Vision of Chapel Hill 2009 | Diane Lea | Architecture, History Create Chapel Hill Ambiance

Architecture, History Create Chapel Hill Ambiance

By Diane Lea

For many North Carolinians, there is no community more iconic than Chapel Hill, whether or not they or their friends or family are graduates of The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since its founding, the town of Chapel Hill has been integrally related to the University and until the 1970s, the University owned the town’s utilities. It is no wonder that the story of this long and intimate association is the stuff of oft-told history and lore.
The University of North Carolina was the nation’s first public university, chartered in 1789 through a bill introduced by William R. Davie, a Revolutionary general, Halifax County planter and in 1798 North Carolina’s governor. The school was to be located in the center of the state — as the Documentary History of the University, cited by professor John V. Allcott in his The Campus at Chapel Hill: Two Hundred Years of Architecture — stipulated. It should be “a healthy and convenient Situation which shall not be Situate within five miles of the permanent Seat of Government or any of the places holding Courts of Law or Equity.” Apparently, the new school was designed to be unsullied by politics and attorneys.
In her book The Town and Gown Architecture of Chapel Hill, 1795-1975, Ruth Little notes that a committee comprised of a board of trustees empowered to oversee the new school selected a site on property that contained two important roads. “The east-west road linked New Bern, Fayetteville, Raleigh (the newly designated capital), and Salisbury to the west. The north-south road linked Petersburg, VA, to Pittsboro, the Chatham County seat.” The land was near the crossroads site of a small chapel, New Hope Chapel on the Hill, which Little describes as a “chapel of ease” because it was more conveniently located to serve the planters of the area than the Anglican church at the county seat of Hillsborough. The chapel is thought to have stood near where the University-owned Carolina Inn stands in present-day Chapel Hill, and the two roads, which comprise the crossroads, correspond to Cameron Avenue and South Columbia Street. When the trustees met to plan the sites of the University’s buildings, they laid out the town too. The campus, known as the “ornament ground,” was 98.25 acres, and the town’s 24 2-acre lots and six 4-acre lots were arranged along both sides of an east-west road named Franklin Street after Benjamin Franklin, who advocated practical education rather than aristocratic learning offered at Harvard. The town’s lots were bounded on the west by Columbia Street, named for the symbol of the American Republic, the goddess Columbia. Town and gown were from the beginning inextricably entwined.

Village Charm
Many are charmed by the small historic town core adjoining the old part of the University campus. There are historic neighborhoods characterized by pretty residential streets overhung with leafy trees bordered by hand-laid stone and brick walls. These human-scale neighborhoods showcase a mixture of architectural styles and periods. The 1814 Hooper-Kyser House at 504 E. Franklin St. is perhaps the oldest residence. A modest Federal period structure with tasteful later additions, it has an interesting lineage. The house was built for William Hooper, a professor of ancient languages and the grandson of the Signer of the Declaration of Independence. It was later the home of UNC graduate and famed band leader and philanthropist Kay Kyser and his wife, Powers model and Hollywood actress Georgia Carroll. It is just a block down Franklin Street from the 1907 President’s House, designed by Frank P. Milburn, architect of most of the University campus between 1898 and 1920. The President’s House at the corner of Franklin and Hillsborough streets features Colonial Revival styling, an imposing entrance portico with paired Corinthian columns and a graceful one-story wraparound porch. As befits a major University town, there is always activity: students walking to class, energetic mothers and fathers pushing baby strollers or striding along with children on their backs, early retirees with their designer dogs strolling and chatting. Buses still hold up traffic when they stop, and drivers still talk to each other from open car windows at traffic lights.

For other Chapel Hill-ophiles, it is the dignity, prestige and beautiful historic campus core of the University that draws them. The physical plan of the nation’s first public university dates from the laying of the cornerstone of Old East on Oct. 12, 1793. The first structure on the campus, Old East, began as a simple two-story building constructed of brick laid in Flemish bond, similar to dormitories at Yale and other colleges of the period. Constructed between 1793 and 1795 by Chatham County builder James Patterson and his crew, it received the first student at The University of North Carolina, Wilmington-native Hinton James, on Feb. 12, 1795.
Old East served as the all-purpose campus building until Person Hall, the second oldest state university building in the nation, was constructed between 1795 and 1798. Also of Flemish bond brick, Person Hall has round-arched windows to indicate its use as a chapel. And, since there were not yet any churches in Chapel Hill, it served the townspeople too. A third floor addition to Old East was designed by William Nichols, who had much to do with the design of the Capitol in Raleigh. Nichols also designed Old West, constructed in 1822, as a companion “wing” to Old East. Additions to the two buildings were built in the 1840s by the prominent architect AJ Davis, a proponent of Romantic Classicism. Davis extended the buildings to the north and added the Tuscan façades there today.

Campus Key To Identity
The first campus plan was composed of the two wings of Old East and Old West on either side of a quadrangle, which was bound on the south by South Building. The prospect from South Building is of McCorkle Place, the expanse of trees and lawn, which flows to Franklin Street and includes the temple-like rotunda of the Old Well, the symbol of the University. In their book, A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Piedmont North Carolina, architectural historians Catherine Bishir and Michael Southern trace the architectural evolution of South Building, which was planned as the main campus building in 1792 but only completed in 1814 after funds were raised by President Joseph Caldwell. “Modeled generally on Nassau Hall at Princeton, the austere Palladian design is traditionally credited to trustee Richard Dobbs Spaight of New Bern,” writes Bishir and Southern. They go on to catalogue the removal, then replacement of the structure’s belfry and the addition on the north entrance in 1897 of an elegant Georgian Revival surround copied from Virginia’s grand James River plantation house, Westover. A final touch came in the 1920s by University architect Arthur Nash, who added the south portico and lowered the roof pitch. The story of the architectural evolution of these early campus buildings demonstrates how current architectural trends became popular and were adopted by early university architects and planners and were often grafted, quite successfully, onto more modest earlier structures.

Town And Gown
The commercial core of the town expanded with the growth of the University, though the 100 block of the “village” business district was still unpaved at the beginning of the 20th century. It had grown from the days when William Dunn Moseley, an 1818 graduate of the University, whose reminiscences were included in Little’s Town and Gown, is quoted as saying, “Along the main street were about a dozen houses, two stores — Trice’s Store and Tom Taylor’s store — and Hilliard’s tavern.” Today the phrase Franklin Street is synonymous with the Chapel Hill mystique. It conjures up the low-rise Georgian Revival brick commercial buildings typical of small-town North Carolina and especially beloved by Chapel Hill. On Franklin Street, students and alums, as well as longtime residents explore stores, restaurants and new addition Kidzu, a children’s museum. The ritual is to stop for a coffee, check out the menus at the venerable Carolina Coffee Shop, or Spanky’s, or Top Of the Hill, or Ye Ole Waffle Shop, purchase a T-shirt or other Carolina memorabilia, and browse at the retail establishment of famous UNC alumnus Alexander Julian, who worked in his family’s men’s shop when he was growing up in Chapel Hill.
Most likely the weekend crowd will pop into the Old Chapel Hill Post Office, designed in 1937 by Louis A. Simon, the supervising architect for the Treasury, and view the WPA-era mural depicting the laying of the cornerstone for Old East. Or they might extend their stroll down Franklin Street to take in the latest program at the Morehead Planetarium, a red brick Georgian Revival building that gives a nod to Jefferson’s University of Virginia. Located on the edge of the campus, adjacent to the Planetarium is a small Gothic Revival chapel designed in 1844-1848 by Philadelphia architect Thomas U. Walter, the architect of the St. James Episcopal Church in Wilmington. The chapel is part of the Chapel of the Cross, the main building designed in 1925 by New York architect Hobart Upjohn.
For the serious-minded still intent on a walkable adventure, the Ackland Art Museum and Hanes Art Center provide a destination on South Columbia Street. Designed in 1958 by collaborating firms of Eggers and Higgins and Atwood and Weeks and added to in 1983 by Charlotte architect Gerald Li, the Ackland’s subdued repeating bands of red brick and stone play well with both the downtown commercial district and its fellow University buildings. A neighbor to the Ackland, The Carolina Inn, was a 1935 gift to the University by alumnus banker John Sprunt Hill. It was designed by Arthur C. Nash in 1924 and added to by Atwood and Weeks in 1939. Located at the southwest corner of Columbia Street and Cameron Avenue, the Inn’s Mount Vernon-style portico is a prominent feature on the landscape and places the beloved hostelry squarely in the Southern Colonial style that Nash was noted for.
Many visitors choose to walk from the Inn and from the recently constructed boutique hotel The Franklin (located on West Franklin Street) to entertainments at the renovated Memorial Hall. The 1931 Colonial Revival-style auditorium was a collaboration of New York architects McKim, Mead and White and, of course, Nash and Atwood. The building faces Cameron Avenue and is distinctive for its monumental Doric portico. It was completely renovated and expanded in 2002-2005. Special attention was paid to reproducing, as closely as possible, the impeccable acoustics of Raleigh’s Meymandi Hall.

Changing Cityscape
Though there is always a bit of nostalgia in walking along Franklin Street or the brick paths of the University or shaking gravel out of your shoes after a tour of Chapel Hill’s oldest neighborhoods, Chapel Hill is changing. The NC Highway 54 entrance is now occupied, well-landscaped and handsomely detailed brick residences, stores, offices and shops of Roger Perry’s new urbanist Meadowmont community. Perry and his partners are continuing their successful venture into mixed-use residential development in the latest construction, simply known as East 54. Southern Village, designed and developed by DR Bryan of Bryan Properties, Inc., was North Carolina’s first Traditional Neighborhood Development and has received national acclaim. The Village Center includes offices, condos and retail establishments such as The Lumina Theatre and Weaver Street Market and a Methodist Church. Greenbridge, the ambitious LEEDs certified “green” development by Tim Toben and partners — in concert with ground-breaking architect William McDonough + Partners of Charlottesville, VA — is rising from the ground on Chapel Hill’s West Rosemary Street.
With the new millennium, the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees has worked with the Chicago firm of Ayers Saint Gross and their consultants Andropogon Associates and Cahill Associates to prepare an Environmental Master Plan for the University. The ambitious plan proposes a blueprint for campus development for the next 50 years and will guide the addition of 5.9 million square feet of sustainable design construction on the Chapel Hill campus, possibly, within the next 10 years. Of particular interest in the University plan is the restoration and management of natural habitats, including the use of groundwater recharge systems, green space and protected and enhanced pervious surfaces incorporated into the master plan. And the University is negotiating with the town to develop a satellite campus, Carolina North. The new campus would cover 250 acres of the nearly 1000 acres donated to the University by philosophy professor Horace Williams. Williams’ own home was donated to the University and in 1972 became headquarters for the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill. Town and gown in Chapel Hill are always intertwined.