The old Capital Boulevard bridge over Peace Street has now been removed.
Torn apart and dismantled during the night throughout the last few weeks, the bridge that was close to reaching its end-of-life and has stood up over Peace for over 50 years is no more.
The “square-loop” traffic pattern is more and more coming into place around the new bridge, which already has traffic flowing in both directions. With the northbound exit to Peace now open, the next major connection should be the new Peace to Capital on-ramp (and Cotton Mill entrance) road.
I’m really hoping to see this project wrap up this year as was planned.
It’s been a year since I announced the launch of the DTRaleigh Community and soon after shut down traditional comments on this blog. After 365 days, I couldn’t be happier with the results.
In the past year, downtown enthusiasts have been chatting more and even meeting face-to-face. There’s even more eyes on downtown development as residents report in and others ask questions. Answers are found through crowd-sourcing and the conversation is in-depth and respectful.
There are almost 300 registered users and easily hundreds more who read the public-facing topics. Registrations slowly tick up every few days.
As the sole moderator, I’ve found it easy and after users have gotten used to the software, it’s mostly self-policing with rants and flamewars kept to an almost negligible amount.
If you haven’t signed up, I encourage you to do that and jump in with whatever downtown Raleigh topic that’s on your mind. There’s room to grow and who knows where it will go from here.
It’s time for another get-together and chance to meet fellow readers face-to-face.
As always, the more the merrier and we have three additional hosts including yours truly. The folks behind Inbound Raleigh, ITB Insider, and The Acorn will be out mingling with us all and it is sure to be a good time.
Spring 2019 Reader Meetup
Date/Time: Wed., May 29 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Growler USA (upstairs space)
314 South Blount Street
FNB Tower has now topped out and the glass siding is about 3/4 the way up the new Fayetteville Street tower. As the street presence gets cleaned up, I can’t help but look forward to seeing the construction fencing come down and the return of the plaza space between One City Plaza and FNB Tower.
Also, I hope to hear about new ground-floor retail announcements.
The space next door to Poole’s is being worked on. This is the spot for another one of Ashley Christensen’s restaurants, Poolside Pie. The timing of this post was on purpose as Christensen just won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef in the country this year. She’s the only chef in the state to win it.
Congrats to her and her entire team behind AC Restaurants!
Current site of Smokey Hollow Phase 3 along Peace and Harrington. April 2019.
The Smokey Hollow project along Peace Street is moving right along in waves with plans for phase 3 already coming to council soon. The developers, Kane Realty, are requesting a rezoning for the site called phase 3 and the request is to increase the height limit from 12-stories or 150 feet to 40-stories or 500 feet.
The request, found consistent with our city’s comprehensive plan and land-use map, has already been approved by the planning commission and will be coming to city council for approval in May or June of this year.
An extremely talented photographer and regular contributor over on the Community provided this aerial of the sites. I’ve reposted with edits and permission to show the scale of everything that’s going on in the area.
Kane Realty’s rezoning jumps from the 12 to 40 story height limit. There’s a 20 story limit as well so we can assume that their plans consist of something between 20 and 40 stories.
For more in-depth, jump on to the Community as we’ve been following everything but at this point in the development process, we can expect:
A large parking deck about 5 or 6 stories tall
The parking deck would be wrapped with apartments facing Johnson, Harrington, and Peace
The parking would be exposed to Capital but screened to make it better from an aesthetics point-of-view
A single mixed-use tower would sit on top with a combination of office and residential
With so much infrastructure here including road capacity, brand new sidewalks, a future cycle-track, and an upcoming bus-rapid transit route, there is a very strong argument for higher-density in this area.
It’s definitely part of a project that will make an impact and is single-handedly multiplying the resident and job count to this area by a factor of 10.
If you haven’t noticed, Wiley Elementary on St. Mary’s Street is undergoing an extensive renovation and expansion. The $24 million project adds 20,000 sq. feet of classroom and administration space as well as renovations to the 1923 building.
Improvements to the grounds are being made to address erosion issues and a more efficient parking/driveway is being added to improve parent drop-off. The construction should finish in Summer 2019.
The project page has a nice aerial shot of the construction as well, shown below.
Slowly but surely, the townhomes at The Saint are starting to look finished. These beauties, shown above, along St. Mary’s look pretty much finished except for the remaining sidewalk work.
