Often, one’s first impression of Raleigh’s Merrimon-Wynne House is its size — it is huge! Ever since I first photographed the house with my trusty Kodak Instamatic camera back in the 1960s, I have been intrigued by its architecture and beguiled by what wonderment possibly lay within. Now, many years later, I finally got my wish. Goodnight Raleigh had the opportunity recently to photograph the interior of the mansion, and I can tell you — it’s, well, huge!

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Preparing to board the streetcar in the 1900 block of Hillsborough St., ca 1928. (Photo courtesy the NC Office of  Archives and History, State Archives.)

You wanna see some 14k hokum corporate masters employed to hoodwink the benumbed masses into abandoning a transportation system as good as the world had seen? Check out archival footage of “Futurama” the 1939 General Motors New York World’s Fair exhibit. 1960 was s’pose to be some sort of petrochemical, Tom Swiftian Nirvana: undersea hotels, mono-pylon suspension bridges, moderne skyscrapers served by subterranean parkways carved through the very earth, below the grade level sidewalks. Roads, roads, roads to the corners of the world. Instead, we have something looking more and more like, I dunno, a version the Dominican Republic with machine guns and 500 porn channels.

The raison d’etre of this piece is a detail of the Hillsborough project, a brick median under which lies buried a long-disused transportation option, our local section of a “splendid” national electric railway system: Raleigh’s streetcars, formerly headquartered at the 1910 Raleigh Electric Company Powerhouse on West Street. As a kid I watched (and smelled) City Coach’s sulfur-stinkin’ GM’s humping over some of the old track leading from the now-demolished, cavernous barn structure. The streetcars were long gone but Raleigh’s parsimonious tendencies saved much of the system under a protective layer of asphalt.

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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 »