I spent so many years of my life in Chapel Hill for one reason or another that it will always feel like home to me. Just going there was such a treat when I was in high school. We would go down to visit Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, one of oldest and largest institutions of its kind and one that was used to train Gemini and Apollo astronauts in celestial navigation.
Morehead Planetarium and Science Center
Chapel Hill was always the center of a liberal oasis in a Red State Right Wing desert. Jesse Helms, in the days before he was in the Senate, used to spew an editorial on Channel 5 in Raleigh, and he often railed about the Communists down the road in Chapel Hill. The state zoo, which is quite nice, is in Asheboro, but Helms once said we didn't need a zoo. Just put a fence around Chapel Hill, he said. Then we'd have a zoo. Chapel Hill elected Howard Lee, an African American, mayor in the early seventies. The town and the campus were always ahead of the times. It was refreshing just to be there.
Here's the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Wilson Library. When I first went to Chapel Hill, this was the most important library on campus. There was a newer Undergraduate library, but Wilson was the Graduate Library, the place for serious research. When I first visited the Harvard campus and saw Widener library, I thought of Wilson. As a "public ivy," Carolina made its research libraries comparable to those in the Ivy League. (Before the cutters and levelers came through in the 80s and 90s and now again, creating mediocrity wherever they can. The library has had books stay in the shipping boxes, uncatalogued and unavailable to students because of personnel cuts, but no one with power cared.)
Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill
I worked at Wilson while my then husband was in medical school, in the periodicals division and got more education than I had in any classroom. I've had many lunches with my friends on that stone wall in front, happily running back up those steps into the lobby of a library that LOOKED like a library, like a miniature Library of Congress, complete with dome. Later, when I was in grad school, the linguistics department was in the first building to the right of Wilson, Dey Hall, sitting at a 90 degree angle, making a corner of the campus quad. Before I finished my Ph.D., a new graduate library was built, a modern building, no longer in the center of campus, and Wilson began to be used for other purposes. But it will always be what a library is supposed to be to me.
The Bell Tower is another campus landmark. The Patterson-Morehead Bell Tower has been ringing in each hour of the day since 1931. The landscaping around the Tower is breathtaking and was designed by William C. Coker of the Botany department. There is a Bell Tower parking lot that I was lucky enough to find space in back in the Seventies when I worked across the street at the library. These days you park in a satellite lot and take a bus in to the central campus or get your daily exercise hiking in. Chapel Hill's village character is lost, but I still love it anyway. The Bell Tower stands next to the football stadium between the academic campus and the health sciences campus. And there's a spot on the quad where you can stand from which the top of the tower looks just like a dunce cap on the dome of the library. Legend has it that this came out of a rivalry between the men who founded the buildings.
The Bell Tower
Most post cards of Carolina seem to show the Old Well, the symbol of the campus, which is always surrounded by the most beautiful landscaping. The Old Well stand near Old East, the oldest building on campus. For many years the well was the source of water to the first dorms, Old East and Old West. Its shelter and landscaping were added in stages and now there is a drinking fountain many believe brings good luck. And there's a huge, beautiful arboretum on campus. Carolina's picturesque quadrangle makes it one of the most beautiful campuses in the country, full of trees, grass, flowers, and stone walls and brick walkways, and little mini-quads filled with flowers that sit behind the first row of buildings facing the main quadrangle. Across Franklin Street from campus is the small village-like downtown, full of bars, restaurants, and shops. There used to be the best bookstore ever downtown, the Intimate Bookshop, with wood floors that creaked loudly and books stacked and crammed everywhere, but it moved to the mall a long time ago after a fire, and I think it eventually closed altogether.
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| The Old Well |
at the Arboretum
one of the mini-quads off the main quad
Many restaurants come and go, but some become traditions. Off Franklin Street, down Amber Alley, way below downtown, there was an artisan's shop for handmade jewelry next to the classic Rathskellar, which has been a landmark for generations. The restaurant had many rooms, one of which was the cave room, pictured here in days gone by. See the German Shepherd? The Rat, a favorite with alumni, was scheduled to reopen last year, after being closed for several years. I've even taken my mother there. I love it. There's Crooks Corner, gourmet Southern restaurant, specialty: shrimp and grits, which was raved about by the late Craig Claiborne, food critic for the NY Times. Claiborne also enjoyed a little place on Rosemary Street, Mama Dips Country Kitchen, for the best breakfast in town. Dean Smith said that Chapel Hill couldn't be the Southern Part of Heaven without Mama Dip, who began her restaurant in 1976. My favorite bar was always He's Not Here. They had Pac Man and no waiters.
The Rathskellar's Cave Room back in the day
Mama Dip's
He's Not Here
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| The Quad as seen from Wilson Library |
Chapel Hill. I worked there, I played there, I studied there. I loved there, I lost love there. I got my heart broken in Chapel Hill, broken into little pieces. But I learned so much that I realized I didn't know much compared to what there is to know. I learned that one lifetime is not enough to learn much at all. I learned to love learning. I learned to teach. I developed habits of reading and learning and reasoning that I keep to even this day over forty years after I first moved there. You can buy watches and clocks that sing, "I'm a Tarheel born and a Tarheel bred, And when I die I'll be a Tarheel dead." That's me.
Go Heels!
The little village of Chapel Hill.
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