112 Noble Street

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Harry Macklin House
112 Noble Street
c. 1955

One of the few examples of Modernist architecture found in Northside, the Macklin House is located in the northern tract known as Noble Heights that was subdivided in the late 1940s. The small brick house, probably built from a mail-order plan, represents the popularization of International Style dwellings designed by internationally known architects such as Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer in the 1930s. This popularization occurred in the post–World War II period as the principles of modern architecture finally reached the mainstream construction community. The one-story house has an asymmetrical front-gable roof, with large picture windows flanking the central front door and casement windows set beneath the roof eaves on the side elevations. The western side of the roof extends to create an integral carport. This was originally open but is now infilled as an additional room. The house stands out sharply from the Minimal Traditional–style tract houses (simplified versions of the Tudor or Colonial style) built around it in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Harry Macklin, owner of Harry’s Delicatessen next to the post office on Franklin Street, a popular restaurant for campus radicals in the 1950s and 1960s, was identified in the 1957 City Directory as the occupant.

SOURCE: M. Ruth Little, The Town and Gown Architecture of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1795-1975 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2006, 215-16).