Pic of the Week

Old buildings along Wilmington Street, December 2016

Demolition is taking place at the corner of Wilmington and Martin Streets, the former site of the future Edison Office tower. I say “former” tower because earlier this year, Highwoods Properties has acquired the parcel from the past developer. No plans are public yet for what the new owners might do with it.

When I took this photo on Tuesday of this week, it looked like some asbestos was being removed from the center building in the photo, where Reliable Loan was originally located. If full demolition is planned, I imagine in a few days these old Raleigh buildings will be gone.

Pic of the Week

New bike corral on South Street

Sticking with South Street this week, a new bike corral has been installed outside of Boulted Bread at 614 West South Street. To my knowledge this is the second one after the widely popular install of the one on Hargett Street outside of The Raleigh Times.

There will also be more corrals installed according to this tweet.

Pic of the Week

Fiber is indeed coming as Google’s ad campaign continues on. It’s no secret now that the building at 518 West Jones Street will be home to the area’s Google Fiber offices. Or maybe showroom? Storage room? Who knows.

Either way, Google has been very hush about the work that’s taken place in Glenwood South and now you can see the new branding on the building windows. Hopefully there will be more additions to the sidewalk area cause I’ve always found it to be a desert in the summer. (or extra cold in the winter)

Google Fiber may be great for the area but I’m still eager to see how this building will be used once they are up and running.

Pic of the Week

Rendering of Hargett Place

More like Render of the Week.

Above is the rendering for Hargett Place, a group of 19 townhomes for East Hargett Street. I’m into this project because of the high-quality (perceived anyway) as well as unique townhome design shown in these renderings. This is a housing type that I think is hugely lacking around downtown Raleigh and I would like to see much more of it.

For sale, rather than for rent, units are also nice to see in a part of Raleigh where rentals dominate so some balance to the market always seems like a good thing to cheer for.

The rendering reminds me of brownstone rowhouses that you can spot in older cities in the northeast. I can see a very comfortable street face along East Street with these homes facing City Cemetery. Once new sidewalk trees mature it’ll be a nice place to walk in the future.

Pic of the Week

224 Fayetteville Street

This is a shot of 224 (left) and 222 (right) Fayetteville Street. 224 Fayetteville Street, or the Lewis-Woodard Building, has a fresh new front door. This is a huge contrast to the white marble, colder feeling version it had before. You can see the previous version in this April 2015 Google streetview.

A little background on the building from the Fayetteville Street Historic District registration form.

Lewis-Woodard Building
224 Fayetteville Street, ca. 1883, ca. 1925, 1957, 1985, Contributing Building

The three-story, Italianate style building has a brick exterior and extends the full depth of the block from Fayetteville Street to S. Salisbury Street. The facade has a remodeled storefront with original wall treatment surviving at the upper stories and at the cornice. The ground floor has a deeply recessed entry at the south end and a similarly recessed display window at the north end. Elsewhere, the ground-floor facade is covered with large tiles of white marble. The identical second and third stories are four bays wide with one-over-one, doublehung, segmental-arched wood sash windows. Decorative metal window hoods feature keystones and corbels. The elaborate bracketed pressed metal cornice has dentil molding and scrollwork with the same lionshead elements seen in the keystones on the Briggs Building. The three-bay-wide S. Salisbury Street elevation was also remodeled in 1985, when white marble panels were applied to the brick-clad building at the storefront, rising in vertical bands on either side of the center bay, and across the top of the third-story windows. Six-oversix double-hung wood-sash windows remain at the second and third stories; the first floor windows and centered
door were replaced in 1985.

The building appears as two separate structures on the 1884 Sanborn map: a three-story hardware store and office building fronting Fayetteville Street and a two-story tin shop and warehouse fronting S. Salisbury Street. Partners Julius Lewis and Nicholas West had purchased the parcel in two transactions in 1881. Lewis and West ran a hardware store located a few parcels north and across the street at 219 Fayetteville Street that had been in business since at least 1875, according to Raleigh City directories. The business remained at that location until 1883, when it moved to the 224 address, likely into a new building that Lewis and West had erected since their purchase. Lewis became the sole owner of the property in 1894; in 1906, he sold it to Moses Woodard, a local businessman. The building briefly housed the F. M. Kirby and Company Five and Dime before the F. W. Woolworth Company established a store in the building in 1913. Woolworth’s made alterations to the S. Salisbury Street elevation around 1925 and to the storefront on Fayetteville Street in 1957, merging it with the storefront of the Lumsden-Boone Building next door at 226 Fayetteville Street. Woolworth’s moved out of the building by 1972. In 1985, more changes were made to the building to house new owner Raleigh Federal Savings and Loan and other commercial tenants.

*Fayetteville Street Historic District registration form