Downtown streetscape snark 'o the week
Branching out, then turning a new page?

Can downtown's re-development be connected?

A thread over at UrbanPlanet got me thinking about an excellent question: with Brightleaf, West Village, downtown, and American Tobacco all undergoing renovation, what can be done to help these pockets of renewal be connected to each other -- both literally (pedestrian access) and visually.

Downtown_durham_hybrid

From my vantage point, the answer is complicated and requires some patience (and public investment) to help connect the dots.  Let's take a look at the pieces.

One of the first and biggest questions is, what will happen to the parcels under Triangle Transit Authority control along Duke Street, between the Brightleaf/West Village area and W. Chapel Hill Street.  The now-vacant buildings in this area were taken under the control of the TTA for the now-stalled (perhaps permanently) regional rail line connecting Durham to RTP and Raleigh, including a proposed stop at the Duke/Chapel Hill St. intersection.

To date, the TTA is looking to hold on to the parcels it acquired for the rail line, which is a smart thing to do from a long-term perspective (land-banking until population and density support the project), but from a short-term perspective, creates a real damper on the area.  Perhaps the best to be hoped for is that Cherokee Investment Partners, the brownfield and transit-oriented developer that TTA partnered with in the hopes that mixed-use around TTA rail stops can create the necessary ridership, takes an interest in downtown Durham and moves ahead with some redevelopment even before the rail line is committed.

Adding intrigue to the picture are the futures of the Durham Police Department and NC Mutual Life properties.  (On the map, these are the two parcels along Duke St., to the south of W. Chapel Hill St.  NC Mutual is the skyscraper and surrounding parking lot to the east of Duke, while the police HQ takes up the whole block between Gregson, Duke, Chapel Hill, and Jackson.)  Greenfire Development is purchasing NC Mutual Life's building from the cash-poor burial and life insurer and has mentioned possible adaptation and re-use down the road.  For its part, the Durham police department has floated the possibility of building a new headquarters and selling its current property off to developers.  Connected with the TTA parcel, these areas create a form of corridor between American Tobacco (in the lower-right hand side of the map) and Brightleaf/West Village (which together encompass much of Morgan, Main and Peabody to the east of Great Jones).

Another issue for the overall connectivity between these areas of downtown are the current DATA bus station and surrounding parking near the corner of Morgan and Great Jones, which physically separate downtown from West Village. Whether you like the plan or not (and many don't), the eventual multimodal transit station slated for the old Heart of Durham hotel lot will clear the DATA bus terminal out of the area between West Village and downtown.  I haven't seen final plans for West Village to know whether the new parking garage planned to support the project's growth means that we'll see any new development or buildings on these spaces. 

I have to hope that in time we will see some in-fill in this area, because the status quo -- with the horrendous downtown loop, bus station and parking -- separates two dense areas with a flat, car-centric space that doesn't make much sense visually and which serves to discourage walking between the two centers.

Speaking of the loop, there's no question that this one-way traffic monster is one of the biggest problems to solve in connecting redevelopment in the downtown core.  The idea of walking between, say, CCB Plaza and Brightleaf is a rather unpleasant one at present.   Reportedly the city would like to change the loop back to a two-way grid, but there are no dollars available right now to do it, and given the mayor's state-of-the-city thoughts on focusing public money on blighted neighborhoods, this remains one of the biggest question marks.

One place where I'm holding out significant hope is the possibility that local authorities may be able to get their hands on the Duke beltline abandoned rail corridor.  These aging railroad tracks run from the Duke Park/Old North Durham neighborhood line parallel to Markham, turning south (and intersecting with Durham's North-South Greenway) and then paralleling Washington through the old Durham Athletic Park district, then running right in front of West Village and around to the Pettigrew St. side of American Tobacco.

The city and state are negotiating with the railroad to buy this abandoned rail line, which opens the door to a trail linking these areas. That will create direct pedestrian access between a number of Durham's downtown redevelopment, while at the same time creating links between West Village/American Tobacco/Brightleaf and some of Durham's core urban neighborhoods.  I'd like to see the West Village folks step up and help fund this project, since even if the city/county buy the Duke Beltline (and no funds are currently appropriated for it), the city says there's no money in the budget yet to turn it into a trail.

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