Prosperity in the nineteenth century had lined these streets with large, extravagantly decorated mansions. But by the time the Great War came, the rich were building their new mansions near the country club in Irving Park, and College Hill began its long, slow decline. While elderly widows continued to live in the houses their rich husbands built them, other homes fell vacant and were bought by entrepreneurs who began renting them out. Soon some began to be redivided into apartments, with kitchens and bathrooms added wherever they might fit. And as the decay grew worse, the rents fell until students at the growing university could afford them.

That was the end of the neighborhood. At first the students were all young ladies and therefore civilized, but no matter how refined their manners, they were transients, and the houses did not belong to them. Then came the end of segregation, and the women's college became the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Frats and sororities swallowed up the best of the houses near the growing campus. The rest of the houses were cut up into ever-smaller apartments, with students packed in shoulder to shoulder, or so it seemed. They cared nothing for the yards; the landlords seemed to care even less.

All of these things happened to the Bellamy house, including a brief stint as a sorority in the early sixties. But when gentrification came to the neighborhood in the early eighties, the Bellamy house was passed by. In 1987 the aging landlord moved to Florida, and in the vain hope that leaving it empty would help to sell it, stopped renting the rooms. It quickly became a derelict, boarded up, vandalized, lawn gone to weeds and only mowed a couple of times a year. The FOR SALE sign stayed up long enough for the red paint to disappear completely; then it fell over in a storm and no one put it back up again. No one wanted the house, it had been so badly deformed when it was cut into apartments. No one even wanted the land, with its corner location and a gully in the back yard. The landlord forgot he owned the property.