Bull City Renaissance

In the mid-1980s Nora and I bought an apartment in New York’s East Village.  At the time, the neighborhood was just starting to gentrify, but it hadn’t made it there yet.  CBGB’s was a couple of blocks down on the Bowery, there was methadone clinic across the street, and the St. Mark’s Hotel was right next door – alive and kicking in all its drug addled, punk rock, $20-a-night-room madness.

I remember reading an article in a magazine at the time about the changes that were happening.  The writer began, “There used to be two reasons to go to the East Village: to rob somebody, or to get robbed.  Not anymore.”  Still, these things can take awhile.  The first time we had a party at our new place the guests had to make their way around a meth head who was on the nod, as they say, in the building’s vestibule.  Local color.

I thought about that when I picked up the latest issue of The Economist and saw a picture of downtown Durham in a story on the renaissance of mid-sized cities (“The Great Divergence”).  When I moved away some 30 years ago, downtown was a wasteland, and not a metaphorical one either.  When I came back from time to time over the next couple of decades, not much had changed.  Nothing to see and no good reason to go there.

But then a few years ago Nora and I were visiting and some old friends offered to take us out to dinner downtown.  We went.  We survived. I was floored. There were restaurants everywhere.  People were walking on the streets. There were apartments, a great train station in an old Liggett & Myers warehouse, the new ball park, life. Since then, it’s only gotten better.

I always loved telling people I was from Durham, and set my first, self-published, critically unacclaimed novel in the Bull City (see below; available on Amazon, cheap).

It’s always been an interesting place, a gritty industrial town with a white shoe university improbably appended on the outskirts.  But this wasn’t the Durham I grew up in, or the city that had been plowed under by urban renewal in the 1970s. This was something different, something better. Durham was cool.