Bull City Rising

Fayetteville St. corridor streetscape concepts revealed

Representatives from the City's Office of Economic and Workforce Development and consultants EG&G Group unveiled concepts-in-progress last night for the Fayetteville St. streetscape concepts.

Monday night's meeting at the Hayti Heritage Center was attended by ten or so community members and an equal number of City staff, consultants and media representatives; Chris Dickey from OEWD noted that a conflicting meeting was contributing to the low turnout and that a second forum on the Fayetteville St. streetscape project had been scheduled at for Sept. 29 at 6pm at the center.

EG&G will be presenting its concepts for the Angier/Driver district tonight, with the Akron-based consultants returning next week for community meetings on the Mangum/Corporation Little Five Points area and E. Main St. In October, the team will return to discuss the W. Chapel Hill St. streetscape planning being developed with residents and the Quality of Life advocacy group.

At a high level, the designs unveiled Monday would be very familiar to Durhamites who've strolled through downtown Durham since its streetscape project -- a reflection more of shared best practices in urban corridor design, we'd imagine, than an intentional nod. We'll see over the next few meetings to what extent these design themes repeat across all five areas.

DAP breaks ground today, begins half-year's construction

At 9 a.m. this morning, look for a crowd to gather at the block bounded by Foster, Corporation, Morris and Geer Streets, as the venerable old Durham Athletic Park project breaks ground. Local residents as well as the media are invited to see Mayor Bell, city manager Patrick Baker, and Minor League Baseball CEO Pat O'Conner turn shovels with NCCU chancellor Charlie Nelms and Capitol Broadcasting head Jim Goodmon.

Retired from use by the Durham Bulls since 1994, the park has continued in a new life as the home for events like the Bull Durham Blues Festival, World Beer Festival, and as a ballpark for Durham School of the Arts. But the ballpark has been showing its years of late, with peeling paint and outdated facilities limiting the attractiveness and usefulness of one of Durham's true historic places.

In 2005, Durham voters approved a $4 million bond issue to renovate the DAP; the City brought in Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse to evaluate the park and to understand its future uses. At the same time, Durham worked to strike up a partnership with Minor League Baseball, which was interested in using the DAP as a training ground for umpires, groundskeepers, park managers and other staff.

The result? The DAP's renovation (since pegged at $5 million -- the remaining $1 million coming from interest earned on unspent bond funds) would allow the park to maintain its existing uses, as well as to become the home for NCCU's college baseball team,with MiLB operating the park under a contract with the City.

NCCU expansion, Alston Ave. widening: the irony of bad road decisions?

Today's views of the news and blogosphere bring us two stories that seem unrelated, save for their common connections to Durham, growth, and the Bull City's strong and proud black community. And while you can't truly draw a causal connection between the two, there's certainly food for thought in their intermingling.

Exhibit A: The NCCU board of trustees' unanimous vote yesterday to approve Central's new master plan, which calls for the acquisition of 136 homes and properties to the north, west and south of the campus to fuel a major expansion of the physical plant and programs. Read more about it at the H-S, N&O, or WRAL web sites. The vote came in the face of mixed responses from the neighborhood, with some residents supporting Central's expansion while others -- including the great-granddaughter of the institution's founder -- oppose the expansion, a concern shared by everyone from local preservationists to Fayetteville St. business owner Larry Hester.

Exhibit B: Gary Kueber is reporting today that the City Council will take up the design plan concerns for Alston Ave.'s widening north of the Durham Freeway at its work session. The item doesn't appear on the docket anywhere I could find it, but according to Endangered Durham, Mayor Bell thinks he now has four votes lined up to support letting the NCDOT move ahead with its proposed highway design -- a plan which resembles the rest of NC 55 from 147 all the way to friggin' Apex.

Now, on the face of it, these stories don't have much in common. Yet it's worth noting that NCCU is proposing to expand in every direction but one: east. The campus will expand north and south between Fayetteville and Alston, and even to the west of Fayetteville. But Alston Avenue will remain the campus' eastern border, a stalwart demarcation line between the neighborhoods to its east and the institution of higher learning itself.

N&O: NCCU master plan vote delayed for further community discussions

Eric Ferreri over at the N&O has a very good story about the NCCU master plan in today's edition, including the news that recently-installed chancellor Charlie Nelms will not be bringing the plan before the school's board of trustees for a vote today as initially scheduled.

The plan calls for the purchase and re-use or demolition of a staggering 136 homes adjacent to the campus to support Central's campus expansion. The biggest chunk of properties to be purchased would be several blocks on the southern side of the campus, just to the west of the new school of education facility and east of Fayetteville St. The plan would also bring Central's campus north towards Dupree St.

An enlarged nursing building (intended to support a full professional school in the growing discipline), new residence halls and a library, and an enlarged football stadium are central to the proposal.

The big driver for the campus growth is, well, growth -- NCCU has grown from 6,000 full-time equivalent students in '02 to 8,300 this fall, and the General Assembly set a new target last year of 11,745 in the next ten years. The doubling of NCCU's size is a massive change for the campus as well as the surrounding neighborhood, and one that hasn't come without controversy.

It does not appear that the plan is likely to change, according to Nelms -- he wants to offer more community forums to explain the plan, but Ferreri notes that the chancellor "doesn't expect community feedback to lead to substantial changes to the plan." (The plan is posted on NCCU's website, though as the N&O points out, many of the neighbors don't have Internet access. Heck, I have Internet access and can barely get the plan -- it's a massive 118 megabyte file that makes for a slow download. The N&O had a good summary of the project several weeks back, still available on their web site.)

Welcome, student friends, to the Bull City show

I wanted to dedicate this morning's post to Durham's newest residents -- its fair college students, matriculating at NC Central University or Duke University for the first time, perhaps, or returning for a further year of studies. The ride into town is a bit less magical than the Hogwarts Express (please do dodge the potholes, they're not just there for the aesthetics), but once you're here, I hope you'll join in in discovering the great things that the Bull City has to offer.

What's that, you say? There's great things in Durham? Surely you jest, you must think.

Well, I'm not kidding. But I understand where you're coming from. Fifteen years ago, when I was touring college towns to make my own undergraduate choice, I took a look at Durham and headed right back to I-85. It wasn't until a number of years later that I realized that Durham was the right place for my wife and I to live, the place we felt most at home anywhere we'd lived on the East Coast. (I've chronicled that transformation on this earlier blog post.)

I think one of the most jarring things for many new residents of the Bull City -- particularly those hailing from Long Island, or Newton/Wellesley, or Plano, or Manassas, or the like -- is that Durham doesn't look like suburban America. Everything isn't tied up in neat subdivisions and strip malls, outparcels and freeways. Those things exist here, too, but there are actual streets and blocks that haven't (entirely) been torn up for re-development. There are old tobacco and textile factories that haven't been demolished, but instead form the bulk of the skyline.

There are poor people here -- wealthy people, too, but plenty of poor people. And African-Americans and Latinos and Asians and Native Americans, and Caucasians too.

DAP, MiLB next steps under review by City Council

So I was browsing through this week's City Council work session agenda, and what should I see but an update from Alan DeLisle on the Durham Athletic Park plans, which provides updates -- and some tantalizing new material -- on some of the plans at hand. Such as, say, the image at left... but more on that in a minute.

First, the renovation's scope: the project will take care of deferred maintenance and ADA compliance, some sewer repairs, environmental and hazmat mitigation, and electrical upgrades... along with more interesting (to users) elements like a new natural turf field, new restrooms, new/enlarged clubhouses under the grandstand, new dugouts and umpires' facilities, updated concessions, a picnic area along the right-field line, paved parking, and a new manually-operated scoreboard.

I'd heard fretting from some in Durham's development community that the price tag for the DAP renovations was looking pricier than the $4 million allocated by voters in the 2005 bond issue. Well, one part of today's update provides a partial answer to that: a request from DeLisle and the DAP team to allocate an additional $1 million towards the project in the Capital Improvements Project budget.

(Of interest is the fact that, well, interest is to be used to pay for this -- that is, unexpectedly high returns on the unspent capital improvement fund. Or in other words, we've got money sitting around from the 2005 bonds for capital projects that hasn't been spent and we've earned more than we figured on that. I wouldn't expect to see that on anyone's re-election accomplishments.)

Anyhow, the deal calls for Minor League Baseball to be the operator of the facility for an initial three-year term with future extension rights. MiLB would hire all staff and run the DAP's operation, including concessions, ticket sales, merchandising, promotion, and so forth. The city would pay MiLB $35,000 a year for managing the DAP, and would split profits on operation with Minor League Baseball (70% to MiLB, 30% to the City.) The net change over existing Durham operating expenses is a mere $13,000 a year in the worst case -- and the facility could actually net a profit for the City if successful.

Heritage Square: Preview of site plan and renderings

In advance of Monday night's discussion of incentives for Andy Rothschild's Heritage Square and Golden Belt projects, the City Council's web site has a number of materials on the project posted -- including City staff's analysis, a market/economic analysis for the project and incentives, and a PowerPoint from Scientific Properties with some images and renderings of the proposed Heritage Square mixed-use development.

I'll touch on the first two of these points here at BCR on Monday (including some thoughts on the much-maligned, and I think misunderstood, 15% rate of return demanded on the project.) For today, however, let's take a look at the site plan and artists' sketches.

First, the site plan overview. One of the pluses of this design is that it opens the development up to Morehead Avenue, both visually and in terms of vehicular access. On the one hand, this is a plus from the perspective of bringing more life to Morehead Ave. There's also room for a kiss-and-ride-style drop-off over on Fayetteville St. One potential concern is that the development seems to back-up to, rather than face, the East Lakewood Ave. side of the development. The design clearly seems aimed towards connecting Heritage Square with downtown visually, but it seems important that it not become a bookend or firewall separating downtown from the Fayetteville St. corridor.