Storyline
How UNC’s 1987 land use plan met opposition and a joint town-University committee reworked its roads: the crowded June hearing, the committee’s votes against a loop road through Battle Park and against taking private property, the Pittsboro Street extension fight, the 1988 acceptance and the 1989 town-gown committee.
In briefIn June 1987 more than 400 people came to object to UNC's campus land use plan, with its parking decks, a loop road through Battle Park and the removal of Odum Village. A joint town-University committee recommended against the loop road and against taking private property, and the Town Council and Chancellor Fordham accepted its advice in 1988. In 1989 a standing town-gown committee was formed and the council dropped the Pittsboro Street extension from its capital list. A revised plan in 1991 dropped the Pittsboro Street extension but kept a South Loop road through Odum Village and four more parking decks, which a new student group opposed, and that November the council voted to comment on state environmental reviews of University projects. In 1994 a University committee called for second and third campuses on the Horace Williams and Mason Farm tracts. Chancellor Hardin invited the towns to help plan them, Chapel Hill and Carrboro named advisory committees, and in November the Chapel Hill council rezoned parts of the Horace Williams tract so that UNC buildings there would need its review.
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On June 1, 1987 planners from Johnson, Johnson and Roy presented UNC's Guide for Physical Development to a crowd of more than 400 students and residents in Hamilton Hall. The plan called for four parking decks, a loop road through Battle Park and the Laurel Hill and Gimghoul neighborhoods, and the removal of the Odum Village married-student housing. The next day Chancellor Christopher Fordham put off taking it to the trustees from June 26 to August 28. On June 8 the Chapel Hill Town Council unanimously endorsed a joint committee proposed by the University, its members to be named by Mayor James Wallace and Fordham. A speaker from the Laurel Hill residents' association warned against any forcible taking of property, and the trustees' vote was put off until after the committee reported in January 1988.
In early July Wallace and Fordham named the ten-member Joint University-Town Committee, five members from the University and five from the town, chaired by John Sanders, to advise them, chiefly on roads around the campus. On September 9 it recommended against a road through Battle Park and against buying private property for a road along the east side of campus. On September 22 thirty people spoke to it on the town's thoroughfare plan and the land use plan before more than 150. Nearly all opposed extending Pittsboro Street through Little Fraternity Court to Airport Road, which a Northside Neighborhood Association member said would destroy the century-old neighborhood, and many opposed the four parking decks, though the Downtown Chapel Hill Association's president endorsed them. At a state Department of Transportation hearing on September 30, speakers for Kappa Alpha and for the owner of University Square opposed the extension, which would have taken three fraternity houses and 60 of University Square's parking spaces; the state's study priced it at about $5.5 million.
On November 5 the committee voted 7-1 to recommend closing no part of Columbia Street and widening Pittsboro Street to no more than three lanes, against the draft plan's six; council member R.D. Smith voted no, fearing a wider street would bring the extension. Its preliminary report, after eleven meetings, recommended no major road changes until park-and-ride lots and other ways of limiting traffic were tried, no loop road through Battle Park or nearby neighborhoods and none taking private property, a new north-south road from the east end of Hinton James north to Ridge Road, and a study before closing Cameron Avenue at South Building. Most of the sixteen speakers at its December 8 hearing favored it. Fordham and Mayor Jonathan Howes approved the recommendations on January 5, 1988, and on January 13 the council accepted them 9-0 and asked for a permanent committee of town and University officials. In April Fordham's report to the trustees affirmed its recommendations, told the University to go ahead with the changes it had approved and keep studying the rest, and said he could not bind his successor.
In January 1989 Chancellor Paul Hardin and Howes set up a nine-member committee of officials from Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Orange County, the University and N.C. Memorial Hospital to take up land use, transportation and other shared issues, modeled on a partnership between the University of Virginia and Charlottesville. Its members included commissioners chairman Moses Carey, Carrboro Mayor Eleanor Kinnaird and hospital director Eric Munson. On March 27, 1989, on Joe Herzenberg's motion, the Chapel Hill council dropped the Pittsboro Street extension from its capital improvements program, ending its consideration for state funding, though the road stayed on the thoroughfare plan. The Alliance of Neighborhoods had said the extension would harm Northside, which its president called the town's oldest Black neighborhood.
On March 27, 1991 University officials released a revised Guide to Physical Development at a press conference and that evening presented it to the Chapel Hill Town Council, the Carrboro aldermen and the county commissioners at the Carolina Inn. Built largely on the joint town-University committee's recommendations, it dropped extending Pittsboro Street, closing South Columbia Street and buying 16 houses across Ridge Road from the law school, but it kept the South Loop road, which would take six Odum Village buildings, and called for four more parking decks, which town officials criticized. By April 8 students had formed People for a Socially Responsible University, under the Student Environmental Action Coalition, to ask the council to reject the South Loop road and a Ridge Road extension through the Coker Pinetum, and the group opposed the new parking decks; at a forum with administrators on April 9, students called it a parking plan rather than a land-use plan. On November 13 the council voted unanimously to take an active part in the review the N.C. Environmental Policy Act requires for state projects, so that council members, and not only the town manager's staff, could comment to the State Clearinghouse on the environmental effects of proposed University developments. The resolution gave the town no veto; University officials said they had long shared their plans, and council member Art Werner asked the manager for periodic reports on University construction.
On March 16, 1994 the University's Facilities Use Planning Committee sent Hardin a report setting 16 principles for University land use and saying UNC would need second and third campuses by the end of the century on the Horace Williams tract off Airport Road and the Mason Farm tract. In a March 21 letter Hardin asked the town to plan the 970-acre Horace Williams tract with the University, and on April 18 residents asked the council for citizen seats and a stronger town role in the proposed process. On September 19 the council referred to Town Manager Cal Horton a proposal to rezone part of the tract from Office/Institutional-3, which had no height or use limits, to the stricter OI-2; Vice Chancellor Wayne Jones said the University saw no need to rezone before its plan was made. On September 26 the council set up a citizens' committee to draw up principles for developing the Horace Williams tract and the 1,336-acre Mason Farm tract, together about 22 percent of the town's land. After Hardin asked the town to wait 18 months, pledging that UNC would submit no development plan meanwhile, the council deferred the rezoning on October 10; the next day the Carrboro aldermen decided to appoint a 12-member advisory board, since about a third of the tract lay in Carrboro's planning areas. On October 24 the Chapel Hill council named its UNC Land-Use Plan Advisory Committee, chaired by council member Rosemary Waldorf, and by November 1 the University had hired Johnson Johnson & Roy of Ann Arbor, Michigan, for $264,700 to plan both tracts. On November 14 the council rezoned university land south of Estes Drive and a second section by Airport Road to OI-2, so that future UNC buildings there would need its review.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 24 dated events in the chronology →
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows the 1 with a known location.
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.
No indexed work is about this storyline itself yet. These are about the sites and people its dated events name, those named most often first, so they may discuss the storyline only in part. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Lisa Giencke's 2010 conservation report on Battle Park, the university's natural area in Chapel Hill managed with the North Carolina Botanical Garden, with contributions from Alan Weakley, Peter White, Stephen Keith, Dave Vandermast and Elinor Benami. It deals with botany, natural areas and nature conservation, with partial funding from an Institute of Museum and Library Sciences grant.
A 2010 trail guide to Battle Park, the 93 acre Piedmont woodland at Chapel Hill, published by the North Carolina Botanical Garden of the University of North Carolina. The folded sheet carries a map of more than two and a half miles of pedestrian trails together with notes on the park's history. Four unnumbered pages with a color illustration, 22 x 36 cm.
An earlier edition of the North Carolina Botanical Garden's guide to Battle Park in Chapel Hill, printed in 2006, when the trail network was described as more than two miles through 93 acres of forest. The folded sheet gives a trail map with color illustrations and historical notes on the park. Five unnumbered pages, 22 x 36 cm folded to 22 x 9 cm.
Battle Park in Chapel Hill mapped for walkers in 2004, with relief shown by contours on a single sheet of 20 by 34 centimeters. Attributed to the North Carolina Botanical Garden. It guides visitors along the park's footpaths and records the state of the trail network at that date.
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).
Brian Burns's collection of lesser-known episodes from Chapel Hill's past, published by The History Press of Charleston, South Carolina, in 2023. Topics include the town's history, its buildings and structures, and the history of civil rights in Chapel Hill. 158 pages with illustrations and portraits.
A history of the buildings on the University of North Carolina campus by John V. Allcott and JJ Bauer, published by the Chapel Hill Historical Society in 2019. It follows campus construction from the 1790s forward: the plans behind each building campaign, the architects, and the university figures who pushed projects through. 132 pages with photographs, maps and plans.
Deed transcripts for the town lots of Chapel Hill and adjoining land from 1790 to the 1930s, compiled by Stewart E. Dunaway. Each transcript keeps only the working facts: grantor and grantee, price, acreage and the metes and bounds of the parcel. Self-published in 2014 as Issue 1G, 702 pages with maps and facsimiles.
David R. Godschalk and Jonathan B. Howes describe the ten-year building program that reshaped the UNC campus in Chapel Hill, when some six million square feet in new buildings went up and a million more of historic buildings were restored. Chapters treat the campus master plan, siting and design decisions, the historic north campus, the southeast and health-sciences precincts and the planned Carolina North research campus, with contributions by chancellors James Moeser and Holden Thorp. Published by UNC Press in 2012, 175 pages.
Margaret Ruth Little-Stokes's survey of Chapel Hill's town and campus buildings from 1795 to 1975, published by the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill in 2006. Chapters run from the first campus buildings through David Swain's romantic campus to midcentury modernism, followed by area surveys of the campus, east and west Chapel Hill, downtown, Northside and the suburbs.
A pocket-sized guide to the historic buildings and landmarks of Chapel Hill, prepared by the Chapel Hill Historical Society and printed by Creative Printers in 1973. Forty pages with illustrations and maps, 14 by 22 cm. Topics include architecture, historic buildings and historic districts in Chapel Hill, and the guide is useful for a walking tour of the older parts of town.
Planning study by the Research Triangle Regional Planning Commission, November 1969, setting out alternative patterns of land use for parts of the Chapel Hill Planning District and the town's surroundings. Topics include city planning and urban renewal. The 78 pages come with 70 pages of plates, mostly maps, and the work had federal urban planning assistance.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Land use inventory of 1962 and general plan to 1980 for Chapel Hill, Carrboro and their surroundings, prepared by the Research Triangle Regional Planning Commission for the Chapel Hill planning board and published in 1963. Funded through a federal urban planning grant under Section 701 of the Housing Act of 1954, it runs 149 pages with nine leaves of plates and folded maps, some in color.
John V. Allcott's history of the architecture of the University of North Carolina campus across two centuries, from the first buildings of the 1790s to the 1980s, published by the Chapel Hill Historical Society in 1986. A 108-page illustrated survey with a bibliography. Allcott taught art history at the university.
A 2008 study of the tree landscape at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published by the university and dated November 2008 on page four. Topics include the history of campus planning at Chapel Hill, landscape architecture and its environmental aspects, landscape protection and plant conservation. One hundred fifty five pages with color illustrations, maps and plans.
Kemp P. Battle's University Day address of 1883, delivered as president of the University of North Carolina on the day marking the laying of the Old East cornerstone. Battle goes building by building through the Chapel Hill campus, telling how each was named and why it stands where it does. Fifteen pages. Electronic edition issued 2005 by the UNC University Library for Documenting the American South.
A 2005 collector street plan for southwest Durham County and southeast Chapel Hill. It addresses street networks, land use, transit and sustainable development.
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