Weed wacker and some wooden planks. We can make this city the city we want it to be.
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I’d like to see @GucciLittlePig operate a weed whacker.
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It’s quite the sight!
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Would be nicer if they could curve it and tie it into Saunders st or even have it cross Saunders and link right into lake wheeler
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That section of S Saunders between Cabarrus and Lenoir is super narrow and one-way. It would be a travesty to screw up that section of street.
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I agree. That one section is one of the most charming residential streets downtown, and its renaissance would be a shame to mess with now. @atl_transplant if you haven’t explored that stretch, I’d highly recommend taking the short walk down it.
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Definitely one of my favorite spots! Feels like an old world big city.
I meant for the tie in to be further south - see my last post
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It’s pretty cool that you already know that street as a recent transplant to the city. I’d bet that most Raleigh residents have never seen it with their own two eyes. Take a look at what it looked like back in 2007.
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Reminds me of sweet auburn and Reynoldstown in Atlanta.
Did the city give the residents grants to restore the homes?
I don’t know the process, but maybe someone else in the community does. Sorry.
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You’re talking about Rosengarten Park right? I thought there was a history page about it but my 10 second google search didn’t see it.
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A small local builder (the same one who went on to build Dorothea Gardens and now Caraleigh Commons) amassed the properties with the original intention of building row homes. I believe this was opposed by Boylan Heights, and so he renovated some and sold some of them to others to renovate. Eventually he built new houses on Rosengarten Alley as well (there historically had been houses there but they were long gone). He attempted to get a historic designation for the neighborhood, but the city didn’t approve it.
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Go for broke. 5,000 units or bust.
Anything less than 1,000 is an absolute, unforgivable travesty.
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Allow me to introduce you to my really, really extreme grid crayon map for the area spanning from southern downtown to downtown south.
The idea here is:
- Reconfigure the Dawson/McDowell/MLK interchange to a tight diamond
- Extend West St to a traffic light on MLK
- Extend Lake Wheeler to that same traffic light opposite West Street, with an underpass/bridge allowing Rocky Branch Creek and its greenway to pass beneath
- Convert the South Saunders street underpass to a pedestrian-only grade separation that can serve as the front entrance to Dix Park from downtown. If you’ve ever been to Chicago, this would be kind of like the underpasses under Columbus and Lakeshore Drive at the southern end of Grant Park, between the south loop and the museums campus.
-Redevelop Heritage Park with thousands of units. 2000 units, even just 1/4 affordable, still nets a 4x increase in affordable housing.
The trick here is that McDowell/Dawson sees really heavy traffic (about 45k AADT), so eliminating its interchange with MLK will be a tough sell - but the MLK-Western connector itself is somewhat overbuilt for the traffic it carries (24-29k AADT). Reconfiguring the interchange and adding a new signalized intersection at Lake Wheeler/West would probably be okay.
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This is fantastic! I really like the separation of Saunders into one way pairs to give the feel of it extending downtown. That many signals coming into downtown from 40 would be the only drawback IMO.
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One way pairs can handle the traffic. The signals would have to be timed, as they already are through downtown. I would suggest that they should be timed at 25mph rather than 35mph, which would allow for adequate access to downtown, but slow things down enough to discourage some drivers from cutting through downtown.
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Good point. Plus most if not all of those cross streets would be minor. You could run some pretty lengthy cycles. With it being a SR though I think you’d face a tough battle with the DOT trying to get it to be a 25 MPH speed limit on a multi-lane road.
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Regardless of the infeasibility of this pie-in-the-sky one way pair thing for Downtown South, I think the West/Lake Wheeler/MLK intersection, and converting the S Saunders underpass to pedestrian-only, might actually have a shot (however remote) of getting implemented. Since the city is talking about West Street again, and specifically what to do with it when RHA redevelops Heritage Park, this would be a great time to get some concrete plans in the books.
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