Goodnight Raleigh is happy to announce that the celebrated light sculpture, Color Wall, created in 1972 by renowned Raleigh artist and beloved College of Design professor, Joe Cox, will soon once again bedazzle Hillsborough Street. The Color Wall will be relit at a public event during the official reopening and dedication of Hillsborough Street celebration to be held on Sept. 25. You can visit the Color Wall Web site for more information. Goodnight Raleigh will keep our readers posted as details of the public re-lighting are finalized.

I recently stumbled upon an interesting bit of trivia in an old Wake County Schools publication. It was noted that Raleigh is home to the world’s smallest naval base, located on the grounds of the Josephus Daniels House. Daniels is one of Raleigh’s most notable historical figures: Secretary of the Navy, ambassador to Mexico, and editor of the News & Observer (as well as various smalltown newspapers).

When Daniels moved into his Hayes-Barton home at the end of his appointment as Secretary of the Navy, he wished to have a naval gun mounted on his front lawn. The article stated that the only way this could happen was for the small patch of earth around the gun to be declared an official Navy base.

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Side Street Cafe in Oakwood

The painted advertisement on the side of a building is a rapidly fading artifact of urban life, much in the same way that entryway mosaic is a disappearing commercial art form. There seem to be fewer remaining examples in Raleigh than in other similarly-sized cities, probably due to the historical propensity to demolish rather than renovate and recycle the buildings in the city’s core.

[skip to the 6/14 update]

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