What this site is

Top of The Hill Restaurant covers Chapel Hill, the Triangle and the state of North Carolina — a street, a university, a park built on pine land, and the kitchens and rivers around them.

The site takes its name from the building at the corner of Franklin and Columbia, which has held the same third floor since 1996 while the street below it changed hands repeatedly. That contrast is the site’s subject: what stays, what goes, and what the record says about why.

What the sections do

Franklin Street is the street itself — its turnover, its closures, and the institutions that held. The Table is what the Triangle grows, cooks and argues about, from Carrboro to Raleigh. The Park is Research Triangle Park and what grew around it. The University is UNC’s 1789 charter and the pressure it puts on a town. Out of Town is the state beyond Orange County. The register lists all thirty pieces.

Sourcing

Where a piece gives a date, a closure or a figure, it comes from the public record: a charter, a deed, a council decision, a company’s own announcement. Disciplinary and political matters are stated as record rather than argued. Nothing here is reconstructed from memory.

Corrections

If a number here is wrong it is worth more to us than to you. Say so, and name the document you are reading.