Their locations are very suburban development, would be interesting if so…
I’m with you Jake. This post prompted some reflection, and a subsequent tweet.
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I think Macy’s and Ikea are both starting to build smaller more urban stores and Kimbrell’s space would be great for either one.
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Sign me up for a small format urban Ikea every day of the week. As long as we are dreaming, I’ll toss in my desire for an urban Apple Store.
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I don’t use Apple products. Could we get 2 urban Ikeas instead?
I’m probably getting to the age where I should stop buying their furniture, but I like it and I really enjoy putting things together. I’m still very bitter about the one in Cary falling through, but even a small format one in DTR would be great.
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I, for one, loved the Fayetteville Street Mall. However, nobody consulted with me before they reopened the street to traffic 
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I didn’t live here when it was in place. Why did they ever get rid of this?
Could have turned into so much. Compare similar pedestrian streets in Boulder, CO
and Burlington VT.
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I was in college when it was still here. It was usually dead when I went downtown. At the end of college I spent a week in Denver and saw their 16th Street Mall and thought it was pretty awesome and wished Raleigh’s Fayetteville Street Mall could replicate that level of activity. By the time I moved back to Raleigh 6 years later, Fayetteville Street was being reopened and the old Mall was gone.
I think it was partially due to timing. DT was in the infancy of starting to come back to life, whereas the majority of the time the Mall was in place, downtowns all across the country were in severe decline.
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I’ve been to both of these places and the Fayetteville Street Mall just doesn’t compare. The streets are a different size. The buildings that align it are different. The business makeup is different and the local culture is completely different.
I’m of the mindset recently that any talk of making Fayetteville Street a ped mall again is completely wrong. I love ped malls but it shouldn’t be Fayetteville Street. DTR is just not dense enough (we need more residents, more office, more retail) yet to really fill the street with active uses. So sure, maybe one day but not in my lifetime.
If you look at the old photos of the Fayetteville Street mall, all those benches, planters, and fountains, I see that as filler, just urban clutter, to make the large street feel cozier. The two photos from VT and CO above don’t have that.
What other streets should be a ped mall? It should be one that’s smaller in size with an already growing momentum of retail. (ahem, Smoky Hollow is trying to do this today) City Market is another spot where the street could be a ped street, no big changes needed. (at first anyway) Just need to land that big new tenant for the main building.
Seaboard may have one also. The warehouse district would look great with one but I don’t see a good spot for one. Maybe 300 West Martin could be closed down but we need more retail spots on the northern side.
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^ This
It was definitely timing. To make matters worse, Raleigh removed its pedestrian mall just as downtown was making its comeback. While it had become unkempt and dated, there was no reason to completely remove it. They could have just renovated it and made it the sort of place where people would want to be. Just imagine if we had improved it rather than removed it now that we have the social district approved for this very area! It would have been awesome.
The mall could have been renovated to convert to a parade route as well by pushing the hardscape features, fountains, statues/art to the sides and allowing for a wide center lane for a parade route This would have made the areas nearer the buildings more intimate and interesting for al fresco dining and events, while still allowing for street festivals, parades, food truck rodeos, etc. Retractable bollards could have been installed to protect pedestrians when cars were not allowed.
I suppose that we can still quasi make this happen if we removed the street parking and added to the pedestrian experience on either side of the street. The only difference is that the street remains priority for cars and closed for special pedestrian events instead of vice versa
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I am going to have to disagree with you here. Fayetteville is a double ended dead-end street that ceremonially links 2 major icons of downtown (Capitol and Performing Arts Ctr), and I think it’s a perfect street for a ped mall for a city the size of Raleigh, and this is especially true given how often the street is used for festivals throughout the year. Even in the Winter, it’s easy to imagine Christmas markets, temporary ice skating rinks, etc. utilizing it as a community asset, and it does all this without affecting thru-traffic within the city.
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I agree with some of your points. The planters and other things make it dated. Perhaps the right move would have been to do a project to modernize it, rather then converting it back to a street. That ship has sailed though.
I think it would not be a big stretch (financially or otherwise) to make it half and half for a while. Install some bollards that can easily be put up on - say Friday afternoon through Sunday night. Especially with the social district designation. Allow restaurants and bars to set up outdoor tables, etc.
Have it a car street on weekdays, and a pedestrian mall on weekends. Do this on a temporary basis for a few years and see how it goes. before going full blown with it.
I think the other candidate for this would be Glenwood South.
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That makes sense. It works well for events. My perspective is really for the non-events days, the off-hours times, which is more common throughout the year. I just think it’s too big. If we mall it up again, I just don’t see it looking to active during lunch on weekdays, mornings it would be very quiet. Summers would be quiet until the evenings when people start coming out.
I just worry it would still have this reputation of being too quiet. It would take lots of retail and humans to make it look vibrant. You can get more vibrancy around a smaller street with less people and less retail and the reputation of it being a place to be becomes easier. I’m open to hearing a plan that includes more than just closing Fayetteville street though as a retail business component is needed. (all that lobby space is not helping)
Also, I think I’m addressing a scenario where the city has to pick 1 street to close. My first pick would not be Fayetteville Street.
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“If we mall it up again, I just don’t see it looking to active during lunch on weekdays, mornings it would be very quiet. Summers would be quiet until the evenings when people start coming out.”
I’m of the belief that we get the experiences that we design, and that’s especially true within the context of a rapidly emerging downtown, and with the city initiating the social district in this area, the street is ripe for a better experience.
I agree that there’s no way that the city is going to reinstall the pedestrian mall, but I do think it’s fair to talk about giving more space to pedestrians by eliminating the street parking and widening the sidewalks on either side by ~8 feet.
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Oh the horror!! Where would people park when they came downtown??
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I agree, they at least need to make the pedestrian experience better, if nothing else. I’d really prefer the street be closed. People who love their cars can park on intersecting streets.
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They’d park in a garage!
In Miami Beach, street parking is discouraged by making it much more expensive than parking in a city garage. As people choose to park in the garages as a result, the city has slowly been transforming streetscapes that have resulted in fewer parking spaces on the street while improving the pedestrian experiences. They are doing all of this within the context of thousands of housing units that don’t have their own on-site parking and tons of visitors daily arriving by car.
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Hell yeah. A better pedestrian experience is what we all want.
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