Month / September 2007

by Leo Suarez

Canes at The Raleigh City Museum

Here’s a cool event for you Caniacs. This letter comes from James Sutton, the director of education and outreach at the Raleigh City Museum.

When the Harford Whalers announced their decision to move south and become the Carolina Hurricanes, a number of people wondered if hockey would survive in a state usually preoccupied with college basketball. However, the last decade has erased all doubts as the ‘Canes have won over crowds and won our state’s first major professional sporting championship.

Join us this Saturday at 2pm as we look back on the last ten years in celebration of the ‘Canes wonderful achievements. John Forslund, the “Voice of the Hurricanes” will wow us with some behind the scenes stories about the team and their marvelous achievements.

Hurricane mascot, Stormy will also be here to entertain kids and sign autographs.

You can also check out the museum’s exhibit The Thrill Of Victory: Sports & Recreation in Raleigh which includes memorabilia from the ‘Canes 2006 Stanley Cup Championship season.

It’s sure to be fun for the whole family!

As always children ages 6 & up are welcomed to attend and all children must be accompanied by an adult.

Please join us for the fun!!

TEN YEARS WITH THE CAROLINA HURRICANES

DATE: Saturday, Sept 15
TIME: 2pm
LOCATION: Raleigh City Museum, 220 Fayetteville Street
MORE: For more information call 919-832-3775 or write jsutton@raleighcitymuseum.org

by Leo Suarez

Downtown Walking Tour (part 1)

Visit Raleigh is probably the official website for Raleigh tourist information. On their webpage, they have a downtown walking tour. This self guided tour takes you to 65 stops spread out all over downtown. To do the entire tour yourself takes some time and I’ve been working on getting a picture of each stop. I have not finished the tour yet, and honestly have been putting it off for awhile, but the weather is slowly getting nicer so I’ll be wrapping up my report soon enough. Here are the first 10 stops on the tour. I’ll post the rest over the next few weeks.

1. State Capitol Building (1840)

2. First Presbyterian Church (1900)

3. Odd Fellows Building (1924)

4. Raleigh Banking and Trust Building (1913-1936)

5. Masonic Temple (1907)

6. Briggs Hardware Building (1874) and Raleigh City Museum

7. Capital Club Building (1930)

8. Century Post Office (1874)

9. Wake County Courthouse (1970) and Office Building (1942)

10. Sir Walter Hotel (1924)

by Leo Suarez

Peace St. McD’s New Design Causes Frustration

I’m looking forward to the Peace Street Streetscape Project, mentioned earlier in this post. As well as the street being upgraded, the owner of the McDonald’s that sits on Peace and Boylan wants to tear down the restaurant and re-build a more modern one. This plan was proposed in November, 2006 and has been going in and out of city council meetings.

I bring this up because the N&O has an article on the situation and how the final decision has been delayed yet again to approve the plan. The article states that some members of the council are pushing toward a more pedestrian friendly design while others, including a frustrated council member James West, seem to want to approve a design and move on.

Faced with the prospect of delaying the approval of a new McDonald’s, council member James West said Wednesday that enough is enough.

Declaring that the Raleigh City Council has a bad habit of “putting things in committee and committee-ing them to death,” West took a stand for expeditious government review.
“I see no sense in us delaying this another two weeks,” he said.

I can agree with both sides of this argument. I applaud the mayor for calling for more pedestrian friendly designs near downtown but is it necessary to delay this for so long? I also agree with Mr. West, he is practically calling out the council’s “do-nothing” attitude of discussing and fine-tuning designs. There needs to be a more take-action attitude instead of delaying decisions and inevitably delaying progress downtown. If Raleigh has a council with this kind of attitude then developers may be less inclined to work with them.

A pedestrian friendly design would consist of the new McDonald’s to be built right up next to the sidewalk. The original Streetscape plan does not look like this will be the case. Below I have the current sidewalk and the planned sidewalk.


You can see that there is no real change. The lanes going in and out around the island tell me that there will be lots of traffic. There also may be parking spots lining the sidewalk. This is just speculation and to be honest I cannot think of a good way to accommodate the McDonald’s and pedestrians. How do you think it should be built? Could a 3 or 4 story building with the restaurant on the ground floor with condos or office space work at this location?

by Leo Suarez

Hue Showing Life

WRAL has an article on the new Hue condos being built at Dawson and Hargett St. The Hue is the most dense condo project yet for downtown and the prices start in the $160’s. Let’s hope they will stick to that selling point because I can easily think of one person that is interested. Check out the website for the project; it has been updated.

If all goes as planned, people will be living in more than 200 condos at The Hue, at 400 S. Dawson St., by spring of 2009. Developers said these condos will help make downtown more affordable. Prices at The Hue are about 57 percent less than the average downtown condo price.
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“Initially, in most downtowns, you see the higher end stuff being developed first because the developers are uncertain whether the market is there,” said David Diaz, director of Downtown Raleigh Alliance.
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“Our goal is to make the downtown a 24-hour downtown, and in order to do that you need a lot of people living downtown,” Diaz said.