Jones_

That is the future "Uncommon". Pretty stupid name. Seems like a play on Stanhope Commons. Even without that, anything named Uncommon will undoubtedly be the most generic POS building you can imagine. Stop trying to appeal to people with your names stupid developers....you just sound like half rate business school dropouts. Also try building something that does not allow flatulence to be heard through walls and will not need the exterior replaced in 10 years. And set your lease rates to match local median incomes (or even say, 50% of them) and not to match the investor's expectations from the prospectus.

Interstingly I am sitting in Boston right now (Newton area but about to hop on the T and head to the harbor. Anyway, my thoughts... The downtown is and will fill up at a steady rate. It's pretty organic and not fueled by many out of State investors. The employers are small to medium sized and that is why its been not too rapid. I think this is healthier in the long run. I do not think Raleigh or the downtown has much identifiable culture though other areas do such as a large middle eastern presence west of NC State and a large Indian presence in Cary. Downtown is tech culture. The rising rents and real estate prices are pushing out the arts somewhat or at least halting new stuff like that. It's becoming more standardized in some ways commercially but also adding new high end clothes stores recently. The jury is out on whether those places stay in business. I hope so, but also want the lower revenue, creative stuff to find a foothold and be able to hang on. Public transit and transportation is a joke. The bus service is inadequate it uses an inadequate road system that exists in an inadequate urban fabric. Light Rail will not happen in my working lifetime (I am 45) Raleigh will struggle to be an Alpha City with Charlotte, Atlanta, DC and Even Nashville stealing the thunder in the SE. We lack the history of even a Charleston or Savannah. We will always be a 'nice place' with 'plenty of jobs', but that doesn't boost you to the levels I think you are talking about. Personally I think Raleigh is 'fine', but doesn't do much for the parts of my brain that need stimulated. It doesn't push the envelop on much of anything. Grabbing Dix from the State was the boldest thing ever around here. The modernist architecture is pretty cool and I think we have a higher share of that than other places. The university presence is huge and brings the little culture we have. But the lack of soul, lack of any real historic identity, leaves me feeling meh.

I haven't been since the tunnel was installed. Any idea if that is helping?

You know what planning in Raleigh amounts to? Just drawing a zoning map that matches what is already there. There are no road plans at all. They try to connect up a few things after the development has already happened. Streetscaping is about all we get here. Real planning would focus on what makes a city functional. A life tethered to cars, like my hero Edward Abbey states with the same ire I feel, is literally killing people, whether in instantaneous crashes or due to a life of sitting. The tax base in downtown has always subsidized the low density burbs so I say let them go. Sprawl is the enemy to virtually everything, with the environment, and your health being the two overarching umbrellas. It will absolutely use up this planet faster than if we lived efficiently. Government should be leading the way. I live on this planet and in this city too and don't think I have to accept the wrecking of my immediate and of the larger environments I live in.

I'm a regular at Blue Lotus. I learn to focus my energies more than worrying about mellowing. I have no intention of rolling over and accepting terrible outcomes when they are right there in my face. I look forward to your calm level headed support of historic preservation.

I can't believe people ask this stuff with a straight face. Most of that block is Federally and locally listed Historic register stuff. Even if it wasn't, Raleigh has less than 5% of its commercials buildings left that were standing in 1900. That's it. The uniqueness is because everything else was destroyed with impunity. They were built with materials and techniques no longer in use or available. The character of the buildings is irreplaceable. Age nothwithstanding, there is plenty of reason to maintain small, flexible, retails paces and human scale buildings in any and every urban setting. Taller is just taller, and not demonstrably better on any front. Go ahead and trot out some argument. You can build new crap anywhere. Like literally anywhere. Let me turn it around...what about this spot demands 40 stories? Nothing at all. How about we fix the suburbs and make some gridded streets with mixed use blocks and mixed use buildings out there instead of destroying historic blocks that already are perfectly laid out exactly as they are? Your way of posing these questions makes me very mad because it always is a teeing up of attempting to justify putting some glossy piece of crap in place of the rarest of rare. Raleigh has no culture, or soul now an had little back then. Few immigrants, very little pivotal or national level history (Lafayette, Henry Clay, and Grant's visit in 1865 few other little bits...), but it had some great local builders and architects. Thomas Briggs and Julius Lewis were two of them and both of their hardware stores are on this block. Their work is a good as the famous names that worked here (Jacob Holt, Richard Upjohn, William Percival et.al.). Even if you don't 'get' historical buildings there should be enough objective stuff here to buy into.

If you could building around and over the building, maybe, but mostly my response is hell no. Stronger than that really. some of those properties like Kimbrells and Big Easy are not even remotely historic and can do whatever they want but all the rest should be preserved, absolutely, even if that means the City is forced to buy them. This is a soulless, characterless city and to rip up the only block that has any of that left at all, is suicide.

I've long thought news places come on here for ideas for articles. RE the mill site, I haven't been out there in a couple of years but addendums to their article from my memory...it looks like the dam started out as a shorter earthen (and probably wood) dam that was raised with the stone later. It looked like this mill used a millrace and the top of this dam to send water to the wheel and once it hit the wheel was back in the creek. My guess is it was an undershot wheel. This creek doesn't seem deep enough to send the water over a wheel from the top of the dam. The Fendol Bevers map of 1871 clearly names that branch of Marsh Creek "Mill Brook" and yet there is no millpond on it. There are dozens of millponds on the map so either he didn't draw it in because its implicit in the name or by 1871 the pond was empty. The arrival of the railroad stop in Millbrook about 15 years earlier might have made it cheaper to send stuff to nearby larger, more efficient mills like on Crabtree Creek. The Bevers map doesn't even show a small farm road heading down to the site (hashed line roads if you look at the map). It may have gone idle during the Civil War too and never brought back into use. If it went idle in the 1850's or 60's the grindstones are possibly still on site somewhere, buried in the duff. They may have also been carried off to another mill. The timbers would have rotted away long ago. The parking lot of the Catholic Church on Falls of Neuse has the cemetery associated with a house that apparently was Federal style in appearance (can't find that paper now, but this was written in the 1970's trying to document rapidly disappearing stuff in the County). It is the closest house I am aware of that could have been associated with that mill and would correlate with the oldest dates for the mill in the article.

Yeah the area between Clark and Wade popped before SE Raleigh did...the Proximity to Cameron Village, NC State and Hayes Barton was eventually going to do that to what is/was left of Oberlin Village. I noticed something yesterday finally in my area of east Raleigh...there are numerous houses that have tolerance signs or flags of some type...right next to their security company sign. I dunno...It just strikes me as hypocritical...the security signs feel like a big middle finger to all the people who have always lived in the area. If I were to get a security system, I'd just stick to the doorbell systems or put up a few cameras inside. Or put the sign in the rear of the house ...nobody breaks in through the front door anyway. Real gentrification seems like more than just dollars and cents...there is an approach and attitude that overlays things too, and people seem to pick up on that. Who knows...I may lose my TV one day or bike, but I prefer that to 'sending a message' about the security level of my house.

Walkable, street grid style ITB areas are probably passing 50% gentrified on the east side of DTR. I give it 10 years before everything that can be majorly rehabbed or torn down at a profit, is done within that area. ITB entirely could be 25 years but not all areas ITB have the downtown feel of places like 5 points.

I think you mean just connect Centennial to Maywood...? Not sure how that no brainer did't happen.

And by way of Maywood, a direct shot to Dix Park. Too bad this all can't be finagled into some sort of entertainment/recreation axis. Maywood does have a bike lane now. I can imagine bike shares ripping along from the Park to a game and back using both the greenway and Maywood. Fill in the light industrial stuff off Maywood with more stuff like Trophy and you start to get to this somewhat.

I know city staff get paid to do this, but it might e fun to try and sketch out a useful network of curb separated bike lanes and cycle tracks within the individual cities. Useful enough to get a bike to within easy walking distance of most of a downtown. Maybe we are so backed into a corner on this that we might could consider an elevated cycle path/track in places. There are a fair number of people biking around downtown Raleigh at all hours of the day now.

Like I said above, it's for the park too. The park is meant to be a destination. Its just like a giant vacant lot now but will be 7 acres with a bunch of stuff when complete. Park Plan

The parking garage is going to serve the park too, haha. No that is actually why it is so big. They town bought and tore down several houses for a downtown destination style park according to some folks I know who live near downtown Cary.

I don't think the whole bridge is open yet. Half of it will have to take the north bound traffic while the other span gets built...notice the north bound traffic is still on the old span.

Both projects are by Lambert Development. The finished stuff is Townhouses with all but 2 sold to date. The cleared lot has changed proposed site plans a time or two. I think Lambert is also doing a row of townhouses on Clark at Enterprise and I think I read about another spot too.

Gotcha. I excluded that because I assumed it was excluded from development as protected wetlands or Neuse buffer rules.

Penmarc and Cargill are both not near 40 acres without cutting into lots of existing stuff. At Penmarc that would mean really pushing up into the neighborhood of existing mill houses or crossing Saunders St somehow. You can easily eyeball this by knowing that a standard downtown square block is exactly 4 acres. Cargill all the way to Hammond gets closer to 40 acres.

I'm surprised, but also not surprised that developers think people will want a townhouse near that thing.

Sorry to be an idiot...is the Amazon warehouse down by White Oak and 70?

Exactly this. Berger and Moore just sent the memo based on the form letter in the RNC handouts. It is their last ditch, behind the scenes, attempt to stop it.

Do hotels brands or franchises tend to work with certain developers? Just wondering because the One Glenwood folks seem to have a good nose for where to develop and Origin would certainly benefit by coat tailing along with them.

When things stopped, about a days worth of steel studs had gone up (those have since been removed). Since the planned height was 7, this matches other buildings recently built with up to 6 stories of wood on a concrete pedestal. Seems like the answer to your thought is yes.

I read in the N&O today that the crane next to Target is coming down. An arbitrator sided with the contractor and the developer is SOL. No further explanation about the dispute or when the site could ultimately have a new owner who would develop it.