Goodnight Raleigh | a look at the art, architecture, history, and people of the city at night

Project Bird’s Eye View: Main Building, Peace Institute

One of the few four-story structures in the 1872 Bird’s Eye View map of Raleigh is the Main Building of Peace Institute. In this installment of Project Bird’s Eye View, we’ll take a look at this historic Raleigh institution which had aÂ rather tumultuous beginning.

Project Bird’s Eye View — 215 S. Wilmington St (aka The Raleigh Sandwich Shop)

by Raleigh Boy
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Goodnight Raleigh continues to explore our city’s forgotten past. In this, our second installment of Project Bird’s Eye View, we reveal the history of the former Raleigh Sandwich Shop building at 215 S. Wilmington St. This Raleigh landmark is located just a few doors away from our first project entry, Slim’s Downtown Distillery. Judging by the roughÂ common bond brickwork, the solid stone sills and lintels, and unadorned facade, 215 S. Wilmington likely dates from the antebellum period.

Introducing ‘Project Bird’s Eye View’

by John Morris
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In 1872, Camille N. Drie set out to document the city of Raleigh, providing a “Bird’s Eye View” of the city.Â It was just a few years after the War Between the States, and back then Raleigh was a relatively small capital city in the South. Despite how it appears, his map was not drawn from a hot air balloon. Instead, he made a series of drawings from vantage points across the city and later stitched them together.

Although the intricately detailed drawing shows hundreds of structures across Raleigh, there aren’t many still standing. Project Bird’s Eye View is a new series in which we will document the remaining structures from this historical map and provide a small bit of history of the building over the years.

The first entry is 227 S. Wilmington Street, now home to Slim’s Downtown Distillery.