Aug

23

Raleigh’s City Plaza

Written by S. Beaumont and filed under Development 

Raleigh City Plaza RenderingAre you up to speed with the plans for Raleigh’s City Plaza? I started to research the project for a post and came across Bob Geary’s article on Indyweek.com. It covers everything from Jim Goodman’s initial plan for a raised public square to a current design and layout centered around shopping. The primary reason stated for accepting the latter was the activity retail environments can create. From within the story:

Why give so much of the plaza over to stores? Because they’re the most reliable “permanent, everyday activity generators,” says Assistant City Manager Dan Howe. And everyday activity is what’s sorely missing on the plaza today, since the two adjacent buildings—the BB&T and Bank of America buildings—and a number of the others nearby have no ground-floor retail space.

One very interesting fact about Raleigh’s City Plaza - it’s not Raleigh’s.

City Plaza is not actually owned by the city. It was given away when the two buildings were developed in the ’80s, together with the parking garage beneath the old Fayetteville Street, then the ill-fated Fayetteville Street Mall.

Thus, anything the city wants to do there today must be approved by The Simpson Organization (TSO), which owns the Bank of America building and the entire plaza up to the front door of the BB&T building.

Also notable within the story are quotes from Dana McCall of raleighing.com. Even though Raleighing is currently inactive, it’s extremely refreshing and invigorating that the Independent Weekly would reinforce what many of us already know - that local city bloggers are often a credible source of news and print-worthy opinion.

Read the full story here

(Images taken from the City of Raleigh website)

(Update: I just noticed that ‘The Raleigh Connoisseur’  and ‘Boomtown’ also recently covered the City Plaza development, also noting the Indy story. My apologies to them for the overlap. As noted in an earlier post, their has been a recent influx of local Raleigh bloggers and it’s obvious that many of us have our eyes on the same topics. The good thing for readers is that this provides more choices and outlets to hear about and discuss the news. In the future, I guess I should use my own Raleigh feed reader to scan the headlines before breaking out the pen and paper…)

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