Last weekend, my wife and I drove past this development in Durham, North Carolina, and stopped to explore:

I love this sort of thing. It’s a little indoor/outdoor shopping center (with some office and medical space on the upper floors) with this lovely outdoor corridor, residing in a pair of old commercial buildings. I don’t know about the management of it—a lot of the retail spaces inside were empty (as in not leased), and there was hardly anybody wandering around the property, despite the surrounding neighborhood being pretty bustling. Here was a clothing market in a parking lot across the street.

It’s incredible how big a parking lot can feel when you pack it with human activity. It’s heartening to see farmer’s markets, craft fairs, and other events pop up in parking lots. But it also sort of underscores how we’ve squeezed out actual places for this kind of activity. And it underscores how little raw space you really need for them. In many ways, good urbanism comes down to the efficient use of space.

I want to emphasize this before I go back to those grand brick buildings. Here are a few more shots.

The section of parking lot being used for this pop-up market is about 20,000 square feet and holds about 70 cars at full capacity (which probably doesn’t happen all the time). That’s not very much space, all told. Yet it can hold so much when we go down the “scale ladder” from cars to individual people. Think about that.

But those old buildings. The reuse of a sturdy old building with historic significance is always nice to see. This development is called Brightleaf Square, and it’s a redevelopment—specifically, what’s known as “adaptive reuse”—of what were once tobacco drying/storing warehouses! That was the industry that largely built Durham, and like many shrunken, outsourced, or outmoded industries, it left a big physical imprint behind.

From the official website:

The Watts and Yuille Warehouses continued to serve the tobacco industry throughout the 20th century as downtown Durham grew up around them. 

Purchased by a development firm in the early 1980s and registered as a national historic landmark, the buildings were revitalized for a new age of industry, opening the iconic spaces to the public and making room for a burgeoning generation of entrepreneurialism…

A space that once housed one family’s monopoly has been revitalized to become a place where community, careers, and commerce thrive.

This hails from the era of the “festival marketplace,” which was not entirely successful as a driver of economic revitalization. But the property is very nicely maintained and the surrounding area is vibrant and seems well-leased (even though there’s still a lot of dead space in the form of parking lots).

Of course that official description is part advertising copy, but that observation that adaptive reuse opens up spaces to the public which were once closed off is really interesting. It is much cooler to wander around what was once a factory or warehouse than a cookie-cutter big-box store. It’s cool to keep a landmark while finding a use that benefits the city as it exists today.

Here’s the inside:

This mixing of heritage and newness—this continuity—is how cities can grow well. It is growth, as I once saw it put, not like a snowball but like a tree.

And speaking of trees, this reminds me of a story I read once. People will say, “Nothing we build today is as nice as this old stuff.” But who knows what a century will do to perceptions? I don’t remember the details, but two men are planting a tree, and one of them observes, thinking the act is pointless, that it will take the tree 100 years to mature. “Then we had better plant it as soon possible,” says the other.

To sow the field we will not reap is an act of trust in and solidarity with our own future. That is the ethic our city fathers gave us, and it is the ethic we must practice and pass on.

Related Reading:

What Do You Think You’re Looking At? #24

The Queen’s Giant

Roadside Delight

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