Cool Things Open Durham Can Do 4: Maptastic.

Several years ago, I started trying to add mapping abilities to Endangered Durham through various methods- it's amazing how far this technology has come in such a short period of time. I had to manually update the map of posts that I had made every so often, and it was simply a map of every post I had done.

Mapping is a core element of Open Durham - I wanted to build the structure of the site such that mapping was completely integrated into the search and display functions of the site.

The front page shows a search box, which shows results in a text list and on the map. (And by default, without a search, shows the most popular posts.) Results of a search show up in both places, and you can page through the list - this is designed for simple searches.



There are two buttons on here that do more powerful things. One is Advanced Search. Advanced Search gives a list of options to define a search, and displays these search results on a map. For instance, here is every Building post in Morehead Hill:



You can see the search criteria on the left - you can search by any of these, or combinations. Here are Buildings noted to have been used as pool halls.



Or tobacco auction warehouses.




You can combine these - bungalows demolished in 1968 in Morehead Hill, for instance.

Creating the metadata to allow this to work has been a fairly massive undertaking, and it undoubtedly isn't perfect. But thanks to volunteers who have helped me split up multiple-building posts into individual posts and apply metadata, it will be finished by 10/17.

The other button in the search box is "Map all Buildings" which does exactly that, below, every building on OD. I'm not sure how many there are at this point, but on the order of ~2500:



A bit closer in:



And the core of downtown:



You can click on any of these markers to see a small balloon showing what building you've clicked on:



From here, you can click through to the summary/index card for the building, which always shows an inset map as well.



This degree of location information and density will be leveraged in the mobile application - such that you can walk down West Main Street - or any mapped street aboveand follow a self-guided tour of the history of Durham based on location awareness of your smartphone.

CTODCD 3: 360 Degree Tour

I'm very excited about "Tours" in Open Durham - although they can function as literal tours, they are, more broadly, a new way to utilize the data in Open Durham (i.e. the data from Endangered Durham + ) to tell new kinds of stories.

Each "Building" in Open Durham is a story about that building and location, in much the way Endangered Durham has told those stories. I.e., on the northeast corner of West Main and N. Corcoran, there have been two buildings - Blacknall's Drugstore, which burned in 1914, and the Geer Building, which was mostly torn down in 1972. Now it's vacant.

Tours are stories that interlink multiple locations or buildings - so that you can take a series of buildings that have a story interconnecting them and place them in one 'post' - interlinking them with text.

As some simple examples, without much text to tell the stories right now:

Fire Stations of Durham:



Or if you were concerned about the fate of the Liberty Warehouse, and wanted to tell the story of all of the tobacco auction warehouses in Durham to make clear that Liberty No. 3 is the last surviving warehouse of a once-thriving tobacco sales market :



Or, a more complex tour would be the re-work I did of my rather massive Trinity College/East Campus post into this format:



The possibilities here are wide-ranging. Places your grandmother lived. Amusement Parks. Drive-ins from the 1950s. All the places a group has had their annual meetings.

They can be used to tell the story of an architect - i.e., my post about Milburn and Heister.



In each, the building index card is inserted amidst the text - and the reader can 'drill down' on the building of interest to them, and read the parcel history that has been part and, um, parcel of Endangered Durham.

It can also be used for literal tours - i.e., the Preservation Durham tour, DCVB tours, Trinity Park Home tours, etc. Once the Open Durham mobile application is out, users can download these tours and use their phones as 'tour guides'.

It becomes possible then to do various forms of augmented reality through a phone and the tour - although I don't think the tech is mature enough yet to make this really viable at the density of information contained in Open Durham, it is cool as a proof of concept.


100 block of East Main


Main and Mangum

Like the other content types already previewed, anyone can create tours. In a sense I think of this like Legos - I've created a bunch of varied blocks and presented a huge bag of them to you. You can reassemble them in any order you want to, as many different ways as you want.

Durham Historic Restaurant Hunt!

One of my unexpectedly favorite things on Endangered Durham has been the Mystery Photo - you all have blown me away with your identification skills. I decided to put together a fun mystery / scavenger hunt to celebrate the launch of Open Durham that combines two of my favorite things: food and history.

For a 'foodie town,' there is remarkably little written history of Durham's old restaurants - while we've branched into a culinary diversity that wasn't available in mid-20th century Durham, there aren't any more restaurants per square mile in Durham than there were in the 1950s - a quick perusal of a 1960 city directory yields a surprisingly long list of eating establishments - most of which had disappeared by the 1970s.

In an effort to get us in touch with our culinary roots, I'm putting you to the test; for the next two weeks, beginning Monday 10/3, I'll be releasing clues every day on here, Facebook, and Twitter to see if you can find the restaurant. The places will be marked with an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper that looks like the above. You can use the QR code or the web address on the sheet of paper to see the entry on the new Open Durham site.

On October 15th, the hunt will be complete - email me your full list of guesses by the end of that weekend. On October 22, I'll lead a tour of the places, tentatively at 2pm, and tentatively with some local chef(s) offering their thoughts on the historic food (not food past the due date) of Durham. Everyone who comes will get an Open Durham button, and those who got every answer right will get an ExtraSpecialOpenDurham Button as well to show off their superior Durham knowledge.

My hope is that, as the hunt progresses, people will gather stories about the restaurants for the day of the tour. If you have a friend or a relative who knows something about it, or ate at the restaurant, bring them, or bring their story. We'll collect the info to be a part of Open Durham, and thus part of our historical record. The week between end-of-building hunt and the tour is so everyone will know all of the answers and be able to get around to visit their mom or uncle or neighbor and convince them to come and share their stories, or simply to convey it for them when you come.

I think and hope this will be a lot of fun, and that we'll all learn a lot about Durham's food history. I hope you enjoy it!

Gary

Cool Things Open Durham Can Do 2: People are Buildings Too!

When I've gotten myself involved in various debates over land use and preservation, one of the stock soundbites of people used by folks annoyed by my opposition to their bulldozing has been "he cares about buildings more than people." While I admit to a certain guilty enjoyment of post-apocolyptic sci-fi, I actually do care about people. And to prove it, people have equal standing with buildings on Open Durham.

In all seriousness, I've always been interested in telling, sometimes re-telling, the history of Durham through the framework of its architecture. Most history books, and even history websites are organized within some broad geographic framework, but then subdivide history into social subcategories +/- chronology. (I.e., "The War Years")

In doing so, I've often written somewhat detailed biography in the context of, say, someone's house or primary place of business. But what I've hoped to accomplish with Open Durham is to give people and businesses a page that can define the distinct history of that business, but then let that page link in with each house or building that the person or business has been associated with.

To create a business or person post, follow the same initial steps outlined in the first installment (Cool Things Open Durham Can Do 1: Roll Yer Own,) but click on Business or Person, as appropriate, rather than Building. The options are a lot smaller for Business and Person. Before someone (I'm looking east of Alston) seizes on that as renewed proof of my misanthropy, I'll say that it would be great to have the 'index cards' etc. in Business and People too - let's call that a fundraising opportunity.

You can upload pictures and information to the "Body" section and save your entry. Once approved, it will appear on the site. Now, once you create a building, you can associate a Business or Person with that building.

Here's an entry for Julian Carr (note that the the people and business entries are very sparse or non-existent at this juncture.)



I've added a picture and a very abbreviated biography (truncated prior to the full hagiographic blossom.) Note the list on the right - which are all of the Building posts in which I've linked to Julian Carr. So you can, in looking for more information about particular individual, see the scope of their architectural 'web' at a glance, and drill down for more information about those places. You can also 'map a person' and see this geographically represented. More on this in CTODCD 4: Cartographic Cornucopia.

Businesses work similarly, and this solves a problem that I've not been able to resolve on Endangered Durham - how to tell the story of a business that has moved three or four times. Do I repeat the story of the business in each place? Not anymore - you can see each place Hall-Wynne, or Budd Piper , or Scarborough and Hargett, etc. has been located with a click on the business page.

One open question for me, and you, is whether there is a 'standard' regarding what people or businesses merit inclusion in Open Durham. I want the data to be comprehensive on the one hand - geographic genealogy seems very cool to me, but I don't want this to veer into advertisement/self-promotion for its own sake - i.e., present day people and places should reach some level of public figure-ness or businesses should have some cultural relevance or staying power. But that's a blurry line, and I think we'll just take it as it comes. Right now, I'll just be happy that people want to contribute content!

Cool things Open Durham Can Do:1: Roll Your Own (in homage to Durham's heritage)

I'm going to be doing a series of posts about Cool Things Open Durham Can Do; today's 'feature' is really a philosophy behind what I've created. Open Durham is just that - open to your piece of the story of Durham.

Most of my ideas for the site have come through my experience of writing Endangered Durham for 5 years. And one of the many things I quickly appreciated were the comments - often wonderful stories, additions, corrections, discussions that made/make the story of the places I've profiled really interesting.

Beyond that, people email me all of the time with memories or stories, and sometimes with photos, old news clippings, etc. And what became clear to me is that 1) the story of a community is far richer than any one historian/university/museum with a grant to go do a one-off project can capture, 2) people have amazing stories to share that aren't being written down, and 3) the web has evolved to a point where the tools to capture, organize, and interlink people's stories are available.

Let's call it curatorial crowdsourcing, if you will. Someone still needs to verify that people aren't writing about spam buildings or similar, but if folks can make the leap from sending the information to me to the act of creating or modifying a post about their house or a place they know about, we've got a true community history project.

So, a look at part of the Open Durham front page



You can sign in with Facebook, or create your own login to have the option to Create Content. Clicking on that button gives you options - which kind of content you want to create.



You can create buildings, businesses, or people. More on the new content types in "CTODCD 2: Yes, OD Cares about People Too," and "CTOCDC 3: Durham 360 degree Tour"

In this case, I want to add a new building to Open Durham. The Mayor's house.



There are two views for Buildings in Open Durham, Summary and Full. The Summary is an 'index card' that contains the essential particulars about a building. The Full Description is equivalent to an Endangered Durham blog post, and contains the whole history of the piece of land the building sits on. The Title is self-explanatory, the Summary is the short text that goes on the index card.



In the "Body" section, I can add text and photos to give the Full description of the Building - i.e. the story of the evolution of the building or buildings. I've added a picture and a tiny amount of text that someone could expand on later, above.

Below, I add the details about the house that will make it searchable and categorizable in the database and populate the index card. These include the address, Businesses or People associated with the building, neighborhood, uses, architect(s), builder(s), year built, modified, and demolished, and more.



When I'm done, I can save. It won't appear on the site immediately, pending approval by an administrator, who would take out my batcave reference.



And that's it! We've added the mayor's house to Open Durham. (Yes, this is all public information from the city's tax record website.)

I used the mayor's house partly to be a bit cheeky about this, but at the same time to make a small point about our 'current history,' which is happening now, and holds as much validity to a future generation as what I try to decipher about the 1920s. Granted, we've got incredible documentation about what is happening versus the 1920s, but the plethora of websites now related to Place are focused on what is where right now - with no integration with the past, and no particular outlook to archiving that information.

I'm most excited about this element of Open Durham, and I hope you are too - I look forward to seeing what you have to add!

You can check out the Open Durham Facebook page to get updates on the launch and upcoming Building Hunt.

Stallion Club Location?

Can anyone tell me where exactly on Cornwallis Road the "Stallion Club" was located?

Thanks

GK

Open Durham has a Facebook page

After long resisting getting Endangered Durham a FB page, Open Durham (the website formerly known as ED 2.0) has its very own. On the day Google+ opened up its beta to everyone, of course. The launch of the new website is set for October 17th! Very excited to begin introducing features of OD, and the Mystery Buildings + Tour over the next couple of weeks!

Pope Mattress Being Demolished under Durham Rescue Mission Ownership

09.12.11

The handsome if downtrodden buildings at the northeast corner of South Alston and Angier Avenue are being demolished today, quickly after the appearance of many green "Condemned" signs ~ 10-14 days ago. I had a bad feeling about these buildings coming down when I took pictures of them 2 months ago. (Okay, I've had a bad feeling about them coming down for 5 years.)


06.30.11

After Builders of Hope acquired the buildings over a year ago, I had hoped that these buildings would finally be saved. It wasn't to be, as that organization, which has worked hard to preserve and repurpose buildings, sold the buildings to the Durham Rescue Mission in August 2011. I'd say something negative about the mission and their views on preservation, but they're liable to send their whole staff and everyone else they can muster after me. I think they could bulldoze the entirety of Durham and build a mega mission visible from space, and I'm not sure anyone would lift a finger to stop them. Scary. Having an urban planning discussion with their staff and supporters is a bit like opening a discussion on same-sex marriage in the Westboro Baptist Church.

One more possibility for revitalizing a connection between the eastern fringes of downtown and East Durham is obliterated. The quantity of vacant land between Angier/Alston and Hyde Park is astounding. What does anyone think is going to happen to all of this vacant space? How do we keep demolishing more buildings when the area is glutted with vacant land? There simply is no plan that isn't deeply rooted in the un-implementable and unfunded fantasies of the "North-East-Central Durham" crowd, or the well-funded, grand designs of the Mission.


09.13.11

South side of 100 East Parrish?

Does anyone out there have any decent pictures of the south side of the 100 block of East Parrish Street from the 1960s or earlier? Between what was Montaldo's (at N. Church and E Parrish) and the old Duke Power building (at N. Mangum and E Parrish.) (I have good pictures of both of those.) It has remained remarkably elusive.

Many thanks

GK

"Different in Many Respects"

Certain Characteristics Here Distinguish City from Others [Durham Sun, date unknown. Late 1950s/Early 1960s most likely]
by Bill Strawn

Durham has certain characteristics which give the City individuality and distinguish it from most other major North Carolina cities.

What other Tarheel City can boast of anything approximating Duke University and Durham's tobacco plants? What other city can match the medical facilities of Duke, Watts, Lincoln, McPherson, and the Veterans Hospitals?

The pleasant aroma of tobacco is another noteworthy feature of Durham. Visitors often comment favorably on the odor, but many long-time Durham residents no longer notice it.

Durham is different from most other big North Carolina cities in another respect. Many of the City's civic and business leaders take two hours or longer for lunch.

Consciously or unconsciously, many community leaders adhere to the medical adage that a leisurely meal is a digestive aid and an ulcer preventive.

Another Durham feature which comes as an unexpected and pleasant surprise to out-of-town visitors is the absence of parking meters.

Speaking of meters suggests another way in which Durham isn't a typical Tarheel city. Pedestrians in large numbers will cross busy downtown streets at almost any point, with the number of vehicles and not traffic signals determining when they dash across.

Durham residents have been known to remark that it's safer to cross busy downtown streets outside pedestrian crossing lanes than it is to use the lanes. The fact that the traffic accident rate involving pedestrians in the central business area is lower than in some other cities seems to support this theory.

A City Councilman recently stated that Durham "has educated its people to be jaywalkers." He wasn't carping; not at all. In fact, his tone implied admirations for the fleetness of foot of Durham pedestrians.

[Photo Caption}
IT'S A DURHAM CUSTOM - Pedestrian crossing of busy downtown streets without guidance from traffic lights as the group above is doing on Main Street is a common practice which makes Durham unique among big North Carolina cities. The agility of local pedestrians recently caused City Council members to pay informal tribute to their ability to traverse streets with few accidents. As a matter of fact, some contend Jaywalking in the middle of the block is safer than crossing with the light at a corner where automobile drivers customarily ignore pedestrian rights-of-way.

DUKE MOTOR LODGE

Duke Motor Lodge, 1960s.

Durham-Chapel Hill Blvd. Route 3, Box 24
Durham, North Carolina

76 New Units - Located at Jct. U.S. 15-501 Bus. and 15-501 Bypass; 1 mi. So. Durham - Near Duke Univ. and Hosp.; Veteran's Hosp.; Univ. of N. C.

20 Kitchenettes; Room Controlled Elec. Heat and Air-Conditioning; T.V.; Phones; Tub-Showers; 2 Swimming Pools; 9 Holes (Par 28) Golf on Premises. Choice Restaurants Nearby.

Phone 489-9111



2009