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Staff writer, Fayobserver.com
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| Longtime Walnut Terrace resident Mary Hinton takes clothes off the line. Her development missed out on a Hope VI grant. At right, Kristen Rahl, left, Micah Khater and Donna Omile warm up before soccer practice at Halifax Park in the Capitol Park neighborhood. The girls are on the Raleigh Charter School soccer team. |
RALEIGH — When darkness settled in each Friday night, and the ghosts with guns began to gather outside, LaWanda Harris hid.
She put chairs inside a small closet. She moved the television just outside the closet door. And she sat with her children, watching whatever pleasant shows she could find.
Outside in the dark, there was only horror. Halifax Court wasn’t a place for real people. It was a place for the heartless, the soulless, and, as Harris remembers, “the hopeless.”
A decade later, on the same piece of land just north of downtown Raleigh, Harris leaves her blinds open all hours. Her children, now teenagers, run free in the evenings. Her sister now comes to her neighborhood to take nighttime walks.
Hope VI, the same federal grant for urban redevelopment awarded to Fayetteville earlier this month, changed everything here.
Flattened are the projects where the poor were clustered and the drug dealers were kings. Standing are the mixed-income neighborhoods where the grass is trimmed and the working-class feel safe.
About half of the residents remain in public housing. But a casual observer can’t tell which half. The houses look the same. For every person in the neighborhood like Harris — a single mother of three who requires public assistance — there’s a person like Charles Bolton — a retired college administrator who pays full rent.
The new crossbred neighborhood is named Capitol Park. Underneath it is a graveyard, a place once called Halifax Court, where the ghosts ran wild.
They’re only stories now. More HERE
