Duke Students Scrambled to Shield a Garden From Demolition Next Door. Behind the Teardown? Their Own University.

Last Monday, the first day of their orientation week, a group of Duke freshmen showed up for a volunteer shift at a community garden near campus, expecting to spend a few hours weeding and cutting back overgrowth.

Instead, they found themselves assuming the frontline of an urgent preservation operation. Next to the garden stood a century-old duplex that had been headed for demolition for a while, and two days prior, a big yellow excavator had appeared on site. 

Concerned for the garden, as razing an old house can spray lead into nearby soil, a veteran garden volunteer pinged a Community Affairs staffer at Duke University, which owns 405 Swift Avenue, where the garden grows. Surprised, the staffer set out to confirm whether the demolition was indeed imminent. Finding as much to be true, he guided 30 freshmen—some of whom had already been scheduled for garden work, others of whom were called in as backup—through a rushed triage, with students breaking down trellises and pinning tarps over garden beds with rocks.

The demolition proceeded 36 hours later, sending up great clouds of dust and debris.

Ironically, the entity that Duke students and staff had rushed to get ahead of, the property owner behind the demolition, was Duke itself. The university bought the duplex and the land beneath it last October as part of its Central Campus expansion plan. Post-purchase, Duke was not keen to keep the duplex standing, despite the structure housing a tenant and a beloved community space called The Living Room, citing liability concerns. The university was, however, open to sparing the adjacent community garden that The Living Room had spawned: a sizable enterprise that yielded more than 750 pounds of produce during its last two seasons.

Lately, that openness had begun translating into action: conversations between garden organizers and Duke’s Community Affairs staff had put orientation-week workdays on the calendar, and there was talk of getting students involved in a fall planting season. 

Then came the excavator.

All told, the ordeal makes for a vivid illustration of how Duke’s real estate ambitions can run headlong into its stated goals of community partnership: the right hand imperiling what the left had been coaxing to grow.

As the INDY reported earlier this year, the way Duke handled its purchase of 407 Swift Avenue last fall sat uneasily with the university’s freshly amped-up messaging about being a good neighbor to Durham.

Short of issuing an eviction, the university made clear to the duplex’s tenant, Kelly Creedon—who’d lived in one unit for ten years and run The Living Room from the other unit for six—that she did not have a long-term future there: “I don’t want to be in a situation where I have to give a tenant a 30-day notice to vacate. You don’t want it from a planning perspective, either,” Duke’s director of real estate, Julie Siegmund, told Creedon during a walk-through in September.

In February, Creedon moved out. The Living Room also shut down for good that month. Finding a new space with comparable amenities and affordability didn’t seem realistic.

But there was hope that the community garden could persist. It wouldn’t be obstructing any impending development, as Duke currently has no concrete plans for this part of Central Campus, just a vague intent to redevelop it someday. Also, unlike The Living Room, which only came to occupy Duke-owned land after the sale, the garden has sat on Duke land all along: it was planted, in 2020, not on the duplex’s lot but on an adjacent parcel the university has owned for decades. Creedon’s former landlord negotiated permission with Duke for Creedon to put the parcel to use. So to keep the garden going would just mean upholding the status quo.

In March, a Duke spokesperson told the INDY the school intended for the garden to remain, pending “the safety and accessibility of the property.” Organizers were wary, waiting for some hard evidence that the university meant it, according to Creedon. They got that earlier this month, as talks with Community Affairs picked up.

Those conversations included discussion of how to best shield the garden ahead of the duplex’s demolition, according to garden organizers who spoke with the INDY. Everyone knew the teardown was coming—the orientation week workdays were intended in part to start prepping for it. It had just seemed that some notice would come first.

Instead, on Monday, organizers and Community Affairs staff found themselves scrambling against a deadline they’d had to uncover on their own.

The priority was getting tarps over soil: lead can be drawn into plants as they grow—so readily that one tactic for drawing lead out of contaminated ground is planting vegetation that absorbs it—so, when cultivating crops you intend to eat, you really do not want lead in the dirt. Lead-laced soil is also a hazard to handle directly, since working the dirt by hand can lead to accidentally ingesting it.

To create a flat surface for the tarps, students cleared swaths of brush, carting tangles of weeds and vines off in wheelbarrows. Then they dissembled the bamboo trellises towering over the beds. 

Creedon and another neighborhood volunteer joined to help. At one point, as students rushed around her, a trellis came down in a great clatter, and Creedon turned to watch it fall.

“It just didn’t have to go this way,” she told the INDY, sighing.

Creedon emailed Siegmund back in March to request that Duke provide notice ahead of the demolition so that garden organizers could safeguard the garden. Not only did she not get that, but the notice ended up flowing the other way—when the excavator turned up, she’s the one who flagged it to the Community Affairs staffer coordinating the student workdays.

Once the garden was level, students unfurled bright pink and blue tarps that someone salvaged from Krzyzewskiville, the tent encampment Duke students pitch ahead of home basketball games.

How well the tarping protected the garden when the house was demolished last Wednesday—a day that was originally scheduled to be a second orientation-week workday—is hard to say. The only way to know for sure will be to test the soil. The stakes are high; many of the garden’s regular volunteers are children.

The INDY reached out to Duke for comment on this chronicle of events—including that it was Creedon, not anyone within the university, who prompted Community Affairs to check on the demolition timeline, allowing the office to mobilize students before the teardown.

“The community garden was fully protected prior to the demolition of 407 Swift, as agreed,” a spokesperson responded. “Community Affairs maintains regular contact with the garden organizers to enable the garden to continue for the foreseeable future.”

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