{"id":22238,"date":"2014-11-17T06:55:10","date_gmt":"2014-11-17T11:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/raleighpublicrecord.org\/?p=22238"},"modified":"2014-11-17T06:55:10","modified_gmt":"2014-11-17T11:55:10","slug":"the-raleigh-public-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/the-raleigh-public\/2014\/11\/17\/the-raleigh-public-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Raleigh Public"},"content":{"rendered":"

Floye Dombalis, 88, is working the register at Mecca near the end of\u00a0 a weekday lunch hour, greeting every customer who enters. She\u2019s been there since the mid-1960s, when she was called in one day to \u201chelp out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking back, Floye jokes that she \u201cshould not have done such a good job\u201d because she\u2019s been working there ever since.<\/p>\n

The Mecca<\/a> on Martin St. was started by her husband John Dombalis\u2019s family in 1930.\u00a0 Over the years Floye has seen the city of Raleigh morph from a sleepy southern town to a booming Capitol City.<\/p>\n

Floye remembers riding around Raleigh with her husband, and when they\u2019d drive past a new shopping center, he\u2019d say \u201cThat\u2019s where I went rabbit hunting,\u201d<\/p>\n

She knows much more about the city\u2019s history than its former hunting spots, however.<\/p>\n

There used to be 11 shoe stores downtown, Floye said, but none survived the destruction of Fayetteville Street when it was dug up to become the Fayetteville Street Mall.<\/p>\n

She says most folks do not remember the cold, wet winter when Fayetteville Street was torn up. There was mud everywhere, folks could not get downtown and many of the businesses could not survive.\u00a0 She believes that was the low point of Raleigh downtown history.<\/p>\n

The high point was the restoration of Fayetteville St and the public\u2019s return.<\/p>\n

As her shift at Mecca winds down, Floye laughs, recalling another time a photographer came in asking for a picture. Reluctantly, she agreed, only to face the camera and be told, \u201coh no, I want to take a photo of your cash register.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Floye Dombalis, 88, works Mecca’s 49-year-old silver cash register.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24026,"featured_media":22239,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1745],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22238"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24026"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22238\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theraleighcommons.org\/raleighpublicrecord\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}