Storyline
How UNC built its Student Activities Center between 1978 and 1984: the arena plan for the Baity land, the 1980 approvals by the trustees and the Town Council, the gift and loan that paid for it, the 1982 student seating fight, and the reviews of its steel and cracked beams in 1983 and 1984.
In briefUNC planned a basketball arena and athletic complex for the former Baity land in 1978, and in 1980 the trustees and the Chapel Hill Town Council approved a center seating about 22,000. Private gifts and an Educational Foundation loan paid for it, and students won a better seating plan in 1982. In 1983 and 1984 engineers reviewed a former subcontractor's charges about its steel and then cracks in its beams. After a delay the center opened as the Dean E. Smith Student Activities Center with a win over Duke on January 18, 1986, and was dedicated that September. It lost about $120,000 in its first year but drew almost 1.02 million people to 72 events by early 1988, and in 1989 the athletic director added lower-level seats for students.
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On October 13, 1978 the UNC Board of Governors voted to ask the General Assembly for authority to plan a $21 million athletic complex near Manning Drive with an 18,000-seat basketball arena and an indoor pool, to be paid for without state money. The University looked to the former Baity land off Mason Farm Road, 36.6 acres it had bought from the H.G. Baity family in 1974. Over neighbors' objections the Chapel Hill aldermen rezoned the tract for University use in January 1979, as the Planning Board had recommended, and in March they required a special-use permit for any arena seating more than 2,000. In August 1979 the trustees approved the Baity land as the site and chose Hakan-Corley and Associates of Chapel Hill as architects.
On March 21, 1980 the trustees approved plans for a $21 million student athletic center seating 18,000 to 22,000 between Manning Drive and Mason Farm Road, to be paid for with private gifts. On July 14 the Chapel Hill Town Council voted 8 to 1 to grant the special use permit for a center seating about 22,000, with Joe Herzenberg dissenting, and added a limit on the sound level reaching Mason Farm Road. So that rock concerts would meet that limit, the trustees approved a $105,000 movable acoustical liner for the roof on September 26.
On June 12, 1981 trustees chairman Hargrove Bowles announced an anonymous $1 million gift toward the planned $30 million Student Activities Center. By November the Educational Foundation had agreed to pledge income from its endowment to repay a loan for the center if the fund drive raised another $5 million; Bowles, the drive chairman, said 500 volunteers had raised $17.7 million of the $30 million needed. The trustees formally approved construction plans for the center on South Campus on February 12, 1982, and planning director Gordon Rutherford said it could open in 1985 or 1986, with money raised for everything but its Olympic-size pool.
A tentative seating plan put most student seats away from courtside, 1,655 in a lower corner and 6,298 in the upper level. On February 26, 1982 a student petition against it drew 2,000 signatures in a day, and the lobbying group Students Have Pride Too called a three-minute "silent time" at tip-off of the next day's Duke game. On July 1 the steering committee passed a seating plan that kept the students' seats in one block, defined them and left room for more center-court seats later. Student Body President Mike Vandenbergh said Coach Dean Smith had backed the students.
By late October 1983 a former steel subcontractor had charged that the general contractor, Paul W. Howard Co. of Greensboro, had ordered him to reduce the reinforcing steel in the center's walls and columns. Vice Chancellor Farris Womack told the trustees on October 28 that he was unpersuaded but that the concrete was being exposed for an independent engineer. On November 3 engineers confirmed that some steel ties were missing from one of the main columns, and Womack announced that post-tension bolts would be drilled through the wall as a precaution. An independent review by Paul Zia, head of civil engineering at N.C. State, ended on December 19; it confirmed some deviations but found them inconsequential to the building's safety. In January 1984, after the extreme cold over the Christmas holidays opened new cracks in three concrete tie beams, the University asked the New York firm Weidlinger Associates to review the center's structural design; the state construction director said work would go on. The center was then due to open in February 1985.
By March 1985, with the contractor warning that the whole building might not be finished by the 1985-86 basketball season, the trustees passed a beneficial occupancy resolution letting the team play in the arena before the rest of the building was done, and the University moved to split the contract into arena and swimming projects. On October 22, Athletic Director John Swofford said the 21,426-seat center would not be ready for the November 24 opener against UCLA; the architects expected it to open for the January 18 game against Duke. Swofford put the University's loss from staying in 10,000-seat Carmichael Auditorium at about $80,000 a game. The men's team played its last game in Carmichael on January 4, 1986, beating N.C. State 90 to 79.
The center opened as the Dean E. Smith Student Activities Center on January 18, 1986, when North Carolina beat Duke 95 to 92 before 21,444 fans. The Daily Tar Heel reported tight parking, with about 4,500 spaces within 2,500 feet and nearby lots reserved for Educational Foundation donors, and complaints about wheelchair parking and access. Kenny Rogers gave the first concert there on April 12, and the arena went on to book Lionel Richie, the Monkees and three Genesis shows; its director, Steve Camp, said concerts helped pay its operating costs. On August 18 the state Division of Land Resources fined the University $12,700 under the Sedimentation Pollution Control Act because, without enough ground cover on graded slopes, sediment from the parking area had run into a creek in 1985 and damaged public and private property. The center, which had cost about $34 million, was formally dedicated on September 6 with a game among former Tar Heels who had played professional basketball; the dedication had been put off so more of Smith's former players could come. The jerseys of Phil Ford, James Worthy, Michael Jordan and Lennie Rosenbluth, national players of the year, were retired, and proceeds from more than 21,000 tickets at $5 went to the Ronald McDonald House of Chapel Hill and the North Carolina Athletes Against Crime. On September 16 UNC, which had been warned about the erosion in 1983 and 1985, appealed the fine, arguing that the state could not fine a state agency and that the contractor was responsible.
The women's basketball team played its first game in the Smith Center on January 13, 1987, losing 82 to 76 to 13th-ranked N.C. State before 2,700 fans. A week later about 20 residents of Odum Village, UNC's married-student apartments, met with the village's Board of Aldermen and formed committees to write to University officials and circulate a petition against a Rams Club consultant's proposal for event exit driveways through the village. The Rams Club said the report was only a recommendation, and the town's transportation planner said such exits would need a change in the center's special-use permit. On September 1, 1987 Camp said the center had lost about $120,000 in its first year because too few concerts were booked, and that it needed $600,000 to $800,000 a year in event income to break even. By February 1988 polls by Performance magazine and Pollstar had named it the country's best new facility of 1987; it had drawn almost 1.02 million people to 72 events since it opened.
In January 1989 the Carolina Athletic Association found that students held about 1,600 lower-level seats in the Smith Center, not the roughly 2,000 its leaders said had been promised during planning, and student leaders talked of a five- to ten-minute boycott of a game. On January 20 Swofford met CAA president Carol Geer, added 50 lower-level student seats at once and agreed to consider bleachers in the student sections.
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Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange, Orange County GIS, OpenStreetMap and a few other published sources named on each site’s page; town and community pins show approximate locations.
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A ceremony, possibly a graduation, in Carmichael Gymnasium and Auditorium at UNC-Chapel Hill, photographed by Hugh Morton between 1966 and 1972 on color sheet film. UNC President William Friday and Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson are seated in the rows behind the speaker.
Hugh Morton photographed a basketball game in Carmichael Auditorium at the University of North Carolina for this postcard he published, with players in blue and white, cheerleaders and a crowd in the stands. Printed as a Plastichrome by Colorpicture of Boston in the 1960s.
William Donald Carmichael Auditorium on the UNC campus in an undated exterior photograph, from the UNC Campus binder of the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection (CHHS.002).
Victory Village, the postwar student housing at UNC, in five photographs from 1948 to 1950. They show houses among trees, the backs of the houses in winter and a house with a car parked outside. From the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection (CHHS.002).
Victory Village, the University of North Carolina's housing for student veterans and their families after the Second World War, in newspaper clippings and photocopied articles. Undated folder, Chapel Hill Historical Society vertical files.
UNC athletic director John Swofford at the inauguration of Michael Hooker as chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill on 12 October 1995. Hugh Morton shot it on 35 mm color negative film.
Woody Durham, John Swofford, Charlie Justice and Dick Baddour, left to right, gathered for an event in the UNC-Chapel Hill Alumni Center, about the late 1990s or early 2000s. Color print by Hugh Morton.
UNC athletic director John Swofford at a press conference for WCHL 1360, the Chapel Hill radio station, sometime between 1988 and 1994. 35 mm black-and-white negative by Hugh Morton.
Press conference for the Chapel Hill radio station WCHL 1360, 1988 to 1994, with an unidentified man, UNC athletic director John Swofford and head football coach Mack Brown, left to right. Hugh Morton, 35 mm black-and-white film.
Art Chansky's 2016 account of Dean Smith, Charlie Scott and the years that changed Chapel Hill as a Southern college town. Scott was the first Black scholarship player in the Carolina basketball program. Topics include civil rights, racism in sports and the university's twentieth-century history.
Art Chansky's 2009 history of the Carolina basketball dynasty that three coaches, Frank McGuire and Dean Smith among them, built at the University of North Carolina. Smith wrote the foreword and Rick Brewer the introduction. Chapters cover Final Fours, the Larry Brown bond, recruiting and the program's records.
John Feinstein's account of the three coaches who defined Triangle college basketball in the 1980s: Dean Smith (1931-2015) at North Carolina, Mike Krzyzewski at Duke and Jim Valvano (1946-1993) at N.C. State, all working within a few miles of one another. Feinstein follows the recruiting contests, the rivalry among the three programs and the personal competition among the three men, which was not always friendly, and the pressure that came with national attention. Published by Doubleday in 2016, 404 pages with plates.
Dean Smith's autobiography of forty years in college basketball, most of them as head coach of the Tar Heels at the University of North Carolina, published by Random House in 1999. It runs 350 pages with 48 pages of plates.
Adam Lucas marks one hundred years of basketball at the University of North Carolina in this illustrated history, published by UNC Press in 2010 in association with the athletics department. Chapters follow the program from the game's arrival on campus and the 'White Phantoms' of the Southern Conference through the founding of the ACC, the 1957 season, Dean Smith's changes to the game and the title seasons of 1982, 1993, 2005 and 2009, closing with a century of statistics. 289 pages.
Rick Jackson's true crime history of Chapel Hill, published by The History Press in 2023, in 28 short chapters. Cases include the Efland bank robbery, the execution of John Henry Breeze, the unsolved murder of Suellen Evans, the killing at the Internationalist Bookstore and the death of Eve Carson.
The Duke and North Carolina basketball rivalry written together by Johnny Moore and Art Chansky, the latter a sports reporter who has followed it since his student days at UNC. The book opens with the 2014 season and moves through recruiting battles old and new, 'Black and Blue Sunday', 'Blood and Roses', and chapters on the rivalry's heroes, leaders and teachers, with a foreword by Jay Bilas and a photo gallery. Published by Triumph Books in 2014, 289 pages.
H. G. Jones follows the fortune of Mary Ruffin Smith (1814-1885), the unmarried heiress whose Orange and Chatham County lands passed at her death to the University of North Carolina and the Episcopal Church. Chapters profile her grandfather Francis Jones, then trace the bequest through a quarrel among Episcopalians over Price Creek, the Chapel of the Cross and the university's buildings. A December 1885 New York Times report called the gift money; Jones shows it was land. Published by McFarland in 2014, 231 pages.
Steven J. Tepper's chronicle of how the University of North Carolina marked its bicentennial in 1993 and 1994. An appendix reprints the University Day speeches of October 12, 1993, given by Paul Hardin, James B. Hunt Jr., C.D. Spangler, William C. Friday, Charles Kuralt and President Bill Clinton, plus bicentennial addresses by Li Lu, Francis S. Collins and Richard J. Richardson. Published by the university in Chapel Hill, 1998; 284 pages.
Biography of William C. Friday, president of the University of North Carolina system, by historian William A. Link, published by UNC Press in 1995 with the subtitle power, purpose, and American higher education. It covers Friday's career and the history of the university at Chapel Hill and statewide. Part of the Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection.
William D. Snider's history of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1992. It runs 370 pages with illustrations, a bibliography and an index.
Reviewed in History of Education Quarterly (1993), The Journal of Southern History (1993).
Twelve essays by novelist Daphne Athas (1923-2020) on the Chapel Hill she knew across the twentieth century. Subjects include Carrboro as 'the Paris of the Piedmont', philosopher Horace Williams, Betty Smith writing in Chapel Hill, Junius Scales, Ab Abernethy and the Intimate Bookshop, Richard Wright's visit, and a set of Chapel Hill murders. Published 2010, 243 pages with illustrations.
Scott Fowler gathers recollections from Carolina basketball players, decade by decade from the 1950s to the 2000s, organized around Roy Williams and the question in the title. Contributors include Lennie Rosenbluth, Larry Brown, Billy Cunningham, Charlie Scott, Phil Ford, James Worthy, Brad Daugherty, Eric Montross, Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison, Raymond Felton and Sean May, each entry giving position and playing years. Published 2010 by Triumph Books of Chicago, 270 pages, here as an e-book.
Archibald Henderson's history of the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, its buildings and grounds from the founding in the 1790s onward. Henderson, a professor of mathematics and a prolific historian of the university, wrote it in the years around the university's sesquicentennial. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 412 pages with illustrations and bibliographical footnotes.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1949), South Atlantic Quarterly (1950).
Charles Phillips Russell's biography of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825-1908), the Chapel Hill writer remembered for ringing the bell of South Building when the university reopened in 1875 after its closure during Reconstruction. It doubles as a history of Chapel Hill and the university. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 293 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1949).
Books in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection whose titles, catalog subjects, or descriptions match this storyline. The Friends’ recommended starting points are labelled.
Art Chansky's 2016 account of Dean Smith, Charlie Scott and the years that changed Chapel Hill as a Southern college town. Scott was the first Black scholarship player in the Carolina basketball program. Topics include civil rights, racism in sports and the university's twentieth-century history.
Biography of Dean Smith, the University of North Carolina basketball coach, by Thad Mumau, published by J. F. Blair in Winston-Salem in 1990. A revised edition of the author's 'The Dean Smith Story' from 1980, 287 pages with illustrations.
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