East Raleigh-South Park Historic District

East and southeast of downtown Raleigh lies a neighborhood of 708 buildings, 532 of them contributing, made up mostly of modest one- and two-story frame houses. Most were built between about 1900 and 1940, though roughly a fifth date to the nineteenth century. The area includes the original city grid, the South Park subdivision begun in 1907, and parts of the post-Civil War neighborhoods of Smith-Haywood and St. Petersburg. Vernacular house types dominate: shotguns, Triple A houses, side-gabled and hipped-roof cottages, and a few I-houses, row houses and houses with attached groceries. Many carry restrained Folk Victorian or Craftsman detailing. Raleigh's longest surviving block of shotgun houses, eleven in all, stands on South Bloodworth Street. The district became predominantly Black, and while rental housing for working people prevails, it also holds the homes of the early twentieth-century Black middle class, including a pharmacist, a funeral director and a postal carrier. Churches, institutions and Shaw University's historic campus are also within it.