601 Ramseur Street (1890s-1954 )

The original path of Elizabeth St. still persists south of East Main, roughly equidistant between Dillard and Fayetteville St., which is now where N. Elizabeth deposits its southbound traffic. The old route was a smaller, winding street that traveled north of E. Main through the current Liberty St. Apartments housing project, connecting with the original Elizabeth St. somewhere between Liberty and Holloway.

This smaller caliber roadway supported neighborhood traffic in the residential neighborhood to the east of downtown - a variety of smaller and larger houses typical as one moved away from more prominent, often ridgeline streets.

Looking east northeast at the corner of S. Elizabeth and Ramseur Sts. Although not readable, one of the once-ubiquitous white obelisk-like street markers is visible by the brick sidewalk. June, 1954.
(Courtesy Herald-Sun)

The caption on this picture read "Houses being torn down." So it goes. The neighborhood began to transform as early as the 1920s, when houses on East Main were torn down (Julian Carr's Somerset Villa in 1924.)

What replaced this was a decent commercial structure. Ongoing expansion of Carpenter Chevrolet further transformed the neighborhood into a commercial area by 1959..

 

The red dot is on 603 Ramseur - 601 is just to its left/west, 1959.

The remainder of the houses in this block were torn down during the 1960s

Looking south, early 1970s.

The landscape, overall, is just - I may have used this word three days in a row - bleak.

Looking northeast, 2007. (G. Kueber)

Two blocks worth of surface parking just to the west (starting at the corner on the left side of the picture) courtesy of the county certainly isn't going to help matters much.

The city razed this entire block of structures in 2016-2017 to build a fancy all new police department. Now with new vacant land with new grass!

12.14.2019 (G. Kueber)