Shopping center

Northgate Mall

1959 aerial view of the area north of West Club Blvd - construction of the US 70 bypass/Duke St. interchange is visible in the upper right corner. The property upon which Northgate Mall sits today had a rural character prior to the construction of the US 70 bypass immediately to its north in 1958-1959. While a small cluster of businesses stood at...

Wellons Village

05.22.59 Wellons Village, ~1960 (Courtesy The Herald-Sun Newspaper) Wellons Village, the shopping center, was built in 1959 - Durham's second after Forest Hills Shopping Center, which was built in 1955. (I'm actually not sure when Loehmann' Plaza was built; Northgate was built in 1960, Lakewood was built in 1962 and South Square in 1975.) As the...

North Duke Mall

North Duke Mall --- (Courtesy Durham County Library / North Carolina Collection) I'm a bit embarrassed by the lack of detail in this post, but I've found information difficult to uncover at best. The aerial above shows Fairfield Road, North Duke St., Roxboro Road, and Duke Homestead Road in 1959 - the mostly rural nature of the landscape is even...

Lakewood Shopping Center

( Many thanks to Myers Sugg for making his files on Lakewood Park available to me, and to Marcus Latta, whose recollections extensively document the park.) Looking north from Chapel Hill Road, around 1910. (Courtesy Durham County Library / North Carolina Collection) The Durham Traction Company, which purchased the city's streetcar system in 1901...

Forest Hills Shopping Center / Third Fork Creek

I've been trying to put together a shopping center chronology in Durham - suffice to say it is a work in progress - but Forest Hills, Northgate, Lakewood, and Loehmann's Plaza were among the early arrivals in the 1950s-1960s. Interestingly, low-lying riparian land seemed to be a preferred development location; my guess would be that these were some...