Anyone who takes the tour can expect to see not only the grand opening of the Plaza (RBC) Condominium sales model, but also Carlton Place Apartments, Founder’s Row, The Dawson, Bloomsbury Estates, a few rehab’d historic homes, the Residences at Quorum, West at North, the plans for the redevelopment of Blount Street, Village at Pilot Mill, 712 Tucker, 630 North, and a handful of other apartments, homes, and condos.  For the full map, check out the website at www.raleighdowntownliving.com.

It is a self guided (and sometimes walking) tour but now that Raleigh has rickshaws you can just grab a ride with one of them! Tickets are $10 and “proceeds from ticket sales benefit the Department’s Designing as 21st Century City lecture series. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Support Circles Program of the Plan to End Homelessness, the joint City of Raleigh, Wake County, Triangle United Way, and Wake Continuum of Care effort aimed at ending homelessness in Raleigh and Wake County.”

The new website is www.hueraleigh.com and promises to amplify the color in your otherwise gray life.  The project is being developed by Trammel Crow out of Atlanta (who is also responsible for 222 Glenwood) and is being sold by York Simpson Underwood.

To see the plans, click here (PDF).  Sales will be managed by Susan "Bootsie" Harris who manages York Simpson Underwood’s new downtown office.

712 Tucker

With two courtyards, underground and garage parking, two workout rooms, and a variety of other things it should be a very interesting project if they can keep to their pricing.  The smallest unit shown on the website is 720 square feet, and the largest sits just under 1600 square feet.  Some of the renderings and floor plans suggest that there might be some Brownstone type units on the Boylan side which would add a nice touch to the ever changing downtown area. 

When this project was first proposed quite some time ago, it was mentioned that the development might be part apartment/part condo but no news has been heard about whether or not that still remains the case or if it will be all individually owned.  The Crosland website (the developer) suggests that there will be a section of units available for rent, but it also quotes the pricing and square footage different than the sales website.  It is shown with an old rendering of the project so it can be assumed that the information has changed.

The sales website says the building will be done in 2008, but given the scope of the project and that the existing buildings have not been removed that seems like a lofty goal. Crosland is also the developer of Oberlin Court on Wade Ave. 

At any rate, the news of affordable condos is a much needed breath for Downtown and it will be exciting to see this project take shape.

The cross-section drawing of the Main Street looks promising with wide sidewalks and landscaped promenades on either side.  The plan encourages multi-storied buildings with the south side of the street being used for high-density residential and the north side for commercial development.  The goal is “a high intensity urban development pattern.”

This is the kind of development that is needed if Brier Creek is to truly be one of three regional centers as city planners have designated it.  But, while Brier Creek has mastered big box retail and chain restaurants, will a manufactured urban design concept be successful there?

The event was sponsored by the Urban Design Center and Designbox. Using a similar format to that used at Sparkcon, tables of eight people a piece each tackled an assigned topic. One table had technology, one had the square as a
symbol of the city, one had programs, etc. Our table tossed around ideas for water. We started by writing three memorable thoughts/feelings from our experiences with great water projects. These ideas were grouped together to form 5 main themes: A river runs through it, splish splash, chill out, Surpise!, and Nectar of Gaia.

We then arranged some ideas which incorporate each of these themes and came up with a couple of interesting ideas. It begins when Mother Earth erupts with her nectar from the Wilmington Street sidewalk between the BOA and Progress I buildings. The blob of water will leap out of the ground on to a plate mounted on a pole. Once it lands, water is shot out of that plate to another nearby, higher plate. The water seems to hop up to each successive, higher plate (made of various materials to create differing sounds), until ultimately the water has hopped all the way to Fayetteville Street. At this point the water hops from the high plate into the street where jets of water successively explode in a serpentine pattern down Fayetteville Street to the Marriott area. This has the effect of involving a symbol of the earth inviting one to explore the plaza; a plaza so powerfull that water flows up to the experience.The street could be defined not by giant dark gray Greek revival pots, but by small foaming water bubblers.

Additionally, a water feature against the front of the BOA building resembling the face of a breaking wave could be a great respite on a hot day. The parabolic incline could be made of glass and have a large video display underneath. As water flows down the slope, the video could show anything from water flowing upward, fire, acorns, whatever. The water would pool at the bottom with ankle deep water for a few feet in the plaza. At each pedestrian access the same video feature could be shown on video boards submerged in the sidewalk.

While our concept is by no means a working model, it shared many, many features that other tables created. Nearly every concept involved water jets, video displays, and flux. Nearly everyone in the room felt that the plaza should offer a different experience for each visit. No doubt these ideas are seeds from Plensa’s concept. However they go to show what was right about his vision.

Personally, I think a lot of the concepts presented at the meeting’s conclusion could be tied in with a theme and slogan like "Find Yourself…In Raleigh". Themes of water looking for its purpose, people finding themselves in video displays, and the like could all tie into a single purpose without the area looking like a wayward hodgepodge of leftover amusement park features.

As with Sparkcon, the ideas will be compiled into a tidy presentation to the City Council early next month. The main purpose of the brainstorm was to give the City Council some idea about what sorts of infrastructure will be needed in the plaza. Whatever is the case, we still have a chance to have a City Square that people want to be a part of.

• 111 Seaboard – ? units, planned
• 222 Glenwood, 120 units, under construction
• 510 Glenwood, 36 units
• 630 North Street, 42 units, planned
• 712 Tucker, 179 units, planned
• Bloomsbury Estates, 110 units, under construction
• N. Blount Street Area – planned
• Boylan Flats, 14 units, planned
• The Cotton Mill, 50 units
• The Dawson, 66 units
• The Glen on Peace, 18 units, planned
• Gregory & Parker Apts.? – ? units, planned
• Hobby Properties Condos – ? units, planned
• The Hudson, 64 units
• The Lafayette Hotel/Condos – planned
• The Nash, 208 units, planned
• Palladium Plaza, 66 units, under construction
• Park Devereaux, 46 units
• The Paramount, 82 units
• The Quorum, 44 units, opening this month
• RBC Plaza Condos, 140 units, planned
• Reynolds Tower – ? units, planned
• Site 1 – planned
• West at North, 170 units, planned

Take a look at the comprehensive map of these projects at Google Maps. To open the map in Google Earth, click Earth’s link at the top of the list, download the kmz file, and open it in Earth.

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Functionally the building works quite well. The market is demanding smaller units, and these condos will likely be smaller than other new alternatives; somewhere around the 800 square foot mark (Note: This is not confirmed, just my own estimate. The point is the building’s focus is on small units.). A downtown overall development map (which has disappeared from the downtown alliance site) showed Hargett and Martin as important East/West retail corridors linking the Eastern portion of downtown to the TTA train stop in the Warehouse District. The alignment of five or so retail outlets works well in space that normally wouldn’t sell easily as residential.

Unfortunately the parking garage access is placed at the left end of this retail row. Perhaps integrating the service alley on the north side with the Dawson’s service ally would allow parking garage access from a lesser traveled sidewalk.

During the meeting Commissioner Betsy Kane addressed the redundant vehicular accesses that will be side-by-side on the Dawson Street margins of both properties. She pointed out that the service and parking garage access issue is so common with these new developments that the city should consider an ally system within the block to allow for common access and minimize pedestrian disturbance. Good idea! A shared access for the Dawson and The Nash’s service and parking areas would be an efficient use of space and offer an unbroken retail strip along Hargett.

Nash Square is a special block in downtown Raleigh, and surrounding buildings should acknowledge the public square. The Victorian Park Hotel once sat over on Martin Street diagonally across the square from the site of The Nash. Even then architects knew that the feature corner of the building should address the formal park with its best feature. So kudos to the architects for getting this dramatic element right.

While the building serves many great purposes, preliminary sketches appear to make it look cheap, though. The plain treatment of the windows, EIFS skin, and partial blue color scheme hold little promise for the public’s love of this building in the future. Perhaps a  style that hasn’t been used in downtown Raleigh like French, Gothic, or something else could make this building a classic for the ages for relatively the same cost. Given its prominent location, it is important that this building be one that adequately coexists with its neighbor, Nash Square.

Planning Director Mitchel Silver showed several images of the project’s impact on the neighborhood skyline. At 7-stories this project adds mass, but not height like the nearby Reynolds tower "projected at 30 stories". Silver showed alternative massing for this project at 14 stories and showed how only half of the property would only have to be used. While 14-stories creates more of a landmark building, I’ll take the 7-stories at this point. Downtown Raleigh has nearly 150 unbuilt lots, so we’re not even close to having a land scarcity.

The project still must gain acceptance by the Raleigh City Council, however, because if its size, scope, and downtown location.

map it

A couple of years ago, as the new North Hills (fuschia) was reopening, the property across Six Forks Road caught my eye. I saw an outdated bank building, a tiny motel, a closed Bennigan’s, an outdated office mall, and a non-descript glassy office building. Behind that was a large set of low-rise apartment buildings that had seen better days and a street that meandered without a purpose. I thought,"Wouldn’t it be cool to expand this North Hills idea across the street where more substantial buildings could go in?"

I returned from my only Las Vegas visit thoroughly impressed with the Bellagio hotel and its dancing fountains. It seemed a crescent-shaped building with an italian flair, like the Bellagio, could go in the place of the North Hills office plaza (yellow). On the building’s east side would be an elliptical pool with dancing waters (blue), much like the Bellagio’s but to a far smaller scale. Also like that hotel, the building could gracefully step downward with restaurants perched overlooking the water. To the east of the waters, the newly aligned St. Alban’s Drive (brown line) could cut through at its current elevation. The water plaza would be one story above the street, disconnecting pedestrians from the vehicular thoroughfare.

To the east of St. Albans would be three blocks of shopping village (purple), each with parking decks flanking to the exterior. To the south the project could house a big box retailer like a much-needed Home Depot as well as a large parking garage (orange). Graduating away from the retail mall would be various housing (pink) including a 3-sided condo tower, stand-alone housing, row houses like those on Capitol Hill in Washington, and condominiums. A park also could fit in on the south side of the project.

Cars would access the project from a newly aligned Dartmouth Street segment called "St Alban’s". It would proceed downhill from Six Forks as it currently does, however it would curve to the right and pass through the development as if it were a bypass road. Camelot Drive would intersect the curving St. Alban’s at an intersection after receiving Dartmouth Drive. This intersection could be an interesting residential corner. The project would be connected to the New North Hills via a pedestrian bridge or a tram.

The idea here is to develop Phase II of a master new-urbanist development that begins at North Hills and continues all the way to Atlantic Avenue. Shopping centers and existing office and residential areas could be redeveloped to a confluent, walkable area that would eventually reach a TTA transit station. The village could have its own free transit circulation to tie different phases together, and a pedestrian and/or bus transit-only bridge over I-440  halfway between Six Forks Road and Wake Forest Road could connect the north  and the south portions.

Just after throwing my ideas for this Phase II on paper we got the opportunity to move into a fantastic house down the street. I got buried in moving chores and never bothered to drop my plans off in John Kane’s mailbox (like I did with my original North Hills plan). Nine months later (one year ago from now) Kane announced plans to build North Hills East. His plans look different from mine, but are nonetheless an exciting addition to work well done so far.

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If you are interested in volunteering for the construction or production side there will be a table set up near the house during Saturday’s demolition. Streets are closed and parking is limited (see details below).

Someone excited about the subjunctive mood wrote this piece:

"Our proposed start date would be this Thursday, November 30th, 2006. We would arrive early in the morning and then work continuously (24 hr days) for the following eight days, demolishing and rebuilding a brand new home. We would illuminate the house in order to work at night, and production would continue, uninterrupted, until the end of the day on
Friday, December 8th, 2006. A small cleanup crew would also remain in the area for up to a week, to make sure the neighborhood is cleaned and returned in the same condition as when we arrived.

Please note that we have applied with the City/County for Road Closures and the posting of "No Parking Anytime" Areas that would be in affect 24 hours per day beginning 11/30/06 at 6:00 am and ending 12/9/06 at 12:00 pm, to facilitate the safe and timely delivery of equipment and materials to the job site. Residents living within the closure areas would be able to enter and exit their homes without interruption. Please exercise caution and proceed slowly through these areas. Postal service, garbage collection, newspaper delivery and other municipal services would not be interrupted. The following areas would be affected:

No Parking Zones:

• Both sides of Blount Street from Delway Street to Mulberry Street
• Both sides of Poplar Street from Blount Street to Wake Forest Road
• Both sides of Marshall Streets 1 & 2 from Poplar Street to Mulberry Street Road Closures
• Blount St at Delway St, at Oak Chase Ln, at Cedar St and at Mulberry Street
• Poplar St at Blount Street and at Mordecai Drive
• Marshall Streets 1 & 2 at Poplar Street and at Mulberry Street
• Person Street at Poplar Street
• Mulberry Street at Marshall Street"

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