On the restaurant front, the folks who brought Durham Pizzeria Toro -- Cara Stacy, Gray Brooks, and Jay Owens -- have signed on to open a diner in the old "We Want Oprah" building.

The diner is slated for seven-day-a-week operations and will offer everything from breakfast and plate lunches all day long, to weekend brunch. The diner is planned to have a full bar as well.

Brooks -- whose Toro origin story was replete with references to his dozen years learning pizza and restaurants under local chef-entrepreneur Tom Douglas -- brings a different bit of lore to this venture, this time familial and Durham-based in nature.

His grandfather Peter Ligets, it turns out, owned a number of luncheonettes and diners in Durham in the 1940s, it seems.

A Seattle architecture firm will team with Durham's Center Studio Architecture (which worked on Toro and the larger Five Points site rehab) on the build-out, which is slated to be complete in summer 2016.

Oh and hey, guys, here's a big plus with a diner concept: no crazy pizza oven exhausts you have to worry about this time, right? Right?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Meantime, kudos to Triangle Business Journals' Amanda Hoyle for an update on the progress of Austin Lawrence Partners' slightly larger project: the 28-story One City Center tower on the old Woolworth's site.

Quick recap: Woolworth's donated their Corcoran and Main St. site including the remnants of the Geer Building to the City years back. Durham PR firm owner Carl Webb gained control of the site, later joining forces with Michael Lemanski as the other key man in Greenfire for a time. (Gary Kueber has much more on the site's history at the excellent Open Durham site.)

After Greenfire's stumbles in the post-Great Recession era, property control fell to Aspen-based developer Greg Hills, who pitched and won city incentive dollars for the signature skyscraper that local leaders had long favored for the site.

It's slated to be the first new skyscraper in Durham since the 1980s, when the late colorful-character Frank Wittenberg constructed the Durham Centre complex on Morgan St. during the last-generation downtown boom.

The big question we've heard in downtown circles has always been, does Austin Lawrence Partners have the financing lined up to get the project out of the ground?

During the City Council meeting on incentives, we seem to recall Hills talking about the significant interest that real estate investment trusts (REITs) had in projects like this and his confidence of getting financing.

To our (limited) knowledge, REITs are usually the so-called take-out financing on a project; along with pension funds and life insurers, they're looking to sink capital into assets and get cash flows over a long period of time.

More typically, a bank or other shorter-term lender will step up for construction financing, usually as long as they know that there's a take-out lined up.

According to the TBJ's Jones' reporting, a public records search didn't turn up signs of "major construction financing" as would typically be secured by the property itself -- though Armada Hoffler, a firm that partnered with Greenfire earlier to build the Whetstone Apartments on a downtown site Greenfire controlled near American Tobacco, is providing some funding through a joint venture deal.

Still, ALP Durham office managing partner Paul Smith (yep, formerly with Greenfire) told the business newspaper that the "project is doing great, and we're moving forward," saying underground work would resume on the site in the coming weeks.

Read more about the financing and project status at the TBJ, or stop by for their longer-look at the Hills and their larger vision for Durham.