Chapel Hill dentist office, apartments planned for historic corner near downtown
A local dentist is asking to build a four-story office and apartment building on West Rosemary Street, next to Mama Dip’s Kitchen.
Szostak Design applied in late November to build the project at 500 W. Rosemary St. after Chapelboro Properties LLC, owned by Dr. Jeffrey West, bought the 1.5-story, wood-frame house on 0.15 acres last year.
West wants to replace the house with an 8,637-square-foot building. His dental practice would occupy the first two floors, with two small apartments above. Eight parking spaces are planned behind and under the new building.
The current zoning allows town center commercial development, which can include commercial uses and buildings up to 44 feet near the sidewalk and 90 feet at their core.
The town has not yet scheduled advisory board or council hearings for the project.
His dental practice now occupies a second-floor space about a block away in the Greenbridge development, where he was the first commercial tenant 11 years ago, West said. He initially considered moving his practice into the house, but later learned the foundation wasn’t in great condition even though the house seemed solid inside.
“The engineer said, I think that the hardwood floors are holding the house together,” West said. “The floor joists underneath are set pretty far apart, and they’re pretty thin timber.”
African-American history, homes
The bungalow-style house with the dormer windows and wide front porch has been a fixture on the corner of North Roberson and West Rosemary streets since 1922, when Butler Strowd and his family lived there. Orange County land records show the family provided the land to extend North Roberson Street into the historically Black Northside neighborhood.
In 1955, Strowd’s son, William C. Strowd, inherited the property, after which it housed a number of tenants, including The Loom Press, a vanity printing and graphics services company that operated in the 1970s and 1980s.
William Strowd sold the house in the early 1990s to Sarah Carter, the town’s first female taxi driver, who owned and operated Airport and InTown Taxi there until she sold the business and the property in 2003.
In the last several years, it was rented to UNC students. On one side, is at St. Joseph’s CME Church, where the town dedicated the Freedom Fighters Gateway in 2017. Across the street is First Baptist Church — one of the county’s first black churches — and to the west is Mama Dip’s (previously home to Internationalist Books).
For now, the house remains one of the last family homes on West Rosemary Street, marking the breach between the town’s historic African-American neighborhoods and encroaching gentrification, largely driven by student housing investors. In addition to the 10-story Greenbridge tower to the west, several multistory condo and apartment buildings have been built or are planned to the east.
