CARY -- From the front porch of her flat-roofed rancher, Susan Johnson recalled the people whose paths crisscrossed old Cary. There were the Holders, the Pleasants, the children who used to roam near the intersection of Harrison Avenue and Page Street.
"I used to know everybody in this neighborhood," she said with a wistful chuckle. "Now I'm the bad neighbor. I don't socialize anymore."
It's a sign of change in an area that for a long time was placid, she said. And as some see new interest in Cary's core, the town government and its residents are asking how they can preserve winding rows of tidy houses and their post-war aesthetic.
Cary is sponsoring a $40,000 survey of its historic properties, focused mostly on thousands of homes built inside the Maynard Loop during the Research Triangle's earliest booms. The town and its consultants are studying thousands of houses built before 1969, looking for noteworthy architecture and well-maintained homes that represent the town's past.
Central Cary, with many mid-century homes newly eligible for historic designations, already has seen a stream of remodeling and could see more interest as Cary's sprawl slows.
For many, the central neighborhoods' appeal is their cared-for, lived-in feel. The homes are small but comfortably spaced, the trees so old they tower above, the architecture dated but often uniquely adorned.
At Susan Johnson's house, huge windows line the exterior walls, slate covers the floors and leather-tufted cornice boards dot the walls. In the neighborhood nearby, wood-post fences, ornate iron work, white brick and arch-topped chimneys detail houses that have barely changed.
The area, explained her son Nick Johnson, is filled with appealing, subtle details and hidden corners that even in a lifetime he hasn't seen.
"This is what I consider 'old Cary.' This is where I've seen people from my generation come back to their parents' house, their grandparents' house," said Johnson, 34, as he joined his mother on the porch.
Core preserved
Central Cary seems in stasis, unperturbed by new architecture and relatively unscathed by the passing decades. The phenomenon, some say, could be a result of Cary's outward growth. While many of Cary's oldest residents stayed in their houses until death, new construction layered on the town's fringes.
"Unlike Raleigh and Chapel Hill, a lot of (older) subdivisions are really intact," said Ellen Turco, a consultant for the town's survey of historic buildings.
The inventory project is the first Cary-focused survey of historic property. Wake County sponsored county-wide searches for historic properties in the 1990s and 2005, but didn't look at houses built after 1957, when Cary's boom was just beginning.
"Cary prior to World War II was really just a sleepy train stop. Starting in the '50s, people lived and worked in Cary," said Bob Myers, a director of the Friends of the Page-Walker Hotel, a local historic preservation society. "We've got an opportunity here to recognize these communities while they're still largely intact."
Town planner Anna Readling anticipates the survey, to be published in late spring, could add a hundred properties to the town's current list of 180 historic buildings, of which some have been demolished. Inclusion on the list will not come with any restrictions or obligations.
"We'll use that survey as a basis of being able to answer ...: What do we have that's historic, and what are our best examples?" Readling said.
The survey is one step in the ten-year historic preservation plan the town government laid out in 2010. Once its map of notable and historic properties is updated, the town will consider ways to encourage their protection.
At present, there are few incentives and no hard-and-fast rules to protect historic downtown houses. An exception is a county and town program that offers tax breaks to homeowners who preserve Cary "landmarks."
Cary's historic plan calls for eventual consideration of economic incentives such as low-interest loans, renovation grants, or fee waivers for owners who agree to certain preservation conditions. And it's not inconceivable, Readling said, that a central Cary neighborhood could become a historic district with rules aimed at protecting older homes.
"It would need to be something that is a request and a desire by the people that lived there," the town planner said.
