Live in Lakewood Park

Lakewood Park, on this page, is the area the City of Durham's own Neighborhoods layer calls by that name: 118 acres on both sides of Chapel Hill Road and West Lakewood Avenue, between Morehead Avenue on the north, Rosedale Avenue and Bivins Street. The layer is a reference map the City keeps for its own work orders, with no published date, author or definition, clipped here to the city limits; it is not an association's line. It held 1,336 residents in 615 housing units at the 2020 census. It is not Tuscaloosa-Lakewood, the separate neighborhood to the southwest with a guide of its own, and the 2002 nomination says the wider Lakewood neighborhood runs south to Chapel Hill Boulevard, well beyond this line.

The name is an amusement park. In 1902 Richard H. Wright's Durham Traction Company built an eight-mile trolley system, bought 27 acres on Chapel Hill Road for its shops and car sheds, and built Lakewood Park on most of it: a merry-go-round, a roller coaster, a lake, a skating rink, a dance pavilion and a casino theater, opened on 20 July 1902. By 1910 it had Durham's first public swimming pool, and in the 1920s its manager billed it as the Coney Island of the South. Cars thinned the crowds, the trolleys gave way to buses in 1930, and the park closed about 1934. In 1960 Lakewood Shopping Center went up on its site. A Food Lion at 2000 Chapel Hill Road, inside the line, is in that block now.

The houses came piecemeal, not from one developer. Three farms were cut into lots from 1906 to 1908 and sold to individuals, who built Queen Anne cottages, then bungalows in the 1920s, then Minimal Traditional houses into the early 1950s, with grocery stores and the 1924 Lakewood Baptist Church along Chapel Hill Road. The nomination records that at least one early James Street deed barred ownership or occupation by Black people. The area was annexed to Durham in 1925.

A historic district with no local rules. The 28.7-acre Lakewood Park Historic District, listed on the National Register in 2003, covers 14.8% of the City's area here, around Chapel Hill Road, West Lakewood Avenue and James Street. A National Register listing restricts nothing a private owner does with private money, and no local historic district, which would need the Historic Preservation Commission's certificate of appropriateness, touches the line. No census block point falls inside the Register district, so the count cannot say how many residents live in it. At the southwest edge, 66 residents live under the City's 2008 Tuscaloosa-Lakewood Neighborhood Protection Overlay, drawn for the neighborhood next door; what it restricts was not read, so ask the City's planners before buying there.

The bill and the map. County and City together charge 101.63 cents per $100 for fiscal 2027 (57.92 and 43.71), on values the County reset to market on 1 January 2025 and will not reset until 2029; the combined rate was 139.49 cents before the revaluation. Stormwater and optional yard waste come on the City utility bill. North Carolina has no homestead exemption for an ordinary buyer. Every 2020 resident lived on a block in flood zone X, and FEMA gives zone X at the point; check the address itself. No sale price is published for the neighborhood, and Zillow's $406,475 for August 2026 is the whole 27707 ZIP, condominiums included.

Day to day, Duke is the neighbor. West Campus is about 0.9 km from the point and Duke University Hospital 2.2 km. Routes 10 and 10B run down Chapel Hill Road with eight stops inside the line, each route every 30 minutes at midday, fare-free through June 2027. Of the two census tracts that hold the residents, the one with 413 of them counts 26.3% of its people in college or graduate school and the one with 923 counts 7.5%, both with wide margins.