Storyline
How Chapel Hill and Carrboro set out to revive their downtowns in 1988 and 1989: the Main Street pledge, the Downtown Commission and its first directors, the sidewalk vendors, Chapel Hill’s downtown tax district, Carrboro’s refusals, and the trolleys that began running on Franklin Street in 1989.
In briefThe Chapel Hill-Carrboro Downtown Commission, incorporated in October 1988 with money from both towns, the University and businesses, hired its first directors, brought back sidewalk vendors and ordered two trolleys. Chapel Hill taxed its downtown merchants to support it in 1989, but Carrboro's aldermen refused money and a tax district. The trolleys began running in Chapel Hill on Labor Day 1989 and first reached Carrboro that December on runs paid for by Carr Mill Mall's owners. After private donations dried up, the commission laid off its two paid staff members in March 1991 and became a volunteer group, and in April 1992 Mayor Ken Broun revived its idle plan committee to draw up a downtown plan. In 1994 the council kept the trolleys for another year while the commission tried to raise ridership, and the town began Streetscape, a $4.8 million plan for downtown sidewalks, lights and buried wires, with a pilot block on West Franklin Street.
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Early in 1988 Chapel Hill and Carrboro pledged $30,000, $22,500 from Chapel Hill and $7,500 from Carrboro, to pay a downtown manager's salary and expenses for a year, one requirement of the National Main Street Program. Mayor Jonathan Howes said the program could answer a feeling that downtown was becoming a student precinct. In March the Town Council and the Carrboro Board of Aldermen approved the joint Downtown Commission's proposal for a three-month trial of a free lunchtime shuttle between Henderson Street and Carr Mill Mall that fall, and on June 13 the Chapel Hill council voted 7-2 to have the town manager begin planning to buy two trolleys for Franklin Street.
The commission had been formed in May 1987 by the Public-Private Partnership and run by volunteers. On October 1, 1988 it was incorporated as a nonprofit, and its first executive directors, Deborah Dibbert and Margie Haber, began work on a better retail mix, new businesses and clean-ups. It had nearly $100,000 for its first year, including $22,500 from Chapel Hill, $7,500 from Carrboro and $10,000 each from the University, Village Companies, Kenan Transport and downtown merchants. Under a temporary ordinance passed in August, flower sellers, artists, street performers and merchants could sell on downtown sidewalks Thursdays through Saturdays from September 29. Turnout was light, but early in 1989, at the commission's request, the council extended the trial for 90 days; Howes recalled that street vendors had been banned in the era of long hair and beads.
On October 24, 1988 the Chapel Hill council voted unanimously to share the cost of two trolley-style buses to run between the Henderson Street intersection and Carrboro Town Hall by September 1989. Each was to cost $150,000, 90 percent of it from federal and state funds; the commission had raised $75,000, and Carrboro's aldermen still had to approve. In December the commission ordered two wood-and-brass trolleys from Chance Coach of Wichita, Kansas, to run free from Morehead Planetarium to Carrboro Town Hall, at first only at lunchtime. On February 13, 1989 commission president Joe Hakan asked the Chapel Hill council for a special service district taxing downtown property 7 cents per $100 to help pay for the commission and the trolley; in March the commission's survey of 482 people found parking the leading complaint.
Carrboro held back. On June 8 its aldermen reluctantly let the commission seek trolley money from Carrboro businesses but said they had not decided to join; Tom Gurganus recalled the town's costly C express bus. On June 12 the Chapel Hill council unanimously created the downtown service district and taxed its merchants seven cents per $100 valuation, about $35,000 a year for the trolley, sidewalk cleaning, improvements and promotions. By early July the Carrboro aldermen had denied the commission money for the trolley and voted down a special tax district to support it, after aldermen including Gurganus and Judith Wegner said parking mattered more, and the trolley route was kept to Chapel Hill. In July the commission's appearance committee also set standards for newspaper vending racks.
Howes cut the ribbon on the two teal trolleys on Labor Day, September 4, 1989, before a crowd of almost 1,000. They ran weekdays from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. between Morehead Planetarium, Crook's Corner and N.C. Memorial Hospital at 10 cents a ride. On October 17 the Carrboro aldermen voted 4-3 not to endorse the commission's planning guidelines, and a week later the commission heard that Carrboro merchants resented being left out. On December 2 the trolleys ran to Carrboro Town Hall for the first time, the first of three Saturday runs paid for by the owners of Carr Mill Mall; the Daily Tar Heel said the runs came from that deal rather than any change of heart by the aldermen.
By November 7, 1990 fliers bearing the names of the commission and the Inter-Faith Council had been posted near North Columbia Street, saying poor people were not wanted on the block and offering free one-way bus tickets out of town; both groups disowned the fliers in a press release that day. On March 20, 1991 organizers of the commission's Chapel Hill Classic Criterium bicycle race announced that the race set for April 6 and 7 would move to September, because only about $12,000 of the $25,000 to $30,000 needed had been raised; the first race, in 1990, had cost about $21,000. On March 28, meeting in closed session, the commission's board made it a volunteer organization and laid off its only two paid staff members, the executive director and the director of special projects, after private donations dried up. The commission, which ran the trolleys and the sidewalk sweeping, was asking property owners to back doubling the downtown service district tax from 7 to 15 cents per $100, a proposal due before the Chapel Hill Town Council on April 8. On April 13, 1992 Mayor Ken Broun told the council that the commission's plan committee, idle for three years, would draw up a plan for downtown Chapel Hill and Carrboro, with public focus sessions and a database of downtown business activity. At the same meeting Alan McSurely of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP said the recession was ruining Black-owned businesses in the Midway area on the town line and that a Midway Development Commission of Black businesses and churches, backed by Broun and Carrboro Mayor Eleanor Kinnaird, was being organized.
On November 22, 1993 the Chapel Hill council voted $28,000 for a pilot section of Streetscape, the $4.8 million plan to fix sidewalks, add crosswalks, improve lighting, bury utility wires and add small parks along Franklin and Rosemary streets between Hillsborough Street and the Carrboro line; it wrote Streetscape into the town's comprehensive plan and formed a committee to look for public money for the rest. In the week of April 4, 1994 a council committee recommended building the plan in pieces rather than through a bond issue. That April the council considered selling the two trolleys, which carried about half as many riders as the buses, but kept them a year while the commission, whose downtown service tax supplied $39,000 a year toward them, tried to raise ridership; it extended their route through campus and by the hospital. After about a dozen West Franklin Street merchants objected on May 31 and planners postponed the pilot, the council voted 6 to 2 on June 13 for a survey of the block's landowners and businesses, and on July 5, over some merchants' objections, it sent the pilot ahead from Ham's restaurant to Chapel Hill Cleaners. By mid-October the new sidewalks and paving were in, at about $28,000 of the $33,000 set aside. A plan by the Orange County Visitors Bureau to raise trolley ridership, approved by the council on October 24 and the commission on November 3, proposed a Friday and Saturday evening route from local hotels beginning in March and suspended service from December 16 to March 6.
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Dorothy J. Kiester's account of the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service, the Chapel Hill and Carrboro charity through which local congregations pooled volunteer and professional effort, subtitled 'a volunteer/professional partnership'. Published by the council in 1984, 68 pages with illustrations. It relates to charities, churches and social service in Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
A 1996 publication of the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service in Chapel Hill, describing the agency as a partnership between volunteers and paid staff. Topics include social service in Chapel Hill and volunteer workers in social service.
Myles Presler's 1996 report on the demonstration phase of the Employment Project, which paired job training with substance abuse treatment for homeless people in Chapel Hill. The introduction gives the aim as helping participants overcome addiction and reach independence through work. Topics include Community House, the town's shelter, occupational training and substance abuse treatment in Chapel Hill.
Kathryn M. Yount's 1991 case study of Community House in Chapel Hill, examining voluntarism and how far it met the needs of homeless women. The bibliography runs on leaves 131 to 133.
Jonathan Howes, a former mayor of Chapel Hill who served in Governor Hunt's cabinet and later worked in the UNC chancellor's office on urban planning, gave this illustrated talk on the past and future of the Chapel Hill campus. Cassette, 1998.
Papers of Ellie Kinnaird, born 1931, a North Carolina state senator, spanning 1987 to 2016 and running to roughly 6,400 items across 20.5 linear feet in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, collection 5356. The papers focus on capital punishment in North Carolina and the campaigns against it, health insurance legislation, voting technology, and the work of women legislators in the General Assembly.
Eleanor Kinnaird beside an election campaign poster in an undated candid photograph. Kinnaird served as mayor of Carrboro and in the North Carolina Senate. From the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection (CHHS.002).
Engineer, planner and developer Joseph (Joe) Hakan, who worked for UNC and in private practice in Chapel Hill, interviewed by Doug Eyre on 21 January 2002. Oral history cassette from the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Audiovisual Materials Collection, CHHS.012.
Edward G. Danziger's memoir of love and cooking, published by J. F. Blair in 1967. Danziger (1893 to 1972) ran Danziger's Old World Restaurant in Chapel Hill, and the book tells his life as a restaurateur in the town.
William M. Rohe's history of Research Triangle Park and the region around it, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2011. Topics include regional planning and the economic and social conditions of the Research Triangle Park region, one corner of which is Chapel Hill and the university. 298 pages with illustrations and maps.
Herbert G. Gutman's 1976 history of African American families from 1750 to 1925, published by Pantheon Books in New York, 664 pages with 38 leaves of plates. Its Orange County connection is the Bennehan and Cameron family plantations, Stagville and Fairntosh: the book discusses the people enslaved by Richard Bennehan (1743-1825) and the Camerons, and follows family ties among them under slavery and after emancipation. Subjects include African American families and enslaved persons in Orange County.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1977), The William and Mary Quarterly (1977), The American Historical Review (1977), Journal of American History (1977), The History Teacher (1977), Political Science Quarterly (1977), Journal of Black Psychology (1978), Journal of Social History (1978), Civil War history (1978), Signs (1978).
Orvin Lee Shiflett's biography of William Terry Couch, 1901 to 1988, the editor who built up UNC Press at Chapel Hill over four decades in publishing, with a subtitle that calls his career a lightning rod for controversy. Chapters treat culture in the South, a case history in book publishing, objectivity and social science and 'The Sainted Book Burners'. It bears on scholarly publishing and university presses in the twentieth century. McFarland, 2015, 268 pages with illustrations.
Albert N. Link's early history of Research Triangle Park, published in 1995 by the Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina. Topics include research parks, research institutes and industrial research in the state, with the park's own history at the center. 149 pages with illustrations and maps.
Annette Marie Council's book about her family and Mama Dip's Country Kitchen, the Chapel Hill restaurant, published by NP Press in 2005. Subjects include African Americans in Chapel Hill, the restaurant's history and family biography. Fourteen introductory pages and 223 pages of text with illustrations, part local history and part family account.
Albert N. Link's history of the Research Triangle Park, the research park founded to draw on the universities at Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh, published in 2002 by the Research Triangle Foundation of North Carolina in 278 pages with illustrations. Topics include research parks, research institutes and industrial research in North Carolina and the history of the park itself.
Charles X. Larrabee's history of the Research Triangle Institute over its first thirty one years, published in 1991. Topics include research institutes and research parks in North Carolina and the history of Research Triangle Park, the research district that lies between Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh.
Alex Sayf Cummings's 2020 book on the knowledge economy of the Research Triangle, technology research and the history of Research Triangle Park. Chapel Hill and its university form one corner of the Triangle.
A tour guidebook prepared for the 2016 Vernacular Architecture Forum conference in Durham, leading visitors through buildings in Orange and Caswell counties. It takes in the architecture of the bright leaf tobacco economy and the work of Thomas Day, the free Black cabinetmaker of Caswell County who worked in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Account of student protest in 1960s Chapel Hill, published by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007 with illustrations. It draws together the civil rights movement and segregation in the town, discrimination in restaurants, academic freedom and university autonomy, protest against the Vietnam War, Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Student Movement on campus.
Maxine Freeland's biography of James John Freeland (1918-1999), a Hillsborough man of the twentieth century, compiled in 1999.
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