Category: United States

After visiting four museums and one of the largest bars in the world, it was time to leave Raleigh after just a brief visit. It’s fair to say that spending under 24 hours in the city clearly wasn’t enough, I very much liked Raleigh and would merrily go again.

Raleigh’s first railway station was built in 1890, relatively late by European standards for a city of its size. This building is new, opened in 2018, taking the name Union Station as a nod to the original Union Depot building.

There seem to be numerous levels in the building, but there are a number of lifts for those who don’t or can’t traipse up and down all the steps.

In the background is the traditional tall back Amtrak seating, with the railway station being a multi-functional building that they can hire out as required. They’re very good at creating railway stations with event space to help mitigate the costs of running the building, it seems a decent plan for the future.

Mine was the 15:00 Piedmont train departure, which I cut incredibly fine by my standards by arriving just one hour early.

This was very handy, I could charge my devices and also use Amtrak’s very fast wi-fi (their web-site says they don’t have wi-fi here, but they absolutely do) to upload hundreds of photos. I thought that it was a thoughtfully designed railway station, modern and functional.

Many railway stations in the United States don’t allow access to the platforms until just before the train is due, so passengers wait in the main hall to be called. In the background the Amtrak staff member is visible guiding passengers, whilst I was faffing about uploading the last of my photos onto Flickr…. It was time to board the train to go to Charlotte, my next stop in North Carolina.

There are two menus on display in the museum, the one on the right is from the 1950s and is from the Sir Walter Hotel. But, it’s the menu from 1926 (Tuesday 30 November 1926 to be precise) that I thought was the more interesting, from the Yarborough House Hotel, which burnt down in 1928 and was never rebuilt. During its period of opening it was the place to be seen, and numerous Presidents, including Presidents Johnson, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson.

Frankly, some parts of the menu sound hideous, although each to their own, but the pigs brains with eggs don’t really appeal to me, nor do the chicken giblets. Although having written that, there’s a chicken pan pie, which I think is another way of referring the rather delicious chicken pot pie. There’s an appearance of Chop Suey, which at that time was a relatively new dish that was created for Americans along the lines of Chinese food. The phrase “French Fries potatoes” was also relatively new at the time, indeed they sound quite exotic served alongside the broiled bluefish.

As a museum exhibit, I liked it, it’s a snapshot of culinary history in the United States from 100 years ago.

It still seems remarkable to me that at the turns of the 1960s there was segregation at lunch counters in Raleigh and other cities across the United States. This is a leaflet encouraging people to boycott companies such as Woolworths and Walgreens where segregation was enforced, with these campaigns being mostly organised in Raleigh by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University. The latter of those establishments is important as it’s what called an historically black university, namely one which educated black students in the days before educational segregation was brought to an end with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. St. Augustine’s College also has a proud history of educating black students, being founded by the Episcopal church in 1867 to give freed slaves education.

This campaign, and others like it, were successful and lunch counters in Raleigh were made integrated on 19 August 1960. Alongside other North Carolina cities as Greensboro, the peaceful protests caused large economic losses for the companies as well as raising the rather obvious issue that it was ridiculous to have segregated counters. As an aside, it’s an interesting quirk of history just how popular lunch counters in drug stores, such as Walgreens, became and perhaps something of a shame that they mostly fell of fashion in the 1970s and 1980s.

I was clearly lax in my reading of the history of Raleigh in North Carolina as it wasn’t until I got to this museum that I realised where the city got its name from. I had stupidly assumed that it was someone called Raleigh who had funded the city or something similar, but it is all a bit more prosaic as it’s named after the great British statesman Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618). And here he is in statue form in the museum.

Raleigh had the honour of having a city named after him because when they were laying the new state capital out in 1788 they decided to commemorate him as he was the sponsor of Roanoke Island, the ‘lost colony’. As an aside, people have been arguing how to pronounce Raleigh for at least 175 years, which is something in itself. I think the explorer’s surname should be pronounced ‘ral-lee’, but Americans tend to go for ‘rah-lee’, which has also impacted on how their pronounce their city’s name. And it all goes back to the word ‘ra’ meaning deer and ‘lea’ meaning a clearing, so somewhere in England in the tenth century or whatever there were some deer in a clearing and now there’s an American city named after them….

Without context, I accept that this isn’t the most riveting display I’ve ever seen in a museum (and there’s a pun there with rivets, but readers can write their own….). However, they’re iron nails from Isaac Hunter’s tavern from when it was first constructed in 1769. And this building is important, because in 1788 the State’s General Assembly declared that the new capital of Raleigh must be built within ten miles of the tavern. Talk about how much this must have been important to the politicians of the time, it’s like the House of Commons declaring that any new city has to be constructed near to a Wetherspoons.

And here’s the tavern in the 1970s. It was a little bit rediscovered (primarily as a previous owner had moved it from its original location) and it had been used for many purposes since its early days as a tavern, including being split up for domestic purposes and also redesigned to be a stable. However, I understand that instead of saving this, it was torn down and I’m guessing that’s when they sent some of its nails to the museum. I’d bet that at some stage in the future this will be rebuilt, it’s too important for Raleigh to be ignored and all that there is at the moment is a heritage sign to mark the location.

The conclusion of all of this is that I like nails with a bit of history to them.

There’s a news story circulating across social media about how this week a customer of Clyde Cooper’s BBQ called the police because some of the BBQ meat she ordered was pink. This is entirely normal, but it seems that the customer is now taking legal action against the now very annoyed restaurant. On the bright side, they’re quickly getting merchandise ready and so this is some rather excellent advertising…

https://www.facebook.com/clydecoopersbbq/

And why am I mentioning this? Primarily because I think it’s an amusing news story. Although I didn’t go there, it just happens that the restaurant is located on the next road to the City of Raleigh Museum that I’m currently writing about on this blog, so it felt appropriate in terms of timing….. And not everything has to be entirely relevant on this blog ?

Not only does Raleigh have the bar with the second highest number of draft beers available in the world, it also has the second largest earth on earth (the largest is in New York) as they call it. The globe is known as the SECU Daily Planet and it’s 70 feet in width, another sign that the Americans do things bigger if nothing else.

It’s part of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and they decided to plonk it here in 2012. It’s not just decorative either, inside is a theatre which they use for educational performances. The construction wasn’t entirely easy, they needed to use vinyl roll on 217 panels with the image on the globe being 60GB in size.

Suitably impressive and apparently it’s often lit up at night, although I had a train to catch later that afternoon so had no way of proving that either way.

You have to admire a city that has sand art. Not just because they’ve found someone talented enough to create it and someone organised enough to fund it, but because no bloody local person has got drunk and stomped all over it. I’m afraid I’m not sure that this would have lasted in a lot of UK cities, so all credit to Raleigh for having some permanence to their sand art in what isn’t meant to be a particular enduring technique.

The creator of this sculpture is local man Ed Moore and his company Sandy Feat and he explains on his web-site just how much time it takes to craft these pieces of art. Where possible, he also likes to get anyone passing by involved in the creation and I can imagine that’s quite exciting and especially so for children. It’s not within my limited range of talents to create anything like this, but I can see that it’s something that an artist can really enjoy. They get the immediate response of those walking by, it’s an artwork that appeals to children and they can be endlessly creative with their project.

This all gives me an idea of how to measure the well-being of a city, put a sand sculpture in the main square of every major settlement in the world and see just how long they last before being damaged, vandalised or otherwise faffed about with. The Economist have the Big Mac Index to measure the true value of a currency, this could be the Sand Index to measure the decency of the local population.