Raleigh’s Richard B. Haywood House

About a month ago we published an article on this blog about Raleigh’s “nail buildings”. It cited two adjoining downtown businesses, Poole’s Diner and Doug Van de Zande’s photography studio, as examples. The term ‘nail house’ or ‘nail building’ is used to describe businesses or residences whose owners refuse to allow their buildings to be demolished, even in the face of development all around them. (The phrase refers to a nail in wood that is difficult to remove.) That description made me think of the historic Richard B. Haywood house, located at the corner of Edenton and Blount Streets.

However, the encroaching development in this case was not a high-rise building or construction site, but a four-acre expanse of state government parking lots.
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On the eastern fringe of downtown Raleigh an imposing Jacobean manor stands sentinel over the surrounding neighborhood. I am referring, of course, to the former Thompson School on East Hargett St. Although the school itself closed with the merger of the city and county public school systems in 1976, the building still bears a prominence in the community today as Wake County’s family services Thompson Center.
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From Treasure to Trash: The Demolition of the Wake County Courthouse

When I was a teenager back in the mid-1960s, Raleigh was fast losing all too many of its architecturally significant buildings to the wrecker’s ball. These included most of the grand Victorian homes on Blount Street, the magnificently turreted Chateauesque style Mansion Park Hotel, (which I referred to then as The Castle), the Jacobethan style Hugh Morson High School, Sullivanesque Wachovia Bank building, Italian Renaissance Olivia Raney Library and Wake County’s Beaux Arts courthouse. Downtown Raleigh back then was a veritable treasure trove of late 19th and early 20th century American architecture.

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