ncbrian
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Posts posted by ncbrian
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It will take time and a good stretch of good economic development in Winston-Salem but I think eventually, all of those infill lots downtown will be put to good use and downtown will return to something like its former glory.
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Hanberry's on Trade St has closed. In its place is Gotham Park Home, a furnishings and crafts store.
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How do you guys feel about a Mcdonald's down-town?
Would not hurt to have one downtown though I would prefer a Wendy's instead. Would do quite well if located near the bus terminal for people to grab and go something on their trips. It probably will not affect other businesses downtown as the people who would normally get something at McDonalds probably would not get something a lot better for a bit more money and lot more fresher. On the other hand, people may actually get breakfast there as there is a real lack of breakfast options downtown so getting a Bacon Egg Cheese biscuit will be a real choice for many people.
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The old Towne Jeweller's store on 4th and and Cherry is becoming Towne Markets. From a posted sign on the door, I gather that it will be like a boutique type of store where different vendors have a portion of the floor space but there will be a central cash register for all of the sales. There will a display for an artist, an antique food dealer, a speciality food dealer, an arts & crafts store and perhaps a bit more later on.
It will be a nice addition but I wonder about its success as the facade of the store is not very inviting and this is the kind of store that will rely heavily on casual pedistrian traffic. You could walk right past it without knowing it existed. Let's hope that is taken in account on the renovation through the addition of a large street-level window display.
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Well for the Ben and Jerry's ice cream place, I did not vote for the downtown location. As much as I would want more retail downtown, these kind of places rely heavily on being a destination type of retail and given some of the barriers currently in place for viable downtown retail, it may be premature to do so for such a place downtown. As for the other locations and their viability, in a cross post on another board, I gave my views of the vote choices:
Stratford Road area - heavily built up road means it will be difficult to access from the road unless within a shopping center, Thruway centre already has Baskin Robbins and on the other side of the street, Blue Ridge ice cream is there.
Miller Street/Cloverdale Avenue - Mayberry's is an old standby with a decidely older clientile. Fair bit of commerical development that draws heavily on the hospital.
Hanes Mall Boulevard - heavily built up with quite a few ice cream establishments (Moola's, Carvel etc...).Not much open space available except at Little Shoppes development.
Downtown - no other retail draw in the area, residence levels currently low, large weekday worker population, limited street parking; may fit in with the Arts District culture but is there enough business?
Southeast Gateway - new development with large resident areas around it. large education section from Salem College, NCSA, WSSU. Tourists from Old Salem and development will draw people from the YMCA.
Robinhood Road/Peacehaven area - large commerical area with no known similar businesses. Residential areas abound.
University Parkway/Hanes Mill Road area - somewhat off the beaten track and unlikely to draw in people from other parts of the city unless located next to the new theatre.
Given all of that, my choice in the site selection would be the SouthEast gateway as there is quite a lot of business potential in the area with high foot traffic and it will gain the prestige of being located in a new upscale development.
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I was wondering: are there any supermarkets on the east side of Hwy 52 in the downtown area. To the best of my knowledge, there are supermarkets in the Stratford/Miller St area, Peters Creek Parkway and up on University but I do not know anything about the section of downtown on the other side of 52.
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Oh God no. Theme parks are cheap facsimiles of things. Main Street, USA, at Disney World is a cheap cartoon of a real American main street. Old Salem is THE REAL THING!!! Faithfully restored property that adheres to the Secretary of the Interior's standards for historic preservation. There's no reason to treat it like Gatlinburg, TN.
Old Salem is already one of the top 2-3 tourist destinations in NC. We tamper with that success at our peril.
I agree; Old Salem is just about right where it should be. The re-enactors provide a nice semblance of what life was like then without veering into Williamsburg-type of place. Ironically enough this makes it more real than having scores of people walking around in some sort of fossilised outdoor museum. A hotel tower in this area is the last thing it needs though having a hotel in the nearby Gateway development would work as it would also be within walking distance of the NCSA.
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That's great that national chains are looking into downtown! I have always thought that to entice people to come to downtown and eat you need a national anchor there but sometimes that isn't always the case.
Continuing this sub-thread about downtown coffe shops, Scott Sexton has a column out talking just about that in the Journal. The lede:
Christina Sin and Gena Knighten have been down this path before. Though they're nominally competitors because they both own coffee shops downtown, they have something in common.They're small business owners trying to compete with larger chain stores.
When Starbucks Coffee Company opened a spanking new branch last year in the lobby of the Embassy Suites Hotel - less than a block from the Sin coffee shop and three from Knighten's Chelsee's - both women swallowed hard.
Making a living at $3 a shot isn't easy, even without a behemoth around the corner.
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Which brings up the question on what sort of retail, non-food, would be viable downtown. Arts and Crafts work well on Trade St but what would entice people to come downtown to shop?
Getting back to restaurants again, there was an announcement early this year that a casual dining sort of resturant with a California feel would go into the vacated space at the southwest corner of Marshall and Fourth, the old United Way offices. Haven't heard anything about it since the announcement but then again would an additional casual dining resturant work downtown? Within a stone's thrown away you have Foothills, Camel Cafe, Cat's Corner, Bistro 420, Mellow Mushroom, the hotel cafe and Dudleys on the Park all serving similar foods. The Downtown Thai is a good alternative so what would work well there? Before it closed, Kabab's Indian cuisine seemed to draw a good steady crowd. Vegeterarin restuarant may have some success too. WS Prime is good high end steak place, could we do well with another? My preference which I have mentioned before is that downtown needs a seafood restaurant first and foremost.
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It appears we may have some shoppes opening in the Nissen building downtown
Quizno's, Bruegger's Bagels, and Dilworth Coffee interested in Nissen Retail Space Journal Aritcle
While this would be more for the lunch crowd and I'm a bigger proponent of local business, it's great for downtown when national chains start to think it's a good area to have location in as well!
So the Cheesecake cafe touted for the street level retail space is not going to happen?
The Quiznos shop will be a good addition when you consider that there is a lack of fast food retail downtown. Tokyo Sapphiro's takeout and some of the other sandwich shops cover part of the market but there is ample capacity for more and the location is far enough from the Subway on Main St so as not to take business away from there. If they are open late in the evenings, they could get a fair bit of trade from the hotels.
As for the coffee shop, we are not lacking for coffee downtown.
While I would prefer local indigenous retail stores downtown to foster a sense of community and identity, these franchises do provide a bit of stability for downtown.
Notice also that much of the latest announcements(Marshall McGreatys, Skippys, Downtown Billards renovations etc..) have been around the Marshall and Fourth St area which ties into the Twin City Quarter project around the hotels/convention center. Hopefully when the One Vista Place and the Civic Plaza projects are completed on the south side of Fourth St from Cherry to Liberty, then we will have a solid downtown core.
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Is this the 1 story building? It would be nice if they would tear it down and built something larger...but, I guess since they only have 17 employees, that's not going to happen.
It is a pretty much an unremarkable building indistinguishable from any building you would see in any industrial park. It is on the sunken side of 1st street and is pretty easy to miss if you drive past it.
I concur that it would be nice to tear down the building. There are some surface parking lots surrounding the building and then there is that hollow behind it that goes under Business 40 and stuck in the middle of the hollow is a steel column supporting a billboard. It is not a desireable location by any stretch. In fact, I am probably of the mind to contour the land, plant some trees there and make it an extension of the strollway. The office buildings on Cherry and 1st can be much better locations for the current building's tenants.
On a side note, walking past the One Vista Place development, I see that the work crews are gutting the interiors now. It probably will be a while before they start tearing down the buildings but at least there is progress.
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That is unusual for a prospective business to be booted out after all of the announcements and preliminary construction. My guess is that it is probably a personal dispute but we should find out soon enough what the cause is.
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Does anybody have a list of the bars, cafes, restaurants and similar places in the Burke St area?
I would probably define the area as including 4th street from Broad St to where 1st St meets up with Hawthorne, essentially most of the West End thus including places like the Filling Station and West Cafe but not places along West End Blvd.
Also, I see that I now have reached Whistle-Stop ranking. How many more posts before the next level?
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I like to think of Charlotte from what I have seen of it in my few visits as a right size city: large enough to handle all of the modern needs and desires of a city yet small enough that you do not feel overwhelm by it. I hope it sort of slows down its growth a bit so it does not start sprawling into a mess.
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How many conventions in Greensboro use both Koury and the Coliseum? I can't imagine there are many. If there is an actual market for this type of thing, Charlotte will soon steal all the business away because their convention center and arena will be a short walk or light-rail ride from each other.
I agree. I have spent two weekends now in the Charlotte area I am impressed with their downtown as a place of commerce and living. Plenty of restaurants and hotels, densely packed together, I can see the attraction of the city in drawing any sizeable conventions in this region. Once they have a better handle on retail in downtown ( more shops and business hours in the evenings and weekends), I can not see how any other city can compete really.
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I'm with Yadkin on this. I think the center should be doubled in size. It could be expanded onto the surface lots either across Sixth St or Marshall St. And, if it's expanded, there's no reason why it couldn't compete with the Koury Center and the center in Raleigh. The Benton CC has the advantage (at least as compared to Koury) of being downtown putting it close to the Arts District, the Steven's Center and within walking distance of Old Salem and West End. Its location is a marketing advantage over Koury which is in a sea of parking adjacent to a mall whose tenants are the same tenants that the convention visitors would find in their own local mall.
There is no question that the location of the Benton Convention Center is an attractive one considering what is in the area now and what is being constructed and planned. But my concern is still the same, nearly every decently size city in the country has a convention center and far too many of them turned out to be white elephants for the communities that had them built in anticipation of bringing a sizeable convention business to their city. While the Benton CC is under the management of the Twin City Quarter group, I doubt anyone in the private sector would be willing to pay the expense of constructing a new center. The question then becomes whether the city and/or county is willing to put money into this expansion at the expense of other projects in the city. It is like those fantasy jobs projections of building new stadiums where proponents tout thousands of jobs and high revenues for the community but never turn out to be even close to what they say if it can be measured at all.
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This is a nice short-term, minor fix, but I hope eventually it becomes realized that the center needs to be doubled, or really trippled in size (and the room for major expansion is there). Actually, it should probably be razed to make way for a major replacement because only then would it be truly competitive. After all, a convention center built in 1969 with no expansion, only cosmetic change is at the least outmoded. I think the opinion of folks in W-S, official and otherwise is still that they cannot compete with the other big three, although hopefully this is changing.
Question is though what kind of business the convention center could potentially attract if it expands its size. There are only so many conventions and trade shows around and as Greensboro has its own convention center to handle the bigger events in the Triad, I do not think Winston will be able to pull those events to its convention center. Regional small and mid -size events are the best Winston could probably do and you can not discount the fact that though Winston has a good number of hotel/motel accomadations, only a small portion of it is downtown.
Triad Photo of the Day
in The NC Triad
Posted
Morning breaking over God's Acre cemetary in Old Salem