durham inc.
BUILDING EQUITY
The recent sale of 109 W. Parrish St. brought a prime market price and a chance to pass on its legacy of black ownership to a third generation BY H A N N A H M c C L E L L A N | P H O T O BY B E T H M A N N
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S THEY SHOWED a photographer around on a bright spring afternoon, Elaine Curry and Dawn Paige looked up the ladder to the roof of 109 W. Parrish St., the building they bought in 2013 and sold this year for nearly 2 million dollars more. The building had proved to be just the kind of smart, profitable investment that they had in mind when they bought it. But the building itself also held a deep allure, they said, a legacy that they had hoped to preserve and pass on. They bought 109 from Durham stalwarts Irwin Holmes, the first black graduate of N.C. State, and Meredythe Holmes, who has had a long career helping Durham students finish high school and get jobs. Curry and Paige were the second generation of black owners. They hoped to sell to a third. Durham’s recent renewal has not spread proportionally to black- and minority-owned businesses. Only 3.5% of businesses downtown are black owned, according to Downtown Durham Inc. One of the keys to
restoring diversity in business ownership, many black business owners say, is improving diversity in property ownership. If the landlord had a vested interested in diversity, advocates argue, then balance might be restored. Sometimes in business, even on the cold bottom-line of what the market may bear, things require this broader view. So Curry and Paige looked again at the ladder to the roof, took off their shoes and began to climb. The roof of 109 is a nice perch from which to see Durham, both as it is and as it was. To the southwest, there’s the art deco Kress building, which was the site of sit-ins in the ’60s, sat nearly empty in Durham’s bad years, and is now full of high-end condos. Towering above 109 next door is One City Center, the sparkling new home to coworking space WeWork – and to even more condos. And you can see the block itself, a small and irregular rectangle formed by Magnum Street, Parrish, Corcoran and Main. More than 100 years ago, this block was key real estate in Black Wall Street (BWS), a thriving district of some 200 black-owned businesses nearly unrivaled in the rest of the country.
110 • durhammag.com • June/July 2019
Then came setbacks and downturns, as urban renewal programs, gentrification and the building of the freeway helped boost the city as a whole, but had an inverse effect on black neighborhoods and businesses.
IT IS GREAT WHEN WE CAN ALIGN WITH PROPERTY OWNERS LIKE ELAINE AND DAWN, WHO SAID [THAT] IF THEY COULD CONTINUE THE TREND OF IT BEING IN AFRICAN AMERICAN HANDS, THEY WOULD. – NICOLE THOMPSON
The paucity in real estate feeds the disparities in businesses, advocates say. “If you’ve got an owner who has a mindset and a commitment and an initiative around an inclusive approach, that’s going to be built into the contractual document, it’s going to be part of the deal,” Gloria Shealey, president and CEO of the construction management company The
Daniele Company, told us in March, then “Then it’s going to be up to the owner to make sure it’s not just words on paper.” It is a blueprint Curry and Paige wanted to follow. “I had the idea that it would be nice, being that it was on Black Wall Street, and we had bought it from another African American couple,” Curry said, “if we could sort of keep it going, at least with that building.” “We wanted to try to preserve some sort of presence downtown,” Paige added. But the passing of legacy was somewhat by chance and was not entirely smooth. After extensive renovations in 2014, they began to lease the space, bringing in Empower Dance Studio on the Parrish Street side, and Luna Rotisserie, Empanadas and Morningstar Law Group on Main Street. In the summer of 2018 they decided to sell, reaching out to their networks to identify potential buyers. But, they did not find the interest they were looking for, and listed the property through a broker, which sparked interest but did not immediately bring offers from black owners. Then Nish Evans came along. While the building was on the market, Nicole Oxendine,