I love all that glass!

I’ve long loved this building – ever since I was kid. My Dad frequented the original 42nd Street Oyster Bar at the corner of West and Jones streets in the mid 1960s, and I was often in tow.  The modestly styled Art Deco structure is across the street from the famed oyster bar and a Progress Energy power substation. The now long gone Bing Lee Chinese Laundry  was on the fourth corner of the intersection. The neighborhood back then was industrial; it was gritty– it was where guys went to drink PBR after work. This glass-walled building  was once the Carolina Power and Light Co.  truck garage.

The truck garage is an industrial, utilitarian structure. It was erected in 1925 as a part of CP&L’s power plant complex, which included a steam generating power plant and a similarly styled streetcar barn.

(Photo courtesy the NC Office of  Archives and History, State Archives.)

According to the National Register listing by the National Park Service,

The sleek Art Deco styling of the building reflects the forward-thinking corporate image the rapidly expanding power company wished to project in the 1920s. The brick building features a corrugated metal roof, terra cotta coping, large multi-light metal windows and protruding brick piers, the tops of which are ornamented by terra cotta inlay and molded capstones.

It is one of only a handful of Art Deco buildings that survive in Raleigh — the most notable being the former Durham Life Insurance building on Fayetteville St.

To me, the CP&L truck garage is an elegant and beautiful building. While its design does take a nod to the Art Deco style, its intrinsic beauty lies with its utilitarian nature — and with all that glass!  Three sides of the structure are composed of non-load bearing glass walls; thus, the truck garage is essentially a curtain wall structure, and by my estimation, it was Raleigh’s first.

This is a view of the main Harrington St. facade of the truck garage in a photo taken in 1925, when the building was new. The four stacks of the CP&L steam plant can be seen in the background. I love that hand-operated gas pump standing by the curb. (Photo courtesy the NC Office of  Archives and History, State Archives)

The CP&L truck garage radiates a quiet elegance at night.

CP&L (now Progress Energy) sold its West St. properties in the 1990s. The truck garage and the nearby steam plant were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998. Today, Napper Tandy Irish pub occupies the ground floor and an architectural firm occupies the main floor, taking advantage of all that glass.