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Downtown Hilton Garden Inn


RALNATIVE

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Love the view of Los Angeles from that second render, it's a shame the pool goers can't enjoy it!

 

Edit: I should point out, I didn't mean for that to sound snarky. I just think it's hilarious some of the things that pop up in these renders. That being said, this looks WAY better than the HGI in midtown Nashville, which has all the architectural bravado of a suburban Hampton Inn.

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I think we'd have to be pretty happy with this. Takes out one of the trashier lots in town at Turn Key, rounds out the west side of the intersection now the Ell is almost complete, and helps stitch the warehouse district and the Fayetteville St spine together. I mean....this looks a million times better than the Marriott....

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Yeah, it's good infill. When I first heard the intersection, I immediately though it was the SE corner, not the NW corner. The SE corner will be a good lot for development, too.

The draft downtown plan suggests the whole slice between Gale St and McDowell facing the Ell would be good space for a CC expansion. Thinking it over that might be good indeed...

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The draft downtown plan suggests the whole slice between Gale St and McDowell facing the Ell would be good space for a CC expansion. Thinking it over that might be good indeed...

 

Yes, I like that idea, and add an office tower and a hotel tower above at either end.

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I'd prefer to use that square entirely for office/hotel space and cannibalize the amphitheater to expand the convention center, which was the original plan. (They can put the amphitheater plenty other places).

That square meaning the sliver facing the El along McDowell?

@Euphorius, yeah there is a tunnel under McDowell for trucks to get in under the existing CC. I watched while it was being built and there were like 6 or so diagonal bays semis could back into, but it didn't look look like a future pedestrian connection. That'd be easy enough to put in if the amphitheater ever became CC expansion space though, which I am certain was the stated reason for that block being acquired in the first place. The amphitheater is more about helping pay for that acquisition with minimal addition capital invested than being part of the grand downtown design. I wonder now, perhaps it has become something the City and County want to keep and hence the different site being suggested for CC expansion….

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  • 2 months later...

Different.  The site mentioned in the article is the Enterprise lot.  The southern third of the block along the east side of McDowell directly north of the convention center.

I hope for something high-end and tall.  But based on their other 4 hotels they operate, I kinda feel like it will be neither of those.  $4 million for .57 acres!  Whoa.

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Yep,  TBJ has a quote from the hotel developer... "high-rise hotel of up to 12 stories high with about 175 rooms and its own structured parking deck".  Terrible.

http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/blog/real-estate/2015/07/winwood-hospitality-downtown-raleigh-nc-hotel.html

This hotel component should absolutely be added to 8-10 levels of condos or offices on this site to get the most out of this prime lot.  I wouldn't expect the hotel developer to pull that off though.  And 175 rooms might be the feasibility limit with the other 3 hotels on the way.

Residence Inn Salisbury St: 10 floors,176 rooms

Hilton Garden Inn/Homewood Suites: 13 floors

Wilmington/Lenoir Hotel: 12 floors

 

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Like an office tower, hotels feel dead without ground floor retail spaces. Does this one have any? Doesn't look like it. Marriott and Shearton both have done a nice job of supporting Fayettevile Street with their retail presence. A sandwich shop facing the CC would be all I'm asking for. 

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If all the hotels currently underway open up, will we have the requisite number of downtown hotel rooms sufficient to move Raleigh up one tier in the convention hierarchy?  I'm guessing we are about a 4th or 5th tier convention city right now, but would these move us up a notch?

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I would have to say for a southern city, Raleigh does exceptionally well in the bar scene. I've seen a number of bars in Raleigh that rival bars that I've seen elsewhere in cities like Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, and even NYC.

 

 

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Raleigh's bar scene is good for a city its size (best in the state, one of the best in the southeast). Its restaurant options downtown are on par for a city its size, and I think only Asheville and Wilmington can claim the same in NC. Its retail and entertainment options in other categories downtown are still lacking, severely.

Like many revitalizing downtowns it has developed asymmetrically and it has yet to slide every category over. Things that it still needs

-A Theater, or really two theaters, one to play hipstery indie stuff and the other to play the big titles. No, Marbles doesn't count.

-A stadium. You can point to the numbers and say it won't help economically and you may be right, economically. But socially, and in terms of how the city is perceived I still believe it does help.

-A grocery store - again really more than one. This, at least, looks like a problem that's about to be solved.

-A bookstore. I think it needs a central library as well.

-Other retail - quirky stuff, knick-knacks, specialized equipment. And then practical stuff like department stores.

 

Yeah you can get better beer in Raleigh than in Nashville, but you get an experience in Nashville. There are all kinds of different shops on and near broadway st. The city has bravely chosen an image for itself and cultivated that image. In Raleigh it's pretty much just beer and food. The city hasn't figured out what else it wants to be yet. Asheville's the only city in the state that has, imo. No city in the state ticks all the boxes though.

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I'd love to see a bookstore or more quirky/knick-knack stores, but unfortunately I don't know if rent prices will allow readily allow for stuff like that.  You're more likely to see chain retail probably.  That and bookstores aren't really clamoring for expansion like the old days.

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I wish the retail we had was clustered together better. If say, Raleigh Denim, Lumina, Holly Aiken and Trig were say all at the same intersection with Videri, Boulted Bread and Raleigh Wine Shop all lined up in a row off that same intersection you'd have a destination intersection that would draw in, and make successful, more businesses like these. Our physical form sucks...two old buildings next to a parking lot, next to a new building next to primary arterial road with synchronized lights allowing traffic to scream through. I'm sticking to my old argument that for it to really work, we need those rows of uninterrupted old store fronts. We need the charm of the old port in Portland ME. King St in Alexandria VA. King St in Charleston SC. And now that I think about it, none of these places have parking decks anywhere near their successful retail areas. They all seem to survive on a combination of locals and some tourism and not people in the 'burbs coming down on Friday evening. I've become a little sick of seeing the "more parking" comments on NewRaleigh. So my negative stance there is that it breaks up the continuous frontage and hampers the pedestrian environment...I regularly almost get hit by cars exiting the Alexander deck, PNC, or really any of the decks downtown. So I realize in NYC, retail and parking decks coexist...but this is out of necessity. In Charlotte the overstreet mall is space travel weird...in Minneapolis necessary due to cold weather. Anyway, classic, historical retail patterns and forms work best in a downtown and our leaders and cheerleaders alike are trying to crunch together some incompatible ideas in my opinion. So if we want real retail, I think we have to rework the vector the urban form is on, even perhaps to the detriment of (gasp) parking, and downtown being a destination party spot. 

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I wish the retail we had was clustered together better. If say, Raleigh Denim, Lumina, Holly Aiken and Trig were say all at the same intersection with Videri, Boulted Bread and Raleigh Wine Shop all lined up in a row off that same intersection you'd have a destination intersection that would draw in, and make successful, more businesses like these. Our physical form sucks...two old buildings next to a parking lot, next to a new building next to primary arterial road with synchronized lights allowing traffic to scream through. I'm sticking to my old argument that for it to really work, we need those rows of uninterrupted old store fronts. We need the charm of the old port in Portland ME. King St in Alexandria VA. King St in Charleston SC. And now that I think about it, none of these places have parking decks anywhere near their successful retail areas. They all seem to survive on a combination of locals and some tourism and not people in the 'burbs coming down on Friday evening. I've become a little sick of seeing the "more parking" comments on NewRaleigh. So my negative stance there is that it breaks up the continuous frontage and hampers the pedestrian environment...I regularly almost get hit by cars exiting the Alexander deck, PNC, or really any of the decks downtown. So I realize in NYC, retail and parking decks coexist...but this is out of necessity. In Charlotte the overstreet mall is space travel weird...in Minneapolis necessary due to cold weather. Anyway, classic, historical retail patterns and forms work best in a downtown and our leaders and cheerleaders alike are trying to crunch together some incompatible ideas in my opinion. So if we want real retail, I think we have to rework the vector the urban form is on, even perhaps to the detriment of (gasp) parking, and downtown being a destination party spot. 

Charleston has loads of parking decks near King Street. They're generally, though not entirely, set back about a half block from King. Savannah has plenty of parking decks too. In Alexandria public transportation is definitely more of a "thing" than it is here, nevertheless there is parking - mostly underground though. Alexandria's King St district successfully spans the GW Parkway (Washington Street) which is way more of a traffic arterial than you'll find anywhere in downtown Raleigh, as well as the Patrick/Henry one way pair which is quite similar to Dawson/Morgan in Raleigh.

I would also hold that retail doesn't need to be in a single, uninterrupted strip to be successful. In fact I would say it's more interesting when there are two dimensions to it, there is more of an "exploring" vibe than just "strolling". My hometown of Asheville is a good example of this.There are about a half dozen different districts all with somewhat different personalities. You can have disparate districts and you can have areas that are not lively, there just has to be an obvious connection between the lively places.

The two-dimensional, multi-district model is, to me, the one that Raleigh will have the most success pursuing. But there needs to be a very deliberate effort to choose which streets are to be the "connections" and make sure they're done right. Hargett and Martin I believe are planned to be the main connections between Fayetteville and the Warehouse district, and that is why Kane's building is possibly the most important downtown project in the pipeline right now. The N&O building, when it's eventually redeveloped, might be more important still. And that is also why a hotel at Cabarrus & McDowell with only the bare minimum retail is not that big of a deal.

I guess my point is that Raleigh needs to find its own way. Successful downtowns can take all forms.

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Charleston has loads of parking decks near King Street. They're generally, though not entirely, set back about a half block from King. Savannah has plenty of parking decks too. In Alexandria public transportation is definitely more of a "thing" than it is here, nevertheless there is parking - mostly underground though. Alexandria's King St district successfully spans the GW Parkway (Washington Street) which is way more of a traffic arterial than you'll find anywhere in downtown Raleigh, as well as the Patrick/Henry one way pair which is quite similar to Dawson/Morgan in Raleigh.

I would also hold that retail doesn't need to be in a single, uninterrupted strip to be successful. In fact I would say it's more interesting when there are two dimensions to it, there is more of an "exploring" vibe than just "strolling". My hometown of Asheville is a good example of this.There are about a half dozen different districts all with somewhat different personalities. You can have disparate districts and you can have areas that are not lively, there just has to be an obvious connection between the lively places.

The two-dimensional, multi-district model is, to me, the one that Raleigh will have the most success pursuing. But there needs to be a very deliberate effort to choose which streets are to be the "connections" and make sure they're done right. Hargett and Martin I believe are planned to be the main connections between Fayetteville and the Warehouse district, and that is why Kane's building is possibly the most important downtown project in the pipeline right now. The N&O building, when it's eventually redeveloped, might be more important still. And that is also why a hotel at Cabarrus & McDowell with only the bare minimum retail is not that big of a deal.

I guess my point is that Raleigh needs to find its own way. Successful downtowns can take all forms.

Charleston and Alexandria are both dealing with only a single one of these unwieldy items...Charleston, parking decks....King isn't the same sort of artery as Patrick/Henry or Dawson/McDowell, and King in Alexandria is 100% uninterrupted urban fabric in every direction as the historic guidelines make it difficult to ever tear down anything let alone for a parking deck. Asheville, like Savannah, survives because the vastness of its charm, made it so, that despite destruction of much of it, much remains. The parking decks along Rankin and Walnut, and 240, unnecessarily cleaved downtown Asheville into several districts when it might otherwise be a continuous quilt. The multi-district model is great, when it's a natural occurrence like say Pearl/Alberta/Mississippi/Broadway/Burnside/Hawthorne in Portland Oregon, but here it's more like "well since we lost our nice continuous city, at least now we have districts!". For us, some of the districts are modern constructs. Fayetteville St, City Market, and the Warehouse districts used to be one continuous commercial (and some residential)  fabric. Glenwood also grew onto the existing grid but is now cleaved off by dead end and one way streets. Will redevelopment ever stitch these back together? To some degree yes, as you've said with the N&O and also stuff like the L Building. But the districts will more or less remain. Fine. Can this work for Raleigh when it comes to producing the ambiguous retail people rightly would like to see? I am not convinced, unless very deliberate effort is put into branding them and focusing efforts and forcing some things into place. Perhaps some districts are better suited for certain types of stuff. Warehouse and Person for clothes, art, and generally walk in and brows seems logical. I definitely do not ever see a nice quilted downtown that will have an even distribution of shopping options across it's entirety ever returning. I suppose I get frustrated when I hear "we need more retail!" when no further thought is put into it beyond that want/complaint. I want to get into the limitations on it, where it might work best, why there is so little of it now and that discussion is both general in nature and specific to Raleigh. 

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