1105-1109 Broad Street

36.0159, -78.919565

1105-1109
Durham
NC
Neighborhood
Building Type
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Clyde Kelly Funeral Home, 1950.

1105 Broad Street appears to have been the home of JE Smith before its conversion to the Clyde Kelly funeral home in the late 1930s or early 1940s. The business became the Clements Funeral Home in the late 1950s.

The business is still in operation today. The house is somewhere behind all that stuff in front.


1105-1109 Broad St., 06.27.09

The funeral home has continued to acquire land to the north to expand parking, which I'll write more about in my next post. Like churches, funeral homes eat up immense amounts of surface parking for very intermittent peak usage - a similar situation exists behind Howerton-Bryant and Hall-Wynne on West Main St. These huge swaths of asphalt are particularly difficult in urban areas - ideally, these type of institutions come up with shared parking arrangements with nearby neighbors, but in practice, outside of major metro areas, it rarely happens.

Find this spot on a Google Map.


36.0159,-78.919565

Comments

I would imagine very little is left of the house in that mess of a structure. There must be a structural or financial reason the house has lasted this long.

If you hadn’t mentioned it, I would not have recognized a portion of the monstrosity as what was once a house.

It is interesting that you can so easily identify the original roofline of the house.

This is a great example of the sort of architectural change that occurs over time when ownership or use does not really change over that same period. Organic growth, if you will. (A new owner might have just razed and started over.)

Quite agree about surface parking taking so much space and not being used much of the week. Thus the folks who join together for worship etc. at Blacknall Church (Perry & Iredell) really appreciate the willingness of Duke HR to share its parking area each Sunday. Otherwise...?

Remodel chop job.

Cool post. I've often stared at the semi-hidden building behind the facade when at Joe Van Gogh's and pondered...

I believe Clyde Kelly lived behind the funeral home at 1100 Iredell as he was on my paper route. If memory serves me correctly, he also had an ambulance service in the 1950s.

Wow, who knew that's what lies beneath?

I'll be interested to read your take on their parking expansion tomorrow. Even since I moved to the neighborhood a couple of years ago, I've always thought what a shame it was that some great storefronts were just left empty while such great businesses thrive right across the street.

Even with their existing lot, this seems like it could be a great lot-sharing arrangement. The majority of usage of a funeral home is during the day. The majority of customers at Broad St Cafe/Watts Grocery/Green Room/Palace International are at night.

I hope you will also touch on whether there is a specific reason almost every commercial area in Durham is only on one side of the road. Broad St, Ninth St, Main St (downtown portion). Only Brightleaf seems to have escaped this phenomenon. Is this just a weird coincidence?

I heard that Clyde Kelly Funeral Home used to advertise on bus stop benches. Although I don't live in Durham anymore, I seem to remember seeing green benches in the '60's - '70's with Clements Funeral Home in yellow stenciled letters.

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