And we’re back with more Downtown Raleigh. Actually I was working on a longer piece but this bit of news is too interesting to sit on. This comes from the great reporting at the Raleigh Public Record.
Edison Plans Scaled Down, But Inching Forward via Raleigh Public Record
At Tuesday October 18th’s Budget and Economic Development meeting, there was talk about The Edison project, a four building complex with about 540,000 square feet of office space for the block bounded by Blount, Wilmington, Martin, and Davie. You can see an old rendering here.[Link now broken] According to the meeting agenda, we now have:
The original plan for the Edison block included taller office buildings, but the recession has reduced the likelihood for taller office building construction for the foreseeable future. Today, Edison is proposing the first phase of its Edison project to be a $30,600,000 239 unit 6 story high end residential community with 18,000 square feet of ground floor retail space. This project would be on the southern side of the block, bounded by Blount, Davie, and Wilmington streets.
The Edison residential project is considered feasible in today’s economic environment.
I don’t think skyscraper fans will be happy about this one. Building this piece of The Edison also means we lose the building with Cooper’s in it on East Davie Street. Six stories of new building at a loss for two stories of history is not a good exchange in my opinion.