I started out with only a Facebook status update and the vague directions “across from the Carmax on Glenwood” to go on. An hour and a half later, I found the Water Garden.

Walking along Glenwood Avenue after it leaves downtown Raleigh, one feels beyond doubt that this is not a place intended for human traffic. Furniture warehouses and car lots sit in misanthropic isolation off of a busy road with no sidewalk. You’re not supposed to walk around here, and if you do, you feel small and lost in a blinding, concrete commercial desert. On foot, you realize how far apart everything is, how much space there is that possibly no one has walked in years.

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For more than a century rain has been mulling over a way to make a home inside the once regal house on the corner of Ashe Avenue and Hillsborough Street.  The house, often referred to as the “Green House” or “The Jackpot House”, drops slate roof tiles as if it were inviting its wet foe inside for an extended stay.  The perimeter of the house is littered with malt liquor bottles, window glass, and broken slate. Read more »

If you’ve driven down Hillsborough Street towards downtown, then you’ve gone past the old Staudt Bakery at the Hillsborough/Morgan Street split.  This nondescript art moderne-styled building from the 1940s has sat vacant for around 50 years.

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The local graffiti artists have taken over the exterior with their spray cans.

Among Raleigh’s commercial development areas, along well travelled highways, behind overgrown rows of southern pines, lie left-behind abandonments that most drivers and pedestrians overlook. The haste to arrive at the ‘next place’ has consumed so many that they have forgotten to stop and look around.

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