The Town of Chapel Hill has installed 13 new recycling bins along Franklin Street to collect cans and bottles that were previously thrown in the trash, and another four bins will be placed in Southern Village's central business area.

Studio Supply, the art supply store on West Franklin Street, will close its doors on Dec. 24, after 26 years in business.

The shop at 421 W. Franklin St. has seen a significant decrease in customers over the years, said owner Jim Shura.

"Business is terrible, it's been going down for four or five years," he said. "It just got to the point where it was just losing too much money for us to keep it up."

Shura and his wife, Claire Reeder, bought the store in April 1999. They own the building the store is in, but Shura said he didn't know what kind of business would be there next.

The couple owns another art supply store, True Blue Art Supply, in Asheville, which they bought in 2004. That store is twice the size of Studio Supply, Shura said.

Many of their big customers who used to live in Chapel Hill and bought from Studio Supply have moved to Asheville and now buy more from their other store, Shura said.

"What we've seen is that a lot of the customers that used to go and spend a lot of money in Studio Supply are coming here to Asheville," he said.

Reeder has spent more time in Chapel Hill at Studio Supply than Shura, but he said he remembers when The Streets at Southpoint was built in Durham, foot traffic along Franklin Street declined.

"That’s when things started to go downhill in Chapel Hill," he said. "Now it seems like the big thing that people go to Franklin Street for is to eat, not really to shop."

Early rain, cold weather and the town's crowd-control efforts cut the estimated number of Franklin Street revelers to 27,000 this Halloween, the smallest in recent years.

This was the fourth year the town closed roads leading downtown under "Homegrown Halloween," a program designed to keep the celebration local after mounting concern about arrests and injuries. The town has reduced crowds by more than half, from about 80,000 people in 2007 to about 35,000 in 2010, according to police.

There were an estimated 316 officers in downtown last night. Police made three arrests: for assault on a law enforcement officer, indecent exposure and being drunk and disruptive.  Orange County EMS responded to nine calls. Seven of the calls were related to alcohol intoxication, and three people were taken to the hospital, police said.

The streets were cleared of people at 12:10 a.m. and opened to traffic around 12:45 a.m., after being cleaned by town crews.

See staff photojournalist Takaaki Iwabu's online photo gallery with 224 pictures here.


 

The Ackland Art Museum today will open its Ackland Museum Store on the corner of Franklin and Columbia streets, in downtown Chapel Hill at 2:30 p.m. today.

The store's merchandise supports and reflects the museum’s core mission "to animate, inspire, and transform people's lives with works of art," according to a news release.  It will sell pottery, glass, and metalwork; kitchen and tabletop items; jewelry and accessories; children’s toys and books; and stationery.  Books about art history and criticism, contemporary art and design, and culture and lifestyles will also be sold along with books by UNC and regional authors and artists’ monographs.  

A gallery will feature rotating exhibitions.  The premier exhibition features works by seven North Carolina artists connected to the Penland School of Crafts.  The show, “Nothing is Impossible,” features work by Margaret Couch Cogswell (book arts, multi-media), Celia Gray (encaustic paintings), Bryant Holsenbeck (environmental art), Ann Marie Kennedy (paper art, installation), Evan Lightner (furniture), Gretchen McLaren (metal), and Sylvie Rosenthal (woodwork, sculpture).

The store will be open from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday with evening hours Thursdays until 8:30 p.m. and Sunday hours from noon to 5 p.m.
All proceeds from the store support the Ackland’s exhibition and education programs.

The Ackland Art Museum is located on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus just a five minute walk from the store. The museum collection has more than 16,000 works of art, featuring significant collections of European masterworks, twentieth-century and contemporary art, African art, North Carolina pottery, and folk art.  In addition, the Ackland has North Carolina’s premier collections of Asian art and works on paper (drawings, prints, and photographs). 

In the coming weeks, the town of Chapel Hill will be test-driving four new parking meters downtown to unify the town's parking payment system and make it more convenient for patrons to pay.

The new meters will accept coins, debit and credit cards and will also allow prospective parkers to add money to their meter over the phone.

"You can add time to parking while you're sitting in a restaurant and you think you're going over time," said Ken Pennoyer, business management director for Chapel Hill.

Pennoyer said the meters will be in two downtown locations and will be a part of the field test for three to six months beginning this summer.  He said the town is looking to get feedback from downtown patrons and businesses on the convenience and efficiency of the machines, which can account for the payments of up to eight parking spaces at a time.

"There is frustration with parking in the town because it's a scare commodity," Pennoyer said. "So anything we can do to make it more user friendly is a big improvement...(it's) very exciting to have various options to make parking easier."

Convenience might come at a cost, however. Pennoyer said the town council has discussed the possibility of raising parking rates by a quarter after the pilot program is completed and the new meters have been implemented.

More than 4,000 people walked down Franklin Street Saturday afternoon to show their support for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools system.

The Public School Foundation's "Lucky" 13th Annual Walk for Education raised more than $83,000 to support the schools.

Seawell Elementary had the most walkers at 426. Rashkis Elementary raised the most money.

For photos from the walk, visit the Chapel Hill-Carrboro flickr site.

Okay. This is just crazy.

Jasmin Jones, the student body president at UNC Chapel Hill, wants her fellow students to chill out just a little bit when storming Franklin Street each time the basketball team beats Duke. Or wins a Final Four game. 

No, she's not trying to throw a wet blanket over what has become a Carolina tradition. But she's concerned about the safety of those students who clearly didn't think things through when they decided it would be fun to light a fire to celebrate the big win and then jump over it.

Jones would like to see a slightly more structured celebration, perhaps one that even has a service element to it.

Read it all in today's Chapel Hill News.

It wasn't until Emily Banks got to Chapel Hill that she realized she had to hate Duke.

No way around it. You're a Tar Heel now, Emily. You hate Duke.

Writing this week in the education section of the New York Times this week, Banks, a rising UNC-CH sophomore, tells the story of how she figured out the Tar Heel thing. She's a New Yorker, from Brooklyn, and had never been much for basketball.

But that changed for her when she got to college.

She writes: "U.N.C. was quite the transition. Basketball players are treated as deities, and students quote Coach Roy Williams. Professors let class out early when it's evident students are too distracted by the NCAA tournament to concentrate on poetry. If the Heels are playing, no one is asking if you're watching the game, just where and with whom."

Banks, who is studying English, also wrote about the community feeling of the national championship won by the basketball game and the craziness of the Franklin Street aftermath.

I called Banks this week to hear a little more about this view, that a basketball game can create a sense of community.

"When you're watching the game, you realize everyone is feeling the same thing at the same time," she told me. "It's like this group emotion."

 You can read Banks' column here.

Former North Carolina Tar Heel football star Jesse Holley was working at a security monitoring company and hawking cell phones for T-Mobile when he got the call that he'd be competing on Spike TV's football reality competition "4th and Long."

Holley got on the show and won it Monday. By beating out 11 other hopefuls, Holley, who'd played briefly for Cincinnati in the NFL with another stint in Canada, earned a second football life. He earned the final roster spot to the Dallas Cowboys training camp, which begins July 28 in San Antonio.

Holley, effervescent and chatty as always, spoke to The N&O from Dallas on Tuesday, and shared stories about proving his mettle for Cowboys' great Michael Irvin, smiling pretty for the cameras. deciding whether or not to cut off the
dreds he's been growing for years, and getting a new nickname to replace the perfect-for-primetime, "Hollywood."