Live in Longview Gardens
Which side of the King Charles overlay line a lot sits on decides what it is: inside, Clarence Poe's 1938 subdivision of big lots, which no one may split below three-quarters of an acre; outside, the postwar tract streets on quarter-acre lots, where most of the new building is.
Longview Gardens was laid out in 1938 by the Richmond landscape architect Charles Gillette for Clarence Poe, editor of The Progressive Farmer, as curving streets of large lots on both sides of New Bern Avenue, which Poe made a parkway; it opened in 1939 under covenants that barred anyone who was not white until 1965, and it was listed on the National Register in 2011. The Longview Neighbors Association's registered area also takes in Longview Park, the smaller-lot tract subdivision Poe's company platted from 1947, and 1,722 people lived inside it at the 2020 census. Wake County dates 402 of its 613 houses to 1945 through 1959 and assesses the median one at $401,064: $488,505 inside the King Charles (South) conservation overlay and $354,951 outside it. What is not settled is New Bern Avenue: the bus rapid transit line under construction on it has no opening date from the City, and a 2024 transit overlay now allows townhouses and apartments on 39 lots along it.
Poe's big lots are held whole, and the change is on the streets beside them
This guide uses the area the Longview Neighbors Association registered on the City of Raleigh's Neighborhood Registry, in the registry's Southeast district, about 649 acres with 675 homes on the registry's count: Milburnie Road on the north, North Peartree Lane and Donald Ross Drive on the east, Poole Road on the south, South King Charles Road and then New Bern Avenue on the southwest, and North Raleigh Boulevard on the west. Victoria Place, about 20 acres north of New Bern Avenue registered separately with 92 homes, is cut out of the middle. The Longview Gardens National Register district, bounded roughly by King Charles Road, Poole Road, Donald Ross Drive, Albemarle Avenue, Longview Lake Drive and New Bern Avenue in its 2011 nomination, lies almost entirely inside, and so does the King Charles (South) conservation overlay, which covers most of the district and the streets just north of it.
Longview Gardens is Clarence Poe's subdivision. The editor of The Progressive Farmer had gathered more than 800 acres east of Raleigh by 1938, when the landscape architect Charles Gillette drew curving streets off a traffic circle on both sides of New Bern Avenue, on lots of three-quarters of an acre to more than four. Poe gave the state the land for the avenue's median in 1940 and sold 136 acres south of it to the Raleigh Country Club in 1948. The lots went on sale in 1939 under covenants that barred anyone who was not white until 1965. From 1947 his company also platted Longview Park north and west of the circle, on quarter-acre lots for tract houses. The Longview Neighbors Association's registered area takes in both, and 1,722 people lived in it in 2020.
The houses are the postwar houses. Wake County dates 402 of the 613 to 1945 through 1959, and the 2011 National Register nomination found one teardown in the whole district. What divides the stock is a line on the zoning map. Since 2005 the King Charles (South) conservation overlay has covered 251 of the houses: a new lot there must be at least 33,541 square feet and 144 feet wide, with the house set back 76 feet and no taller than two stories. That is larger than 178 of the lots it covers, so nothing inside it gets split. The 362 houses outside sit on quarter-acre lots zoned R-6, and 20 of the 29 built since 2015 are there. The county assesses the median house at $488,505 inside the overlay and $354,951 outside.
The lake is private; the dam is the City's. Longview Lake, built in the mid-1940s, lies between Longview Lake Drive and Albemarle Avenue. The county bills the 12 acres around it to Homeowners of Longview Gardens, an association the Raleigh Public Record found in 2013 had been inactive for 30 years, with about 20 properties holding deeded interests in the water. The City owns both Lower Longview Lake dams and rates them high hazard. Albemarle Avenue, which crosses the lower dam, was closed in 2009 and reopened in January 2019 after a rebuild the City budgeted at $3.6 million, against a 2013 estimate of $2.5 million. The City's copy of the flood map puts 13 acres in the 1% annual chance zone, mostly the lake and its marsh, and three houses on Milburnie Road have their centers inside it. The 2013 reporting left the lake and its sediment to the owners, and this guide found nothing later that changes that.
New Bern Avenue is the commute, and it is being rebuilt. GoRaleigh Route 15 runs down it every 15 minutes on weekday daytimes, a scheduled 9 minutes from North King Charles Road to GoRaleigh Station. The City is building bus rapid transit on the avenue, with a Longview station between Raleigh Boulevard and WakeMed; two of three construction phases are under way, and the City gives no opening date, though WRAL reported summer 2030. Transit overlays adopted in 2024 cover 39 lots along the avenue, where apartments are allowed and the conservation overlay does not reach. At the east end is WakeMed, opened on 24 April 1961 as Memorial Hospital of Wake County on land that had been Poe's.
What it costs, and who lives here. The median assessment is $401,064, and $519,274 inside the historic district. At 90.91 cents per $100 the first is about $3,650 a year until Wake revalues on 1 January 2027 (citywide figures are on the Raleigh page). The county recorded 74 house sales from January 2024, at $210,000 to $1,300,000, without marking which were market sales. The census counted 854 Black residents of 1,530 in 2010 and 641 of 1,722 in 2020, while the white count rose from 558 to 804. Why, the census does not say, and this guide does not guess.
- Check the parcel on the City's zoning map for the King Charles (South) overlay, and for the transit overlay on New Bern Avenue frontage
- On Albemarle Avenue and Longview Lake Drive, ask whether the deed carries an interest in the lake and what it obliges
- Look the lot up on the City's flood map: the 1% zone follows the lake, its marsh and a branch near Milburnie Road
- Ask what the wiring, roof and ductwork date from: 509 of the 613 houses were built before 1966
- Below 80% of area median income, ask the City about the $60,000 loan and its 10-year resale restriction
How Longview Gardens got here
- 1916Clarence Poe, editor of The Progressive Farmer, buys a 90-acre tract east of Raleigh bounded on the west by Pear Tree Road, now Donald Ross Drive. By 1938 he owns more than 800 acres, including the tract holding Longview Lake, bought in 1919.
- 1925Poe and his wife Alice Aycock Poe build Longview, a stone house designed by James Salter overlooking Crabtree Creek, which gives the subdivision its name. A plan drawn for Poe that year by Warren H. Manning's office is never built.
- 1938Charles Gillette, the Richmond landscape architect, and the engineer Louis E. Wooten draw the plan the neighborhood follows: curving streets off a traffic circle two blocks north of New Bern Avenue, with lots of three-quarters of an acre to more than four acres. It is revised in May 1940.
- 1939Longview Gardens is announced in the News and Observer on 7 May. Its covenants, as revised in 1940, set a minimum house cost of $6,000 or $7,000 and bar anyone who is not white from owning, leasing or living on a lot. They expire in 1965.
- 1940While the state widens New Bern Avenue, Poe gives it the land for a wide median, and the highway becomes the parkway the neighborhood is built around. He plants crepe myrtles along it for the rest of his life.
- 1947Longview Gardens Inc. begins platting Longview Park west and north of the traffic circle, through 1952, on lots of a quarter to a third of an acre for builders' speculative houses. The 2011 nomination leaves it out of the historic district for that reason.
- 1948The Raleigh Country Club is incorporated and buys 136 acres south of New Bern Avenue from the Poes; Donald Ross designs its 18-hole course, built in 1948 and 1949, which the club calls his last.
- 1955Raleigh annexes 1,368 acres to the northeast, effective 17 October, taking in 484 of the registered area's 685 parcels today. The nomination says all of the subdivision north of New Bern Avenue came in that year, but the City's annexation layer puts Albemarle Avenue, Longview Lake Drive and most of the New Bern Avenue frontage, with Poole Road and Donald Ross Drive, in the Rock Quarry annexation, effective 31 March 1960.
- 1961Memorial Hospital of Wake County, now WakeMed, opens on 24 April on New Bern Avenue just east of the subdivision, on land that had been Poe's, open to patients regardless of race.
- 1965The racial covenants expire. The 2011 nomination, drawing on interviews with the Poe family and residents, says Black families bought houses gradually afterward as original owners died and heirs sold.
- 2005The King Charles (South) neighborhood conservation overlay takes effect on 1 November under case Z-73-2004: a minimum lot of 33,541 square feet, a lot width of 144 feet, a front setback of at least 76 feet and a height of two stories.
- 2009The City closes Albemarle Avenue where it crosses the Lower Longview Lake dam because the bridge structure has deteriorated. The rehabilitation had been approved as a capital project in 2008.
- 2011The Longview Gardens Historic District is listed on the National Register on 3 January: 294 resources, 194 of them contributing, on about 350 acres. The nomination finds a single teardown in the whole district.
- 2017Construction on the $3.6 million dam and spillway rebuild begins in the spring. Albemarle Avenue reopens in January 2019, the lake is refilled in July and restocked with fish in September.
- 2020The census counts 1,722 residents in the registered area, 641 of them Black and 804 white, against 1,530, 854 and 558 in 2010. The Raleigh Country Club renovates the Ross course under the architect Kyle Franz.
- 2024The City Council approves the New Bern station area plan on 30 January, and transit overlays take effect along the avenue on 5 April and 6 June, covering 39 lots in the registered area, most of them zoned for three-story mixed residential use. On the City's maps the conservation overlay covers none of the lots the transit overlay does.
- 2025Construction of the New Bern Avenue bus rapid transit line begins in September, with stations planned at Raleigh Boulevard, Longview and WakeMed.
- 2027Wake County revalues every property on 1 January, and the City expects to reopen Longview Pool on Bertie Drive in the summer.
Most of the open space here is not public
The largest open spaces are private. The Raleigh Country Club's 134-acre course, which the club calls the last Donald Ross designed, fills the blocks south of New Bern Avenue, and Longview Lake belongs to the lots around it. The City's share is the 6.9-acre Longview park at 321 Bertie Drive, whose pool is the neighborhood's one public facility, 1.5 acres at the fork of King William Road and Donald Ross Drive, and 0.9 undeveloped acres on Longview Lake Drive. The Crabtree Creek Trail passes about 200 meters beyond the northeast corner.
What the map does not show: Longview Pool is closed until summer 2027, and the City's page gives no reason. No source this guide found says whether anyone but the owners around Longview Lake may fish it, although the City restocked it with fish in 2019.
Elsewhere in Raleigh, not Longview Gardens
26 places, with real drive times
Road-adjusted distance and drive time from the centre of the community to each destination, nearest first. Filter by category.
Showing 1–12 of 26 places, nearest first.
Method: distances and drive times are computed from a point on Lord Berkley Road in the 1938 core north of New Bern Avenue, using straight-line distance multiplied by a road factor and a tiered speed model: honest ranges, not routed times. The area runs about two kilometers from Milburnie Road to Poole Road, so from its edges add a few minutes.
Every gym within reach
There is no gym inside the area. The nearest is the City's Roberts Park community center, about 1.8 kilometers southwest, with a gymnasium and a fitness room on the City's $15 monthly pass; Lions Park on Dennis Avenue has another. With Longview Pool shut, the nearest open pool is the Southeast Raleigh YMCA's outdoor one on Rock Quarry Road.
- Roberts Park, 1300 East Martin Street: gym and fitness room, $2 a day or $15 a month
- Lions Park, 516 Dennis Avenue: gym and fitness room, $12 a month on its own page and $15 on the City's pass page
- Southeast Raleigh YMCA, 1436 Rock Quarry Road: a six-lane outdoor pool, a gym and an indoor track
| Facility | What it is | Drive |
|---|---|---|
| Roberts Park open | The City's community center at 1300 East Martin Street: a gymnasium and a fitness room on the City pass at $2 a day, $15 a month or $150 a year. Open 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on weekdays, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday and 1 to 6 p.m. on Sunday. | 4–6 min |
| Lions Park open | The City's community center at 516 Dennis Avenue: a gymnasium and a fitness room, which the park's page prices at $12 a month for adults and the City's pass page at $15. | 5–8 min |
| Southeast Raleigh YMCA open | 1436 Rock Quarry Road: a six-lane outdoor pool with a water slide, a full gymnasium with an indoor track, two studios and a wellness floor, open from 5 a.m. on weekdays. | 6–9 min |
| Longview Pool closed | The City's pool at 321 Bertie Drive, inside the neighborhood, with a lap and recreation pool and a wading pool. The City lists it as closed until summer 2027 and gives no reason on its page. | 2–4 min |
The free option is the Crabtree Creek Trail, with an access point at 2901 Milburnie Road.
Enloe is in the neighborhood; the elementary school depends on the street
The Wake County Public School System assigns every block here to Enloe High, a magnet school on Clarendon Crescent inside the area, for 2026-27. Below it the area splits four ways: the 1938 core to Hunter Elementary and Ligon Middle, a few kilometers southwest; the northeastern tract streets to Douglas Elementary, about nine kilometers north; the northwestern ones to Underwood Elementary; and the blocks south of New Bern Avenue to Wiley Elementary and Oberlin Middle. Both northern groups go on to Martin Middle, about ten kilometers west. All eight are magnets on the traditional calendar.
| School | Board | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Enloe High School | Wake County Public School System | The base high school for every block in the registered area for 2026-27: a magnet school on the traditional calendar at 128 Clarendon Crescent, on a 49-acre school parcel inside the neighborhood. The 2011 nomination records the junior and senior high schools built there in the 1950s. |
| Hunter Elementary School | Wake County Public School System | The base elementary for the 1938 core around the old traffic circle, Lord Ashley and Lord Berkley roads, Clarendon Crescent and Longview Lake Drive, blocks that held 727 residents in 2020. A magnet school on the traditional calendar at 1018 East Davie Street. |
| Douglas Elementary School | Wake County Public School System | The base elementary for the northeastern blocks off Stevens Road, Derby Drive, Albemarle Avenue and Chatham and Culpepper lanes, 426 residents in 2020. A magnet school on the traditional calendar at 600 Ortega Road in north Raleigh, about nine kilometers away. |
| Underwood Elementary School | Wake County Public School System | The base elementary for the northwestern blocks off North King Charles Road, Colleton Road, Tudor Place and western Milburnie Road, 332 residents in 2020. A magnet school on the traditional calendar at 1614 Glenwood Avenue. |
| Wiley Elementary School | Wake County Public School System | The base elementary for the blocks south of New Bern Avenue, around the golf course on Golf Course Drive, Poole Road, South King Charles Road and Donald Ross Drive, 237 residents in 2020. A magnet school on the traditional calendar at 301 St. Mary's Street, west of downtown. |
| Ligon, Martin and Oberlin middle schools | Wake County Public School System | Ligon Middle, 706 East Lenoir Street, takes the Hunter blocks; Martin Middle, 1701 Ridge Road in west Raleigh, about ten kilometers away, takes the Douglas and Underwood blocks, 758 residents; Oberlin Middle, 2816 Oberlin Road, takes the Wiley blocks. All three are magnet schools on the traditional calendar. |
| Magnet and year-round applications | Wake County Public School System | For 2027-28 the choice window for magnet and year-round schools runs from 15 October 2026 to midnight on 21 January 2027. The district's next-year base maps carried no assignments on 26 September 2026, so this year's lines are the only ones published. |
Run the exact address through the district's lookup. The next-year maps carried no assignments on 26 September, and a house one street over can fall in a different one of the four areas. Magnet and year-round applications for 2027-28 run from 15 October 2026 to 21 January 2027.
Month by month, what living here looks like
Not a highlights reel: the actual annual rhythm, including the dates residents have to remember.
- Wake County's revaluation takes effect on 1 January 2027, the first since 2024, on houses assessed at a median of $401,064 here
- Highs near 11 °C, 18 nights at or below freezing and 6.6 cm of snow in an average January at RDU, the snowiest month on the normal
- The magnet and year-round application window closes at midnight on 21 January
- The 2011 nomination describes Longview Lake's heavily wooded shore and an extensive marsh at its western end, and with the hardwoods bare both show from the street
- Highs near 13 °C, 3.6 cm of snow and 14 frost nights on the 1991 to 2020 normal
- The Crabtree Creek Trail passes about 200 meters beyond the northeast corner, with an access point at 2901 Milburnie Road
- The county's parcel file records 74 single-family sales since January 2024, from $210,000 to $1,300,000, not screened for sales between relatives
- Inside the conservation overlay a new lot must be at least 33,541 square feet and 144 feet wide, so the big lots are sold whole
- Highs near 17 °C and 104 mm of rain on the normal
- Memorial Hospital of Wake County, now WakeMed, opened on New Bern Avenue on 24 April 1961
- Highs near 23 °C, and 1.1 frost nights on the normal, the last of the season
- Roberts Park's community center, the nearest City gym, stays open until 9 p.m. on weekdays
- Longview Gardens was announced in the News and Observer on 7 May 1939, promising buyers no crowding together of homes
- Highs near 27 °C and no frost on the normal
- Bus rapid transit construction continues on New Bern Avenue between East Street and Sunnybrook Road, the first two of three phases
- Longview Pool on Bertie Drive stays closed until summer 2027; the nearest open pool is the Southeast Raleigh YMCA's six-lane outdoor pool on Rock Quarry Road
- Highs near 31 °C and 99 mm of rain on the normal
- Most of the transit overlay along New Bern Avenue took effect on 6 June 2024
- The hottest month at RDU, with highs near 33 °C and 128 mm of rain, and 52 days a year at or above 32 °C
- The large crepe myrtles in the New Bern Avenue median were planted at Clarence Poe's urging
- Route 15 buses leave New Bern Avenue at North King Charles Road for downtown every 15 minutes on weekday daytimes, the first at about 5:30 a.m.
- Four base elementary schools and three middle schools divide the area, all on the traditional calendar, and every block goes to Enloe High inside it
- The drive to Douglas Elementary in north Raleigh is about nine kilometers, and to Martin Middle in west Raleigh about ten
- Highs near 32 °C and lows near 21 °C
- The wettest month on the RDU normal, at 131 mm; the City's copy of the flood map puts 13 acres of the area in the 1% annual chance zone, most of it the lake and its marsh
- The City restocked Longview Lake with fish in September 2019, after the dam rebuild
- Highs still near 28 °C
- The magnet and year-round application window for 2027-28 opens on 15 October 2026
- Anniversary of the annexation, effective 17 October 1955, that brought most of the area into the city
- Highs near 23 °C and lows near 10 °C
- The City expects to advertise the third construction package on New Bern Avenue, the bus rapid transit stations themselves, by the end of the fall
- Highs near 17 °C and 7.8 frost nights on the normal
- The King Charles (South) overlay has been in force since 1 November 2005
- Highs near 13 °C, 15 frost nights and 2 cm of snow on the normal
- The last month of bills on 2024 values: at 90.91 cents per $100, the median assessment of $401,064 carries about $3,650 a year
- Inside the National Register district the median is $519,274, about $4,720 a year at the same rate
Every photograph in this guide's library is above
This library holds 2 photographs and the page has already printed all of them, each once. The credits are in the footer.
About these photographs. Openly licensed images geotagged in or near Longview Gardens, found on Wikimedia Commons and served from there with full attribution. Inline photos elsewhere on the page may still come from the site's shared Raleigh library.