Chapel Hill NC is ninety miles west of both Wilson NC (population 48,000) and Rocky Mount NC (population 54,000.). Those small cities are twenty miles north/south of each other. Since I had recently explored Rocky Mount, I followed this up with several bike rides around Wilson NC. Cutting to the chase: Wilson seems more put together than Rocky Mount,
At eight o’clock on a hot summer morning, after another ninety minute drive from Chapel Hill I parked our Ford Escape Hybrid on a residential street of Wilson NC and pulled my bicycle out of the back.
The Bike Friday has returned, back from a big overhaul and re-brazing a spot, including trendy new brakes, front and back, sourced from a company called Paul Components who make bicycle parts more or less by hand in Chico CA. This shot also shows the Chris King headset. Bicycle people get off on this stuff.
I bicycled through Wilson streets. The most prosperous neighborhoods of Wilson NC are clearly on its west side. Raleigh NC is just fifty miles away. In these parts Wilson does indeed keep up appearances. While Raleigh’s recent boom is built on universities and tech, the buzz is that the wealth in Wilson is old tobacco money.
These neighborhoods are all within an easy FLAT bike ride to closer-in older neighborhoods around downtown. Some neighborhoods look better than others.
Wilson is NOT “filled” with boarded up houses but you can certainly see many such houses. Nevertheless, I sense Wilson is on the way up.
This is a great gas station.
In another neighborhood that is no longer “nice” these two large houses must have been occupied by wealthy families. They sit across the street from each other near busy railroad tracks, nowhere near that previously seen leafy west side.
Just down the street the 1920’s Anderson Apartments appear slowly coming to life. In 2017 the entire row totaling 14,000 square feet was for sale by Preservation Wilson for just $109,000.00. Someone is clearly working on them. Note the last number on the sign. Maybe it will open sometime in 2026.
Around back there was clearly work going on, perhaps slowly.
I did not see any Trump signs in Wilson. The flags and homemade right-wing placards are mostly in rural areas. In a prosperous neighborhood of Wilson I did see this.
The actual downtown Wilson is just a few blocks away.
On the way, I passed these places. Wilson Soul?
Downtown Wilson’s most famous attraction is the relatively new Whirligig Park, celebrating the folk art made a few miles from Wilson by the late Vollis Simpson. Behind it is a brand new baseball stadium for the class A Wilson Warbirds, who just started playing here this year.
The rest of downtown, like all over America, is a mix of vibrancy and emptiness. Here, local boosters seem on a mission. Various buildings are re-done as arts spaces.
In a recurring project that I think is updated once a year, buildings that are mostly empty are posted with photographs from all over the world.
Down near the tracks is the former Cherry Hotel, from 1917; locked and empty except for colorful photographs on ground floor windows.
At those tracks, like nearby Rocky Mount, Wilson is served by several Amtrak trains a day that go up and down the East Coast.
There is at least one new set of apartments in downtown Wilson.
There are really only two coffee places in downtown Wilson. The nicest is the only other location of where I had had such great avocado toast over in Rocky Mount NC; Larema Coffee House. Just like in Rocky Mount, there were fresh flowers at each table.
On the second ride to Wilson I needed to try somewhere else local for breakfast. What about Nash Cafe?
At a prime coffee hour of the morning I was the only customer. I skipped the oat milk latte and just drank their standard joe plus a bagel with cream cheese and sat across from the vacant Cherry Hotel reading the old-school paper version of The New Yorker. Reading that magazine on a phone or computer just got too difficult.
After breakfast I bicycled back to the car and drove home to Chapel Hill.
I had been touring around both Rocky Mount and Wilson because they are easy to bicycle gently. Both cities don’t have any hills and I could drive there easily from Chapel Hill. Two months earlier my cardiologist had advised me to restrict vigorous exercise until I got my heart valve further checked out. I have always had trouble sitting still and two months with hardly any exercise was driving me crazy.
On August 5th I reported to the heart Valve Clinic at UNC Hospital. After a CT scan, three UNC MD cardiologists and one PA cardiologist (total four opinions!) each gave me the same good news, each separately over-ruling their older colleague, my regular UNC cardiologist. This “Gang of Four” said that surgery NOW for my admittedly severe aortic stenosis is premature. All four said:
“Go back to exercising normally! We will need to fix that valve but not yet, probably in a year or two or three.”
I am planning a much longer bike trip as we speak.
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