It sounds like how I feel riding at NCMA on the weekend. Shelley Lake gets busy as well.
I saw a friend post pictures about trolls in their park as well. I was also planning on heading up to Maine for a vacation and came across a tour that included pictures of a troll up there. This led me to looking into this and finding where they are all placed.
In seeing the map, I’m a little disappointed in that the trolls doesn’t seem to be a unique thing. I do think they bring something to the park, but again just wish we had something that would be more unique. From my understanding, the power lines are a bit unique. So that’s still something. I keep going back and forth on it. It could also be a way for someone to decide places to visit. Let’s say you wanted to “check off” seeing each one.
Well they are super cool in person especially if you have never seen them. And they do have a following. In a world of the negative, if someone wants to chase trolls, I say the more the merrier. But to your point, I too was surprised to know how many places they exist.
I would argue that, while they are a recurring public art installation - each troll itself is absolutely unique from every single other one that’s been created.
I will say that I recently visited the trolls in Maine and the gardens they are located in, and it was definitely worth the trip. It’s a massive privately funded botanical garden, and while the trolls are no longer super unique, it was still cool to see and did a good job of driving visitors to different parts of the gardens. I think the trolls in Dix will have a similar effect.
Per the prior Dix Leadership Meeting, some interesting updates:
600K visitors to the Gipson Play Plaza in last 3 months; 420K unique visitors.
Note: Will be interesting to follow how the trolls impact visitation numbers overall moving forward. 1.1M total from mid year 2024 to mid year 2025, but I’ve noticed a LOT more activity in the last month.
Flower Cottage coffee shop+ concept to open Spring/Summer following permitting process that is nearly done.
New mural going up in November on the Brown Building.
City preparing to fully takeover the park as DHHS finishes its move out, including additional security.
Decommissioning of aging utility corridor followed by re-building it to meet current needs is going to be a major project - steam, chiller is out; gas, electric, fiber is in.
Removal of remaining old buildings on West Campus to begin January 2026 (thank goodness) - more on that below.
Water line tree removal area: Raleigh Parks is committed to using this as a greenway connection. Feasibility study getting started. Love to see this per the conversation earlier in this thread.
Progress also being made on the direct connection to the State Farmers Market.
A lot of outside interest in adaptive reuse of buildings on East Campus - seems like a lot of potential there but it’s going to be costly.
Removal of these old buildings in January will seriously open up the park’s 140 acres on west campus for new trails/connections, etc.
On the far left, South Saunders Street is seen running off into the distance. The black car on South Saunders is seen turning onto Rhamkatte Road, present-day Lake Wheeler Road.
This entrance was closed 31 July 1995 as work progressed on the Western Boulevard extension into downtown. Instead, Umstead Drive was re-routed to intersect with Lake Wheeler. The new entrance was opened the same day.
Visiting this scene today would place you under the Western Boulevard bridge that spans South Saunders Street. “
I’m doing the Troll Trek and there are thousands of people walking around the park right now. The park desperately needs more accessible sidewalks connecting the popular sections of the park (Gipson Play Plaza and Troll areas).
Yeah, my wife and I have had several close calls in the park with vehicles in recent years.
No sidewalks + very narrow roads + drivers that are mostly frantic trying to figure out if they’re in the right place for whatever they’re trying to do. It was already challenging before the trolls.
This will be a common complaint until it’s addressed. I just hope it’s addressed before someone gets hurt.
That’s odd because on the latest Bottom Line podcast they claim almost 900k visitors to the play plaza, seems like a massive discrepancy in what is apparently an important statistic. I’ve always wondered how they even count that. I’ve been to the play plaza at least 10 times and never been knowingly accounted for in any way?
Right. Some degree of variation is to be expected with the various ways of tracking, but Dix Park reports using placer.ai, which is mobile location data driven. If someone enters a specific part of the park and has a mobile phone, they’ll get counted and then there’s some machine learning element to normalizing the estimated values. It’s geo-fenced, so someone driving down Lake Wheeler wouldn’t get counted because of proximity.
My step daughter works at the play plaza and indeed has had to walk around with a counter and count people. I’m sure they just extrapolate from a subset of days.
Maybe I’m just not seeing it, but I don’t see anything that specifically addresses sidewalks. I mean, maybe the ADA Improvements category aligns, but that should have happened by now if that were the case.
