Live in Walltown

Walltown, on this page, is an area the City of Durham's own Neighborhoods layer draws directly north of Duke University's East Campus: 198 acres between Broad Street on the west and Guess Road and Buchanan Boulevard on the east, from Green Street up to Interstate 85. The City publishes that layer for its work-order system with no date, no author and no definition of a neighborhood, so it is not an association's territory, and this guide claims nothing about where residents think Walltown ends. Clipped to the city limits, it held 1,924 residents in 1,046 housing units at the 2020 census.

It is named for a man, and built for workers. Wikipedia's account gives the name to George Wall (1854 to 1930), born enslaved, who worked as a custodian at Trinity College, the school that became Duke, and built a house near it in 1906. The land itself was a speculation: in 1890 Julian S. Carr and Richard H. Wright bought 286 acres north of the new campus and cut it into 56 blocks, and the 1980 historic inventory Open Durham reprints says the stalled scheme moved only after the electric trolley came in 1902. The level ground by the college sold first, to professors, as Trinity Heights. Walltown got the rest, low ground with deep gullies, and in the late 1910s and 1920s developers filled it with rows of cheap frame rental houses and duplexes for the Black workers of the tobacco factories, the mills and the college.

A neighborhood with its own civil rights record. The Walltown Graded School, a Rosenwald school, opened on West Club Boulevard in 1919. In May 1958 Rachel Richardson of Walltown and Evelyn McKissick filed the first legal challenge to segregation in Durham's public schools; white students first attended Walltown School in 1970. By 1990, 73% of the homes were rentals, and in 1994 Self-Help began a large renovation program. In 2018 the Walltown Community Association asked the City Council for rules to slow rising taxes and rents. Whether those pressures have eased since was not read, and no sale price is published for the neighborhood: Zillow's typical value for the whole 27705 ZIP, condominiums included, was $467,307 in August 2026, a ZIP model rather than a Walltown price.

The creek runs through the middle. A branch of South Ellerbe Creek, which Wikipedia calls Dye Branch, crosses the guide, and the inventory says the park at its center was the city dump. Only 5.2% of the ground is in the special flood hazard area, but 113 residents of 2020 lived on blocks in the floodway itself, and the point this guide is measured from, by Walltown Park, is in zone AE on FEMA's map. That is a neighborhood center, not a house: check the address. Hurricane Florence flooded Buchanan Boulevard at the east edge in September 2018. Any land disturbance in a FEMA floodplain needs a City permit, and the City's Class 7 rating takes 15% off flood insurance in the hazard area.

The bill and the rules. Every parcel pays Durham County's 57.92 cents and the City's 43.71, 101.63 cents per $100 for fiscal 2027, on values set at market as of 1 January 2025 and fixed until 2029. On the west edge, 65 residents lived inside the Watts-Hillandale local historic district, where exterior changes need a certificate of appropriateness from the Historic Preservation Commission; the Trinity Heights district clips the south edge. Most of Walltown is in neither, and the National Register lines that also touch it restrict nothing a private owner does with private money. Duke is the other neighbor: the census tract counts 17.2% of its residents in college, nearly all graduate students, with a wide margin.