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Just came across a rendering - new to me - of the East End development near the Iron Works site. It shows an 11-story office building with some apartments. Not sure how feasible the office portion is given the current market conditions, but thought it was still worth sharing!
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The project has been stalled for the past year plus. Does anyone know what’s going on with it? Are any of these additional buildings actually happening?
Only news Ive seen is I think they might have aquired the empty warehouse across the street, sort of shown in the foreground of this render. Edit: Confirmed that Atlas Stark bought the warehouse. Its currently listed for rent on their website and they have a render up of it basically the same but with a paint job and some new windows.
Sure would love to see some of those sidewalks get built.
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This render is about 4 or 5 years old I think lol
I drove by there this morning and saw that the empty warehouse is now painted in the same East End Market color scheme with the logo on the side. Saw that they had recently purchased, but it now matches the building across the street.
Would love to see some of the sidewalks in that rendering go in that area. Desperately needed all around there and Iron Works IMO.
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Triangle Rock Club at Salvage Yard is opening tomorrow, 12/5, at noon. Members only tomorrow and Friday, then open to the public starting Saturday.
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It’s been said a million times this thread but man, I went to the RIW Christmas market today and the lack of pedestrian connectivity is such a pain. They had the main street closed for booths, so there was no connectivity from Whitaker Mill to the parking deck. Drivers were confused, u-turning on WM as masses of pedestrians darted across Atlantic when the lights seemed ok… just chaos.
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It’s only a matter of time until a driver kills a pedestrian at this intersection. The city has dropped the ball by not requiring at least a signaled crosswalk.
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Sadly someone will likely get hit and killed here. We will then have developers and a city who will finally take pedestrian safety seriously here and will get a proper pedestrian crossing of some sorts a few months later.
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It’s annoying to look at this as a planner. This is an example of what not to do. I don’t understand how the city didn’t see the need for a crosswalk here. There could at least be temporary crosswalk(s) here, until the road is repaved or something.
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Yeah, this is an example of the city doing virtually nothing and the developer doing the ‘spend fiscally’ shrug. Major LAME in so far as connectivity considering the TWO dev’s across one street built out by the same firm (one of which includes ‘outside market’ funds).
Should the city have more of a ‘progressive’ role… ?
Well, that depends I guess, but looking in from the outside if on foot on the corner of Whitaker / Atlantic headed to / from either spot for some good fun, it’s both hard to describe the experience as ‘good’ therefore hard to imagine the developer really loves the outcome unless they’ve never played frogger themselves — but they also didn’t spend the damn money to make it 
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I wonder if all the pie in the sky talk about pedestrian bridges has gotten in the way here.
I think there is some policy where developers can build a sidewalk just along the frontage of their property, but the city and DOT won’t spend money to build a sidewalk or a crosswalk that doesn’t connect to an existing sidewalk somewhere. The extremely patchy nature of the sidewalk network in the area means that any project that builds a crosswalk to RIW will be, big because it has to connect to an existing contiguous sidewalk somewhere.
A sidewalk along the west side of Atlantic all the way down to Hodges, with a crosswalk over Hodges, and from there over the bridge to the greenway, is one option I see.
West along the north side of Whitaker Mill all the way to Wake Forest Rd, with a crosswalk across to the existing sidewalk on the west side of Wake Forest is another.
Anyway it seems to me that the city clearly dropped the ball by not making them put in sidewalks and crosswalks when Dock 1053 was built. Again I ask if dangling the fanciful idea of a pedestrian bridge was a distraction and got in the way.
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The developer in this case actually put in nice sidewalks on all sides of their development. But seems the city decided this signaled 35 mph intersection must be walled off by a guardrail and get no signal or crosswalk, making the sidewalks basically useless. Your options are nice new sidewalk to nowhere or walk in the street on the other side of the guardrail right beside a nice new useless sidewalk. Its honestly some of the dumbest pedestrian infrastructure I’ve ever seen. Then once you get done jumping the guardrail and playing frogger across the stroad, youre greeting by either walking in an active intersection or walking up a steep hill covered in loose pine straw.
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I see why the city wants a guardrail on this portion of Atlantic, the roadway is significantly elevated relative to the properties on the east side of the road. Could easily imagine a car launching over the northeast corner of the intersection down into a crowd of people at RIW if the guardrail wasn’t there. The guardrail needs to be there, but I can’t help but think that there’s a better alternative to allow pedestrian access to cross Atlantic.
Maybe they can put a break in the guardrail big enough to allow a crosswalk but not large enough that a car could pass through? Combine it with significant calming on that portion, does the north bound section of Wake Forest Rd/Atlantic going up the bridge really need to be 2 lanes?
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It’s definitely not a straightforward problem, but as noted the current experience is actively dangerous. Holding a toddler in my hands and attempting to jump a barrier and climb pinestraw, as noted, was super imposing. I almost left and went home.
The barrier is definitely there for a reason. I think a crosswalk on the south side of WM may be the most viable, terminating at the existing cutout here. But there’s not really room for a sidewalk on the opposite side without significant changes to a separate property.
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This is clearly another example of “urbanism that you drive to”, and it’s likely planned to be just that. While I applaud the re-use of these older buildings into something much more useful, the development of both the east and west side of Atlantic are straddling a commuting artery for north Raleigh, and the priority has always been the car.
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I think the solution is obviously a small gondola system.
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I get that it’s set up with the guardrail preventing some Dukes of Hazzard level idiocy which requires a walkaround from the mid-level of the development near Lil Rey’s back up to the intersection / crosswalk ( ** went to Lil Rey’s the other night for their training BTW, got some free grub, pretty decent - should make a nice addition to the options here for food / bev - not the super value street food tacos some on hear might still want but I digress…) BUT the lack of DIRECT cross walk linking back to Dock 1053 is absolutely because of some decisions made when Grubb built that out that simply don’t mesh with how RIW came together. This just seems to be a place where the city and developer really should’ve had more discussion because the outcome to cross this intersection is simply POOR and not going to change any time soon (**outside the imaginary pedestrian bridge across Atlantic between the two which will cost some good coin and won’t happen until well after they build out all the rest of the planned RIW additional buildings only exacerbating the obvious Poo-Poo connectivity issues…).
The rest of the Whitaker lack of sidewalks definitely creates a pile-on but the Atlantic intersection…Big WOOF.
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I mean, there are many Gucci-like folx on this site that drive to all sorts of urbanism… 
Atlantic, Wake Forest and Six Forks funnel people through town N-S, and much like Dawson and McDowell through DTR, could use functionally well-thought out ways to cross the road safely on foot to change the freeway mindset that values car above human.
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