Western Durham

(Courtesy John Schelp) The El Rancho Motel was one of an initial wave of businesses catering to the new development of the VA and surrounding medical complex in the late 1950s/early 1960s, located on former wooded land on the east side of Fulton Street (at Elf and Erwin.) On the obverse (capitalization theirs):

--- Construction of the VA hospital, looking southwest, 1951 (Courtesy The Herald-Sun Newspaper) The VA may seem like a bit of an odd building to profile, but its location and construction presaged the transformation of a mostly rural area on the fringes of Durham into a busy, highly developed medical corridor today. In November 1945, the Veterans...

Within the past few weeks, what had recently been Cattleman's steakhouse / the Italian Garden restaurant was torn down. Patrons may have noted the large stone chimney at the front of the building with the letters "SC" worked into the stone.