How ‘Bull Durham’ became a musical and Durham became a thriving city

“When someone leaves Durham, they don’t come back,” wails a character in the new musical restaging of the 1988 movie “Bull Durham.” Once they work their way out of the gritty North Carolina town, she says plaintively, there is little reason to return.

Cities in decline are often desperate for comebacks. Surprisingly, a movie — and architectural preservation — helped accelerate Durham’s 40-year civic revival.

“Bull Durham,” starring Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, became 1988’s breakout summer hit. The film, now a cult classic, portrays a down-and-out minor league baseball team in a down-and-out North Carolina town. Writer-director Ron Shelton had a brief minor league career. In “The Church of Baseball,” his recent book about making the movie, he wrote that he chose the location because of the city’s “desperate look and feel.”

When the movie was released, the city was still struggling with a decades-long, seemingly irreversible decline. Parts of downtown were boarded up; a landmark high-rise hotel had been razed; a freeway had steamrollered a formerly prosperous historic African American community. The town’s longtime economic base had eroded, its textile mills and cigarette factories closed or closing.

Drying tobacco smell from Durham’s last tobacco warehouse still wafted over the movie’s vintage downtown ballpark. Early film advertising — discarded after local protests — featured the subtitle, “A major league romance in a minor league town.”

Still, Mayor Wib Gulley sounded optimistic, telling the Los Angeles Times that the movie “not only put Durham on the map for folks around the country, it was an even bigger boost for the people who live here. It says we’re a big-time community with a major-league motion picture.”

The city was gradually shifting its economic base from industrial manufacturing toward education, medicine and culture. Durham’s comeback effort was underway: a city-supported downtown parking garage, office tower and a new civic center and hotel, plus a human capital explosion as 1960s and ’70s Duke graduates created their own institutions.

By 1982, during pre-production, Durham’s architectural bones were rattling. Instead of leveling vacant structures, the city underwent a “red brick renaissance.” It repurposed vintage, vacant tobacco and textile buildings, transforming them into unique, upscale condos, apartments, restaurants and retail outlets, mostly serving Duke University and Medical Center students and employees. The film’s release inadvertently revealed the town’s latent charm.

In 1998, Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies founded a film festival. Each spring, filmmakers and fans worldwide flock to the Carolina Theater, a beloved, restored downtown movie palace that had hosted the “Bull Durham” world premiere.

Fueled in part by the movie’s popularity, Durham built a new, larger municipal downtown Bulls ballpark in 1995, similar to Baltimore’s red-brick Camden Yards. Thanks to a cadre of diverse and forward-looking office holders, the town embraced the now-AAA team, simultaneously preserving the old ball field for recreational sports. In 2008, next to the new stadium, it built a successful performing arts venue.

Across the street, the American Tobacco Co. campus, formerly an office complex and railroad loading bay, became an entertainment venue, with bars, restaurants, a public radio studio, a documentary film theater and a high-tech entrepreneurial incubator.

Major tech companies Google, Microsoft and Oracle have located offices nearby. The city has become a destination for creative millennials and Gen Zers, many lacking a Duke connection and with no interest in living in a college town like nearby Chapel Hill. Downtown has been transformed and includes a thriving weekly farmers’ market. 

“Durham is a model for how to keep a city center alive,” said Boston-based urban planner and Duke grad Ed Shoucair. But it’s not just the restored buildings drawing newcomers. “Its growth is largely due to its critical mass of new residents. The only missing piece is affordable housing.”

Unquestionably, urban revival included a troubling cost, with gentrification pricing longtime Black residents out of their homes. 

In September, Ron Shelton premiered a musical version of his movie at Duke’s Reynolds Industries Theater. The production is a sweet, bouncy showcase with Broadway-Off-Broadway ambitions.

At the musical’s closing night curtain call on Sept. 22, Shelton spoke to the audience about his story’s screen-to-stage journey and dramatic changes in Durham they bracketed. Any civic revival’s urban alchemy is difficult to analyze, but, Shelton joked facetiously, “I take full credit” for the city’s booming return. Audience members who knew better laughed at the hyperbole.

Some irony existed in staging the musical’s showcase run in Duke’s student union, given the sometimes contradictory and contentious town-and-gown relationship. The school’s founder, robber baron James B. Duke, built his fortune on the American Tobacco Co.’s monopoly of a deadly product whose effects Duke Medical Center researchers have devoted careers to mitigating.

For the most part, Durham and Duke maintain symbiosis, as the university’s exponential growth in stature has paralleled Durham’s economic recovery.

“Duke has helped catalyze the economic renaissance of downtown,” says local developer Bob Chapman. “The city and county collect higher ad valorem taxes based on Duke’s above-market rent payments.”

There are caveats. Thousands of Duke students annually seek Durham housing, noted former Mayor Gulley. “This sharply limits the supply of affordable housing available to Durham’s residents and drives up the cost of whatever is left. Duke is not unique in this respect, but it also is not doing a lot to mitigate this impact.”

And in 2019, Duke helped kill a regional light rail plan that had been percolating for years. University administrators objected — selfishly, many felt — because the line would have located a medical center stop on the edge of the campus.

Today, Durham is a growing city of 300,000 in a metro area of 1.5 million. It offers urban life on a livable scale, with most destinations within walking distance or no more than a 15-minute drive. Despite the “Bull Durham” musical character’s complaint, after a 40-year hiatus since my Duke undergraduate days, I moved back in 2021.

Mark I. Pinsky is a journalist and the author of seven nonfiction books.