ABORETUM→[sic]
Brand Raleigh. Fastest growing city. New Southern mecca. Austin Jr, Atlanta Jr. Proximity to the Research Triangle Park, highest concentration of PhDs in the country (outside of that other tech corridor in California, of course.) Ranked the number one place to live in the country. Ranked highly for singles. Good middle-class tech jobs and “quality of life.”
But in this place that tries so hard to seem sophisticated and rebut Northern caricatures of the South, accidents still happen. Coming off the Beltway onto Hillsborough Street, there are two misspelled signs to the JC Raulston Arboretum. Curiously, a third sign to the Raulston Arboretum is spelled correctly.
I got in touch with Al Grandy, the division traffic engineer for NCDOT. He wasn’t aware that the signs were spelled wrong but looked into it for me. “I don’t know how it got misspelled, I’ll have to get somebody to go out there to take a look at it.”
I called Al back later and, having looked into it, he seemed perplexed. The signs were fabricated in Durham. Nobody had ever mentioned before that they were misspelled. “Best I can determine, the fabrication guy made a mistake.”
