Just a sneaking suspicion, but when lawyer Mike Brough, who represents the Knightdale group called CARE (Citizens Against Residential Encroachment), handed his maps to Superior Court Judge Henry Barnett last week while hastening to say, however, that “this case is not about the wisdom of the rezoning,” what he was really saying was: “Judge, will […]
Bob Geary
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N.C. State considers Pope money
When Toby Parcel, the dean of NCSU’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, read that the conservative John William Pope Foundation and UNC-Chapel Hill were splitsville on that Pope-funded “western cultures curriculum” idea, and that Pope might give its money to “other universities” instead, she did what any fund-raising dean would do, right? She got […]
Posted inNews
Imagine Dix
When Dennis Carmichael, a landscape architect from Virginia, said the “Big Field” at the back of the Dorothea Dix Hospital grounds “has no intrinsic qualities to it,” well, you could just about hear the folks in Raleigh choosing up sides. Carmichael was a member of the Urban Land Institute (ULI) team that came to town […]
Posted inGuides
Andrew Pearson
2006 Citizen Award winners Margie Ellison | Lanya Shapiro & Traction | Chad Johnston | Andrew Pearson | The Pesticide Education Project Two days after Andrew Pearson returned from a trip to his native Australia, to work for an environmental group and seek out distant family, the Sept. 11 attacks occured. The event thrust him […]
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Wake County’s conservatives out, centrists in; $970 million school bond passes easily
If you listened closely last week in Raleigh, you could hear them pounding the last nails into the coffin of the conservative movement that controlled and confused Wake County politics for the last 12 years. Not only did voters approve a record $970 million bond to build and renovate schools, they also dismissed the last […]
Posted inNews
Mountaintopping on Kidd’s Hill in Raleigh
All eyes in Raleigh are on Dix Hill, our topic a week ago, and the question of how much of it to save as a great urban park. But meanwhile, what of Kidd’s Hill, which merits its own memorial to the man who, more than any other, paved the way to our rich history of […]
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Dorothea Dix plan: The Urban Land Institute’s plan is not exactly a park
Returning to Raleigh, I see that Mayor Charles Meeker is finally ready to make a move on the Dorothea Dix tract. As many obstacles as there are in the way of his breaking through to a great urban park there, however, he still needs to zig some and zag some more, or else he’s gonna […]
Posted inArt
Sparking connections
‘Twas interesting, at the final Spark Con session, where everybody got a chance to say what went well and what didn’t, to hear Ty Beddingfield say he was still looking for a succinct explanation of what Spark Con was. Beddingfield, after all, was the DesignBox member in charge of marketing the thing. Also interesting to […]
Posted inNews
Some Raleigh trash talk
I’m working with two ideas today about Raleigh. One is taken from Mayor Charles Meeker’s valedictory letter in the local daily on Tuesday. It’s “a new era,” Meeker wrote. Raleigh is “young at heart and full of creativity.” The other is Christina Stableford’s comment Saturday at the antiwar event in Moore Square. “Raleigh,” she said, […]
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Missing the train
We’re in Charlotte, driving south out of the downtown (their “uptown”) along the route of the Queen City’s first light-rail commuter transit line, now under construction. When it opens in a year or so, the South End line will cover nearly 10 miles, with 15 stations, before terminating just short of Interstate 77. Our guides […]
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