adaptive reuse of historic, brick factory buildings, this troika of 1980s initiatives signal the genesis of the bedrock of sense-of-place into the reinvention of a community which has evolved to its resurgence today as one of the most highly ranked communities in the nation across a wide and diverse number of benchmarks, earning the signature “where great things happen.”

Booth continued to make inspired choices to guide the Chamber’s public policy and government affairs efforts.  When Downin moved on he was replaced by Frank Smiley, a native returning to North Carolina after serving a career as a city manager in the Great Lakes region.

Smiley, who past away down east the year I retired, made certain with the leadership of Wayne Hays, then head of the Chamber board, that DCVB, the organization I was recruited to jump-start in 1989, would be formed as an independent organization and that its mission and resources would be safeguarded and not siphoned off as they often had been in prior decades by some chambers or local governments in other parts of the country.

As the 1990s emerged, Booth also tapped another inspired choice when Smiley moved on.  Nick Tennyson, another Duke grad and a former developer headed that Chamber division for a several years before moving on to head of the homebuilders association that represents three of the four counties that make up the Durham metro area and serving two terms to end the decade as the Mayor of Durham.

No one deserves more credit than Tennyson for paving the way for the massive American Tobacco Campus, one of many successful projects which ride on the shoulders of those 1980s adaptive use pioneers including West Village, Peabody Place, the campus of Measurement Inc., Golden Belt and now several adaptive reuse projects in the City Center such as 21C and a few more in the organic but unofficial NoCo district, each fostering the “built aspect of Durham’s sense of place.

But It is important to never forget that the path for these successes along with the preservation and promotion of far more temporal aspects of Durham’s sense of place was laid in that pivotal decade of the 1980s.

The Bellwether Mayor And A Chamber In Sync

It is a positive sign for Durham’s continued economic prosperity that 60% of adult residents believe the community is a good place for gay and lesbian people to live compared to 27% who disagree.  Most telling perhaps, is that a full third feel strongly on this matter according to the annual scientific poll commissioned by the Durham Convention & Visitors Bureau (DCVB.)

Further evidence appeared last week when the Board of the Durham Chamber of Commerce, an advocacy organization for business voted unanimously to oppose Amendment One, a ballot proposition to insert a ban on same-sex marriages in the State Constitution.

The Chamber was on safe footing.  By my count among friends who own businesses, the reaction has been overwhelmingly in favor of opposition and a statewide opinion poll taken during the time of the Chamber’s deliberations revealed that 6 out of 10 North Carolinians also oppose the amendment.

Wily proponents of the ban pushed it onto a primary election ballot next month so it will all come down to voter turnout, but I agree with House Speaker Thom Tillis that even if approved, such an amendment will be repealed by the demographic and psychographic shifts already well under way in North Carolina where nearly 4 in 10 residents already support the rights of gay citizens to be married.

Sentiment wasn’t always so clear to read.  When I moved to Durham, one of the state’s most progressive communities, in 1989, Mayor Wib Gulley had barely survived an effort a few months earlier to have him recalled when a petition requiring 13,000 signatures fell short by a thousand.

Issuing an “Anti-Discrimination Week” proclamation while speaking highly of gay citizens had also resulted in Gulley being black-balled from membership in the big Downtown Rotary Club.  Much of the uproar had been fueled by the organization of a former WRAL broadcaster down in Raleigh, then US Senator Jesse Helms.

For several years I avoided rejoining Rotary until it was clear that the organization’s sentiment had become more reflective of Durham values and I eventually served as that club’s president.  Wib Gulley was overwhelmingly re-elected to a second term as mayor and went on to serve several terms as a State Senator.

Coincidentally, he is the current chair of the governing board of the organization that I came here to lead as the spearhead for visitor centric (demand-side) economic and cultural development organization and from which I retired several years ago.  Wib was mayor  back when DCVB was first chartered as a provision to state legislation.

The Durham Chamber works the supply-side of economic development, thanks in part to a grant from Durham County.  While I continue to give it grief for a regressive stand it took and still promotes that undermines Durham’s popular ordinance banning billboards, that stands out as an anomaly and probably would have never happened today.

The Durham Chamber in my experience has always been one of the most progressive organizations of that type. By the time I moved to Durham, it had been responsible for populating Research Triangle Park here in partnership with the Research Triangle Foundation.

After acceding to the Durham ban on outdoor billboards in ‘84, according to public documents, the Chamber openly supported a zoning overlay turning the portion of I 40 that passes through through Durham into a sense of place best practice.

In 1987, in another forward-thinking move, the Chamber supported creation of an independent, official community-destination marketing organization for Durham for which I was recruited as chief executive.  A decade later, it joined with DCVB to jointly create a best practice collaboration for placed-driven communication.

It isn’t always easy for any chamber to reflect its community’s values.  Who can ever forget Marvin Barnes’ impassioned support here for school merger when he was board chair of the Chamber.

I also recall being in the room when the Chamber’s board, then, as often the case, laden with non-residents, came very close to opposing bonds for affordable housing until word arrived just prior to the vote that Bob Ingram, then-head of GlaxoSmithKline supported the bonds.

Some at the Chamber groused when Durham established its vaunted school of the arts magnet school, an elaboration on the nationally-acclaimed NC School of Science and Math that had already been established in Durham in 1980 with Chamber support.

But the Chamber quickly acceded when it was revealed how much better many students at every socio-economic level do, even in subjects such as science and math, with art as a lens, something demonstrated over and over by the legendary Joe Liles when he taught art classes at the NCSSM for 28 years.

And the Chamber’s progressiveness isn’t limited to its positions on issues. Examples are the joint official publication created with DCVB to tell Durham’s story and aid both visitors including those who become  newcomers.

I spotted another Chamber innovation being created in the storefront nook of Beyu, the downtown cafe where I often buy bulk coffee beans, a collaboration with DDI, our downtown advocacy organization called The Smoffice.

Overall I’ve always been impressed by our community’s Chamber, but at no time more than with its opposition last week to Amendment One.

Violating A Cardinal Rule Of Motorcycling

One of the cardinal rules of motorcycling is that the bike will automatically veer where you look with your eyes and that’s just one of many reasons that new temporary regulations permitting clear cutting need further study.

Let me show you an example on the Durham Freeway where a South Carolina-based billboard company has already marked trees in anticipation of being able to clear cut a grove of large trees even though the sign has plenty of visibility now.

• As you can see from the first image in this blog or by clicking here, the billboard is already clearly visible to travelers on the Durham Freeway.  But the owner wants to clear cut the forest to the right anyway.

 

• As shown in the second image or by clicking here, these publically owned trees are sizable, and

 

• Cutting them opens the Freeway view to an unsightly parking lot, an abandoned building and storage items as seen in the third image or by clicking here.

 

• The goal of the gratuitous cutting is to draw the attention of travelers on the entrance ramp to the right at just the moment they should be solely focused on merging into traffic to the left and onto the freeway as illustrated by the fourth image or by clicking here.

That will be especially hazardous to motorcyclists like me who could inadvertently veer into the guardrail on the right if they happen to glance at the billboard.

But any automobile driver whose attention is diverted to the right when full attention should be left will veer the wrong direction at a critical time, thereby endangering himself as well as drivers already on the freeway.

It is an insult to hide behind hasty regulations by the state in a blatant effort to trample on and override local values by clear cutting publicly-owned trees, but it is criminal to deliberately mess with public safety.

To help reclaim North Carolina’s scenic character, email scenicnc@gmail.com and click here to “like” Scenic NC’s new Facebook page.

(Visuals courtesy of Dale McKeel, a recognized expert on the adverse impacts of outdoor billboards.)

Looking Back At the Best And a Belated Tribute

I worked directly with a dozen or so Chamber of Commerce execs during my now concluded nearly 40 year career managing community/destination marketing organizations in three communities.

If you know me, it goes without saying that I consider Harvey Schmitt down in Raleigh as not only a close friend, even in my retirement, but as one of the very best Chamber execs on the planet.

But in the three cities I represented, no one has impressed me more than Casey Steinbacher at the Durham, North Carolina Chamber, home of the legendary Bob Booth.

Before retiring back in 2009, I frequently enjoyed early-morning coffee with Casey, worked side by side on some projects, consulted by telephone on issues and even served her as an ex officio advisor to her board.

Chambers and Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) are two very different and distinct organizations and models with very different missions but in savvy communities they still strategically partner and team where a project is mutual.

A quick Google search revealed that I’m more than a little out of touch these days. Casey is honoring Durham as Chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce Executives (ACCE) and bringing the group home for its spring meeting as her term winds down.

This group isn’t to be confused with the big business guys who throw their weight around during national elections, ACCE is a professional association for more than 1,000 heads of local, community Chambers, advocates for their local business climates.

During my just-concluded 12,000 miles traveling cross-country on two road trips in five months, thanks to the exceptional news and blog aggregator by the Durham News Service, I saw an announcement that the Chamber is teaming up with DCVB on production of Durham’s official publications for visitors and newcomers.

Here are just a handful of reasons I can see that move making perfect sense as part of Casey’s vision:

• It leverages a strategic partner’s expertise in graphic production, comprehensive content, distribution and community branding, much as DDI did to produce the Downtown Durham Guide.

 

• It strengthens the “Make It Durham” effort with options to interweave even more with Durham’s overarching brand signature, e.g. “Make it Durham – Where Great Things Happen.”

 

• It applies nationwide research and analysis revealing that 80%of newcomers and 75% of relocating business executives try a community out first as leisure visitor.

 

• It frees the Chamber publication from fundraising and reinvests every dime of revenue goes into vastly expanding content and greatly broadening distribution.

 

• It moves beyond the model of restricting content to members to comprehensive listings that best serve the target audience while giving members special recognition.

Thinking back also reminds me again that I have neglected to pay tribute to the first Chamber exec with whom I worked.  Born ten years after my Father, the late George Reitemeier graduated from high school the year I was born.  He was 39 when he was appointed to head the Spokane Chamber in 1970, a post from which he retired in 1993 before passing away in 1999.

I went to work for George in my mid-twenties while going to law school at at Gonzaga at night.  But I also answered to the separate governing board for the Spokane Area Convention & Visitors Bureau, for which the Chamber was serving as a temporary incubator as was a practice back in the 1960s.

In 1975, as the just-concluded and environmentally-themed Expo ‘74 began its conversion to a spectacular 100-acre Riverfront Park surrounded by hotels, restaurants and shops, the SACVB board decided it was time for the organization, as Spokane’s community/destination marketing organization to become fully independent, as the great majority are.

Needless to say this put me in between the proverbial “rock and hard place.”  George had his reasons for opposing the CVB’s transition to independence maybe because his own board was dragging its feet.

As you might expect, in my 20s and my first real job out of college, I took it all a bit personally.  Everything seems personal in your 20s and it did get personal and very public.  I’m sure George could have easily steamrolled me but he didn’t.  He also didn’t make it easy.

George though was not like “frenemies” I’ve run into more often than I’d like to think, a word used to describe individuals who act like a friend to your face or in a personal context but do their best to discredit and undermine you behind your back, often putting you in a corner ethically.

Some tell-tail indicators, for those who haven’t run into “frenemies,” are that they will believe they are always right, that they are dead certain they are smarter than you are and that they think they know how to do your job better than you do.  “Bless their hearts” as we say in the South.

George was different.  He was ethical and he told you right to your face what he thought.  He also respected your decisions if you could back them up with logic and information.

He may have had trouble listening, at least to a kid in his 20s.  Part of it was the times.  It was the mid-70s.  I wore my hair longer and for the times was able to mix some pretty progressive politics with a passion for small independent business owners and visitor-centric economic and cultural development.

I was also determined to do my job, no matter how long it took, no matter the price to me personally.  He may have disagreed but he respected those traits.

SACVB did become fully independent in 1976 and stabilized for a couple of years before I caught the attention of the infant destination marketing organization in Anchorage in 1978 and was recruited there as chief executive based I later learned on  recommendations from the CEOs in Seattle and San Francisco.

George  would be very proud of Chamber peers like Casey and Harvey, and I think he would have been proud of what I was able to accomplish in my now concluded career in DMO management, much of which was due in no small part, both to what I learned from him and the toughness I developed going through that transition in Spokane.

Regretfully, while I thought about it often, I failed to ever call and tell him thank you in person.

A belated thank you George, R.I.P.

A Better Roadway Signage Option For Attractions

Road signs were a part of my previous life in destination marketing so, even though I’m now retired, it is impossible for me not to spot solutions and best practices on recent cross country road trips.

I’ll pass on at least one in particular from February’s trip to the head of DCVB, who teaming with Chamber leadership, is still tying up some loose ends on sign projects I left unsolved, one of which was requested by the Durham Performing Arts Center and another by Nasher Museum of Art and the Sarah P. Duke Gardens.

They all want and deserve good signage on the Durham Freeway (NC-147) and the two Interstates that dissect Durham, I-85 and I-40. The former is a north-south Interstate which happens to run east and west through Durham but that’s another story and another signage challenge.

Much more effective for travelers than big outdoor billboards are the logo signs you see at both Interstate and other US and state highways as you travel across the country. First used for gas, lodging and food, they are now used in some states for attractions such as the one shown in this blog from Oregon.

The signs are valuable for several reasons. One, they smooth or control the flow of traffic by giving travelers, including visitors, newcomers and established residents more certainty. Two, they alert pass-through traffic to points of interest for future trips and three, they reduce sign clutter by consolidating signage and protecting the view-shed by eliminating the need for huge, inefficient and distracting outdoor billboards.

The logo signs are self-funded by the businesses and organizations they promote. In Oregon for example, along the heavily traveled I-5 through the cities around Portland, a logo sign is $480 per year per direction. Supplemental logo signs, which indicate the direction after a driver exits the Interstate, run another $180 per year. They are less at other locations in Oregon depending on traffic density I suspect. I also spotted them being used for attractions, not just food, lodging and gas in New Mexico.

The Durham Freeway is a real problem as it cuts past Downtown. There are simply too many signs, too many exits in too tight of an area. I’m sure it has already been considered but it seems to me the logo signs can be the solution to eliminating a lot of signs and at the same time greatly benefit travelers and traffic control, not to mention the impression made on travelers at that particular gateway to Durham.

In North Carolina, the cost to be on a logo sign is standard statewide at $300 per sign per year. The rate is the same per direction and for each supplemental sign to guide travelers beyond the exit.

The program was authorized nationwide in 1972 but it is managed differently from state to state within the federal guidelines. Click on the links above for more information or go to your state’s transportation website and put “logo signs” in the search box.

Durham’s NoCO District – Emblematic of Revitalization through “Small Room Gardening”

It is getting better but many economic developers, including those with my background in visitor-centric economic and cultural development, seem more than a little “macho-man,” maybe even chauvinistic.   And I hope it doesn’t take one to know one!

So a decade ago when Richard Florida first began to publish his data analysis on the bellwether “creative class,” (formerly known as knowledge workers or people who “think” for a living) it wasn’t surprising when many economic developers, addicted to “big game hunting,” either blew his work off as a fad or more often perverted the nomenclature to justify anything they happened to be doing.

Just as quickly though, more savvy economic developers coined the term “economic gardening” based on Florida’s data to describe a far better way to appeal to the Creative Class than the traditional “big-game” hunting approach with its over-reliance on huge incentives and mega cultural and sports facilities and events.

As you can imagine, “gardening” just didn’t jive with the macho mindset of many and while it is easy to quibble with
Florida, his findings have proven dead on over the years. Today he is even featured in mainstream media frequented by the macho-prone such as the ESPN Radio talk show The Herd with Colin Cowherd.

Cowherd loves to antagonize listeners by belittling college basketball as being small town and rural while the NBA is about big cities, diversity and tattoos but I’ll save that for another blog.  I just hope he actually reads Florida’s books, especially the part about the turn-off of “generica.”

After reading Florida and studying his data beginning a decade ago, I could immediately identify examples in Durham that were, from what I was hearing from newcomers and relocating executives, already making the community a center of creativity.

Maybe it resonated more deeply with me than others not only because I actually read and studied his books but because his remedies dovetailed nicely with Durham’s strategic focus on “placed-based assets” and inherent Durham brand values like “genuine, textured and authentic.”

Florida’s data signaled to communities that while the creative class “occasionally,” to use his words, attends “big-ticket” sports or cultural events, to be compelling as a place to live, work or visit, “street-culture” is the essential ingredient.

Creatives are drawn to districts that while not world-class or major league are “indigenous,” “organic,” “eclectic,” “social and interactive,” and offer a “multidimensional” “smorgasbord,” allowing people to “modulate the level and intensity” of their experience compared to “a single, one-dimensional experience that consumes a lot of recreational resources,” again to use his words.

All I had to do ten years ago was look at the organic and eclectic nature of districts like Brightleaf, Ninth Street and just-emerging Rockwood as perfect examples of just what Florida meant.

Just as I was leaving on my most recent cross country trip, journalist and historian Jim Wise chronicled the emergence of another indigenous Durham district that fits the definition, NoCO for (north of Corporation Street.) anchored by the City’s now restored Historic Durham Athletic Park, made famous in the movie Bull Durham and operated as a training center by Minor League Baseball.

To me developer Bob Chapman, as unpretentious as Durham itself, is the unofficial mayor of NoCO and George Davis of Stone Bros. & Byrd is the elder statesman of what plow-to-pint Fullsteam’s co-founder Sean Lilly Wilson coined as the “do-it-yourself” district.

Even the nickname is organic.

NoCo is home to an experimental theater, a historic country store/garden center, a sculpture gallery, a rocking nightclub, a micro-brewery and tavern, a beloved corner hamburger stand, event space, an after-school studio for teens, residential lofts, a tuition-free public charter school and much more.

It also features two tiny, historic, corner gas stations which Chapman has restored and adapted for a restaurant and yoga studio. 

Hopefully, Durham will see more organic districts emerge in the City Center, East Durham and other parts of the community.  I say emerge because these districts can’t be master planned.

Try as they may, massive, heavily packaged, single-owner districts are no substitute and the magic of indigenous, organic, small room districts cannot simply be bottled and then replicated into what Florida terms “generic,” “heavily programmed,” “Disneyland facsimiles,” “safe, secure and predictable.”

Durham is fortunate to have many good developers like Chapman who “get it” and even its mega-malls and master-planned districts do a good job of trying hard to reflect the community sense of place.

We’re also fortunate that the City, County, Downtown Durham Inc, and Durham Chamber have worked just as hard to facilitate both organic districts, although at much less expense and with much less certainty and control (e.g. Durham Central Park anchored by the Durham Farmers Market,) as they have to enable excellent master-planned districts like American Tobacco, West Village and The Streets at Southpoint.

Durham is also fortunate that DCVB, as the agency for marketing the community as a whole, has always been able to weave both types of districts into Durham’s story in such a way as to drive the demand that helps make them sustainable.

But the eclectic, organic districts are what make Durham, Durham and they foster the unique sense of place that enables mega-districts where newer facilities seek to emulate the look and feel of these more humble but equally significant areas of Durham.

You’ll spot new ones as they emerge because again in Florida’s words, they “cluster along certain streets lined with a multitude of small venues. These may include coffee shops, restaurants and bars, some of which offer performance or exhibits along with food and drink; art galleries; bookstores and other stores.”