Ousted Raleigh garages find a new home

RALEIGH -- Pam Wood picks up the phone, cigarette poised between her fingers. "Two thirty four South Boylan, near the bridge," she tells the caller. "We'll be open Jan. 2."

In a last-minute reprieve, two garages tucked away in a nondescript corner of Raleigh's Cameron Village shopping center have gotten a new life.

They didn't want to leave, but they had to abide by a City Council decision in October to rezone 2.7 acres at Clark Avenue and Oberlin Road to make way for taller buildings for shops and homes. Now, they'll spend the next month packing up and unpacking in their new location in Boylan Heights, on the western edge of downtown.

Cameron Village, home to boutiques, specialty toy stores and upscale gift shops, seems like an odd place for any mechanic to call home. But over the past two decades, Cameron Village Auto Service and Village Motor Werks settled in at the corner of Clark and Oberlin, quietly changing oil and fixing broken car windows and making friends.

Last month, they feared they'd be homeless. Rents in the area were prohibitively high. Locations in Garner or far north on Capital Boulevard were too far away to keep longtime customers.

"I don't know what we're going to do," Bill Harris, owner of Cameron Village Auto Service, said last month.

Then a business contact told them about her father, a mechanic on the cusp of retirement. He owned a building that had housed a garage since 1946, and he wanted it to stay that way. Now it will.

Cameron Village Auto Service and Village Motor Werks, next-door neighbors, will now join forces under one roof. Same names, same phone numbers.

The garages must vacate their modest digs, behind a diminutive gas station that also must go, in the next several days.

Who'll jump the cars?

That leaves Cameron Village garage-free, which could present a problem when a car battery dies in the shopping center.

A few times a week, someone in one of the garages is summoned to jump-start a battery. Often, that dead battery belongs to an elderly patron supping at K&W Cafeteria.

The garage owners have advised those who manage Cameron Village: Keep jumper cables in your security cars from now on.

A garage is a garage, one might think, grease-stained and bare bones, with the stereotypical torn vinyl couch in the waiting room.

At Village Motor Werks, the requisite bikini calendar hangs on a wall, but sophisticated jazz tinkles from the speakers -- one of their favorite customers used to host the Jazz Cafe program on the Shaw University jazz station they're sampling -- and they prominently display a certificate from a food bank thanking the garage for its donation of 50 pounds of food.

It's the kind of place where they'll diagnose air in the gas mixture at no charge, where the owners joke around with the customers.

Alex Ross of Cary dropped by last week to get an update on the situation. When he heard they'd found a new home, he rejoiced.

"That's good news, baby," he said. "I'm going to help you move."

"Tell your wife we're going to take over that oil drum in the back of her new Crown Vic," she told Ross with a grin.

About that music ...

Years ago, customer Mary McVicker wrote in a thank-you letter that "the only thing better than finding a good mechanic is finding a good judge."

She won't have to find a new mechanic now that Wood, her business partner Greg Ashe and Harris will be in cahoots.

Wood and Ashe will take over the front of the Boylan garage; Harris will occupy the back. No major conflicts are expected, since they've cooperated for years.

But it might require a tactful discussion about musical preference. Says Wood: "We're gonna have to talk to Bill about that country music."