State of Things
10:36 am
Fri December 9, 2011

If This Old Neighborhood Could Talk

Historic Oakwood
Credit www.historicoakwood.org
Historic Oakwood

Downtown Raleigh's historic Oakwood neighborhood puts on its annual candlelight tour this weekend. It's a chance for curious strangers to poke around in some of the city's grandest and oldest homes. What few people realize is that the tour began some 40 years ago as a last-ditch effort to keep a freeway from demolishing the historic area. Neighbors have recently begun collecting one another's oral histories, to help preserve the neighborhood's fascinating story.

  • Host Frank Stasio talks Liisa Ogburn, a documentary maker and Oakwood resident, who is spearheading the project; and with Randy Hester, a landscape architect and sociologist who helped lead the fight to save Oakwood in the 1970s.

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