Raleigh-area Mall / RTP Redevelopments

Make Raleigh Greater Again!
#mrga

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Stopped by the Restoration Hardware in North Hills today. It’s actually a pretty fun time. It was like being in a museum but you could touch the stuff and walk around with a drink. I’m not in the market for a $10,000 couch, but it’s nice to pretend. I know Raleigh has a certain small crowd that’s always dressed to the nines with fancy hair and make-up, and I see them at places like GEM, North Hills, etc. but it was kind of comical to see people who appeared to get dressed up to go to a furniture store.

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I would never get dressed up to go furniture shopping. I don’t need to be validated by RH sales people or the others who are shopping there.

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I had a $15 flannel shirt from Amazon on because I had been getting a haircut right before. No one judged me too harshly once I had a glass of pink champagne

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Quit being a communist. You live in a luxury condo. Went to RH Friday night with Boltwoman. Good time, good atmosphere!

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Communist? That’s funny.

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The new Standard Food building is going up in the NHID district.

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Shot in the dark here, but I have been wracking my brain trying to remember if this project even existed:
On Glenwood just north of Crabtree there was a proposed development, maybe hotel and residential, but I can’t entirely recall. But it was a wild proposal – I distinctly remember the colorful rendering with fountains and a curved building.

It obviously never came to fruition, but wondering if others remember this proposal.

I want to say it was around 2005-2008 just before the recession. It is driving me nuts trying to remember it.

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I think it was called Soleil, and was going to rise between Crabtree Creek and the building where Perry’s Steakhouse is. There was a building on that lot which was demolished sometime in 2006 and I believe foundation work was actually started on the tower sometime in 2007 or 2008 but stalled shortly thereafter. If you look at a satellite view of the site, you can still kind of see the foundation grid poking through all the undergrowth.

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There was… “Crabtree North” I think it was called… but I remember it being initially a lot taller and denser than this image I found.

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So far none of these are what I was thinking. Specifically, this was on Glenwood between Creedmoor and Rembert. The renderings were similar to Crabtree North tho…

There was this, but this is at Glenwood and 440. “Glenwood Place”

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I think you may be talking about “Carolina Row”

This was all cancelled and replaced by the mediocre, absolutely bog-standard, surface parked garden apartment complex called Clairmont Crabtree.

This in turn led me to dub Crabtree Valley as “Disappointment Gulch”: the place where development dreams go to die.

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It’s weird as a 2020 move-in to think there was a time in recent memory people though the Crabtree Mall area would be interesting or up-and-coming.

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As recently as the 2002~2004 era, Crabtree was the spot in Raleigh.

Perhaps that only seems recent to me because I’m old. But my, how the mighty have fallen.

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St. Albans construction video update :building_construction::

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Sadly none of these are it…but I will continue my research. Maybe I’ll find it. Again, I wanna say it was across Glenwood from the old Golden Corral headquarters.

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Here is a rendering of the Soleil Center proposed in Raleigh by Crabtree Valley Mall.

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One positive outcome from all of this is that NH is seeing a lot of growth that resembles what these developments would’ve looked like. Another positive outcome is that all of these developments are relatively close to Crabtree via 440.

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Don’t forget the Kidds’ Hill project that was also floated in the mid-2000s.

In retrospect, all of these plans failing probably created the market space for North Hills to hoover up all the retail and office demand – and even though it has its critics, the format is much less car dependent than having a bunch of towers next to, but not actually connected to, one another.

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