Recent Tours

A collective effort to upload 2002 survey photos to new Open Durham pages and improve documentation of this historically Black neighborhood.

Published by Oliver B. Quick - dated in 1922, but the buildings and residents appear to be ~mid-1920s, the introduction reads: "This little book presents views showing property owned and controlled exclusively by Negroes in the city of Durham, NC. It is not a complete collection. There are other institutions and homes in the city equally as deserving of place in this book but lack of space prevents their showing. We have selected these as evidence of the progress being made by our race group in this section of the South." -OLIVER B. QUICK.

The Preservation Durham Annual Home Tour is back – October 16 and 17, 2021. Visit homes that reflect the Tudor Revival architecture style in Durham from cottages to mansions. Click the banner photo below for ticket information.

Richard and Lonna Harkrader built dozens of passive solar, contemporary houses in Durham in the 1970s and 1980s. The unique, environmentally-conscious and energy-economical designs have come to be known as 'Harkrader Houses' among the Durham built-environment cognescenti.

An ever-expanding cheatsheet (or explorers' map) from past posts in the "What's It Wednesday?!" series on our social media accounts. Would you have been able to pick out these places from a single picture?

Scroll down to see a running account of the buildings identified in this (as of yet) undated aerial photo looking northeast across the railroad tracks at Duke East Campus. Their location is also shown in the map at left. So far, we know this has to be post-1930 and pre-1957. Can you pick out any others and help narrow it down further?

Even before the recent Oscar win for the 2018 film Green Book, there's been a long overdue spike in interest about the actual directory the movie title references - The Negro Motorist Green Book, published for three decades starting in 1936 by a New York City postalworker named Victor Hugo Green. Well aware of the rich history of black-owned businesses in the Bull City - only a small fraction of which were ever featured in the Green Book - Open Durham is initiating a project to better document the sites listed here in our community.