Our first day in town featured dinner at Dame’s Chicken and Waffles on Main Street.  The rather small restaurant-bar delivers on it’s promise.  “Southern fried perfection meets sweet European decadence.”  The menu reflects an era when jazz musicians would finish their gigs in New York City.  They’d find a Chicken and Waffles joint open till late for something to eat before going home.  My choice was called “Orange Speckled Chabo,” –a chicken cutlet laid on a sweet potato waffle, drizzled with honey dijon with a smear of orange-honeycomb.  The side of collard greens was something that you have to come down South to find.  My daughter and I could not have had a better meal.

The evening was young, the weather nice so we walked down Main Street.  I grew up here and remembered the 17 story Hill Building.  One of the tallest, and truly regal skyscrapers in Durham of my youth was designed by Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon.  The same firm designed the Empire State Building.  The building was built to house the Durham Bank and Trust company.  I learned that the building was literally built around the bank vault.  The rehabilitated building now houses 21 c, a museum art-gallery hotel.

We entered and found the elevator.  My daughter wanted to see the vault and pushed the button for the basement, never mind that it said “employees only.”  The doors opened and it was obvious that we were in the bowels of the building.  A worker approached us and said that he’d find someone to show us the vault.  Within moments we were taken by Alvis Gentry to see the old vault.

There it was, massive steel door, over a foot thick, that was hand cranked into closed position, with the floor rising up to seal the vault.  Nothing would ever have penetrated that door, or gone under it for that matter.  The vault was filled with hundreds of safe deposit boxes.

How straight forward, secured by old but effective technology was the value created by the society of my parents. In their prime in the 1940s and 1950s, they probably banked at the Central Carolina Bank which was here when I was  a kid.

I felt a strange time dissociation this morning with a glimpse of the headline of the USA TODAY weekend edition.  The extensive article outlined the with ease with which the president and his immediate family is able to further enrich themselves with their real estate holdings.  Property for sale or lease can be exchanged for money. The influence, a tacit dimension of the deal, is naturally worth far more than the property purchased or the space leased.  CONDO DEALS PROVIDE WINDOW TO INFLUENCE

Robbing “the bank” has never been less direct, or easier, or more lucrative than it is today.

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