Towerview Feature

On Saturday, Jan. 6, 1940, about 8,000 people walked through the doors of Duke Indoor Stadium, situated about 40 feet from Card Gymnasium, for the inaugural game in the new arena.

Some 150 years before the state of North Carolina banned smoking in all its bars and restaurants, Washington Duke completed his incarceration at Libby Prison in Richmond, Va.—an air-tight, inhumane hellhole, or as a 1864 article in the Richmond Enquirer called it, “a huge, improbable box of nocturnal sardines”—and was sent to New Bern, N.C. Finally free, he traded his Confederate currency for American dollars, walked 137 miles to his farm in Durham and founded the sprawling, University-endowing, industry-leading American Tobacco Company.

In neighborhoods just off East campus, groups of undergraduates live in houses whose bedroom doors have rotted off, whose stairs have fallen through and whose cracks birth cockroaches. But for the students living in these houses, it isn’t the conditions that bother them as much as the prices. Many pay between $600 and $900 per person per month, excluding utilities, to lease large, older homes within walking distance to campus and owned by local rental agency Bob Schmitz Properties.