To the casual observer, Maiden Lane doesn't look like anything special. It's a single block that turns off Hillsborough Street, tucked behind the boutique Aloft hotel, across from N.C. State's Memorial Bell Tower. There's history here, but it's the sort that takes extra attention to recognize. Maiden Lane's value resides in the stories of its dozen or so century-old frame houses, which are now in varying states of upkeep, some turned into frat houses, with yards packed with cars, fronted by buckled sidewalks.

And while some folks might scoff at the idea that the easy-to-overlook Maiden Lane, its once gracious, now bedraggled houses filled with renters, deserves its placement on the National Register of Historic Places (which it earned in 2006), its connections to both Raleigh's past and to that of the university to which it is so closely linked are inescapable.

For when today's fraternity men walk those sidewalks, they cross paths with the spirits of eighties punks and the ghosts of N.C. State professors from the turn of the twentieth century.

After all, where else can someone find the mixed traces of D.H. Hill, president of what would become N.C. State from 1908–16, and the crucial Raleigh metal band Corrosion of Conformity?

Come summer, however, all of that will disappear. Heavy construction equipment will show up to reduce Maiden Lane to rubble, along with its 125 years of history and its decades of colorful decline. In its place will go a three-story, fifty-foot-tall apartment complex called Hillstone Cameron Village, making room for 201 more inside-the-Beltline dwellings.

Hillstone's property will reach from Enterprise Street to Oberlin Road, taking out a swath of old Raleigh and replacing it with more of the kind of development associated with the Raleigh of the last decade. The Texas-backed developer spent $11.6 million on property and will, proponents say, further the city's public-policy goals of density, walkability, and access to mass transit.

Still, Raleigh will also lose something of value when Maiden Lane falls. That's clear from a look at the street's first decades as a respectable streetcar suburb and its subsequent years of families, rentals, politics, fraternity bonding, and punk rock lifestyle.

"They're taking character away from N.C. State," says twenty-year-old Maiden Lane resident Austin Conner, a State student and Sigma Chi member who's been told his lease is up in May.

City council member Kay Crowder recently expressed her own fondness for the street, an affection shared by prominent figures such as developer and former Raleigh mayor Smedes York, who lived there while his father, J.W. York, was starting to develop Cameron Village a few blocks away.

"We lived at number thirteen Maiden Lane, and I have many, many memories of it," the seventy-five-year-old York told the INDY recently. "My dad purchased number thirteen on July 1, 1944, and we lived there when I was three, four, and five years old."

In the first half of the twentieth century, horse-drawn wagons brought Pine State milk to Maiden Lane, and kids could ride the streetcar or run all the way to downtown Raleigh to catch a Tom Mix cowboy movie. Former residents often count Maiden Lane as a landmark. For some, it was a place of growing up.

"Maiden Lane is in my district. I've driven it," Crowder said during a January council discussion. She smiled and added, "As a student, I had time over in this area. It was a time. It was a very good time."

Lots of students did.

As the decades passed, most of the houses were divided up to make room for generations of students, rock 'n' rollers, artists, State graduates who couldn't quite manage to leave Raleigh, denizens of the late Sadlack's restaurant, and lots and lots of frat members.

Maiden Lane is one of Raleigh's old places, soon to make way for another new place. There's no denying that the Hillstone complex makes sense from a planning perspective. But there's also no denying that Raleigh is losing another of the offbeat landmarks that made it so attractive in the first place.

And that's something worth remembering as yet another shiny new edifice reaches into the city's skyline.

No one would propose tearing down rows of century-old houses in Cameron Park, founded in 1910, or Boylan Heights, dating from 1907, but those better-known, also historic "streetcar suburbs" followed in the tracks of Maiden Lane, which got its start in 1892. Nearby attractions included the agricultural and engineering school that became N.C. State and the park donated to the city by R. Stanhope Pullen in 1887.

Families were drawn to Maiden Lane, then a rural area outside of the town, because the streetcar line ran west along what was then Hillsboro Road, according to the city's Historic Development Commission. The nearby state fairgrounds, located beginning in 1873 at what is now the Rose Garden, also attracted residents. The whole neighborhood was outside the city limits until 1920, distant enough from downtown that it was known as West Raleigh. Many of the street's early residents worked at the college, which started offering classes in 1889, some holding deanships or other positions that paid well enough to afford a house on Maiden Lane.

D.H. Hill, who served as an English professor and the college's first librarian before his term as the third president of the N.C. College of Agricultural and Mechanical Arts (now N.C. State), lived at 2 Maiden Lane with his mother. The steps on the little rise from Hillsborough Street to the Bell Tower site were said to have been built to accommodate Hill, after whom the college's library was later named, as he walked to his office on campus. (The tower wasn't built until he left office.)

Other prominent Maiden Lane folk included Samuel W. Brewer, an agricultural implements businessman who in about 1900 built the house at 4 Maiden Lane that's occupied today by thirteen Sigma Chi frat members. Architectural engineering professor Howard Ernest Satterfield, known for his high-quality "Satterfield Built" residences, lived on Maiden Lane before building many of the houses in Raleigh's Hayes Barton suburb in the 1920s.

In the 1930s, when Raleigh businessman Zack Bacon was growing up on Maiden Lane, the growing university across the street was an unceasing lure.

"That was just about my home; I could go over there and play," the eighty-eight-year-old Bacon told the INDY recently. "I could go into the gymnasium and play. When I was in the sixth grade, I was the batboy and the water boy for the baseball team. I didn't know any other school. State College to me was the whole world."

From the early part of the twentieth century, Maiden Lane's houses offered rooms to students. In August 1917, rooms at 12 and 14 Maiden Lane cost $20 a month. And as decades passed, more of the old homes were rented, and some were converted to businesses. Just as Cameron Park and Boylan Heights once saw many of their elegant homes broken up for rentals, Maiden Lane's parade of stately beauties took a turn to the commercial as the decades rolled on.

"That's the real shame about it," says Tom Bryan, a Raleigh biologist and musician who played music on Maiden Lane in the seventies and later. "Some places like Boylan Heightsa lot of those neighborhoods went through a decline. In those places, people recognized the glory and restored the houses. But that didn't happen on Maiden Lane."

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John Dancy-Jones, a longtime Raleigh resident who recently moved to Asheville, met his wife, Cara, at a 1984 backyard concert on Maiden Lane by Jon McClain and Ugly Americans, the Durham hardcore band.

"I saw this flower-power girl standing at a telephone pole, explaining the flowers and plants around it to some guy," Dancy-Jones says. "I thought, 'I would like to talk to that girl about gardening.' I didn't get to, that time, but the next time I saw her we found out we both gardened and both owned pianos, and the rest was history."

According to those in the music and art scene of the early eighties, creative people kept up a trail among Maiden Lane, Sadlack's, the Hillsborough Street bars, and other nearby Oak City regions. Raleigh resident Brent Wilson played in the band Slow Children, which enjoyed a career moment in 1982 opening for the Go-Gos, a few blocks away at the Pier in the Village Subway.

"Because Maiden Lane was off the main drag, it was a major advantage," says Wilson, who moved into 7 Maiden Lane in 1980. "You could always find somebody to talk to or hang out with somebody. There wasn't anything desperate. Everybody knew each other, and we had each other's backs."

One of the bands playing house concerts along the street was Corrosion of Conformity, which went on to worldwide success. COC was in tune with the combination of punk, politics, and parties that ruled Maiden Lane for years. (A vintage poster has COC playing a Maiden Lane house party on May 15, 1983.)

"That was our birth, from the primordial ooze of punk rock in the early eighties," COC member Reed Mullin told Live Metal last year. "That's where we came from. That's what we were really into at the time. It wasn't a hobby. For me in particular, it was between a movement and a religion, the whole punk rock thing, in terms of music and the whole phase we were writing songs aboutit was in the midst of the Reagan era."

A frustrated landlord on Maiden Lane installed a fence between Sadlack's and the street, but it never lasted long. Between "anarchist, hippies, and punks," Wilson says, the free-flowing atmosphere on Maiden Lane welcomed musicians, artists, leftists, and gay-rights activists, with parties at any one house open to neighbors, too.

Frats became a fixture in the mid-twentieth century and remain so to this day. For the members who call Maiden Lane home, the street offers matchless access to campus and an unrivaled party atmosphere. (Depending on which brother you ask, the Raleigh Police Department cruises the street only occasionally or all the time.)

"Everyone has come to at least one party on Maiden," says Cameron Lewis, a twenty-year-old N.C. State student and member of Sigma Chi. "Our lease goes through the summer, and we can't even renew it. Sigma Chi has been living in these houses for five to six years."

(Robert Baumgart, a Raleigh real estate investor, owns the two houses that have been occupied by Sigma Chi. He chose not to take part in the big development on the north end of the street, and he isn't ready to make public any plans he has for 2 and 4 Maiden Lane. But the occupants say they're definitely out when their leases are up.)

Sigma Chi is only one of the Greek organizations that will be affected by the street's redevelopment. Alpha Sigma Phi, Phi Gamma Delta, and Delta Kappa Eta will also be looking for new homes.

"It's so unfortunate because all of the history here," says eighteen-year-old Jake Schronce, a member of Phi Gamma Delta. "It's changing Greek life altogether."

According to the minutes of a January 24 Wade Citizens Advisory Council meeting, the students of the old Maiden Lane wouldn't have a prayer renting at Hillstone. At that meeting, a representative of designers JDavis Architects offered a wealth of information on the new project, including this caveat: "This is being designed as market rate housing where you have to be at least 21 years old to sign the lease, which parents cannot cosign."

Rents haven't been announced, but nearby apartment complexes advertise prices starting at $1,064 for studios.

There's more to the development than just the Maiden Lane houses. As part of the project, the communal Roundabout Gallery at 305 Oberlin, which backs up to Maiden Lane, will be torn down along with a neighboring artists' space. And council member Russ Stephenson's expansive, historic property will also border the new Hillstone development. (Stephenson was out of town and didn't vote on the measure that closed Maiden Lane.)

Representatives of the Dallas-based Leon Capital Group, the developer behind Hillstone, won an agreement from council members on January 3 to close most of Maiden Lane to traffic. In the next month, the developers said then, they'd make every effort to find a way to move one of the old houses to a nearby property.

But when attorney Michael Birch and company principal Brian Nicholson returned on February 7, they reported that their efforts had been in vain. They'd talked to a number of different agencies, nonprofits, and business people, they said, with no luck finding anyone willing to move a single house from Maiden Lane.

Mike Blake, unofficial king of North Carolina house movers, pointed out in an interview why such a move is unlikely.

"I've looked at some of those houses on Maiden Lane before. They are just tremendous in size," Blake told the INDY from his Triad office. "A lot of those houses are higher than telephone poles."

The significance of utility pole height, Blake says, is that a move would involve putting in temporary, sky-high replacement poles at a cost of $15,000–$20,000 apiece. And that's just one of the obstacles that would have to be overcome to move an aging, possibly termite-ridden house, however warmly people remember it.

(Over the weekend, movers found a way to transport two other historic houses to new locations downtown. Planning commission member Matt Tomasulo and his wife, Nicole Alvarez, moved a twelve-hundred-square-foot house from East Lenoir to South Bloodworth Street. The route was planned for a year and involved wider streets and fewer power lines than the area around Maiden Lane, Tomasulo says.)

Instead of moving a house, the developers told the city council, the company has agreed to salvage sought-after elements such as hardwood floors and moldings, as well as to donate $25,000 to the rehabilitation of the Bell Tower and another $17,500 toward historic preservation in Raleigh. They also hope to incorporate elements from Maiden Lane such as stoops, porches, and vintage siding into the buildings. Perhaps there will be public artwork made up of bits and pieces of the houses, they added, offering small inducements to those concerned about the loss of Maiden Lane for posterity.

Kay Crowder continues to mourn for the once proud, much used, soon-to-vanish houses of Maiden Lane.

"I think it's unfortunate for a city of our size that we can't find a way to save a house from the eighteen-hundreds, from our city's first neighborhoods," she said at the February meeting.

January's city council discussion on Maiden Lane was protracted, with considerable pressure on the developers to come up with some means of saving perhaps three of the houses. Judy Payne, a former Maiden Lane resident, even suggested that the entire street could be transformed into a pocket business district lined with specialty shops and boutiques. But at the February meeting, when such a recourse was said to be impossible, council members simply proceeded with other business after hearing the move wouldn't happen.

And so it goes: in Raleigh, in Austin, in Nashville, in almost any "hot" town. Some historic buildings are renovated and saved. But others, with a lesser role in mainstream history, get torn from their foundations by a city's need for density, by the benefits of growth, and, in the end, by a flood of hard cash.

This article appeared in print with the headline "The End of the Lane"