208 Tatum Place / Pipe St.

35.991681, -78.904214

208
Tatum Place
Durham
NC
Year built
1880-1920
Year demolished
1967
Construction type
Frame
Neighborhood
Downtown South
Use
Residential
Building Type
Residential
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There was nothing particularly remarkable about Tatum Place, once called Pipe St. - a small one-block street with small unassuming housing that connected Matthews St. with South St. - except, for me, the contrast between the landscape then-and-now.


208 Tatum St.
(Courtesy Durham County Library / North Carolina Collection)

Below, aerial looking north. Tatum St. runs left to right, only between Matthews and South - the street isn't really visible, but the small houses are. (South is the street on the right side of the picture.)


(Courtesy The Herald-Sun Newspaper)

Tatum Place was torn down by urban renewal, and the street was eliminated, becoming part of an American Tobacco parking lot.


Looking northwest, 02.01.89
(Courtesy The Herald-Sun Newspaper)

By 1995, it had become part of field of the Durham Bulls Athletic Park. The most interesting thing about Tatum Place to me, today, is to picture the houses sitting between home plate and first base of the DBAP as runners run by. Or vice versa - to think about kids playing in this street, and how they might have pretended that their street was a big baseball stadium.


Looking south, 08.08.08.


Old street grid overlaid on satellite imagery.


35.991563,-78.904143

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Comments

Submitted by Natalie&Harris (not verified) on Fri, 8/15/2008 - 12:50pm

Everytime I see pictures of these row houses I think of that scene in It's a Wonderful Life where they are describing row after row of the prettiest little houses in Bailey Park all owned by people who used to pay rent to Potter.

Were the people who lived over there renting the houses or did they own them?

Submitted by Gary (not verified) on Fri, 8/15/2008 - 1:05pm

Natalie and Harris

The vast majority of housing in this area was rental - I don't have the specific records for these houses at the moment, but I can tell by the way I digitized the pictures that, for instance, the three houses on the south side all had one owner, and one of the houses on the north side was owned by someone who owned houses on Matthews as well. Demographics from the 1930s indicate that Matthews, Tatum, and Proctor were majority African-American; the ridgelines of South and McMannen to the east were majority white. As I move past that to the east, further into Hayti, there will be a lot of housing that resembles this.

GK

Submitted by Andrew Edmonds (not verified) on Mon, 8/18/2008 - 12:46pm

Gary, on the 1891 bird's-eye map of Durham a large, four-story structure is shown on the south side of Tatum Place; any clue what that was?

Submitted by Gary (not verified) on Mon, 8/18/2008 - 1:52pm

Andy

I don't know. There's no clear business address on Tatum in the 1892 City Directory, and by the 1898 Sanborn maps (the first to cover the spot) it appears the building has been replaced with two duplexes.

GK

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Wed, 8/20/2008 - 3:06am

Would it be possible the four story building on the 1891 map is the Red Cross?

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