327-329 West Main

35.996471, -78.903549

327-329
West Main Street
Durham
NC
Year built
1920s
Construction type
Masonry
Brick
Local historic district
Downtown Durham
National Register
Downtown Durham
Neighborhood
Downtown Central
Use
Clothing Store
Shoe Store
Jewelry Store
Offices
Building Type
Commercial
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The building at 327-329 West Main St. was built during the 1920s with the C.D. Kenny company (which sold Teas, Coffees, and Sugars) as one tenant and the Federated Clothing Store as the other. I've previously posted on another location of the CD Kenny company, 301 West Main St.

KennyCo_327-9WMain_1920.jpeg


In keeping with the concentration of retail stores near Five Points, this building continued to house retail tenants through the mid-20th century, housing "Weldon's" and "Reed's" during the early 1960s.

327_328WMain.jpeg

Reed's gave way to Sonny's in the late 1960s / 1970.

~1970 (DCL)

Weldon's received a facade 'improvement' in the early 1970s. Away abhorrent brick!

327WMain_covering_1970s.jpg


This building has been renovated, (including, thankfully, the removal of its pseudomodern facade) and now houses offices - and, I believe, living space on the second floor.

327_329WMain_2007.jpeg

January 2007 (Photo by Gary Kueber)

327-9WMain_100811.jpg

10.08.11 (Photo by Gary Kueber)

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Comments

Submitted by JoeBlogs (not verified) on Sat, 1/27/2007 - 8:13pm

Interesting to see how drastically places have changed.

Submitted by Joe (not verified) on Sun, 1/28/2007 - 10:21pm

OT: GK, are you happy with your new hosting setup? It occurs to me you could use Tabblo. You could probably do the whole blog there, but the layout tools, although they do more, might be more trouble than you want to put up with. But they don't have any image size or volume restrictions, and the unresized image is always available. FWIW, my publicly visible Tabblo stuff is here.

Submitted by Gary (not verified) on Mon, 1/29/2007 - 12:12am

Joe - no, I've only got a temporary solution going right now using university servers for the newer pictures, which won't be available to me by this summer. Does tabblo let you link your pictures directly by url? Ideally, I'd like to continue to use blogspot but simply have a server space that I could url access photos on.

GK

Submitted by DS (not verified) on Fri, 6/29/2007 - 2:03am

327 West Main is the home of Net Friends, Inc and SciMed Solutions with the entire building used for office space. There is a spiral staircase in the lobby, not sure if original or put in later.

329 has 600sq ft of retail in front, a small apartment unit in back and a beautifully renovated residential space on the 2nd floor.

Submitted by Joe (not verified) on Thu, 11/11/2010 - 1:13pm

Wow, the third Joe to leave a comment. As DS said above me, 327 is entirely used for office space. Netfriends is downstairs, and SciMed Solutions is upstairs.

There've been some skylights added upstairs, and some walls have been added or removed, but you can still see a lot of the old architecture inside (as I type this I'm looking at it).

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