DURHAM - With the state's declaration of its official historic status, the 1920 bungalow at 1712 Fayetteville St. appears to have a new lease on life.

The house, once home to Alex Rivera, a civil rights era photographer and N.C. Central University publicist, had faced demolition for the university's expansion.

This week, though, Jeffrey Crow, North Carolina's chief preservation officer, said the house has statewide historic significance -- putting its future under the protection of Durham's Historic Preservation Commission.

Rivera, 94, has been skeptical of efforts to preserve the house.

"I don't know how they could" call it historic, he said Friday.

Rivera has lived in southern Durham since selling the house to the state in the mid-1990s.

"I was sure by now it would have been torn down and something built on it," he said.

Preservationists, and some other homeowners in the College View neighborhood where NCCU plans to grow, differ.

Preservation Durham took a lead role in making the Rivera house's case to the state, said Cathleen Turner, regional director for the nonprofit Preservation North Carolina.

"This place, so intimately associated with [Rivera], is a landmark for this community of Durham," said Turner, who shares an office with Preservation Durham. "As well as for those who did contribute so deeply and importantly to the civil rights movement."

Larry Hester, a Fayetteville Street businessman, said he is "excited" by the safeguarding of an important property in Durham's only historically black historic district.

The city adopted a Fayetteville Street Historic Preservation Plan in 2000, but before Crow's ruling this week there was no legal restriction on what owners could do with their property there.

"I'm glad that it happened," Hester said. "It's very important to maintain the historic district and these houses. ... People feel strongly about it."

A Greensboro native, Rivera attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., before transferring to what was then N.C. College for Negroes and, as a student, establishing the school's news bureau in 1939.

After World War II service, he became a correspondent and photographer for the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black newspaper, covering the civil rights movement in the South, including the trial of a black man in Yanceyville for "reckless eyeballing" of a white woman.

Rivera went back to work for NCCU in 1974 and remained the school's public relations director for 19 years. NCCU has named its sports hall of fame for him, and an exhibit of his work is on view at the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh until March 1, 2009.