I’m sure all retailers would prefer to conduct their business in a hermetically sealed environment, but unfortunately, that’s not how cities work. A city is not a loose cluster of self-contained developments, no matter how individually successful those developments might be. Raleigh should aspire to be more than the sum of Smokey Hollow + Crabtree + Fenton. If retailers really want to operate in an anesthetized setting that only they control, they should move to an actual shopping mall next to the Hot Topic, not an open-air pseudo-mall that takes up valuable street frontage. Inward-facing projects might make short-term sense, but they don’t last long without some connection to their surroundings.
There’s also a chicken and egg problem – if our city streets and sidewalks are not inviting places, maybe it’s because developers keep building inward-facing storefronts and quasi-private plazas that don’t encourage circulation.
And back to Seaboard, there’s an opportunity for a street-facing connection to William Peace across Halifax, or even Peace St proper. Oh well…