A view of the city

What's wrong with this picture?

Let's play a game from The Mini Page:  How many things can you find wrong with this picture?

(UPDATE:  See possible answers below)

1. First of all, the building has no windows.  How weird is that.

2. At street level, there is only one opening to the building, and it has been surrounded by a fortress-like security enclosure.  The darkened security glass and concrete stanchions give off the atmosphere of a military checkpoint and are unnerving to pedestrians.

3.  Part of Nash Square Park was lopped off to give more room to motor vehicles.  At the left side of the picture, note the mismatch between the curb edge in the foreground and the continuation of the street in the background.  The sidewalks do not line up.  The street has been widened, taking about an 11-foot strip off the east side of Nash Square (just to the left of the foreground). 

The aerial view reveals that all four sides of the park were lopped off at some point to make more room for motor vehicles.  (See the visible evidence at each corner:  the misalignment of the curb edge with adjacent blocks, and the white crosswalk stripes that are cattywompus instead of perpendicular.)

4.   The city street has been transformed into a high-speed throughway for heavy traffic. This part of McDowell Street has four lanes of through-traffic and two lanes of parking.  The one-way designation and multiple lanes are traffic-engineering methods to allow higher volumes to pass through at higher speeds.  This approach treats downtown as if it were the background territory around an expressway.

This list will be continued.  In the meantime, can you spot more problems?

Raleigh alley

How many functions does this Raleigh alley serve?

Psychotic episode

The Comprehensive Planning process has overwhelmed us with its spirit of continual civic improvement, and in that vein we wish to point out some very, very low-hanging fruit: 

Change the city code so that the following can NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. 

We are assuredly not the first, nor even the ten-thousand-and-first, to compare the 1970s to a psychotic episode.  But where pride of place -- so to speak -- is concerned, the development of this site (the State Employees Credit Union on St. Mary's Street) must surely take the cake for Worst Streetscape Interface In Raleigh History. 

What gives this building its je ne sais quoi? 

Is it the compressed-gas holding tank, screened in such an original fashion from the adjacent sidewalk by the circlet of prickly bushes?  ("An opaque vegetative buffer!" exclaimed the critics of the time -- "surely a solution never before conceived by the mind of Landscape Architecture!")  But Modernism is nothing if not innovative.

Is it the semi-subterranean automated doors on the parking-garage vomitoria, which risk the lives of pedestrians at not just one, but even a generous two, junctions with the sidewalk? 

Is it the malign apertures in the Death-Star pillbox of a parking deck that forms the structure's principal streetwall, whether to enable the launching of Phlogiston Bolts By Lockheed-Martin (TM) or simply to facilitate the entry and exit of the personal flying commutercraft of the future?

Is it the pinkish-orange cast of the sodium-vapor illumination in the Vehicular Storage Basement, which, in the nighttime, casts outward through the rectangular gun-ports a baleful and corrupted light, shedding doom and disorder on its surroundings -- a lantern of darkness -- a modernist inversion of medieval stained glass -- spreading spiritual desolation, as if the entire construction were an inside-out York Minster? 

And yet these features do not fully exhaust the potential of the site to shock and dismay.  Indeed, horrified reader, there is more!   

We have yet examined only one-half of one side of this triple-frontage lot.

Stay tuned, if you dare, for the rest.

Gratuitous dooryard picture

Gratuitous dooryard picture

Hillsborough Street: Already 100% happier

Well, it's true: As long as former councilors Jessie Taliaferro and Joyce Kekas had their fangs in Hillsborough Street's neck, no initiative for that street on the part of Mayor Meeker or his supporters could go anywhere.

But since Monday, a 7 to 1 city council majority for re-investment and revitalization of this important urban corridor -- the front door to the state's flagship land-grant university -- is in play.

Word's in from the first meeting of the Hillsborough Street Partnership since the new City Council was sworn in Monday night:  The mood was encouragement -- relief -- and renewed hope that Raleigh's long-neglected main street will soon be on the mend, with the institutional buy-in that's now possible with a working, pro-Raleigh majority on the city's elected board.   

Change won't take long, either.  In May, construction will begin on the first two Hillsborough Street roundabouts, along with landscaping, parking, and median improvements.  The ugly aerial utilities will come down, and streetscape improvements to sidewalks and other street furnishings will be installed.

Next up for consideration, on December 11: choices for another roundabout, at Morgan Street. 

The last time Council looked at the question, it was still mired in the same voting deadlock that impeded progress on so many other issues in the last two years. 

Meanwhile, at the staff level, the highway dinosaurs in the city's Public Works department (and the consulting engineers they hired) were still advocating for a high-speed thru lane to circumvent the roundabout -- as if Hillsborough Street were just another Taconic State Parkway. 

Expect a different approach next week.  And over the next two years. 

Side note:  Woe betide those city staffers who don't shift gears (or perhaps we should say, match their stride) to the new council's more inclusive, pedestrian-friendly approach.   

 

Gratuitous dooryard picture

Gratuitous dooryard picture

Electric Bonsai

Thousands of street trees across Raleigh will soon be sacrificed for the sake of aerial power lines.

The question that isn't asked:  Why put our electric distribution system up in the air, where it is vulnerable to every ice storm, hurricane, and scurrilous adventurer? 

Here in the sleet belt, at least one massive ice event occurs every couple of years, with the same predictable result -- widespread power outages, lost work time, and inconvenience for thousands.

The problem isn't the trees.  It's the expectation that stringing up an electric grid in the most exposed and provisional manner could result in a reliable power supply.

Prediction:  Within a year after Progress Energy completes its program of chopping down 50,000 street trees, another winter storm will ice the lines, and we'll all be in the dark again, just the same.