Goodnight Raleigh Looks Into Another Wall of Colors
We’ve mentioned it before, but Goodnight Raleigh! is a fun blog that always has some interesting items about Raleigh’s past and present (like the two sets of pics of the NC State steam tunnels). One of its contributors, Karl Larson, who’s helping to lead the effort restore the Color Wall in D.H. Hill, has been researching that piece’s creator. Turns out NC State design prof Joe Cox had another work just right down the street at a BB&T branch. The bank’s still there, but the mural has been removed.
Forty-seven years ago next month, Branch Banking and Trust Company opened its “State College Office” at the corner of Hillsborough St. and Oberlin Rd. The ribbon cutting ceremony was held with great fanfare, with the mayor of Raleigh, the chancellor of NC State and the president of BB&T in attendance. Though the pick and shovel groundbreaking had occurred several months earlier, the bank’s opening “broke ground” in another, more significant way — it was the first Raleigh bank to feature a work of public art as an integral part of its design — a dazzling stained glass mural. “The mural represents the growing cooperation between artist and architect that is rapidly spreading throughout the country,” the N&O reported in an article on the event in 1962.
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