Rushing Franklin Street: A history of celebration

Story by: Jared McMasters

CHAPEL HILL, North Carolina — Forty years ago, it took more than a four-point win over Duke for University of North Carolina basketball fans to rush Franklin Street. In fact, any win over the Blue Devils didn’t cause much of a hoopla in Chapel Hill.

“We didn’t see any need to celebrate beating Duke because we did it every day,” said Eric Frederick, who graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1981.

In the 10 years leading up to Frederick’s graduation — 1972-1981 — the Tobacco Road rivalry was a lopsided battle. The Tar Heels boasted a 23-8 record over Duke that featured two separate runs of eight consecutive North Carolina victories.

“Back then, we never did it [rushed Franklin Street] during the regular season,” Frederick said. “We beat Duke, but we didn’t take the street. We were kind of arrogant Carolina people, I guess.”

It took a win over the Ralph Sampson-led Virginia Cavaliers in 1981’s Final Four to get students and local fans off the couch and onto Chapel Hill’s main thoroughfare.

The scene Frederick and his friends witnessed that night featured a naked fan climbing a tree, students painting each other and the street Carolina blue and toilet paper rolls flying through the air.

“It was just really drunk people kind of standing around screaming at each other in glee,” Frederick said.

Four decades later, while the essence of rushing Franklin Street largely remains the same, the criteria that demands students and fans storm the street has taken a sharp turn. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, hundreds of UNC fans flocked to the intersection of Franklin Street and Columbia Street on Feb. 6 to rejoice in North Carolina’s 91-87 victory over Duke. Then, even after Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz condemned those who rushed, and more than a dozen Chapel Hill Police officers blocked the intersection the night the Tar Heels thrashed the Blue Devils a month later, another group of students decided to gather for the tradition.

For more than six decades, rushing Franklin Street has been a bonding ritual passed down through generations of UNC fans, with periodic tweaks to the process happening every few years or so.

“It really shows that the heart and soul of Chapel Hill is in the crossroads of Columbia and Franklin Street,” said Matt Gladdek, executive director of the Downtown Chapel Hill Partnership. “It’s super important for each of us to have a place like that that is where you want to be when you’re celebrating.”

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In 1982, the Tar Heels secured their first men’s basketball national championship in 25 years in a 63-62 nail-biter against Georgetown. A retrospective article from UNC’s student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, estimated that 25,000 fans gathered on Franklin Street to celebrate that win. Paint and toilet paper made their encore appearances from past parties, while some students used the chaos as an excuse to damage about 100 vehicles.

Tim Crothers, a former senior writer for Sports Illustrated, was in his first year as a student at UNC when he joined the crowd on Franklin Street that night.

“I remember feeling a tad guilty that I was standing on top of someone’s Toyota,” he said. “Eventually, the roof began to buckle a little bit because I was not the only one on top of that car. I remember feeling a little guilty about that, but then I kept telling myself, ‘How stupid do you have to be to park your car on Franklin Street that night?’”

Perhaps the driver didn’t expect the crowd. A search through The Daily Tar Heel’s archives indicates that the night of the 1982 national title game was one of earlier times fans mobbed Franklin Street. The first mention in the archives was a celebration of the 1957 men’s basketball team’s national championship.

An article from March 26, 1957, details aspects of the first demonstration ranging from “an automobile accident, three arrests, a huge bonfire and dancing in the streets” to thousands of people gathering in the road to block traffic until 2 a.m. with a massive conga line.

Since then, the act of rushing has really only been heavily documented in local news over the last 30 to 40 years. Some themes remain constant: it’s always after a basketball game, toilet paper and bonfires are usually present, and no trees or street signs are safe from attack.

Still, though, there have been some variations over the years.

Celebrating wins over Duke began to take off a few years after Frederick graduated, when the Tar Heels routed the Blue Devils by 20 in Durham on Jan. 18, 1989. The Daily Tar Heel reported that Franklin Street was rowdy by 11:30 p.m., and some basketball players even joined in on the festivities after making the short trip home from Durham.

After the basketball team’s double-digit victory over Connecticut to advance to the 1998 Final Four, the celebrations on Franklin Street migrated from their usual spot by Carolina Coffee Shop to the new norm at the intersection by Top of the Hill.

In the aftermath of the party, a police officer told Scott Maitland, the proprietor of Top of the Hill, that the popularity of his restaurant and bar were the cause of the shift. Nearly 25 years later, that comment still means the world to Maitland.

“That’s something I’ll always remember because it shows the impact we’ve had on the community,” Maitland said.

Other little changes — the phasing out of paint, a brief favoritism toward firecrackers and the odd appearance of someone in a Batman costume or banana suit — have come and gone over the years, but the essence of rushing has remained the same.

“It means a ton to the college experience,” said Bret Oliverio, owner of the Franklin Street restaurant and bar Sup Dogs. “If you have the opportunity to do that, it makes a lifetime memory, which is what college is all about.”