Thank you for the link and post! 
I just provided my feedback and I am so glad that they asked! 
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Moving off Fayetteville St? 
I did put staying downtown as #1. Briggs is such a great, historic building, but the museum lacks exhibition space, and other amenities. I enjoy the exhibits, but always get a little overwhelmed because each section is so dense with information.
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I did too, and I even put that in the comment section at the end.
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I’m curious what other locations they would consider. I do like it on Fayetteville St due to it being pretty close to the Capital and other museums.
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How awesome would it be - at least in my mind - for them to get a hold of the old Union Depot, and restore it as the city museum. Plenty of room for a cafe, outdoor seating, maybe even a couple train cars!!
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Now that is an awesome idea! 
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That’s really a great idea because whoever bought the old Union Depot was likely going to have to negotiate with the City for the adjacent land and fire station anyway. If the city owned all of it, that would really simplify it because they could sell off the whole chunk that they didn’t need for the museum in one go.
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Oh, wow. That’s actually the best leverage the city has over this site, although landmark designation of the facade wouldn’t hurt.
310 W Martin is just a fire department office. It and Central Fire Station #1 are due to be vacated. Their replacement is going, as of Feb 2024, to be on a 2-acre site facing MLK, south of Memorial Auditorium. Missed opportunity to build a mixed-use fire station.
Yet the 2018 Civic Campus Master Plan only considered the existing city hall block, not the half-block they owned across Nash Square. It mentions 310 W Martin but only as one of the offices to be consolidated into East Civic Tower. It does not mention Fire #1. The little #3 blob here doesn’t highlight the city’s full footprint on that block, which includes Fire #1 to the northeast and the parking lot to the northwest. (Likely excluded are the townhouses at the southwest corner of the block.)
Though this is all in a world where the city holds the half-block. Highwoods (ugh) has assembled the northwest corner of the block, though they probably don’t have the fiscal capacity at this time to add to those holdings. Having just skimmed the campus master plan, its big selling point is that the city can break its existing leases, including Briggs Hardware (#5 above) and presumably move those uses into East Civic. Although the city also owns Exchange Place #6 above), and even though it’s not historic it does have a lot of street-level frontage across from the Y.
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The new Fire Station 1 will also have the admin space. The city plans to sell off this ~half block anyway once East Civic Tower and New Fire Station 1 are completed. Keep just the depot space for a new city museum and rezone the rest for 40 floors and issue a RFP for a competition to sell it and get something tall.
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Having taller buildings facing Nash Square on all sides makes a lot of sense to me.
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I’ve heard it said that the old Union Station has basically nothing left worth preserving - that everything that was ever nice about it, has been stripped away long ago.
Have you (or anyone here) ever been inside that building? I haven’t. There are plenty of before/after pictures of the exterior, but I can’t find pictures online, historic or recent, of the interior. I’d love to know what it looks like in there.
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Yeah, the building looks thoroughly stripped of its exterior character.
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No, I’ve never been in, so I defer to @John on this. (oops, I misread John, so strike that) I would not surprised that it is stripped of everything inside, but I wonder how much of the original footprint is still existing within - the building structure. It would be a major undertaking, but as a museum you wouldn’t necessarily want it to return it to its original floor plan. Restore the outside, make the inside modern exhibition and event spaces, and then give us back the clock tower!
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I’ve never been inside, but my comment about it being stripped is in regard to its outside!
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Based on historic exterior photos and the fact it was built in 1890 I imagine the interior being comparable to City Market. But it stopped being used as a train station way back in 1950, when the Southen finally moved out (Seaboard departed earlier, in 1942) so it’s been used as a mere office building for quite a long time - more than half its existence, in fact!
Even just restoring the exterior details, let alone the clock tower and the interior, would be an enormous undertaking.
If feasible, I’d love to see it happen - but I don’t think it would be worth the huge, nine-figure project that I expect it would turn into - especially when we can’t even put City Market to better use than an event venue.
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It would be amazing to have that restored, but yeah, it would cost a ton. Would probably need a wealthy donor to foot a big portion of the cost in order to make it feasible b/c I’m not sure that it would fly to spend taxpayer dollars. I love the idea though.
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It’s pretty much totally stripped of all of its character. It’s a damn shame. The only thing left is its basic massing.
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That building looks/looked fucking gorgeous. A damn shame. This is exactly the kind of building that is/was worth protecting.
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