Corner of West and Lenoir, December 2016
The service station at the corner of West and Lenoir Street is shown above. Plans for a restaurant are in place for this building in an area that will rapidly change in the next few years.
There will be apartments across West street, currently under construction townhomes across Lenoir, and more residential along South Street, at the corner of Saunders.
The two-way conversion of Lenoir and South Street appears to really be a factor in this area’s change.
Corner of Morgan and Blount Streets, November 2016
Marbles has tentative plans for an “urban courtyard” for the corner of Morgan and Blount Streets. The service station that currently sits there would be demolished for the expansion of the kids museum. The Raleigh Public Record has an in-depth look at the plans for this section of downtown.
Designed by Clearscapes Architecture, which has worked with Marbles in the past on projects such as the 2014 Kid Grid Expansion, the Urban Courtyard would see the entire property razed and turned into an outdoor green space.
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.
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.
@NewRaleigh it's the next phase of rolling out new bike parking facilities downtown. 3 bike corrals going in this round.
— RaleighMoves (@RaleighMoves) October 4, 2016
Bike parking at Citrix along Hargett Street. While private, this is probably the peak of bicycle parking in downtown Raleigh.
Raleigh’s giant copper acorn has a new home. It was moved from Moore Square to the corner of South and Salisbury Street. I imagine the reason is to clear the way for the impending redesign of Moore Square.
The construction shown in the photo above is the new Residence Inn on Salisbury Street.
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.
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.