Downtown South

Lucky Strike Service Station, 1966 (the back of the tobacco warehouses at 207 Morehead are visible at right) First listed in city directories in 1932, this filling and service station operated for roughly 35 years where Blackwell Street ended at Morehead Avenue, across from the southeastern corner of the American Tobacco factory complex. The first...

The oldest building remaining in downtown Durham as of 2011, the Old Bull building remains an impressive structure after 130+ years. Its hard to overstate how impressive it must have been in the context of a still-small town full of small frame buildings. Demand was booming when John Green died and William Blackwell purchased his interest in the...

The first tobacco auction warehouse in Durham- run by Henry Reams, with auctions by EJ Parrish

Looking northwest. Looking southwest from E. Pettigrew and Pine (S. Roxboro) (Courtesy Duke Archives) While we think of a relatively small number of early tobacco companies in Durham these days, there were many early companies, most of which fell by the wayside, one by one, as Blackwell and Duke became the predominant players. The Lyon Tobacco...

07.26.15 (G. Kueber) I keep being struck by the sense that the new Aloft hotel kinda looks like a Federal Government building from the 1960s. Maybe they should lose the flags.

04.11.13 In 2012, Capitol Broadcasting (the owners of American Tobacco,) began construction on the third of their new construction office buildings, appropriately, if somewhat prosaically, named "Diamond View III." The area on which this building was constructed was the intersection between Matthews Street and Blackwell Street prior to the late...

201 Pine Street - late 1940s. The Ray S. Coley service station was built in 1936-37 on a small chunk of land adjacent to the Venable Tobacco Company warehouse, created by the realignment of Pine Street in the 1920s to meet S. Roxboro (north of the tracks,) rather than meet East Pettigrew at a perpendicular. (The Venable Warehouse follows the...