New Police HQ on East Main Street

Are you interested in the future of Durham?  Do you want a vital, vibant downtown?
A place still full of quirky, unique buildings?  A good place to walk?  A place that 20 years from now still looks like the Durham you know and love?

NOW is the time to give your opinion on yet another project that can have a big impact.   Please attend tomorrow evening’s meeting:
Community Visioning  Session

New Police HQ on East Main Street

Thursday, April 16th, 6-8pm

Durham Convention Center
We support the City of Durham in their efforts to create a much needed 21st century downtown Police Headquarters facility. We look forward to theCommunity Visioning Session being held by General Services on Thursday evening, and encourage all who choose to live, work, and play here to actively participate.  Redevelopment of the 4 ½ acre East Main Street site chosen for the complex is an opportunity to create a great public building and to begin to reconnect our thriving city center with parts of East Durham that have been largely left behind.
It’s essential that we get it right.
The reinvention of our downtown over the past two decades has been astonishing, and has inarguably been driven by historic preservation.  Where other great cities have busy ports, mountain vistas, and river walks, Durham has a railroad and an exceptional wealth of 20th century industrial and commercial architecture.  We have become leaders nationally in the adaptive re-use of these character filled and underutilized places, repurposing abandoned warehouses, factory buildings, power plants, and service stations as one-of-a-kind restaurants, retail spaces, breweries, hotels, and state-of-the-art laboratories.  These extraordinary places set Durham apart, and are largely why people of all kinds continue to flock here.
What’s Behind that Blue and White facade?
An Awesome Building Worth Saving

Carpenter Motor Company, 1923 (left) and today (right), located at 600 E. Main Street

The East Main Street site affords similar opportunities in the 1923 Carpenter Motor Company Building and the 1948 GMC Truck Building.
Both are rock-solid masonry and steel structures, intact and still largely occupied.
Buildings in far worse condition and retaining much less of their original character have been successfully and profitably renovated all over Durham.
Demolishing these places would eradicate the few remaining historic assets on several blocks of East Main Street and needlessly generate thousands of tons of debris.
Renovating and incorporating them into the design of a modern Police and Emergency Services campus would be environmentally and fiscally responsible, preserving our past and creating labor intensive renovation jobs in a community that needs them.
Let’s seize this opportunity to create the truly unique and innovative public facility that Durham deserves.