A Delicate Balance

Rd Smith is a longtime Northside resident. Pastor Troy Harrison has led the push to bring the 2 sides together.

About a month and a half ago, I started working on a portrait series in the Northside neighborhood Chapel Hill, NC. Northside is known as a traditionally African-American enclave in a town where such things are not common. It was the neighborhood that after World War II, many black soldiers could move home and build a house, using GI Bill money and raise a family, although many had to get the loans to do so from a bank in Durham, 13 miles away, since none of the Chapel Hill banks made loans to black people, veteran or not. Northside had traditionally been where the cooks, maids and, yes, servants, for the college folks and the hotels had lived, but also where the residents had a strong community, sense of unity and pride it what they had built.

Velma Perry and Belinda Caldwell are longtime Northside residents.

As it happens in many communities where homes are passed down generation to generation, some of the younger people did not want to stay in the neighborhood they grew up in so they started selling some of the homes to real estate people who used the newly vacant homes for student housing for kids from nearby UNC-CH. This trend continued until a neighborhood that was once 85% owner occupied, is now 85% rental. Many of the black owned businesses, such as Charlie Mason’s supper club and hotel, eventually closed and the spaces were taken over, dozed over or over looked. It was still a strong neighborhood, but not thriving as it once had.

Tim Toben and Frank Phoenix are two of the primary developers of the Greenbridge project.

Enter Greenbridge. Billed as “urban, sustainable living” the 2 tower, 7 and 10 stories each,  new development became a lightning rod for discussions of gentrification, property rights, and the future of the Northside neighborhood as soon as it was proposed in 2005 as it sits right on the southern edge of the neighborhood and across from St. Joseph’s Church, one of the important community centers of Northside . Once it won approval from the town, the discussions became more heated with parties from both sides of the discussion accusing the other of misleading the community as to the benefits and drawbacks of the project.

Kane Smego and CJ Suitt have led spoken word performances in opposition to Greenbridge

Now the development is finished, or almost, and residents are moving in as of yesterday. What reporter Joe Schwartz and I set out to, that month and a half ago, was to try and get beyond the past arguments of whether or not the project should have been built, and talk to all the parties involved, from the developers, to the residents of Northside, to the new people who will be moving in, and find out how, or if, the parties can come together after all the disagreements, and make the best of what is now done, incorporating the old with the new, the young with the old, and move forward to something undoubtedly different, but perhaps stronger and a suitable replacement for what once was, and could be again, a close, strong neighborhood.

Delores Bailey is a community organizer. Nate Davis is the director of Hargraves Community Center in Northside

For me the story was great way to sink into a neighborhood and all the sides of the issues at hand. Also, I had never made a portrait series on white, so isolating the characters for their context, but it felt like a way to get at the faces behind the words, to make the individual characters that make up the story speak on their own, evenly, away from all the clutter, to see them as they are, open and telling their side of the story. It was an excellent way to spend a couple days a week and I thank all those involved for helping me to make the photos.

Tim Ross is a new resident of Greenbridge. David Mason Jr. grew up in Northside and his parents have lived there for almost 90 years.

Read the story here

More photos below

Delaine Burnette Ingram runs a beauty shop in Northside and hopes the new residents will help business. Gladys Pendergraph is the head of the food program at St. Joseph’s Church, which is across the street from Greenbridge.

Rob Stephens and Della Pollack are members of UNC Now, a group of UNC-CH students and faculty that have led outside opposition to Greenbridge, but also helped to create a media center for the Northside neighborhood and continue to work in the neighborhood.