Good evening and I’ll come right out and say it, the weather is perfect here. Absolutely wonderful. I won’t get into the details.
After stepping outside yesterday, I put up a stupid post noting that this was what North Carolina was all about. It got more response than anything I’ve done or said in years.
Okay.
I don’t know what it’s called in social media, but in the news business, we used to call that kind of thing a brite. I’ve worked with some of the best brite-writers in the business and even contributed a few pieces, including one about a giant sweet potato grown at the entrance to the law school that I am particularly proud of.
People like brites, crave them, especially now. If you can kick one out, good on you. Sentiment and nostalgia have their function in a pandemic.
I much prefer the former to the latter. This sprawling city of ours is nostalgic af, fraught with it, even branded with it. After all, tens of thousands of former residents return each year just to revel in what once was. Newcomers quickly pick up on that part of the culture. If you haven’t heard it, the punchline of the Chapel Hill version of the lighbulb joke goes: “one to change the light bulb and four to talk about how cool the old one was.”
The problem here is that raw, unbridled nostalgia drives an infuriating amount of local decision-making. That has had real consequences. It’s slowed change and warped it, crusted up the gears of government and enshrined past mistakes as too precious to touch. No better example of that is what it takes to do anything downtown, the very epicenter of nostalgia.
That, I am kind of happy to report, appears to be changing.
It wasn’t surprising to hear some of the complaints about plans for the 100 block of East Rosemary Street or the shock over the scale of change once demolition started, but there was not a lot of fondness, thankfully, for what was essentially two failed parking decks and a retrofitted movie theater that had proven fairly unrentable.
In the coming months, the Wallace deck, the town owned and operated deck behind the post office at Henderson and Rosemary, is coming down. That’s a significant milestone in and of itself, that also ends a much longer debate over that particular corner.
In the early 80s the original development proposed for Henderson and Rosemary included a decked parking area, which the town was desperate to have, as well as four or five stories of condos, which would have made the project the first of its kind downtown.
It was a brutal fight with people in fits over the very thought of condos. The Chapel Hill Newspaper (formerly Weekly) tore into the idea and politicians who backed it. The dispute went on for years and the town finally cut a deal — dubbed Rosemary’s Baby — that it would build a parking deck and plaza on the site with no housing or commercial space. Yep. Prime corner. That was it.
I attended the ribbon cutting ceremony for the deck with then Mayor Jonathan Howes, who was my planning professor at the time. We stood near former Mayor Jimmy Wallace, who was very frail and in a wheelchair, but determined to make it to the event.
I wrote a story for Triangle Business about the new “not vanilla” parking deck. Gah. It was supposed to have buskers and maybe little stalls w/ vendors and be a lively plaza right off Franklin Street.
That didn’t work out for a lot of reasons, with use of materials being among the top two or three. As anyone who has been up there knows, it is as uninviting and uncomfortable a place as one can imagine. It’s brick and rough concrete and no place for a little kid. The various enclosed spaces, planters, nooks and crannies that were constructed defeated the idea of it as a plaza. But damn if that brick didn’t match the rest of downtown perfectly. Still does.
I tried to use the place, eat my lunch up there when I worked downtown. It was definitely quiet.
The plans for the redo of 100 East Rosemary include turning part of the space taken up by the deck into a small park. The same with a portion of Parking Lot #2 on the other end of the project at Columbia and Rosemary. I think decisions on what actually happens in those two spaces ought to take into consideration what happened with the Wallace “plaza” space.
As those public spaces that bookend the new building take shape, the obvious lesson is to let the public in on the process early and don’t overprogram/overdesign it ahead of time. Don’t build something people don’t want to start with. Take a more organic approach.
The other big lesson is the draw of greenspace. Before it became mostly hardscape this year, the Weaver Street lawn spent three decades as a community-building greenspace, major attraction for Carrboro’s downtown and the perpetual envy of every Chapel Hill planner and elected official.
Fortunately, the two spaces on Rosemary have little nostalgic value, just some parking and a plaza that didn’t work out. I hope they plant some good native plants and have a space where kids can run around and a comfortable spot where you can sit and watch the sunset down Rosemary Street.
Sounds crazy, I know, but it’s dreamy weather and I’m going to dream — Kirk Ross
News & Items of Interest
Here’s a look at some stories and links for the First Sunday of Fall
• UNC governance — N&O on the BOT’s disregard of faculty and staff
• Rogers Road & The Greene Tract — DTH opinion piece on the Rogers Road community and how to approach what to do about the tract.
• School shortages — Indyweek on the staffing challenges, vaccine strategies for Orange County’s two school systems.
• Carrboro candidates — DTH look at who is running in the contested races for mayor and three seats on the council.
• Land for tomorrow — Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney is getting it done. Good time of year for a hike over in Alamance, btw.
• Is that legal? — Chatham N&R reports that Chatham County has decided not to redraw its county commission districts even though census data shows shifts.
• Mayor interview — Carrboro’s outgoing Mayor Lydia Lavelle on the CHL podcast, talking about the new (w00t!) comprehensive plan process and some other stuff.
State
• Tracking Hurricane Sam — Another major hurricane to keep an eye on along with another in the making. Yale Climate Climate Connections is a good place to follow for more detailed hurricane info.
• Redistricting — Really great work by data journalist Tyler Dukes in Monster, a podcast laying out the sordid tales of math and maps behind redistricting in our state.
• Sure, great idea — How about we privatize building inspections and then only lightly regulate the inspectors and make it so they’re not liable if anything goes wrong.
Pls share. See you next week.
I once heard a wise man say that, the town needs to be what the people of the times need it to be. Pointing out that no one really wants to live in Chapel Hill as it was in our great-grandfather's time. As people change, the town changes. Another friend pointed out that everyone wants Chapel Hill to be exactly as it was the first time they came to college here. "Unbridled nostalgia" is a good description.