Ninth Street in Durham and Franklin Street in Chapel Hill have been, from time to time, likened to each other. Not without reason, but, usually, the likening is quickly qualified by something to the effect of “Franklin Street like it used to be.”

That’s also not without reason, but before too long old-timers could be sighing about “Ninth Street like it used to be,” too.

It’s not that we old-timers are nostalgia freaks, it’s that we can remember 40 years ago better than we can remember where we left the cell phone. And we can remember Franklin Street back when, and feel something like it walking down Ninth from Bruegger’s to Barnes Supply or so.

Ninth is distinct because it’s so distinctly itself, and so was Franklin once upon a time. They also sort of summed up and oozed out something essential about The Bull City and The Village, as Chapel Hill used to call itself, respectively.

In short, there was nowhere else quite like them: the one an archetypal business district that brought itself into existence for a quintessential college town, the other a mill-village downtown morphed by site and circumstances into a blend of the hip and the homey – arguably, the epicenter of Durham’s current cool.

On old Franklin Street and still on Ninth, practically every business in the district is an entity unto itself. Ninth Street has the Regulator Bookshop; Chapel Hill had the Intimate – appropriate name, since both streets have a sense of urban intimacy with a whole lot of different elements packed together in a small chunk of real estate.

Both are/were destinations: time was, if you asked “What’s there to do in Durham at night?” the answer was “Go to Chapel Hill.” Franklin Street was a place to just go hang out, the place itself its own attraction. Same with Ninth.

Besides the Intimate, old Franklin Street had two movie theaters, the Rat, Harry’s, the Tempo Room. Ninth Street has burritos at one end, a feed ‘n’ seed store at the other and a biker bar in between. Ninth Street has Fiddlin’ Dave McKnight; Franklin Street had the Flower Ladies.

Inexorably, though, change comes, and nowadays change usually swaps the organic for the generic. Chain stores moved into Franklin Street starting in the early ’70s and over time it went from cool to chic with a veneer of corporate. Ninth Street is different, too, than it was in the ’70s when the Regulator pioneered its transition: the Pizza Palace, where you could find the mayor manning the cash register, is now a gourmet seafood place.

Fancy food doesn’t make that much difference, though. Where a difference is being made is a great big hole in the ground where Circle Nine, 303 swanky apartments, will stand before long. A Harris-Teeter is coming in next door, and over on Main Street, a swatch of bright green grass is due to sprout a hotel. And if that weren’t different enough, the planned light-rail station is going to need even more people and their business packed in good and close.

There goes the neighborhood, notwithstanding the years of talk that went into rules to save old Ninth Street even as it becomes an island of small-town downtown in the midst of 21st-century “density,” as the planners call it. There are a lot of upsides to such a future, but no question it’s going to cost something some of our friends and neighbors find important.

We’ve seen it happen before.