Before It was Glenwood South

This is how Ravenscroft School looked in 1972, right after the Glenwood Towers seniors apartment building was built. It had remained virtually unchanged since my school days there in the late 1950s. The buildings were converted to office use shortly after this photo was taken. Below is the view today.

Last week GNR publisher John Morris and I attended the Blogger Bash at the Edge Office on Glenwood Ave. Afterwards, we stopped in at a nondescript bar on Tucker Street around the corner from the Cafe Helios coffee shop.

As we were sitting on the outdoor deck sipping our brew, engaged in heady conversation, John asked me if I remembered Glenwood South when the strip was primarily a commercial and industrial area. (He relocated to Raleigh just four years ago, so he knows the area only as the entertainment district it has become in recent years.)

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Tucked away in the woods behind a nondescript building on Raleigh’s busy Oberlin Road is a long-forgotten chunk of inside the beltline real estate. I am speaking of the old Oberlin Village Cemetery.

Few people are aware of its existence now, but this weedy, three-acre graveyard entangled with ivy is the final resting place for many former residents of the once-thriving African-American Community known as Oberlin.

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Like a Phoenix from the Ashes: Raleigh’s Downtown Warehouse District

From left to right: Julia Demarre, Allyn Stewart, Avi Wenger (author of the performance), Katherine Myers, Ronnie Ruedrich, and David Sedaris

The cast of  “Openings Windows and Passages” peering up from the floor of Lot 13 in this promo shot by Mark Herdter in 1979.

Just as Raleigh’s Fayetteville Street is currently undergoing a Renaissance, likewise is the city’s old industrial warehouse district located between downtown and the railroad tracks. New housing units intermingle with nightclubs; lofts are filling long empty warehouse spaces; and it is emerging as a focus of downtown nightlife. The warehouse district is awaking from the long slumber it had fallen into after the hustle and bustle of its industrial glory days had faded.

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