The American Tobacco Campus: What Durham Did with Its Past

For most of the twentieth century, the American Tobacco Company's Durham complex was one of the largest cigarette manufacturing operations in the world. The factory covered roughly fifteen acres in the heart of downtown. The Lucky Strike water towers were visible from miles away. The smell of curing tobacco drifted through the neighborhood on warm days. Forty thousand pounds of tobacco moved through those buildings in a single shift.

In nineteen eighty-seven, the American Tobacco Company shut down its Durham operations and moved remaining production to Reidsville. The buildings emptied. For nearly a decade, roughly fifteen acres of prime downtown real estate sat vacant, the towers rusting, the loading docks unused.

The Durham Bulls Athletic Park opened in nineteen ninety-five on the edge of the complex, bringing minor league baseball back to downtown and beginning a slow reorientation of the district. The film Bull Durham, released in nineteen eighty-eight, had already given the Bulls national recognition. The ballpark gave them a home next to the history that named them.

In the late nineteen nineties, Capitol Broadcasting Company began converting the factory buildings into a mixed-use campus: offices, apartments, restaurants, a hotel, and open public space built around the original brick structures. The Lucky Strike smokestacks became landmarks in a new way, their painted letters cleaned and preserved. The campus opened in phases through the two thousands.

The American Tobacco Historic District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is one of the more successful examples in the country of industrial redevelopment that kept the bones of the original buildings rather than replacing them. Durham did not erase its tobacco past. It moved into it.