Just Missing By A Hair A Monumental Shift

Our local paper speculated this week that the downtown “loop” has been a matter of “civic discourse for at least a couple of decades.”

Actually, it has been more like six decades if you count the discourse leading up to creating it in the mid-1950s.

It took a couple of decades to create it but after a little more than a decade in use, the same group that pushed for it, now under a different name, began advocating its demise, ironically using the same rationale used to create it.

Tragically, it’s too late for the hundreds and hundreds of historic structures that were destroyed to create the “loop,” including the iconic Durham Union Station (shown in a County Library photo below).

But the story of the “loop” is not only the story of a near miss but that of an era.

More than three decades before the early 1990s founding of today’s Downtown Durham Inc., a predecessor was formed, first as a committee of the Merchant’s Association, then as the Downtown Development Association.

When I arrived in 1989 to jumpstart Durham’s first community destination marketing agency, I gathered intelligence by interviewing many of those earlier bygone commercial activists.

Refreshingly, they were willing to look back on regrets as well as achievements.

The “loop” was meant to save downtown Durham when it was envisioned in 1958.

Forest Hills Shopping Center had just opened on the southern outskirts and by the next year, even the increasingly “Black” neighborhood to the east would have a new shopping center, Wellons Village.

Rumors, soon founded, were that the Rand family was planning another to the north.

Of course, we know now that it was television that was changing the retail landscape by promoting to viewers the misperception that vast regions were centric.

This included the notion of driving a hundred miles to buy something consumers could easily find at home, thereby robbing their own local business climate and tax base.

But it wasn’t just competition that worried downtown advocates in the mid-1950s.

Durham had been the fastest growing county in North Carolina during the 1930s and second fastest during the 1940s, just behind Mecklenburg.

But what had Durham leaders worried was how fast Durham still continued to grow into the 1950s, while the number of jobs hadn’t grown since the end of World War II, more than a decade.

Poverty had first taken root in Durham in a neighborhood now called Edgemont in 1938 after a mill closing there brought on by the Great Depression.

But Durham continued to grow economically during the war years, thanks in some part I supposed to four cigarettes including Lucky Strikes and Chesterfields being included in each WWII ratio kits.

However, that growth abruptly ended in 1947, while the flood of people moving here didn’t.

There is evidence that this imbalance is the root of Durham’s generational poverty rate today.

By 1960, when downtown advocates formally proposed creation of the “loop” to local officials, 1-in-3 Durham residents lived in poverty, as did 1-in-4 North Carolinians and about the same proportion of Americans.

One rationale used for the “loop” back then was that it would make the Research Triangle Park more attractive to tenants.

It was a new project carved out of southeast Durham pinelands just four miles from downtown that Durham leaders such as George Watts Hill and Yancey Milburn, members of the downtown group, had been furiously working to create.

The report was shaped in the immediate aftermath of a transition from federal grants for Urban Redevelopment, which had been pushed in the late 1930s, finally passed in 1949 and then re-branded as Urban Renewal in 1954.

The program, which had to overcome opposition from rural lawmakers, incentivized communities to tear down old buildings to make way for parking lots and then sell surrounding parcels to private sector developers.

However, Urban Renewal was already in disrepute by 1956, when architectural journalist Jane Jacobs gave a presentation at a Harvard conference leading up to creation of a new discipline.

It was called urban design, a fusion of architecture and planning that would focus on overall settings rather than icons.

As downtown Durham advocates began meeting to plot its salvation in 1958, they should have been reading a new book based on a series of articles that Jacobs and others had been writing in Fortune Magazine.

Entitled The Exploding Metropolis; A study of the assault on urbanism and how our cities can resist it, the essays in the book might have helped Durham not only avoid a huge mistake but leapfrog to a new paradigm.

Economic development was just beginning a transition from the 20th century’s obsession with “what you don’t have” to what urban researcher Edward T. McMahon calls the 21st century model of focusing on “what you do have,” a transition even today that so many communities have failed to make.

Instead, Durham’s downtown advocates issued a report in November, 1960 based on the falling-out-of-favor Urban Renewal, just as Jane Jacobs was putting the finishing touches on a book that would be published a year later entitled, The Death and Life of American Cities.

It rewrote the book on rebuilding cities.  In fact, Durham’s Downtown Development Association members would have had access to excerpts published months earlier in Harper’s and the Saturday Evening Post which were very popular at the time.

Jacobs advocated an organic understanding of how districts evolve, the way Ninth Street evolved in Durham during the 1970s and the way downtown Durham evolved before WWII.

She articulated the importance of innate character and what would two decades later be christened as sense of place in an essay by Wallace Stegner.

By a matter of days if not hours, Durham was caught instead on the far side of the paradigm shift and soon set about destroying vast swaths of its organic character only to discover that Durham was able to populate RTP and become an economic engine again without it.

But a decade later, what I term a sense of place revolt dramatically slowed the destruction and birthed historic preservation here, just as the movement swept across America, as much in reaction the carnage of Urban Renewal as the nation’s upcoming bicentennial.

Within a few years a new breed of private developer including a couple who taught business at Duke emerged and began to adapt historic structures to new uses rather than destroy them.

By the 1980s they were populated with offices, galleries, restaurants, artists studios, apartments, music venues and stores.

The last Durham project predicated on the destruction enabled by Urban Renewal was a convention center and adjoining hotel, which opened in 1989 just as I arrived.  They looked as though they just didn’t fit and still do.

As a seeming nod to that bygone era, every decade or so since, Durham has continued to erect an icon that doesn’t fit.  It is as though the developers, often the local governments that should know better, are still defiantly objecting to sense of place.

They seem to forget, to quote from Witold Rybczynski in Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities, that “The real challenge for cities today is not to create more icons, but rather to create more such settings.”

But as downtown advocates regrouped in the early 1990s to complete the task of revitalization, they were still plagued by the same inertia faced by predecessors nearly forty years earlier.

Back then a survey found that 76.9% of Durham residents community-wide supported the redevelopment of downtown including 57.7% who would support a new tax levy to do it.

But ironically only 41.8% of the merchants and property owners downtown were positive in regard to either redevelopment or a tax to fund it.

Fast forward four decades and the biggest suppressant to bringing downtown fully alive were landowners who didn’t have the means or interest to do so but were sitting on properties hoping others would.

This time, fortunately, the federal government came to the rescue with a new secret weapon, New Market Tax Credits, which when joined with historic tax credits and tens of millions of dollars in local government funds, created the turnaround.

Even as this second renaissance of downtown Durham took root, many were clearly still under the spell of outmoded Urban Renewal thinking such as the need for icons and very slow to grasp what Jacobs saw so clearly about the importance of sense of place and organic evolution.

In a twist of irony, Durham ended up preserving the highest proportion of its historical assets and converting them to adaptive reuse of any of North Carolina’s urban areas and most nationwide.

Yet officials, even today, seem prone to fixate on big projects rather than the little things that facilitate organic revitalization and sense of place such as the upkeep and overall community appearance noted in that 1960 downtown report.

They fail to understand that Americans, regardless of age, prefer protecting neighborhoods to revitalizing them.

The Real Test of Revitalization Comes After

For those of us who love this region, the State of the South report has been issued every couple of years since 1996 by a think tank based in Durham, North Carolina where I live.

So when a friend who is still in the loop forwarded me the newest edition published a few days ago,  I was not only eager to dig right in, but took a moment to reflect on a forerunner I read the month Durham adopted me twenty five years ago.

Published three years earlier in 1986, that report was entitled Shadows in the Sunbelt.

My job back then was to jump-start an organization to market Durham for visitor-centric economic and cultural development and I soaked up that Shadows report for much needed context and perspective.

It declared obsolete “the Buffalo hunt” approach to more traditional “supply-side” economic development and proposed as an alternative that communities, both rural and urban, begin instead to leverage local assets and existing enterprises, such as “place-based” tourism has always done.

Back then, it also signaled something in common with this most recent report, “the tale of two Souths.”

In its epilogue, that nearly three-decade old report prophesied that we in “the South must tend to our roots, or in the end, risk our values.”

Well, it’s been 25 years since I read that report and the “Buffalo hunters” are not only still monopolizing economic development in North Carolina but officials have recently retro-organized it in a way sure to keep its extinction on life support.

And ironically, in at least three of the state’s five largest cities, “demand-side” visitor-centric economic developers have surrendered the far greater value of leveraging sense of place and place based assets in favor of a variant of “big game hunting” around mainstream “edifice envy.”

But the irony is not lost on “stayer” residents of those communities who see it as tragic instead, to see communities once distinct and worthy of love sell out at the altar of “sameness” worshipped by “boomers.”

But indeed, not only are both forms of “Buffalo hunting” still staggering slowly toward extinction three decades later, but in some communities such as Durham, traditional supply-side economic developers seem to be gradually trying to emulate the demand-side nature of tourism by seeking to draw talent rather than big game.

But while Durham may be way ahead of the curve on both economic development fronts, it seems as if far too few here are worried about the unintended consequences surrounding the adaptive reuse of what remains of its “built” elements of its sense of place.

The problem isn’t as a respected friend recently prophesied that revitalization efforts have reached the “tipping point,” but that Durham officials seem totally unprepared that the greater challenge will be to manage success.

Or that if left unchecked, development will almost certainly now begin to destroy the very things so worthy of love here.

Having worked so hard on the front end to leverage its “realness” while sparking the 1990’s image turnaround, a barrier that had been choking off access to financing, I too am stunned at the speed with which. now unleashed, second-wave development has begun to destroy that “realness.”

There seems to be a lack of intensity or sense of urgency, in response, not only to insist on architectural scale and fit but to mitigate gentrification, aggressively get at the systemic roots of poverty and preserve almost temporal community values such as social justice, acceptance, openness, organic creation and diversity.

By failing to “tend to our roots,” in Durham, we too are “risking our values.”

Durham is one of the nine Southern cities and towns highlighted in this newest State of the South report.  Durham and its neighborhoods could have been substituted in this introductory description that echoes the warning thirty years earlier:

“In much of today’s South, economic and demographic vibrancy exist side-by-side, as veritable next-door neighbors, with poverty, underemployment, educational disparities, and stagnant social mobility.”

The graphics alone in this newest report tell a powerful story and none more so than those showing the side-by-side paradox in Durham.

If by bringing appreciation for Durham’s temporal attributes and helping to spark the kindling under this turn-around, was I complicit by failing to see how fast the reinvigoration would turn destructive.

I try to remember to post these essays on social media such as Facebook because those are the places where many frequent readers tell me it is easiest to access, share and/or comment which today is most often via one-on-one emails or text messages.

Recently, in return, several readers forwarded essays related to this shared concern.  One is how Portland is fighting to keep things “real” there and in synch with its unpretentious values.

Another cites the changes that unmanaged gentrification has made along one end of Divisidero, a street in San Francisco where I lived for a few months in 1989 before being recruited to Durham.

My apartment was on the Bay end of Divisidero.

But needing to exercise to help build my lungs up following a bout in the hospital with pneumonia that January, for that few months between jobs, I would religiously take daily walks, also, in part for reflection.

Each of our lungs is only hand-size but on the inside where they do their work, the various branches, cavities and air sacks called alveoli are the combined surface area of a football field.

Some days the walk would take me 40 active minutes south on Divisidero, up and over Pacific Heights a ridge more three times the height of one we complain about on walks each morning now in Durham.

It crested as I passed what is now “Billionaire’s Row” before descending for checkups and medication-refills at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center.

I think it was called “Millionaires Row” back then and the views are spectacular.  But reflection and self-forgiveness are also boosted with a little self-inflicted pain - (Smile.)

The medical center is in the neighborhood that is the subject of Katy Kreitler’s excellent article this month entitled “9 Ways Privileged People Can Reduce the Negative Impact of Gentrification.” 

The author is reverse-engineering how Western Addition, the neighborhood around that hospital, lost the soul of its “realness” after I left when frustrated officials, focused only on reducing crime and blight, unleashed forces that also hollowed out its “there-there.”

Others such as Daniel Hertz have countered recently that he sees no way for us to mitigate or manage gentrification through our personal decisions and that the real problem is a “curiously dysfunctional housing system.” 

Another by Kriston Capp notes that studies show the massive overbuilding of cultural facilities such as performing arts centers over the past decade is spurring gentrification along with deeper poverty rather than the oft-promised Bilbao-effect.

It is important to note, as a new white paper by researchers at AudienceScan does, that high-come adults are 40% more likely to shop at locally owned business and that 60% of shoppers there have above average incomes.

But that is the paradox of gentrification.  These are often not the same locally-owned business that gave these neighborhoods their appealing “real-ness.”

We gentrifyers have a way of killing the things we love.

All of these sources are worthwhile reading for anyone concerned about preserving the values and sense of place in the places they love.

On my return on those walks, I would head up to the historic Fillmore the venue and birthplace for rock, blues, folk and roots music legends of the late 1960s such as Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, The Band, Emmylou Harris and Janis Joplin).

Sometimes before turning back north I would continue on up Cathedral Hill and listen to mid-day prayers sung as Gregorian Chants.

These neighborhoods were still the “real” San Francisco back then compared to those more touristy east of Van Ness/north of Market.

I have been back to San Francisco but not back to those neighborhoods, probably sensing at the time that the forces drawn to them including visitors would ultimately “kill the very things they loved.”

Organic “real places” aren’t created as much as enabled by developers when they are sensitive to scale and work with a light touch so as not to disturb sense of place or force out small, local businesses such as the developers of Durham’s Brightleaf Square did there and then along Ninth Street.

Developers without those sensibilities are drawn to these areas but without officials who are attuned to activist neighbors and small businesses and who are unafraid to say no, places can be quickly overwhelmed, relegating historic structures to little more than an amenity.

Sometimes this corrosion of place is even further enabled by public facilities that are even more disrespectful of sense of place values leading some to warn we should watch what edifices officials build, not what they say, when it comes to preserving values such as reducing poverty.

Looking back, I was fully aware that many of those with whom I stood alongside in the push for revitalization didn’t really share Durham’s sense of place values, or if they did, also didn’t realize that safeguards needed to be embedded long before any tipping point occured.

My reflective ego says I could have and should have done much more to warn officials about the failure inherent in success and that sense of place and community values, while nearly temporal in nature, are not guaranteed.

But starved for the day when revitalization would fully ignite, many officials, hypnotized by arm-twisting on behalf of the “shiny and new,” dismissed warnings that were given back then as merely naysaying.

You can steer a community to “best practices” but there will always be a few otherwise well-meaning souls who seem to always seek out “worst practices” instead.

To use a term from Accounting 101, they, along with formula developers will be “last in, first out” too when community values are purged and the reasons to love a community begin to flicker.

Those who truly value sense of place are more often “first in, last out.”

I’m not going anywhere and my time may be past but the real fight to preserve sense of place began not with revitalization but in its wake.

It isn’t too late for Durham but it is very, very close.

The Bull City Rumble – Rockers vs. Mods!

If you’re like me, you stay off the roads during holidays like Labor Day. This year, I’ve marked my calendar to be sure to see the second annual Bull City Rumble, September 2nd and 3rd, 2011.

Similar to most festivals and events in Durham, it will draw an even mix of visitors and residents. This year the Rumble will be held along West Main Street in the Historic Brightleaf District of Downtown Durham with an event Friday night at the Geer Street Garden in the rapidly emerging self-identified NoCo District a few blocks away. These organic, uniquely Durham districts provide the perfect backdrop.

I love the poster this year, especially the logo which also comes on other merchandise such as patches and shirts. It isn’t just because I ride a retro-styled Harley-Davidson Cross Bones, I just like type of vintage vehicle including old farm tractors.

The event features the café racers and scooters from the late 1950s through the 1970s that will be on display at the event. Not American-made bikes like my Harley but English bikes like the Norton my friend Bill Kalkhof tells me he rode in college.

These bikes’ roots trace back over a half a century during a period when Rockers or Ton-Up boys evolved as a biker subculture that originated in Great Britain and spread across Europe. Rockers were also known as “greasers” to Mods (Modernists) who rode customized scooters such as those making comeback now.

Just think Gene Vincent and Be Bop A Lula vs. The Small Faces. The Rolling Stones are more like Rockers. The cross-over Beatles initially dressed like Mods.

The bikes you can see at Bull City Rumble will be “riders”, not “trailer queens” as the producer notes. This will add even more to their authenticity and the event is more than vintage bikes and scooters. It will also feature the vibe of uniquely Durham neighborhood districts and independent businesses and entertainment venues.

Making this event even more organic is that it is partnering with Preservation Durham which will also benefit from the proceeds.

In my best Michael Buffer imitation: Let’s get ready to Rumble!

(Click here for information on visiting Durham including the master calendar of community events.)

A More Organic Grocery Alternative For Ninth Street!

As I settled back into Durham after my most recent cross-country, I read of speculation that a giant Harris Teeter may be planned right next to one of Durham’s organic and indigenous districts.

If the developer is who I surmise, there is no one who has done more to sensitively revitalize both the Downtown and Ninth Street districts and he does his homework. He cares.

But it seems to me there are much more complimentary grocery stores for an area like the Ninth Street District and hopefully developers aren’t rushing to beat the master plan in the final stages of review which wouldn’t permit something that out of synch.

New Harris Teeters run 70,000 sf which is why some have nick-named them “MajorTeeters,” a name we also affectionately gave the Grand Tetons looming above where I grew up in that nook of Idaho, pardon the pun.

That is nearly twice the size of a traditional supermarket.

I can see why Harris Teeter wants to get back into this area.  It was a huge mistake when it pulled out of the nearby Northgate complex as it was being renovated.  Someone obviously made the mistake that a lot of feasibility people do and neglected to realize the “black hole” on demographic maps is in reality, Duke University, one of the largest employers in the state.

The Ninth Street District already has Whole Foods, formerly Wellspring Grocery, which was originally located where the old Scarborough Grocery was and Magnolia Grill is now and then moved to the site that later became the former George’s Garage, both locations were right on Ninth Street and a perfect fit.

There are other, smaller alternatives perfect for Ninth Street, if another grocery store is needed.

At 30,000 sf, smaller than a traditional supermarket, a Bloom Grocery Store, an upscale, tech-savvy “different kind of grocery store” concept based in Salisbury, would work much better in that location.  I saw a Bloom’s for the first time last year in the Dilworth neighborhood, a similar historic area of Charlotte.  

Or maybe even better in size would be a MOM’s which run about 11,000 sf like the one in in College Park, Maryland where the owner ignored advice about demographics because he knew it was the right fit.  Mom’s are about the size of the old Wellspring (now Whole Foods) when it was directly on Ninth Street.

Don’t get me wrong. Harris Teeter is personally my favorite traditional supermarket.  I just don’t think it is a good fit in a funky, gritty, organic, indigenous district.  It could kill a Ninth Street.

If communities have a choice and want to thrive economically in the future, be very careful to sustain indigenous districts.  Just ask the folks down in Chapel Hill where a Gap store came and went and Franklin Street has never been the same.

I hope the speculation turns out to be unfounded because one things for sure, based on the Chapel Hill experience: a big box can destroy an organic district, but pulling it back out later won’t restore one.