"Death of a Neighborhood" - The N & O on East Durham, December 1994

East Durham business district; Driver St. from Angier Ave., 1944.
(Courtesy Durham County Library)

A bit of a different post today: two readers who grew up in East Durham directed me to an article published in the News and Observer in 1994. I'm going to reprint that article below, which I find interesting for the history it conveys, but also as a point of comparison - as to how much the neighborhood has changed even since this was written. Note, especially, the police officer's assessment of crime in East Durham.


Title: DEATH OF A NEIGHBORHOOD Once a sturdy blue-collar area, East Durham is now just plain blue.
Originally published by The News and Observer, December 28, 1994

DURHAM -

From his big white house in the heart of East Durham, Vance Fisher has watched his world get swept aside.

Outside his window, time has transformed the blue-collar neighborhood and its red-brick business district, born at the foot of Durham's first cotton mill following the Civil War.

In the span of Fisher's 77 years, a neighborhood that once hummed with small-town pride became a place that sings the inner-city blues. He sees a part of Durham's heritage slipping away.

For generations, East Durham residents scratched out a living in Durham's booming mills and tobacco factories. The small business strip at the axis of Angier Avenue and Driver Street bustled with down-home grocery stores, insurance agencies and five-and-dimes.

Life wasn't easy, yet people found a sense of community here. They knew one another by name. They worked together. They prayed together.

But as the textile and tobacco industries began to crumble, so too did East Durham.

Today, the neighborhood is among the city's poorest: Almost a quarter of its households earn less than $5,000 a year. Iron bars and chain-link fences guard the businesses, which include a pawn shop that sells handguns and a convenience store stocked with cheap, fortified wine.

Fisher is moved to tears just thinking about it.

''One of these days, there's not going to be anyone who's been living here long enough to remember how the community was,'' says Fisher, who served on the Durham City Council from 1955 to 1970. ''It was a good community. Poor but honest people. God-fearing.

''It hurts me several different ways. I keep hoping against hope for a miracle. But I don't think it's going to come.''

Across Angier Avenue from his house stands a squat, brick symbol of the neighborhood's fortunes: the East Durham post office.

Since 1887, three years after Julian S. Carr opened Durham's first mill here, along the railroad tracks, a post office has been part and parcel of the community, an emblem of its working-class prosperity.

The first one, tucked inside Carr's Durham Cotton Manufacturing Co., literally put the neighborhood on the map.

Through the decades, the institution remained so closely linked with East Durham's identity that when postal officials talked of moving to a larger building in the 1960s, community leaders, including Fisher, spent six months convincing them to stay.

This year, the reaction was quite different when word leaked out that the post office was again set to close. In January, the operation will move to roomier quarters in The Village shopping center several miles away.

This time, only a handful of business owners seemed to care - mainly newcomers such as Whit Haney, a Florida native who five years ago bought Crabtree Pharmacy, a community gathering spot since 1904 known for its old-fashioned milkshakes and orangeades.

''It's a no-brainer,'' Haney says. ''The post office is a draw, so there'll be one less reason for people to come here. For this neighborhood, it's a disaster.''

Mostly, however, the news has been met with a strange

indifference, as though locals long ago resigned themselves to East Durham's fate.

So much has changed, it seems no one notices when another fixture becomes a thing of the past.

### All in the family:

East Durham stretches and yawns as a crisp, clear dawn breaks.

Already, the usual faces are assuming their customary places at the booths and tables in Libby's restaurant, beneath the sign that declares: ''Absolutely No Profanity In This Restaurant.''

Cigarette smoke mingles with the aroma of hot coffee, scrambled eggs, sausage and country ham. The tinkle of stainless steel forks and knives on white ceramic plates punctuates the well-worn conversations of friends as close as kin.

''Hey Ralph, how you?'' says Fran Tunstall, the blonde waitress who automatically pours a cup of coffee for the new arrival.

''Not half as good as you look,'' the middle-age man shoots back, drawing a laugh.

''Same thing as yesterday?'' Fran asks, scribbling down the order before he has time to answer. ''Half a ham, toast, grits, coffee?''

''Yeah.''

''OK, be right back.''

At Libby's, everyone's family.

It stems from Libby. Since Libby Green bought the place in 1982, she's served up good cooking with homespun hospitality, with a little help from her sister, Kathy, and two nieces, Fran and Wendy.

When Libby's family hurts, so does her restaurant family. Not long ago, her 20-year-old nephew died from an accidental overdose of pills and alcohol. The next day, the restaurant was somber.

Libby's closed that Friday for the funeral, and a dozen or so regular customers attended, offering a shoulder of support.

Among them was Jack Lloyd.

His weather-beaten face a testimony to years of painting lines on state highways, Lloyd was just a boy when his family moved from Orange County to East Durham in the 1950s. Back then, he says proudly, you could leave your keys in your car and your front door unlocked without fear.

Though he long ago moved to northern Durham, Lloyd comes to Libby's three or four times a week for a helping of country cooking and a slice of nostalgia.

''This is probably the last of the home places, the last of the breed I grew up with,'' he says, a faded red work shirt hanging untucked over his blue jeans. ''They've all filtered off. Nobody wants to live down here. It's a ghetto.''

### A dying community:

Nowhere is the transformation of East Durham more apparent than at Angier Avenue Baptist Church.

Since 1886, when the first service was held in a wooden school near Carr's mill, the church has been a pillar of faith in the community.

In its prime, Angier Avenue Baptist prospered with the neighborhood, as the textile and tobacco companies flourished through the first half of the century.

''The church was a major player in the community,'' says the Rev. Jeffrey Wisdom. ''It was where people gathered, where their sons and daughters were baptized and married, and where their mothers and fathers were buried.''

As recently as the 1950s, membership rolls listed 1,300 names, and the 600-seat sanctuary of the red-brick, white-columned church was often filled to overflowing - balcony and all.

On a recent Sunday, only 85 gray-haired parishioners were in the long, wooden pews.

''That's a lot of lumber,'' sighs Wisdom.

When he came from Kannapolis to lead Angier Avenue Baptist, Wisdom inherited a church that literally was dying: In five years, he's presided at 94 funerals for congregation members.

''I've basically buried half a church,'' says Wisdom, 37.

The turning point for East Durham, like city neighborhoods across the nation, came sometime after World War II.

New suburbs began luring the children of residents away, and when homeowners died, their houses often became rental properties, eroding the area's stability.

Moreover, the industrial jobs that formed the backbone of East Durham began to evaporate. One by one, the cotton mills, textile factories and tobacco companies laid off workers or shuttered their doors entirely.

Over time, the old mill houses deteriorated, and poor people began to move in - many of them black. As more black families settled in, more and more whites scurried for the county line. The process accelerated in the 1960s, with the leveling of Hayti, the commercial and residential heart of black Durham, to make way for the Durham Freeway.

Eventually, what had always been a white neighborhood became almost exclusively black. Many old-time white residents blamed the arrival of black people for the area's downturn, and racial animosity lingers.

In recent years, Durham officials and community leaders have started trying to revive a group of impoverished neighborhoods near downtown, a 96-block zone they've dubbed North/East Central Durham. But the target area covers barely half of the neighborhood known far longer as East Durham.

Like the old neighborhood, Wisdom says the future of the church is in doubt. Most worshipers drive in from other parts of the Triangle for Sunday services, and the only new people joining seem to be elderly.

Wisdom says there's a sense of mourning in his congregation.

''These folks see the death of a way of life, a severing of everything that used to be,'' he says. ''One way of life is ending, and it's being replaced by a complete other.''

### Signs of change:

The signs along Angier Avenue testify to the modern reality.

''ITEMS IN HERE FOR REPAIR ONLY AND ARE BROKE OR JUNK NOT WORTH STEALING,'' reads the hand-lettered sign in the front window of Alexander TV Service, where 100 or more televisions are packed, awaiting repair.

''JUKEBOX IS BROKEN INTO EACH NIGHT BY OWNER. NO MONEY LEFT ON SITE. DON'T WASTE YOUR TIME,'' reads the sign at Andrew's Kountry Kitchen, taped above a music machine loaded with 60 Elvis songs.

Crime has risen here in recent years, as elsewhere in Durham, and residents have been sobered by the new level of maliciousness.

Two years ago, a 32-year-old woman was found dead behind a seedy club on Angier. Police charged two teens in the killing, saying they stabbed her with a broken bottle and crushed her skull with a concrete block.

In April, a 46-year-old man died from a heroin overdose on an Angier Avenue sidewalk.

Nearly every business has been broken into - many repeatedly.

Police officer R.A. Smith, dropping in for lunch at Andrew's, says crime has worsened during his five years on the beat in East Durham. But he says the neighborhood is still better off than other parts of town.

Before Smith can order, his police radio crackles, and he's out the door to investigate.

### Down home:

No matter how much the neighborhood changes, East Durham still exerts a strong hold over those who live here, and those who've moved on.

It's home to a shrinking collection of loyal old-timers and eccentric hangers-on, whose roots run as deep as the red clay beneath the decaying mill houses and the leftover brick factories.

Bill Brown grew up here, though at 62 he's retired and lives in the J.J. Henderson Housing Center near downtown. Still, just about every day, he winds his way back to his old stomping grounds.

Sitting at a table in Andrew's Kountry Kitchen, his big belly hangs over a brown belt that's partly hidden by the overturned elastic of his underwear. His arms are splotched with freckles, and it's impossible to tell whether he still has any teeth.

Brown pulls an aspirin bottle without a label from his jeans pocket. It's full of snuff. He takes a swig like it's whiskey, and the brown powder coats his tongue and lips. He makes no effort to conceal the mess as he talks.

And talk he does: One night, oh, 25 years ago, he was walking home ''dog-drunk'' through Woodlawn Cemetery when he stepped right into a freshly dug grave. He tried, but couldn't climb out. So he spent the night there. Scared the pants off the cemetery keeper the next morning.

''He saw my head coming out of the grave, and he turned and run like hell,'' Brown chortles, snuff flying. ''He never saw anybody come out of a grave before.''

Brown is part of an eccentric cast of East Durham old-timers who, for whatever quirks of fortune, have stayed behind.

The best known may be Oscar, a local guy who returned from World War II with a bad case of shell shock. Known as the Mayor of East Durham, he walks the city streets, launching into rambling, incoherent passages from Scripture without warning.

Most everywhere in East Durham, Oscar is welcomed with open arms. At Crabtree Pharmacy, Haney, the pharmacist from Florida, groans halfheartedly every time he comes in.

''This place is like a cross between 'Forrest Gump' and 'Cheers,' '' Haney moans.

But for every Oscar or every Bill Brown, there's a Bill Haley.

In the 1920s, Haley and his boyhood pals would walk to East Durham's ballpark, now the site of Holton Middle School, to watch the original Durham Bulls play.

One day, a player saw the barefoot boys and nicknamed them ''The Dirty Dozen.''

Recently, Haley took time from his business - Durham Marble Works, near Maplewood Cemetery across town - to talk about the old neighborhood. He left 43 years ago, but East Durham still resonates of home.

Haley, now 81, pulls something from his desk drawer - a recent photo of four gray-haired men. They're all that's left of The Dirty Dozen. And since the picture was taken, one more has died.

The other Sunday, Haley wasn't feeling well, didn't feel like any company. So he climbed behind the wheel of his van, and for the first time in ages, gave in to the longing for the way life used to be.

''I just rode East Durham over that day,'' he says.

Out Main Street, down Guthrie and along Angier. Finally, he turned up Driver - once ''one of the prettiest streets in all Durham'' - to see his boyhood home.

Electric lime-green paint covered the proud stone pillars of the front porch, and lemon-yellow coated the house.

''It's just a crying shame what's happened to East Durham,'' Haley says, shaking his head. ''And there's not a thing you can do about it.'