City Hall is studying on doing something about our Bull City's infamous Downtown Loop, that thoroughfare to nowhere some observers have likened to a noose around Durham's town center.

The notion on hand is opening it to two-way traffic. The public-works folks shared their consultant's thoughts on the matter with the interested public Thursday night. The timing is poetic, since it's almost exactly 50 years since Durham's interested public got its first look at a consultant's thoughts that brought the Loop into being.

It was Oct. 21, 1959, when Julian Tarrant, an authority on downtowns from Richmond, showed the City Council and the Downtown Development Association a vision of an encircled business district.

The Loop was conceived to rescue a district already hurting from the newfangled shopping centers with their wide-open parking lots. It would relieve downtown congestion and offer plentiful parking around the commercial edge once some obsolete old buildings like the Carolina Theatre and City Hall (now the Durham Arts Council) were out of the way.

Now, parking and congestion downtown had been problem for quite some time already. Planning for the "northern bypass" (now I-85) to send through traffic around rather than into the central city, began in 1944. In 1952, the city hired a traffic engineer from N.C. State to study downtown where traffic, as one observer put it, "squeezes and crawls down streets too narrow to accommodate much more than rickshaws."

Four years, some recommendations and a few changes later, Planning Commission Chairman Noble Clay predicted a commercial "exodus" from downtown because of parking problems. By 1959, as a Downtown Development Association report concluded, the central city's situation was at crisis point, threatened by shopping centers planned at the northern edge of town (Northgate) and the eastern edge of Chapel Hill (Eastgate) and already well established in Raleigh (Cameron Village). A perimeter loop, the report concluded, would be "the ultimate in traffic circulation," improving downtown's appearance as well as relieving vehicular snarls.

Acting with typical alacrity, the city went to work and the Loop was in place by the early 1970s, about the same time Crabtree Valley was opening, Northgate expanding and South Square on the near horizon. As for those downtown merchants the Loop was going to rescue -- well, they were moving out, chasing the customers who had long since lost the habit of shopping in an area that had been for years under reconstruction that made it even more confusing and inconvenient than it had been in the first place.

Still, when all is done and said, the Loop has not been a total failure. It was meant to relieve traffic congestion downtown and there it succeeded. Beyond, probably, anybody's wildest dreams.