The Deitricks’ 1960 retirement home completes the story of William H. Deitrick’s influence on the architecture of Raleigh. The couple moved here after three decades in the Deitrick-designed Georgian Revival-style dwelling at 2501 Glenwood Avenue, also a Landmark. The U-shaped plan encloses a patio garden, offering multiple access points to the outdoor space and drenching the interior with light without sacrificing privacy. The Modernist design and attention to warm reception of guests reflect the evolution of Deitrick’s work from historicism to Modernism and from designer to architectural ambassador. He designed the house and landscapes with assistance from architect William “Bill” Waldo Dodge III and landscape architect Lewis Clarke.
Date: 1959
]]>Oral tradition holds that Cameron Court, a large 1938 apartment complex, was popular with members of the LGBTQIA+ community in the 1980s and 1990s. The ability to choose to live in proximity with other LGBTQIA+ people created a physical community at a time in Raleigh when many people still felt the need to be discreet or even secretive about their sexual orientation.
Two other areas in Raleigh have been identified through oral history that were small enclaves for the LGBTQIA+ community. The Vance Apartment building at 105 E. Edenton St. was demolished in the 1980s. Young St., between Wake Forest Rd. and Ann St. in northeast Raleigh, is a roughly block-long area of single-family houses said to have been purchased by and rented out to gay men and drag performers in the late 20th century; the street was nicknamed “Queen Street.”
Build Date: 1938
LGBTQIA+ Associated: 1980s-1990s
]]>Legends Nightclub is a long-running and much-loved Raleigh LGBTQIA+ club. Legends and another nightclub, FLEX, are the two most commonly cited by survey respondents as significant social spaces associated with the LGBTQIA+ community, in part due to the longevity of both bars. (The original location of FLEX has also been evaluated as part of this project.) Legends Nightclub also has a significant connection to the history of drag performance in Raleigh.
Build Date: 1958, altered ca. 1991 & ca. 2012 (for 119 S. Harrington St.)
LGBTQIA+ Associated: 1991-present
]]>Pullen Memorial Baptist Church is one of a few church congregations in Raleigh that was very supportive—and very publicly so—to the LGBTQIA+ communities in the 1980s and 1990s. The church hosted educational conferences in the 1980s and its pastor officiated at the blessing of a same-sex union in 1993.
Build Date: 1935
LGBTQIA+ Associated: 1980s-1990s
]]>This bungalow in the Forest Park neighborhood was the location of meetings of the Women’s Collective Coffeehouse, an early lesbian-focused organization in the first years of the gay liberation movement. Few places associated with lesbians have been identified in Raleigh. In the period, the house was owned by the Unitarian Universal Fellowship of Raleigh, which made the space available to the collective. The UUF campus on Wade Ave. was also evaluated under this project for association with other LGBTQIA+ focused groups.
Build Date: ca. 1917
LGBTQIA+ Associated: Ca. 1978-1984
]]>The 1954 McAdams House is a Modernist-influenced Ranch designed by Raleigh architect Leif Valand. Valand came to Raleigh in the 1940s to design the mixed-use Cameron Village development, which included the shopping center, office buildings, and housing. He stayed, establishing a firm that nurtured young designers. Unlike many local architects of the period, Valand was not associated with the Modernist-focused School of Design at North Carolina State University, and his practice was more client-focused than academically inclined. As this house demonstrates, his typical aesthetic incorporated horizontality, ashlar stone accents, and a broad, living room hearth into practical forms like the eminently livable Ranch house type. Private residence.
Date: 1954
]]>The buildings and athletic facilities remaining at the Berry O’Kelly School campus reflect the history of an important Raleigh institution. Residents of the freedman’s village that evolved into Method had always prioritized education. Three schools existed in the late nineteenth century before Method’s most prominent resident, Berry O’Kelly, donated land in 1894 for a new school. A frame building with gable roof housed the school until 1915, when a significant upgrade resulted in a ten-classroom brick edifice to house an elementary and high school. The new institution was called Berry O’Kelly Training School, and it consolidated three rural African American schools. Rosenwald funds helped expand the school in the 1920s, and by 1931 it was the state’s largest high school for African American students. The school remained in operation until 1966. The only buildings remaining are the 1926 Agriculture Building and the ca. 1959 Gymnasium. O’Kelly’s grave is on campus, and a memorial marker further honors and remembers his importance to the community. Saint James AME Church stands at the corner of the campus, another institution founded and supported by those who lived in Method.
Date: 1926, ca. 1928, ca. 1959
]]>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 Owen and Dorothy Smith House is significant for its Modernist architectural design. Architect Owen Smith’s remarkable 74-year career in architecture and related building trades began in1938 with his graduation from North Carolina State College and concluded with his death in 2012. While he is considered a Modernist, he was fully capable of working in other styles as directed by clients. For his own home he chose Modernism. The house is an excellent and intact example of the softer, Frank Lloyd Wright-influenced, “humanist” mode of Modernism that occurred in Raleigh in the 1950s. Its board-and-batten siding and Wake County stone create an approachable and organic feeling and present a distinctive façade. The house integrates with nature through formal garden spaces, naturalistic landscaping, window walls, walkways, loggia, and a screened porch.
Date: 1959
]]>The Anna Riddick House is a distinctive mid-twentieth-century Georgian Revival-style residence designed for a single woman. New York architect William Dewey Foster worked closely with Anna Riddick to design the dwelling, constructed of bricks salvaged from the Oddfellows orphanage in Goldsboro and bricks and heart pine boards from the central section of Raleigh’s Dorothea Dix Hospital, items collected by Miss Riddick. She described the house plan as “a one-person dwelling and as a place for large-scale entertaining.” Brick privacy walls enclose the outdoor living space of the front terrace and a former terrace (now sunroom) in the rear yard. A guest house, built by Miss Riddick about 1960, is set behind the main block. Anna Riddick was one of Raleigh’s earliest interior decorators. Her career spanned forty years from the 1920s to the 1960s. Private residence.
Dates: 1952 (house); 1960 (attached guest house)
]]>The Fadum House, designed in 1949 and completed in 1950, is the first modern design privately executed in Raleigh. This was the first house in Wake County to use structural wood columns to support a double-cantilevered roof truss grid, which shelters the living space within the brick and glass curtain walls. It was recognized in 1951 by Architectural Record as one of its houses of the year. Duncan Stuart, associate of architect James W. Fitzgibbon, drew the plans of the house. A substantial and complementary addition designed by Brian Shawcroft was completed in 2006. Private residence.
Date: 1949-1950
]]>N.C. State's School of Design Dean Henry Kamphoefner, working with architect and professor George Matsumoto, designed this house for his own family. An ardent admirer of Frank Lloyd Wright, Kamphoefner incorporated typical Wrightian features. The closed-off street facade belies an openness to the landscape that is gloriously evident in back. There, window walls dissolve the separation between indoors and outdoors, a feeling literally underscored by flagstone floors that flow from the dining room to the patio overlooking the Carolina Country Club golf course. A substantial 2003 bedroom addition by Robert P. Burns, an early School of Design graduate, is faithful to the original intent. Private residence.
Date: 1950
]]>George Matsumoto, a professor of architecture at NC State's School of Design, incorporated several of Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian house ideas in his design for the Ritcher House: passive climate control, aesthetic use of common building materials, and interior spaces intended for contemporary living. The house was much acclaimed in the early 1950s, and was prominently featured in several national magazines of the period. Private residence.
Date: 1950
]]>Raleigh architect G. Milton Small designed this house as his own residence. It is a nearly square one-story frame house sited on a steep hillside in a bend on Lake Boone Trail. Small studied under the Modernist master Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The Small House, with its uncluttered cubic shape, flat roof, and emphasis on proportions, was the first structure in Raleigh to evoke the design concepts of Mies. Additions and alterations made by Small after the initial construction continued in this style. Private residence.
Date: 1951 and 1961
]]>George Matsumoto built this dwelling for himself, pioneering the use of modular building materials in an attempt to control costs. The proportions, detailing, and materials are exceptional, and the house makes a less-than-ideal building site a benefit by artfully accommodating a sloped grade and stream with a bridge from the street to the entrance. Architectural magazines of the period featured the house. Private residence.
Date: 1954
]]>The Paul and Ellen Welles House was designed by Durham architect Kenneth McKoy, who graduated in 1950 as a member of the first graduating class of the School of Design, established at North Carolina State University under dean Henry Kamphoefner. The house features an open floor plan with high ceilings and large expanses of glass. Summer camp operator and sailing enthusiast Paul Welles Jr. and his wife Ellen built the house in 1956 on land subdivided from the farm of Ellen's parents, George W. and Mary Mordecai. Private residence.
Date: 1956
]]>G. Milton Small found more inspiration from Ludwig Mies van der Rohe than from Frank Lloyd Wight. Working with a chic, opinionated client who wanted a "clean, crisp house," Small delivered an International Style gem loaded with function and elegance. True to its Miesian roots, the house displays its structure with evident vertical and horizontal planes defining its form. Interior finishes include walnut paneling, providing an organic warmth to contrast with the exposed steel structure. Window walls let nature be a backdrop to modern living. Private residence.
Date: 1959
]]>Harwell Hamilton Harris, an internationally known Modernist architect, designed this flat-roofed, stucco-clad house to include living quarters for himself and his wife, a studio for his architectural practice, and a rental apartment. Harris is known for his use of modular design with well-integrated works that express a unified rhythm along their components. A sheltered wood lamppost with a large glass-globe lightshade marking the entrance walk at the left edge of the building façade is a Harris icon.
Date: 1968-1970; 1977
]]>Built in the early 1960s, this dramatic Modernist home is defined by its low, sweeping front gable deck roof that covers a recessed porch. Its post and beam structure conforms to the sloping site, with a one-story front elevation and a two-story rear elevation. The home also features a brick foundation and veneer walls, vertical wood siding, and casement windows. G. Dewey Arndt, general manager of the North Carolina Cotton Growers Association and the Farmers Cooperative Exchange, and his wife Elma hired F. Carter Williams & Associates, a prominent Raleigh architectural firm, to design the home. It was renovated in 1988 and again in 2000; the home’s current owners returned the altered living and dining rooms back to their original design. Private residence.
Date: 1961
]]>Designed by local architect G Milton Small, a student of Mies van der Rohe, the Stahl House is an excellent example of a Contemporary Ranch style residence, as evidenced by its low-slung gable roof, post-and-beam construction, window walls, open floor plan, and integrated carport. Unlike other structures designed by Small, the home uses wood and stone, resulting in a softer, more organic iteration of Modernism. Its high architectural integrity is the result of continuous family ownership.
Date: 1956
]]>The J. S. Dorton Arena features parabolic design that boldly combined architecture and engineering, earning the building its reputation as an exceptionally significant design. Polish architect Matthew Nowicki, who conceived the structural idea for the building, died in a plane crash before construction finished. Raleigh architect William Henley Deitrick oversaw the completion of the paraboleum and made minor changes to the fenestration. The building provides a concert hall and exhibition space for the state fair.
Date: 1952
]]>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
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