Goodnight Raleigh - a look at the art, architecture, history, and people of the city at night
It was 1966, and the gilded luster of the aged grande dame had faded long ago. With great trepidation I walked up to the front door. My buddy and I had been roving Blount St. for more than a year by then, exploring and photographing the once elegant mansions being demolished by the state in the late 1960s. And of course I always had my trusty Kodak Instamatic camera in tow.
In 1872, Camille N. Drie set out to document the city of Raleigh, providing a “Bird’s Eye View” of the city. 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.
Over the course of the past few days, concrete munchers have been hard at work dismantling the building at 410 Oberlin Road in Cameron Village.
Now the building is completely razed, and new construction activity will soon be taking place near the busy intersection of Oberlin Rd. and Clark Ave.
Want a tiny physical reminder of Raleigh? City-Blox are 2"x3" photographic prints mounted directly to wood blocks. You can support this blog by buying them at Etsy.
A few weeks ago we published on Flashback Friday an early 20th century postcard view of Hillsboro St. as seen from the Capitol building. This week, we’re in the same time period, but the view is now looking up the street toward the Capitol itself.
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