Ella Fountain Pratt died last week at age 94. The Herald-Sun front page story on July 30th chronicled her long and enduring impact on the arts in Durham. When I came to Durham in 1984 to be marketing director of Central Carolina Bank, the bank was small by regional or national standards but still one of the few corporations of any size that was actually headquartered in Durham. As the administrator of a sizable marketing budget and the bank’s charitable contributions, I suddenly found myself thrust into the middle community life in a way I had never been in my hometown of Richmond.
One of the things that I was asked to do was serve on the board of the Durham Arts Council which is where I met Ella Fountain Pratt. However, my most vivid recollection of her was the force she was during the production of the street opera at Brightleaf Square. The bank had been asked to help underwrite part of the cost of the production to the tune of $10,000, an amount that seemed huge at the time. While she seemed to effortlessly oversee the production, I was struggling mightily to convince branch managers to use the tickets we had by virtue of our sponsorship to host their best customers at the event. She was more successful than I was but I still remember the event as one of those key turning points when a few influential people began to see that there might be some hope for downtown Durham. A few years later as one of the founding board members of Downtown Durham, Inc. we recognized that arts were already there as a foundation to build a revitalization campaign. It’s taken twenty years but it actually seems to be working.
In more recent years, when I’d occasionally see Ella Fountain Pratt around town she always had a cheerful greeting and I could see a vague sense of recognition in her eyes of me as someone that may have helped the effort in the distant past. However, there is no doubt of the role she played in Durham’s cultural life. There are, in fact, a lot of people that never gave up on Durham and she was one of them. Several others are mentioned in the Herald-Sun article and there are many more that struggled on while skepticism remained the more fashionable attitude. Ella Fountain Pratt certainly deserves an honored spot in Durham’s mythical hall of fame.

In my conversation with a mortgage executive in Cary last week (that’s not him in the picture,) he questioned me about the wisdom of focusing on the luxury market in Durham. I believe he used the expression “tilting at windmills.” Why focus on one of the few stagnant segments of what, until recently anyway, has been a robust market? Is Durham generally still stuck in a decades long ditch that it won’t get out of in my lifetime? Unfortunatly, this reflects a widely held view around the Triangle that makes climbing out even tougher. It was hard to argue that Durham was ready to lose its rough and ready reputation when the day before our lunch I could see the police helicopter hovering for hours over a nearby neighborhood while police were trying to flush out the young thug on parole who was eventually arrested for murders of a Duke student from India and the UNC student body president. Like the still festering lacrosse case, this brings unwanted worldwide negative attention. Still, these are my reasons for sticking with Durham…
In the last post I talked about the $23,000,000 listing in Raleigh that was reduced to $12,000,000 in January. Even at $12M it’s still the most expensive listing in the Triangle MLS. But there are markets where that’s run of the mill. The picture here is of an estate in Lake Tahoe that is listed for $100,000,000. I follow a couple of other blogs on luxury homes in other areas of the country and I saw this on one of those. If you are interested in who buys this kind of home I can recommend a book recently published by Robert Frank entitled Richistan:A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich. By and large this blog won’t address the fraction of 1% of families with the resources to buy this kind of property but I did find it interesting how the writer described it because it provides an illustration of how “post-boom” listing agent/marketing directors must do a better job of positioning all properties, but especially luxury properties.
Nature takes over