502-508 North Street

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NORTH STREET APARTMENTS
c. 1920
Constructed about 1920, this group of four buildings are arranged around a central driveway and parking area. The buildings at 504 and 508 North Street face the street and mirror each other in form. Each building is a two-story, gambrel-roofed, Dutch Colonial Revival-style building. The buildings are three bays wide and double-pile with wide shed-roofed dormers on the façade and rear elevations. They have plain weatherboards, wood shingles on the dormers, six-over-six wood-sash windows, paired on the first floor, interior brick chimneys, and some elevations have partial cornice returns. Nine-light-over-three-panel doors on the façade are sheltered by one-bay-wide, shed-roofed porches supported by square columns. One-story, shed-roofed porches on the gable end facing the interior of the lot are supported by square columns and have matchstick railings. Above each porch, at the second-floor level, is a one-bay-wide balcony with matching supports and railings. A one-story, shed-roofed porch on the rear (south) elevation shelters the rear entrances to the buildings. 506 North Street is similarly detailed though it is arranged with its gable end facing North Street and has two entrances from the north gable-end porch, exposed rafter tails, and casement windows in the dormers. It also has a two-story, shed-roofed porch on the rear (south) gable with an exterior stair and enclosed storage space at the first-floor level. The building at 502 North Street has a gambrel roof with a dormer on the east elevation and a gabled roof on the west elevation. A full-width, one-story, shed-roofed porch on the south gable end is partially enclosed and there is a one-bay-wide, shed-roofed porch on the north elevation, facing North Street. All of the buildings have suffered some level of alteration with the installation of replacement doors, windows, porch posts, or railings, but retain good overall integrity. The buildings, which were constructed as rental housing, appear on the 1925 Sanborn map.

In the 2015 survey, this was deemed a Contributing Building.

SOURCE: Heather Wagner Slane, National Register of Historic Places Nomination: Chapel Hill Historic District Boundary Increase and Additional Documentation, Orange County, OR1750 (Raleigh, NC: North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office, 2015), courtesy of the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office.