Pop the Cap sponsors 'Black Friday Beer Fest'

In the mood to avoid the malls this Friday? The Herald-Sun reported last year that over 100,000 people, or roughly half the population of dear ol' Derm, visited the Streets at Southpoint mall on the day after Thanksgiving, the putative start to the holiday shopping season. (One of these days the Southpoint folks will wisen up to their traffic nightmare and build a parking deck -- if only to be able to lea$e more $pace at the sold-out shopping center via wrapper retail businesses, a la Crabtree Valley Mall in Raleigh.)

There's a better way to spend your Friday: enjoying some good beers, good food from Rue Cler and Pop's, and giving a little back to charity while you're at it. Sean Wilson and the folks at Pop the Cap -- the group that got North Carolina to lift its silly restriction on alcohol-by-volume that impaired the availability of popular microbrew and craft beers in the state -- is sponsoring the Black Friday Beer Fest at Rigsbee Hall, 208 Rigsbee Ave. downtown.

Stop by between 3 and 7 p.m. on Black Friday to enjoy a number of different specialty beers (including Durham's own Triangle Brewing Company), a Texas Hold 'Em poker tournament kicking off at 4 p.m., and an Xbox 360 set up on a big TV.

The great thing about this event is, you get a chance to help make someone else's Christmas brighter without hitting the malls. Bring a new, unwrapped toy to the event to support Toys for Tots and get $5 off the $25 admission. (If you're toy-free, $5 from your admission fee will go to the charity.)

Find out more over at the Pop the Cap web site.

Comments

[Ray Gronberg]

What I'm wondering about is why you think a parking deck would ease Southpoint's traffic problems. I see it producing the mother of all traffic jams at 8:55 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights.

[Bull City Rising]

Ray,

I was a bit hasty in making a passing reference to the subject. Southpoint has two traffic-related issues in my mind -- the parking situation, and the ingress/egress problems on Fayetteville and Renaissance Parkway.

A parking deck would, I suspect, dramatically help with parking issues, both in terms of capacity and, to some extent, in impacting surface circulation, in that you'd lessen the number of cars turning into and out of the property's perimeter loop trying to get between rows of parking -- a challenge in intersecting with the elements of the traffic that are trying to get in or out of the mall.

That said, a deck by itself would do nothing to change the idiotic situation of Southpoint having a single traffic signal. (Northgate, which I'm guessing does one-quarter the traffic, has two, as does the South Square SuperTarget/Sam's Club site.) Ideally, something akin again to Crabtree Valley's choice of three signalized intersections, with two leading essentially into parking deck structures, would make more sense.

I'd personally want to see the decks built out on the south side of the outdoor shopping area between the restaurant section and Ren. Parkway, with a traffic light going in on the parkway and that entrance/exit leading straight into and out of the decks. Still, I wouldn't think we'd see that until and unless General Growth Properties felt they could lease up significant additional outdoor retail space along the deck's exterior.