Counsel-Arena House

From the National Register:

Clyde Hardy House. 2-story Tudor Revival cottage with a side gabled roof with a gabled front wing, 6-over-1 sash windows, the original glazed and paneled front door, plain siding, and a gable end chimney. The corner porch has medieval style boxed posts and Tudor pediment over the entrance bay. 1940 CD: Clyde T. Hardy and nurse Margt. Lunsford occupants.

(The information below in italics is from the Preservation Durham Plaque Application for the Counsel-Arena House)

The first house on this property faced east and fronted on Ninth Street. The lot which is now 1917 W. Club Boulevard was originally the rearward portion of a lot at the corner of Ninth and E Street (as Club was then known) platted in 1908 by the Suburban Land and Power Company and given the address 1123 Ninth Street. According to the 1913 Sanborn Maps for Durham, the house was a gable-and-wing transitional frame structure identical to its neighbors to the south. This house and lot survived well into the 1930s judging from the paste-over updates to the map. See also Map book 5, page 41 in the Durham County Registry.

In March 1936, the lot at 1123 Ninth Street and ten feet of the lot at 1121 Ninth were recombined and re-platted by their owner, Commodore T. Council. See Plat Book 10, page 157 in the Durham County Registry. Council's plat shows a new parcel 100' deep with roughly 150 feet fronting Club Boulevard. According to the Sanborn Maps, the original house and its outbuildings on the property were demolished or removed by 1936. The 1937 Sanborn Map indicates that the new lots were assigned street numbers of 1915, 1917, and 1919 W. Club Boulevard. There were no structures on the lots in the original 1937 Sanborn map, however the houses at 1915 and 1917 show up on the 1938 paste-over and the house at 1919 appears on the next update. This information, when combined with information from the city directories (see above), indicates that the current house at 1917 W. Club was probably built in 1937, but in no event later than the early months of 1938. 

Commodore Thomas Council (1889-1960) began his pharmacy practice in Durham in 1910. With Germane Bernard, he developed, patented, manufactured, and sold BC Headache Powder - an enterprise that made him very wealthy. In addition to his headache remedy, Council was involved in other ventures, including banking and real estate investment. During the Great Depression, Council bought dozens of properties from banks following foreclosures. During the late 1930s he bought a number of lots along W. Club Boulevard and built houses to generate rental income. The subject property was one of these houses. The brick colonial at 2318 W. Club is another. It was the home of Dr. and Mrs. (Mary D. B.) James Trent. See the Watts-Hillandale NR District Nomination. 

As Durham emerged from the Depression, there was a demand for housing. Little had been built between 1930 and 1938, but the population of the town continued to grow throughout the period. The dramatic expansion of Duke University and its hospital brought in dozens of new professors and physicians who needed modern middle-class homes convenient to the new campus and medical facilities. The houses Council built along Club Boulevard were obviously intended to meet this market demand. 

The house at 1917 W. Club is not a typical investment property. It is a full two- story house in the English cottage style with many fine appointments such as the decorative entry gable with its flared eaves and the spacious stair hall inside. It was meant to attract an upper end tenant and although the house turned over regularly during its early years, its tenants included professionals and business men. Dan Umstead was the city financial auditor and Clyde Hardy was a businessman with Texaco. 

The family most associated with the house during the early decades was the Arena family. Antonio Arena (1878-1963), his wife Rosine (1890-1968), his sisters, Teresa and Maria Regina, and his grandchildren, Mary Jo, Robert Anthony, and James,

moved into the house at 1917 at the end of 1941. They would remain until 1953, occupying the house longer than any other tenants. Antonio was born at Valsinni, a village in the region of Basilicata, Italy, near the Gulf of Taranto. He was educated in preparation for the priesthood, but did not take his vows. Instead, he emigrated to America in 1901. He soon found employment as a bookkeeper and accountant with a railroad construction firm in Clarksburg, West Virginia. Clarksburg possessed a large Italian-American community which Arena served as a steamship and foreign exchange agent. 

The Arenas became acquainted with Durham while their son, Jay Arena, studied medicine at Duke University. They determined to make Durham their home in retirement. The Arenas raised their grandchildren, Mary Jo, and twins Robert and James, at the house with the help of their unmarried Aunt Teresa. Arena's sister, Mary Regina, married after the war and moved away. In 1953, the Arenas moved to the house at 1214 Carolina Avenue which was their home until their deaths. They are buried in Maplewood Cemetery. Their son Jay became a prominent physician in Durham. The Jay Arena family resided at 2032 W. Club Boulevard at the street's intersection with Carolina Avenue. Information from the 1920 and 1930 Censuses, Antonio Arena's obituary in the Durham Morning Herald, June 26, 1963, and an interview with James Arena. 
In 1960, the house passed to Hester Sue Council (1901-1973). She was Commodore Council's sister. She worked at the BC company offices in administrative positions. She resided in the magnificent gable-front bungalow at 311 N. Gregson Street. Miss Council never married. 
After the Arenas vacated the house at 1917 W. Club, it was occupied by nearly a dozen tenants between 1953 and 1994. Most of the tenancies were brief; however, Walter and Shirley Broadwell made the house their home for a number of years in the 1970s and the Rev. John G. Steed, Rector of St. Joseph's Church, lived there for much of the 1980s. In 2005, the house became the home of noted author, historian and religious scholar Lauren Frances Winner and her husband, Kenneth Gatewood. Winner is currently a professor of Christian spirituality at Duke Divinity School. Winner and Gatewood divorced and he conveyed the house to her in 2010. 

In 2013, the house became the home of the applicant, Katherine Medley. Medley is a photojournalist and documentarian of food culture, employed by Whole Foods Market. Medley worked for newspapers around the South, including the Charlotte Observer and the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Medley has been a regular contributing photojournalist for The New York Times' southern bureau, as well as an occasional contributor to The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Associated Press, European Pressphoto Agency, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

The house is organized in a gable-and-wing configuration with a porch in the "L" on the front façade. The entry is surmounted by a flared pediment in the porch roof. This is joined by the roof of the forward facing gable which sweeps down to the first floor. In the nomination document for the Watts-Hillandale National Register Historic District, Ruth Little describes the style of the house as Tudor Revival and certainly this is not incorrect. A better classification might be the English cottage style inasmuch as the house does not display many of the principal design elements of Tudor revival such as decorative half-timbering, an overhanging second story, or a steeply pitched roof. The terms do not necessarily conflict and, taken together, they cover a broad, overlapping spectrum of period revival houses which draw upon English traditional architecture. 
The Tudor revival and cottage styles were popular in urban areas across the country throughout the 1910s and 20s. Nationally, the styles died out with the onset of the Great Depression. In Durham, however, they enjoyed a resurgence in the late 1930s stimulated by the development of the Gothic campus at Duke University. The university built many such houses near the campus and in the new Duke Forest subdivision for college professors and officials. Duke's local architects like George Hackney designed houses in the style for private clients and architects with no affiliation to Duke like Archie Royal Davis also revived the English style in the years before World War II. Like the house at 1917 W. Club, most of the Tudor and cottage style houses built at the time are simpler than the more exuberant forms of the mid-1920s. 

Unfortunately, the architect of the house at 1917 W. Club Boulevard is unknown and we have no firm evidence upon which we might base an attribution. 

The exterior of the house is clad with narrow claps. The windows, hung in pairs and singly, are 6-over-1 double sash and are original. The interior of the structure contains most of it original woodwork, including the deep molded baseboards, the colonial revival fireplace, the stair newel and balustrade, the two-panel doors and their hardware, and the door and window casings. The layout of the rooms is original and the original plasterwork is mostly intact. At some point in the 1990s or 2000s, the kitchen was substantially updated and the nook which may once have joined the kitchen and dining room was dismantled for space. 

The house is a contributing structure in the Watts-Hillandale National Register and Durham Historic districts.