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UNC, Chapel Hill, and Carborro History

  • Thread starter Thread starter donbosco
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donbosco said:
From The Sun Magazine archives, 1977: “Tijuana Fats, located on West Rosemary Street, was opened in 1970. In deference to local tastes the owners, Art Lester and Clark Church, serve Mexican food that is not as spicy as that in the Southwestern United States. My personal preference is for slightly hotter foods, so I frequently add a little of their home-made jalapeno pepper sauce to whatever it is that I have ordered.

Menu items include tacos (Mexico’s answer to the hamburger), enchiladas (tortillas filled with meat or cheese), guacamole (an avacado tip), chile rellenos (bell pepper stuffed with chile), Sangria (a wine punch), and Mexican beer. The house speciality is Enchiladas Sabrosas — chicken enchiladas in a white cheese sauce. Superb! Their flan, a rich egg custard, is also excellent.

I have always felt that Tijuana Fats offers the patron a lot for his money. Although many might feel that Mexican food has a low food cost, this is not true when one takes into consideration shipping costs and other inconveniences in delivery encountered by a Mexican restaurant in this area. The most expensive item on Fats’ menu, the special dinner priced at $4.50, consists of soup, salad, taco, enchilada, chile relleno, chile conqueso, refried beans and rice. The rice is better prepared than at any of the Oriental restaurants reviewed below.

Recently Church and Lester redesigned a section of the dining area. They also added a parking lot adjacent to the building.

A tightly controlled Tijuana Fats franchise, the first they have attempted, will open in Greensboro in March.

Church and Lester are training the Greensboro staff and providing recipes and supplies.

Tijuana Fats is one of my favorite restaurants in Chapel Hill. Prices are fair, service is quick, food is consistent, cleanliness is adequate, and employees are amiable. The restaurant is open for lunch and dinner seven days a week.”
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Ah, yes, guacamole, enchiladas, and flan, so exotic and foreign they have to be explained.

I loved the food at Fats, even if it wasn't especially spicy. I also miss the Flying Burrito.
 
donbosco said:
  • IMG_4681.jpeg

Photo by Jock Lauterer

I have a hard time placing that tree in my recollections.
Click to expand...
On the right side of the photo:
  • “SERVICE” is written on the window of the building from which Jock Lauterer took the photo
  • In the building across the street, “HOUSE” or “MOUSE” in written above the door.
  • I don’t think the street is widen enough to be Franklin Street
 
bumeister said:
Ah, yes, guacamole, enchiladas, and flan, so exotic and foreign they have to be explained.

I loved the food at Fats, even if it wasn't especially spicy. I also miss the Flying Burrito.
Click to expand...
Burrito Bunker was also great, though much more recent than the others.

Meanwhile Armadillo Grill has survived for 30 years. I have no explanation for this.
 
Zoo_View said:
On the right side of the photo:
  • “SERVICE” is written on the window of the building from which Jock Lauterer took the photo
  • In the building across the street, “HOUSE” or “MOUSE” in written above the door.
  • I don’t think the street is widen enough to be Franklin Street
Click to expand...


Photo is taken from the back of Jeff's Confectionary.
 
ronjon said:
Burrito Bunker was also great, though much more recent than the others.

Meanwhile Armadillo Grill has survived for 30 years. I have no explanation for this.
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Well it is always easy to find parking
 
grimes70 said:
Dammit. I thought it was Jeff's with the magazine rack but couldn't figure that tree in. Never looked out back I guess.
Click to expand...

Photographer is standing in the back of Jeff's (near the little bar) and looking out the front door. That tree is on Franklin Street but I cannot place it in my memory.
 
IMG_4736.jpeg

We didn’t know much what to do with Disco in #DeepChatham. Frankly, the whole #TarHeelState had some adjusting to do. My first recollections of a particular sound filtering into that world are from the school year 1974 with Kool And The Gang - “Jungle Boogie,” Average White Band - “Pick Up The Pieces,” and Carl Douglas’ “Kung Fu Fighting.” In the Summer of 1975 I attended the Belmont Abbey Basketball Camp with my Chatham Central High hoops teammates and I very clearly remember KC & The Sunshine Band’s “That's The Way I Like It” and “Get Down Tonight” along with Earth Wind and Fire’s “Shining Star” dominating the radio play among the boys in the dorm and on the court during those days of transistor radios.

By the time we were back in school for senior year (‘75-‘76) music was sufficiently scrambled as to pit The Sylvers’ “Boogie Fever” with Stephen Stills and Neil Young’s “Long May You Run,” and Charlie Daniels’ “The South’s Gonna Do It Again” in the competition for the CCHS “Class of 1976 Song.” “Long May You Run,” thankfully, won the day but not by much.

Arriving in Chapel Hill in August of 1976 after spending summer weeks with cousins at RAF Woodbridge in England, much time listening to some permutations of radical, to me at least, broadcasts on Radio Caroline and Radio Luxembourg, I had heard some sounds there that were mainly unnamed and fitfully germinating that would quickly boom (bloom?) into Punk and New Wave. I’d been inexplicably tuned in to David Bowie since 1974 and the glam-rock of ‘Diamond Dogs’ briefly morphed into the disco leaning ‘Fame.’

In Chapel Hill I imprinted on two very different college party scenes that first year — the dorm-rat and fratty duet of Kirkpatrick’s Bar and The Shack, and, across a parking lot, the lit-up dance floor, cosmopolitan disco glitz of Mayo’s ‘Bacchae.’ (Troll’s came later) An occasional weekend back in Chatham introduced me to a raucous scene I never fully explored but have heard tell many tales of — The disco paradise of ‘Crash Landing’ in Southern Pines.

It was also during that time that I made my personal discovery of used records. With great joy I dug into the into the bins (thank you @Dennis Gavin) at The Fair Exchange.

I also tuned into the forward projections in the very air (thank you WXYC) and even bravely started hitting the smokey little clubs where live music was happening (thank you Town Hall/Mad Hatter and Cat’s Cradle).

Jukeboxes were a thing and that could mean that in the college bars of Chapel Hill that you were at the mercy of the tastes and emotions of friends and strangers alike. Likewise, in the dorm, stereos battled and genres clashed. Most radio stations weren’t fully tracked into genres yet and potpourri was the disorder of the day. The Walkman was in the future (‘79) so we were all still stewing in the goulash of the collective soundscape. So many tunes to love, to hate, to space out to. I can’t say if the ‘70s had the greatest music - but that decade without a doubt was an utterly unplanned and anarchic mashup.

I’ve not mentioned so much — so many songs and artists. If you listen closer next time you’re doing your grocery shopping chances are you’ll catch some strains of once-controversial ‘70s hits and near-hits. Really. Try it.

#OTD in 1952, Randy Jones-The Cowboy-was born in Raleigh. After Enloe High, NC School of The Arts, and UNC, he headed to NYC. Jones was a member of The Village People from 1977 thru 1980 and they say that he still performs — and lives — in Greenwich Village. Village People’s Cowboy Hailed from Raleigh
 

In May, they sold the East Franklin Street building to Chapel Hill Foundation Real Estate Holdings Inc., a not-for-profit corporation founded by the UNC-Chapel Hill Foundation,
SO UNC foundation still buying up Franklin St Buildings I still think from the Methodist Church up to TOPO-and back to the Ackland-UNC is accumulating a large Footprint piece of land where Town meets Gown
 
donbosco said:
IMG_4681.jpeg

Photo by Jock Lauterer

I have a hard time placing that tree in my recollections
Click to expand...

donbosco said:
Photographer is standing in the back of Jeff's (near the little bar) and looking out the front door. That tree is on Franklin Street but I cannot place it in my memory.
Click to expand...
Could it be the one they tried to carve into a basketball? That seemss too recent and maybe closer to Spankys/Kanes

It wound up at the museum The Championship Tree | NCpedia
 
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The sculpture was originally located at the site of the live ash tree on the corner of East Franklin and Columbia Streets. It was removed and subsequently restored and relocated approximately three years after carving due to rot and deterioration from the elements. The original carving was taller, displaying more of the trunk of the tree at the base, and was lighter in color. In the restoration, the already darkening wood was given several coats of sealant.
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But this description does not match my memories.
 
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