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Durham's Most Walkable Historic Neighborhood
It's a Tuesday evening in late October, and the light through the willow oaks has gone amber. You're walking home on Watts Street. The sidewalk is cracked in that specific way old sidewalks get when tree roots have had ninety years to rearrange things. A kid on a bicycle passes you. Somewhere behind a screen porch, someone's playing Coltrane. You can smell dinner from three houses. You aren't in a hurry.
This is Trinity Park. It's not the newest neighborhood in Durham or the flashiest. It's the one people choose when they've been everywhere else and know exactly what they want.
Trinity Park exists because a college moved to town. In 1892, Trinity College relocated from rural Randolph County to Durham, and the first five homes went up that same year: Queen Anne-style cottages for professors, ordered from a New York architect, built at the southeast edge of campus. Four of them still stand.
The street you're walking on carries the name of George Washington Watts, a co-founder of the American Tobacco Company whose philanthropy built Durham's first hospital and shaped the city's early institutions. His estate at death was valued at $11.4 million (roughly $200 million today). The man funded hospitals, churches, and colleges across Durham. They named the street for him. They named the school across from 707 for him.
Not everyone loved George Watts. When Brodie Duke (brother of James B. Duke) subdivided this land in 1901, he named the north-south streets so that reading them east to west spelled “Washington Duke Hated Watts.” One street was literally called Hated Street. It appeared on maps through 1922 before quietly becoming part of Gregson. Gilded Age Durham didn't do passive-aggressive. It did cartographic-aggressive.
The tree canopy that defines Trinity Park isn't an accident of time. In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration planted roughly 13,000 trees across Durham, and Trinity Park was a primary beneficiary. The species of choice was the willow oak, selected on the advice of Clarence Korstian of Duke Forest because they wouldn't tangle with power lines for decades.
Those trees are now ninety-plus years old. They form a continuous overhead canopy along the residential streets, filtering light in summer and going bare in winter in a way that changes the character of every block with the season. Walking under them feels different from driving under them. The neighborhood was designed for the former.
There's a Montessori school directly across the street from 707 Watts. George Watts Montessori, at 700 Watts Street, is a free public magnet in the Durham Public Schools system. Morning drop-off means walking your kid across the road. No car line.
Duke University's East Campus sits less than a five-minute walk away. The Georgian-style buildings, Baldwin Auditorium, and the open lawns aren't behind a gate. You walk through. Faculty jog the perimeter loop. Students sit on the grass reading things they'll argue about at dinner.
The Ninth Street district is eight minutes on foot. Elmo's Diner has had a line out the door on weekends since 1997. Cocoa Cinnamon makes coffee worth crossing town for. Cloche does liege waffles you'll think about later. Rose's Noodles, Dumplings & Sweets is at Brightleaf Square, a few minutes further, in the old tobacco warehouses they converted with string lights and outdoor patios.
Whole Foods is a ten-minute walk. The Durham Farmers' Market runs year-round on Saturdays at Durham Central Park. The Durham Co-op, community-owned and local-focused, is fifteen minutes on the sidewalk. These aren't destinations that require planning. They're errands you do on the way home.
Bon Appetit called the Durham-Chapel Hill area “America's Foodiest Small Town.” Southern Living named it “The Tastiest Town in the South.” Then the MICHELIN Guide came. In November 2025, North Carolina was included in the inaugural MICHELIN Guide American South, and Durham restaurants earned Recommended and Bib Gourmand designations. Ricky Moore at Saltbox Seafood Joint won the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southeast in 2022, Durham's first. The semifinalist list grows every year.
The food matters because it tells you who lives here. The scene is chef-driven, farm-connected, and wildly diverse: Ethiopian at Goorsha on West Main, upscale seafood at Saint James, Detroit-style pizza at Emmy Squared, Southern-Louisiana fusion at Seraphine on the American Tobacco Campus.
Duke employs more than 48,000 people and spends $1.39 billion a year on research alone. Apple's building a billion-dollar campus in Research Triangle Park. Google opened an engineering hub at 200 West Morris Street in Durham. Raleigh-Durham ranks sixth on the U.S. News & World Report Best Places to Live list for 2025-2026. The airport runs 86 nonstop routes, including Frankfurt.
People aren't coming for one thing. They're coming because the city works at a scale they can actually live in. A $4 million home in San Francisco buys a two-bedroom condo. Here, it builds you 5,209 square feet of architect-designed living on a historic street with a Montessori school across the road and a James Beard restaurant you can walk to.
The Durham Performing Arts Center seats 2,700 and consistently ranks among the top five theaters in the country by attendance. Touring Broadway, concerts, comedy, the American Dance Festival. The building opened in 2008, and it turned downtown Durham into a destination almost overnight.
Full Frame, the documentary film festival held every spring, draws more than 10,000 international attendees and qualifies films for the Academy Awards. The 21c Museum Hotel puts 10,500 square feet of contemporary art inside a AAA Four Diamond hotel in the middle of downtown. The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke runs exhibitions you'd expect to find in a much larger city. The Carolina Theatre, a 1926 Beaux-Arts landmark, still shows films and hosts live performances on West Morgan Street.
None of this requires a car from Trinity Park. DPAC is a twenty-five-minute walk or a seven-minute drive. Downtown Durham is fifteen minutes on foot.
The Trinity Park Historic District covers 281.9 acres and includes 751 contributing buildings. The styles span from 1890s Queen Anne to Colonial Revival to Craftsman bungalows to Tudor. Walk three blocks and you'll pass four architectural periods. The place reads like a textbook, except people actually live in it.
Trinity Park sits on the National Register of Historic Places but doesn't carry a local historic district overlay. That distinction matters. The National Register confers recognition and prestige. The absence of a local overlay means property owners retain more freedom for exterior changes and new construction. It's how a modern home by an FAIA architect can sit on the same block as a 1905 Colonial Revival without anyone needing a variance.
The neighborhood has absorbed new architecture before. It will again. The WPA trees don't care what's under them. They give every house the same canopy.
Philip Szostak, FAIA, designed DPAC. The building that put Durham on the national cultural map. He received the AIA North Carolina Gold Medal in 2018, the highest honor the state chapter awards to any architect. He's spent more than 45 years designing buildings across North Carolina.
Then he designed a house on Watts Street. Not a spec home. Not a developer's commission. A private residence, built by his own family's construction firm, in the neighborhood he knows block by block. The massing sits at the same setback as the houses around it. The height holds the street's line.
DPAC proved Philip Szostak could design for a city. 707 Watts Street proves he can design for a street.