From the News and Observer
By Sarah Avery
RALEIGH -- There was a time not long ago when Ron and Pam Calliari actually considered leaving the Mordecai neighborhood, since the house they had spent seven years renovating ran out of projects and they began to get that wandering eye common to do-it-yourselfers.
And then, in the way that Mordecai has affected many a resident in what has become a benign sort of "Hotel California" effect, they realized they could never leave.
Instead, they bought a great big project down the street, the old Haywood mansion, 3,900 square feet of renovational bliss.
"We're definitely committed," Ron Calliari says. "My wife and I were raised in small towns, and we like the older neighborhood, the mix of people - the older folks, young families. We know our neighbors. In a lot of the other subdivisions, they're not as easy to get to know."
The Calliaris aren't alone in that sentiment. While longtime residents have always understood the lure of the Mordecai neighborhood, its 1920s charm and diversity have gone largely unnoticed in recent years under the shadow of Oakwood's domination as the vintage downtown neighborhood of choice.
Now it's Mordecai's turn to bloom.
Situated in downtown's northern flank, Mordecai has started to catch the eye of newcomers and trendsetters alike. Newer houses are rising in vacant lots. Dilapidated commercial buildings are undergoing giant makeovers. Home prices are rising.
For Mordecai, such attention is much overdue.
### The original North Raleigh: Back 214 years ago, Joel Lane - a planter who sold the state the land for the state capitol - built the original Mordecai plantation house (named after Lane's granddaughter, who married Moses Mordecai) one mile from the state capitol and amassed thousands of farm acres surrounding it.
The now-insignificant distance from the state capitol was, back then, enough to render the estate well out in the country.
But as the city expanded and the subsequent generations of Mordecais sold off parcels of land, the area around Mordecai sprouted houses, particularly along Wake Forest Road, which was the main artery north out of town.
Many of the oldest and largest of those houses periodically served as tourist homes - what we would now call bed and breakfasts - to people stopping on the outskirts of Raleigh. A picture of the area taken in the early 1900s bears the caption "North Raleigh."
By the time the last of the surrounding land was developed in the 1920s, Mordecai became a full-fledged section of town. Adding to the vitality of the neighborhood was Peace College along its southern edge and Pilot Mills, which in 1893 built the first of two textile plants and a village of employee housing along the area's eastern boundary.
But by the 1970s, the neighborhood started to show signs of wear as people flocked to newer homes with larger lots in the suburbs.
"North Raleigh began to open up and land was cheap and people began moving out," says Howard Cannon, who moved back to Mordecai in 1976, right as the neighborhood was beginning to turn. "Mordecai became less attractive as a residential community."
Cannon says he remained committed to Mordecai because he grew up there, and when his mother became ill and needed his help, there was no question that they'd live in Mordecai.
"This is the only place she would live," Cannon says, who now serves as chairman of the neighborhood's Citizen Advisory Council, one of 18 such neighborhood organizations established to offer the City of Raleigh insight and direction for planning and development.
Cannon says it was hard for the old structures - 1920s bungalows and turn-of-the-century colonials - to compete with the big yards and the split levels being built in Brentwood and other suburban developments.
Adding to the neighborhood's woes was the 1982 closing of Pilot Mills. And Halifax Court, the public housing project built at Mordecai's edge in the 1940s, began to show its age. Built at a time when public housing meant densely concentrated units, Halifax Court had some 1,000 residents. And it became troubled with crime.
As a result, many of the younger folks with children simply stayed away. A lot of the older residents also moved out, often putting their old houses up for rent or carving them into apartments. A good number of the neighborhood's signature homes fell into disrepair.
### Newcomers drawn to charm: Despite these setbacks, many who remained in Mordecai continued to keep up appearances - manicuring their lawns and gardens, spiffing up their houses.
The Citizen's Advisory Council was active, the neighborhood spirit was strong with annual clean-up efforts and picnics and ice cream socials. That spirit sustained Mordecai, and eventually drew others to it.
"When we moved into the area in 1987," says Sally Poland, "we had been living elsewhere in Raleigh for three years and we just loved the hold homes in Mordecai."
The Polands bought their two-story house in the 1200 block of Mordecai Drive and started renovating. Between the projects and plantings, the couple got to know their neighbors left and right, out the front door and out the back.
Down the street lives an 83-year-old widow that Sally Poland takes to the grocery store once a week. Up the street, a group of children shoot basketball after school from a portable hoop that sits at the curb.
"If the trash bins get left outside past trash day, they somehow get carried around to the back," Poland says. "It's a neighborhood where people look after each other. If your paper doesn't go in for a few hours, someone will call and ask if you're OK."
For Isaac Lake III, who last year began renovating the old Dombalis house on Wake Forest Road, it's a simple matter of neighborliness: "My dog got out the other day. And a neighbor called to let me know."
It's the kind of place that drew Jim Person in 1991 when he and his wife were just starting out as a young married couple.
Person had never owned a house before, but saw a run-down, two-story house on Mordecai Drive that the government was trying to sell out of foreclosure. Using a low-interest loan and city renovation credits, he bought in.
Eight years later, the house looks new, with blue-gray shutters and flower boxes under the windows. A dingy apartment that had been carved into the top floor now houses a master bedroom and bath, along with a room for his 4-year-old daughter.
"I'm just so thankful it worked out like it did," Person says. "I couldn't afford to buy this house in Mordecai now."
### With spirit, prices rise: Anne Scruggs, a real estate agent with Simpson & Underwood, says home prices in Mordecai have risen dramatically in the last couple of years, from the low $100,000 range to above $160,000.
"The last two sales I had over there were competitive - there were multiple offers," she says.
Scruggs says her Mordecai clients are people who want to live in an older neighborhood but who may not be able to afford the high-dollar homes in Oakwood, or Hayes-Barton.
"What's driving the interest as much as the location is the individuality of the houses," Scruggs says. "Generally I find that the people who are looking in Mordecai are the kind of people who want a unique house. They don't see the same house over and over and over."
Helping to boost home prices are several developments on the fringes of the neighborhood that have made assets of properties that once blighted the area.
The 48-unit Governor's Square condominium project on Person Street, where the community's only grocery stood before burning in 1992, adds an urban flair at Mordecai's entrance.
Additionally, Halifax Court has been targeted by the city for major restructuring, with the 318 units to be replaced with less dense, more attractive public housing. So far bids for federal grant money have failed, but those efforts continue. Meanwhile, a police substation on the project's grounds has diminished crime.
And the renovation of Pilot Mills into offices, one phase of which is due to be completed in August, has turned what looked like a bomb site into a showcase on the National Register of Historic Places.
Frank Gailor, one of the mill's developers, said he was drawn to the mill project in part because of its proximity to the Mordecai neighborhood.
"I saw Mordecai as being a gem that would contribute to the Pilot Mills project," he said, "and it's a great context in which to develop. I know that Mordecai is going to be stable and improving."
For the Calliaris, whose stake in the neighborhood now includes the home they renovated on Mordecai Drive and the one they're in the midst of restoring on Wake Forest Road, improving the neighborhood is something of a mission.
"We were actually looking to move somewhere else, closer to where my wife works, but that deal fell through," Ron Calliari says. "At the same time, we found out that the city was putting this house back on the market. We saw it as the focal point of the neighborhood. And with the new condos on Person and the other projects, we decided maybe this was good for us to do to help out this corner of the neighborhood.
