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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If you come to the Deep South Bar on a Tuesday night, you can definitely anticipate great music. Every Tuesday night they host Open Mic night, where bands and solo artists of every style are welcome.

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John Morris and Sid Fowler

“Carnival is a pageant without footlights and without a division into performers and spectators.” – Mikhail Bakhtin.

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