Drive southwest on the Durham Freeway and you will pass through where a neighborhood used to be. There is no marker to tell you this. Most drivers never blink.
That gap between the road and what it displaced is what brought six young preservationists to Durham this summer. On October 20, the National Trust for Historic Preservation published findings from the sixth cohort of its HOPE Crew Digital Documentation Fellows — a program whose participants spent several months researching, rendering, recording, and reimagining the Hayti district, the historically Black commercial corridor that generations of Durhamites and visitors knew as the South’s Black Wall Street.
The report arrived as Durham’s real estate market continues to reshape the corridor where Hayti once stood. That context is not incidental…