Joe’s Diner, which opened last week, is a visible sign that families and small businesses are getting an edge in the ongoing push to revitalize East Durham.
Joseph Bushfan, the owner, put a couple of years into renovating three buildings at the intersection, one of which, the former Crabtree Pharmacy, is now the diner. The other two spaces are on track to become an Internet cafe and a grocery store run by Triangle Residential Options for Substance Abusers (TROSA).
When Bushfan was considering the site and selling hot dogs from a cart on the corner, he would offer a free hot dog to anyone with a driver’s license.
No takers, he said. This is an area that needs a grocery store, that needs a gathering place and some amenities within walking distance.
East Durham wasn’t always a blighted shambles where gangs and arson prevailed, and signs — like the busy lunchtime crowds at Joe’s — indicate that the pendulum is swinging back.
Combine the fledgling commercial district with Preservation Durham’s less visible efforts to renovate, restore and salvage turn-of-the-century homes in the surrounding neighborhoods — not to mention the urban homesteaders who have been quietly making lives in East Durham for the last decade — and you have the beginning of urban planning’s golden ticket: a mixed-use, layered community with the infrastructure for residential, commercial and public spaces, close to major transit and with housing that’s still within reach for teachers and cops.
The area is still rough around the edges, sometimes to the point of being jagged, and not every new business owner or resident will come equipped with Bushfan’s background in personal security or experience living in notorious neighborhoods in Boston and Los Angeles.
Still, the overwhelming evidence is that families are finding a foothold, as illustrated in a series that Herald-Sun staff writers Matt Goad and Matthew Milliken wrote last year.
And although there is certainly widespread civic interest in the area (and the chance at grant money), it’s good to see the neighborhood growing from the street level, alongside but independent of a pipeline of tax dollars.
