Goodbye Odum Village. Hello surprisingly pretty park-like setting south of campus.
Odum Village was UNC’s community of family housing apartments along Mason Farm Road, near UNC Hospital, with dozens of two story brick buildings.
Most of the complex was closed in 2016 after UNC determined it would be too costly to add sprinklers to the buildings. Thereafter began perhaps the slowest demolition in history, onlysix years later than planned. (And only then, it seems, because the UNC Board of Trustees was embarrassed that fat cat donors visiting the new business school addition would see what had by 2025 transformed into a blighted area)
That’s how we roll here south of south campus, where I live. Yes, we have the Dean Dome, but we also have the storage facilities where they store campus’ lawnmowers and mail trucks and surplus construction materials waiting to be repurposed. Yes, we can walk to world class health care facilities, but our windows rattle at 2am because we’re under the flight path for helicopters headed to UNC. I still barely know what a chiller plant is, but there’s a remarkable concentration of them around here, with two more under construction. I’m convinced they hid Silent Sam around here for a while – because who would even think to check under the assorted tarps and piles of mulch here? We put up with indignities and endless parking garages the posher campus-adjacent neighborhoods would never tolerate. That UNC, knowing where its bread is buttered, would never consider inflicting upon them.
A couple weeks ago it dawned on me that 401 Mason Farm Road was no more. It had been falling apart for so long, with trees growing into and out of it, that its transformation to a pile of rubble didn’t immediately catch my eye. It was the last Odum Village building they took down.
What remains, at least for now, is over 20 acres of open space. There are still roads and parking spaces, which I assume will remain because hospital staff and football tailgaters park there, but most everything else is gone (work is still underway, so dumpsters and temporary staging areas are still there).
Odum Village is of course among consideration as the home of a future Dean Dome. Or at least, for my fellow cynics, among consideration as an option reasonable enough to convince people that Lee Roberts doesn’t intend to put the Dean Dome at Carolina North. Roberts describes Carolina North as flat (easy to build on) and close to the highway (easy for cars to get to and from), with AI exuberance wafting through a new mixed-use development, perhaps akin to how new Dylan lyrics were passed around Greenwich Village in the ‘60s. Leading the country’s oldest flagship university, in a state whose motto means to be rather than to seem, Roberts embraces AI, the perfect embodiment of seeming rather than being.
Nothing Roberts wants at Carolina North could not be built at Odum Village. But it would be a more complex undertaking – he’s right about that. It has hills and less space than Carolina North, which was previously home to a small airport. It could, however, fit a new engineering school, whose students could mingle with non-engineering students without taking the bus across town. Who could walk or bike to Franklin Street, the spine and soul of our town that seems at risk of being forgotten by Roberts’ UNC. It could fit homes for UNC Hospital staff, for whom we build so many parking garage spaces because they can’t afford to live near where they work. It could be a mixed use community, with shops and eateries that attract neighbors and visitors alike, the latter of whom come to town to experience just one campus, not two by way of a 10 minute bus ride down MLK. It could fit a new Dean Dome. It would require density and careful planning and thoughtful placemaking. And yes, it might be challenging to pull off. To me, that’s part of why UNC should do it. If our university, with all the resources bestowed upon it by the people of North Carolina, won’t try hard things, why should we?
I bought my house in part because it was close to a possible future light rail station. I had just had moved back to town from DC and pictured my husband and my future Friday night trips to downtown Durham and Saturday walks to Dean Dome games. lol. What a sweet summer child I was. The light rail never came but we do walk to a few games each season. But now I assume the Dean Dome will go to the suburbs and my neighborhood, despite being very bikeable and reasonably walkable to Franklin Street, is about to feel more like a suburban outpost.
I’ve been exploring my future forest recently. And I have to say that if I can’t have a new Dean Dome, grocery store, high rise apartment filled with new neighbors, one decent coffee shop, a couple shitty bars, and a place to buy plants and bird seed, I’ll take it. A tour:
RIP – clearing the last standing building
One of several staging areas. Will this become green space? Or…a new staging area? These are questions that do not keep the good people of Gimghoul Road awake at night. 
OK now! Squint your eyes and the dumpster disappears.
Ok if we can’t have a new Dean Dome, how about an amphitheater tucked into here. Lol, I kid. Between the time I left Chapel Hill around 2009 and came back around 2016, someone decided fun and economic development would die. I think the best we could do here now is put up some historical plaques about when Apple Chill and Halloween were things. RIP fun.
Is this the Smoky Mountains?
Yeah, there’s nothing here but we still have bike racks if you want to visit.
Vibes: Watching Chernobyl on HBO while in Salton Sea, CA.
Views! You won’t get this hanging out at the Panera Bread at the UNC Former Airstrip at Carolina North Brought to You By Aramark Food Service Conglomerate Under Contract to UNC That Runs Through Roughly 2041.
Never before in my life have I excitedly exclaimed “hey have y’all seen that new business school addition?!” UNTIL NOW. This is on the eastern edge of Odum Village. Tight.
This is looking toward Odum Village from the new b-school. Note how UNC, instead of throwing up their hands CHALT-style and saying “IT WILL RAIN SOMETIME, WE SHALL NEVER BUILD AGAIN,” instead went with “let’s just put in some plants to soak up the rain until the storm passes so we can still allow modern civilization.” Props.
Keep in mind this is all brand new. I already want to day drink here on a Tuesday morning Teams call but in a few years this will be even mossier/moldier/better. Yes it’s a little corporate but at least it’s DIFFERENT by Chapel Hill standards.
Thank you, Steven D. Bell, rich guy who helped pay for the b-school addition. I don’t know who you are or why you are rich but you seem to like rocks and stormwater retention like I do and if you want to give me a shit ton of money to create a NC-focused news outlet to address the news desert crisis destroying democracy, I am open to a low stakes conversation over BLTs at nearby Merritt’s (your treat).
Yeah, it’s just a field. For now. As I mentioned earlier, this is football tailgate turf. It’s no secret that UNC has some of the saddest tailgating in the redneck states that care deeply about such things. We tailgate in parking garages, which is pathetic. I want a bluegrass band here, and things like a solar powered deep frier making fried pickles, and speed quilting contests, and space for judgement free pre- and post-game naps, hay rides, selfies with Rameses, and an Airstream RV outfitted with a Sunrise Biscuit Kitchen.
Someone in that car is 100% up to no good but this is a nice view of the bottom of Odum Village, where it connects to the b-school.
No joke, new chiller plant going up across from the new business school. How much chillin’ can one university do?
OK but seriously UNC does not fuck around when it comes to chiller plants. This thing is gorgeous. I want to LIVE here, much less partake in its chilled water.
I might take that back. Why does this chiller plant have a jail?
Perhaps that explains why Odum Village has multiple Flock cams. Keep that in mind if you come for a visit. And as you lie in a new grassy field or sit under an old shade tree, considering firing up ChatGPT and have it draft an email to Chancellor Roberts asking why he doesn’t have a Flock camera pointed at South Building or the chancellor’s residence on Raleigh Road. Surely someone so excited about building a new community around AI won’t mind a little digital penetration in his own life.
