Commission denies request to raze house

NCCU will fight Rivera site ruling

DURHAM -- The Alex Rivera house on Fayetteville Street won a reprieve from demolition Tuesday morning, but its future remains insecure.

Durham's Historic Preservation Commission unanimously denied a request by N.C. Central University for permission to tear down the run-down residence to make way for campus expansion.

After the hearing, NCCU Vice Chancellor Zack Abegunrin said the university will appeal the denial "as soon as possible."

The house, facing the Farrison-Newton Communications Building, is boarded up and hung with yellow caution tape and "Keep Out" signs.

In April, Jeffrey Crow, North Carolina's chief preservation officer, declared the house to be of "statewide historic significance" because of its association with Rivera -- a renowned photojournalist who covered the civil rights movement from the 1940s through the 1960s.

"It is imperative this request [to demolish] be denied," said Preservation Durham director John Compton.

The university, which now owns the house, says its condition is decrepit enough to constitute a public hazard.

"That house is unsafe, unsafe, unsafe," Abegunrin said.

The university also says that renovating the house would be prohibitively expensive.

However, commission member Eddie Belk said renovation would increase the property's value.

"If 'unsafe' were the only criterion, a lot of rehabilitated buildings would have been demolished instead," Belk said.

Rivera, who died Oct. 23, also established NCCU's public information office. He sold the house to the university in 1997, expecting it would be torn down.

In 2007, he wrote the university saying, "It is not a historical home, and I am strongly in favor of it being demolished."

However, when the university's expansion plans became public last spring, some neighborhood residents -- including relatives of NCCU founder James Shepard -- and Preservation Durham began a campaign to save the house.

Crow's ruling on the house's significance put it under jurisdiction of the city's preservation commission. The commission's decisions may be appealed to the city/county Board of Adjustment and to district court.