This 1952 plant housed a home-grown, regional, wholesale bakery founded by Karlie Keith Fisher. Fisher started out making peanut butter crackers in her basement on Everett Avenue. Soon, she added pimento cheese and chicken salad sandwiches on sliced bread. Her sons wrapped them in cellophane, hauled a box to Hillsborough Street and Oberlin Road, and sold the sandwiches and snack crackers to NC State students. This followed a Piedmont tradition of sandwich-making businesses. The in-home food production provided hand-held meals for mill workers, who were often required to work without a lunch break. Fisher expanded her business repeatedly in its eighty-one-year history, adding pies and cakes, opening restaurants and chuckwagons, and eventually building this wholesale bakery and sandwich plant.
Date: 1952
]]>The H.J. Brown Coffin House Building was the early twentieth-century headquarters for a local business established in 1836. Originally a cabinet shop and later a maker of coffins, it evolved into an undertaking and mortuary company that eventually became Brown-Wynne Funeral Home. It is Raleigh’s oldest continuously operating business. The Classical Revival style exhibited by the 1907 headquarters building was typical of the early twentieth century—the columns, corner quoins, and bracketed cornice all promoted the idea of a solid, stable business operating within. By the 1970s, the company had moved out. To refresh the old building, a new Brutalist skin was applied, covering all Classical Revival detailing. A 2013 remodel uncovered the original edifice and restored the architectural detail, painstakingly replicating the cornice and the iron-flecked bricks.
Date: 1907, ca. 1920
]]>The Mecca is a Raleigh institution. Greek immigrant Nick Dombalis and his wife Helen opened The Mecca Luncheonette on Fayetteville Street in 1930. They bought this building in 1937 and moved the restaurant. Like the Sir Walter Raleigh Hotel, The Mecca quickly became destination where lawmakers and downtown professionals gathered for lunch and networking. Politicians especially found The Mecca a great place to meet Raleigh voters and business people and find out their take on issues. Also of note is the neon marquee sign, a remnant from a time when such signs were commonplace in downtown Raleigh’s central business district. The restaurant is still in the Dombalis family; four generations have run The Mecca since it first served lunch on Fayetteville Street.
Date: ca. 1880, 1937
]]>The Occidental is among the first office buildings erected outside Raleigh's central business district in the vanguard of suburban development. Cameron Village, the first shopping center in the state, was an ambitious mixed-used development that included housing and offices. Occidental is the finest--and the least altered--of the several modernist office buildings in that development. Architect Leif Valand, who moved to Raleigh to design Cameron Village, produced an International Style building distinguished by its fine materials: red Roman brick, pale Alabama limestone, and green-tinted windows in bright aluminum frames. Outdoor terraces take advantage of the hilltop location.
Date: 1956
]]>The Medical Arts Building, attributed to prolific Raleigh architect F. Carter Williams, is an International Style office building with a steel frame, glass curtain walls, brick cladding, and a flat roof. The building reflects the growth of the Mary Elizabeth Hospital, with which it is associated. The two-story Modernist building housed offices for the physicians associated with the hospital, enabling them to move their practices from downtown buildings into the medical campus formed by the two buildings. In 1978, the hospital moved farther north on Wake Forest Road and became Raleigh Community Hospital; doctors in the Medical Arts Building moved with the hospital into the complex built at the new location.
Date: 1960
]]>When Wilson-based BB&T moved to Raleigh, it needed an architectural statement to underscore its ambition. Emery Roth & Sons, New York architects famous for the Pan Am Building in New York City, delivered a Manhattan-caliber skyscraper perfectly scaled to Raleigh's skyline. The International Style building owes a debt to Mies van der Rohe's influential 1958 Seagram Building in New York, incorporating into the facade vertical mullions shaped like I-beams, a nod to the structural frame. Polished black granite and glass curtain walls at the first and second floors contribute a luxe feel. The lobby and banking floor, designed by G. Milton Small, were removed in 1998.
Date: 1963-1965
]]>Architect G. Milton Small designed this building to contain his own office. Small, who was a disciple of Modernist master Mies van der Rohe, incorporated several elements identified with Mies and his followers: the building elevated over a base, a flat roof, elegant proportions, and simple but careful detailing. An interesting feature of the structure is the group of three fountains below the building, adjacent to the parking area. The building remains an office building.
Date: 1966
]]>Charles McMillan designed the Masonic Temple building, Raleigh's oldest surviving steel-reinforced concrete structure, in the Sullivanesque-style. In addition to its design and construction, the building is significant as a major landmark in the downtown area.
Date: 1907
]]>Built for tin and hardware dealer J. C. S. Lumsden, this three-story commercial building is the only surviving metal-front building on Fayetteville Street. It has a long history of serving as a commercial enterprise, including Kirby's Five & Dime, C. R. Boone DeLuxe Clothier, and, most notably, F. W. Woolworth from 1926 through 1972.
Date: Between 1896 and 1903
]]>The Raleigh Electric Company built this building and its coal-fired steam-driven turbines to power Raleigh's electric street car system and to augment power supplies for the city. The structure's tripartite arrangement, featuring a gable-front roof and structural-steel framing system faced with common bond brick, reflects typical industrial design of the era. Its life as a steam plant likely ended in 1930 when the boiler house became a storage area. In 1998, the building was rehabilitated for commercial use.
Date: ca. 1910, 1930
]]>The Montague Building, a combination of the Neoclassical Revival and the emerging Commercial styles, was the first large retail building in the Moore Square area. This building, along with the Mission-style City Market, helps define a lively center of urban activity around the square.
Date: 1912
]]>The Raleigh Building, one of downtown Raleigh's remaining early-twentieth-century skyscrapers, was not originally a skyscraper at all. Atlanta architect Philip Thornton Mayre designed a three-story base with load-bearing exterior masonry walls and an interior steel frame in 1913. In 1928, the H. A. Underwood firm designed the second phase of eight stories with a steel-frame skeleton and brick-veneer walls. In 1935-36, the lower three stories were updated with a Moderne look and the interior was remodeled. The building houses retail and other commercial uses at the ground floor and office space above.
Date: 1913, 1928-29, 1935-36
]]>The best surviving example of a market house erected in North Carolina since the Civil War, this Spanish Mission-style complex designed by James Matthew Kennedy housed a complement of butchers, fish dealers, and vegetable vendors. Development of the supermarket concept and the new state farmers' market caused its demise in the late 1950s.
Date: 1913-1914
]]>One of downtown Raleigh's few remaining early twentieth-century skyscrapers, this ten-story building designed by the Atlanta architectural firm of G. Lloyd Preacher and Company is Raleigh's first 1920s tall office building. It is brick-veneered with classical detailing, some of which is glazed terra cotta. Dedicated in May 1924, this office building was constructed as a permanent temple for the Grand Lodge I.O.O.F. of North Carolina and as a rental facility, money from which was used to operate the lodge's orphanage.
Date: 1923-1924
]]>Once known as the "third house of state government" because so many legislators gathered there, the ten-story Neoclassical Revival building was long a center of Raleigh's social scene. The hotel was renovated as apartments for the elderly in the late 1970s.
Date: 1924
]]>This eight-story brick-veneered commercial building with classical detailing is an example of early twentieth century high-rise design. The building's shaft rises from a rusticated base and is crowned by a cornice comprising the entire top floor. The division of the building's facades into three distinct areas relieves the mass of the structure.
Date: ca. 1924
]]>The Carolina Power and Light Company erected this simple but elegant one-story common-bond brick building to house electric streetcars and buses. The building later became an automobile garage. It is a rare example of an Art Deco transportation-related facility erected in then architecturally conservative Raleigh. In 1998 the structure was adapted for commercial use and now houses offices and restaurant space.
Date: 1925
]]>The Delany Building is one of only two remaining commercial structures built on Raleigh's "Black Main Street" before World War II. Builder Dr. Lemuel T. Delany, the first black surgeon practicing at Saint Agnes Hospital and son of the first African American bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, built the two-story commercial building in 1926. During the next forty years, he leased it to numerous African American political, educational, and cultural organizations. Dr. David Lane, a dentist, purchased the property in 1970 and the first floor was converted into restaurant a few years later.
Date: 1926
]]>The State College Agricultural Extension Service encouraged the establishment of the Pine State Creamery as a dairy farmers' cooperative at the end of World War I. The dairy products plant is a two-story Art Moderne design in cream-colored brick. The building fronts Tucker Street and Glenwood Avenue, where a three-story tower accents the corner. A 1940s addition at the south end nearly doubled the building's size; a second addition and two wings date from the 1960s. The company closed in 1996 and the buildings have been renovated for commercial use.
Date: 1928, 1940s, 1960s
]]>Architect Frank B. Simpson designed this skyscraper for the Capital Club, one of the oldest prominent men's organizations in the South. The building juxtaposes Art Deco motifs with a classically derived building form, and the twelfth-floor ballroom contains the finest example of Art Deco plasterwork remaining in the city.
Date: 1929-1930
]]>The Carolina Pines Resort and Hotel opened in 1933, promising an idyllic and diversified recreational facility accessible to all members of society. The two-story Colonial Revival hotel stood on four hundred and fifty acres and included a variety of recreational accommodations: two eighteen-hole golf courses, a riding club, tennis courts, casino, outdoor theater, polo grounds, a fishery, camps, a pet farm, and a lake. In 1957, the Rho Chapter of the Delta Sigma Fraternity purchased the hotel and a little more than seven acres for use as their fraternity house. Only the hotel and stables, used as the fraternity clubhouse, are included in the seven acres.
Date: 1933, ca. 1950
]]>Conceived by W.E. Long Company of Chicago, specialists in bakery design, and built by the Raleigh construction firm of James A. Davidson, the Royal Baking Company is a utilitarian one-story brick building with simple International style detail. Built in 1941 and expanded 1946-1947, this bakery illustrates the period of industrial expansion in Raleigh following the stagnation of the Great Depression. The building is also evidence of a shift in industrial construction away from the urban core toward major transportation arteries like Hillsborough Street.
Date: 1941; 1946-47
]]>Located one mile north of downtown, the Raleigh Bonded Warehouse complex developed between 1923 and 1956. It consists of the original warehouse (1923); an office (ca. 1923, expanded ca. 1949); a packing builidng (ca. 1949); a weigh station (ca. 1949); and two additional warehouses (ca. 1949 and 1953). The 1923 warehouse is a rectangular two-story reinforced concrete building with a heavy timber interior framework, a low gabled roof, and corrugated metal doors. Built to store cotton, it is Raleigh's third oldest commercial warehouse and its first made of reinforced concrete. The complex served as Raleigh's main repository for durable goods for muchof the 20th century.
Date: 1923-1956
]]>A three-story brick building in the late Romanesque Revival style with Italianate elements, the Raleigh Furniture Building operated as a furniture retailer for much of the 20th century. Its façade showcases a high degree of architectural detail, including large lintel-type openings, vertical banding, and decorative reliefs, setting it apart from its neighboring, more utilitarian structures. The Raleigh Furniture Building was one of several businesses frequented by the African American community along East Hargett Street during segregation. It was renovated in 2006-2007.
Date: 1914-1963
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