ahh yeah a station there would make a lot of sense.

12/9/2011 3:10:22 PM

Walked by Melvin's today and a sign on the door said that they would be closed until 2/6 and would be reopening in the bowling alley.

1/26/2012 12:30:09 PM

Makes sense I suppose, though I do miss the old Bowling Alley restaurant.

1/26/2012 3:03:15 PM

I never saw Melvins, where and what they were, long term.

1/26/2012 3:07:33 PM

Is the bar staying there, or is it just Melvin's moving?

1/26/2012 3:12:13 PM

I don't think Five O'clock is moving, but I'm not sure. It's stayed open while Melvin's has been closed I believe.

[Edited on January 26, 2012 at 3:29 PM. Reason : derp]

1/26/2012 3:26:56 PM

This article is a month old but it contains some information I haven't heard about the belltower development.

http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/in-raleigh-schoolkids-and-sadlacks-survivefor-now/Content?oid=2739213

1. The hotel will be 8 stories with a 2 story parking deck and retail on the first floor
2. Sadlack's already has their eyes on a different, larger space somewhere else on Hillsborough and the hotel developer is helping to plan their move
3. Schoolkids wants to move somewhere else on Hillsborough as well
4. Construction is planned to begin somewhere around June 2013.

2/15/2012 9:47:49 PM

Does anyone have any contacts in the new Valentine Commons apartment complex? (job related)

2/27/2012 12:34:11 PM

Won't this make location number five for Schoolkids? I still remember when they were located in the I <3 NY Pizza spot.

2/28/2012 11:57:34 AM

I think the new residential aspects will help the street a ton, and the Hotel right by the bell tower will be a great addition. It does suck a bit to lose the original sadlacks, but hopefully they have another location worked out.

I also see a ton of potential in the blocks between Wells Fargo and SECU, which is essentially nothingness + a surface parking lot. Something needs to be built here, and the buldings across from UT need to be cleaned up at some point to make it a more complete college street.

2/28/2012 12:20:33 PM

Does anybody go to "The Alley"??

Their owners are opening up something similar in Charleston and have approached some of my associates as investors/operators. I'm curious as to how successful they've been in Raleigh.

2/28/2012 12:26:13 PM

yes... great bowling alley... it's where "western lanes" used to be. They have updated it some, but left a nostalgic feel about it.

I also went to high school with the owners... good people.

2/28/2012 12:29:38 PM

Are you talking about the bowling alley on Hillsborough? I was in there about a year ago and it looked just as dumpy as it always has but with more TVs. Maybe they've done some renovations since then.

2/28/2012 12:30:09 PM

They've found a great location down here and they want my friends to do the food. Apparently the food part in Raleigh kinda sucks (although that might change with Melvins moving in).

^^ And yes...really cool/nice guys. Upper King St is exploding right now and hopefully they're making their move at the right time.

2/28/2012 12:32:22 PM

^^I think you're forgetting the Hillsborough Building, which isn't going anywhere anytime soon, so the area east of Gardner is a no-go. Other than that the Man-Mur barber shop is an institution, but could easily be moved. So I could definitely get behind redeveloping the block between Brooks and Gardner (the surface lot, hannah's/kinko's/gumby's, man-mur, and the baptist student center with its odd parking arrangement).

2/28/2012 12:33:02 PM

So it seems like Amore's is maybe permanently closed.

3/28/2012 12:02:29 PM

Oh NO!, where will we ever find pizza on Hillsborough St now?

3/28/2012 3:28:19 PM

Anybody know why they closed.

4/13/2012 9:09:29 PM

Its incredible how much Hillsborough has changed in the past few years. Theres a lot of development activity in the pipeline for that area. Pretty awesome for NCSU and Raleigh.

4/13/2012 9:43:39 PM

Quote :

"Anybody know why they closed."

The owner put in a lot of money like 7 or 8 years ago building the bar at Amore's. He never really got the nightlife crowd to come in. He was also looking for any opportunity to sell. He had an offer from 2 guys in 2009 that wanted to own a pizza place (might be the same guys that now own Hot Box Pizza). It was on of those offers when the guys had a week to back out of it. The owner closed down Amore's for my birthday party in 2009 (2 days before the week was up on the offer). He treated it like it was the last hurrah for Amore's. Sadly, the guys backed out of the offer at the last minute. After that, I think the owner had a change of heart and wanted to get more people in the door at Amore's. He hired a girl to help with advertising and promotions. But he shot down every and all advertising and promotional suggestions.

Amore's had been floundering for years. I'm surprised it didn't close a lot sooner than it did. I'm actually very sad that it closed. I had a lot of good memories there. I remember going to watch my brother DJ there and he also was a bartender there for a long time.


[Edited on May 14, 2012 at 9:13 AM. Reason : f]

5/14/2012 9:11:52 AM

Amore's was my favorite pizza joint on Hillsborough. They had the best white pizza (though I've now found better at Salvio's). Good night, sweet prince.

5/14/2012 9:25:22 AM

^^ thx I've been wondering what happened as well. sounds like potentially bad management?

5/14/2012 9:41:04 AM

Road Worrier: Bell Tower roundabout will be scaled back to a single ring

http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/06/04/2112794/road-worrier-bell-tower-roundabout.html

6/5/2012 12:23:58 AM

MERCY IS FOR THE WEAK

6/5/2012 1:46:36 AM

Ugh. That's going to slow traffic down so much during the day. There's nothing wrong with it other than there are a lot of stupid people in America. A simple "Do Not Change Lanes in Traffic Circle" sign would have sufficed.

6/5/2012 4:12:12 AM

Whatever happened to survival of the fittest

6/5/2012 9:02:38 AM

Great news. Hopefully this will also shorten the pedestrian crossing distances. Traffic SHOULD be slowed down on that street. That was one of the whole points of the project (allegedly...), though roundabouts generally conflict with the notion of making things more bicycle and pedestrian friendly.

6/5/2012 9:19:52 AM

why is it so difficult to navigate that roundabout?

6/5/2012 9:24:21 AM

good. that roundabout should have been one lane from the beginning. obviously folks of average to above average intelligence have no problem with it, but there is the "other half" who still struggle with a 4 way stop sign... The single lane pattern will be MUCH better.

6/5/2012 9:43:07 AM

^^ I guess if your IQ is close to that of a potato it's difficult. I don't think most tdubbers have that issue

6/5/2012 10:01:48 AM

this will be much better.

unless they fuck up and decide that the inner ring is the one to keep.

also, i'd like to complain about how asinine it is that there is an entrance to a parking lot from the roundabout at the hillsborough/morgan intersection.

[Edited on June 5, 2012 at 11:03 AM. Reason : -]

6/5/2012 10:59:30 AM

^I go through there all the time and it has never been an issue. (i hadn't even noticed)

6/5/2012 11:17:48 AM

Quote :

"^^ I guess if your IQ is close to that of a potato it's difficult. I don't think most tdubbers have that issue"

I don't think this is completely fair. I have no issue with the roundabout either, but that's because I lived a quarter mile away and was already quite familiar with it before it was even built (not to mention I'm a transportation planner). Once you've gone through it and know how it works there shouldn't be a problem either. However, for anyone who has never driven through it before and is approaching it for the first time, I can see how there would be quite a bit of confusion. The signage leading up to it looks like some sort of alien symbol. Now, certainly, I imagine a great deal of the accidents were due to people not being careful enough, but it's easy to see how a two lane roundabout would be confusing to someone now familiar with them. Also, for a corridor that is supposedly being made more bicycle-friendly, a two lane roundabout seems to me to be one of the more dangerous things you can have.

6/5/2012 11:53:31 AM

Traffic circles are not hard. You stay in your lane and if you realized you fucked up you either keep going around the circle or you exit the circle and start over. You do not act like a dumbass and change lanes into another car. We're not talking about the Arc de Triomphe traffic circle here.

6/5/2012 11:57:14 AM

Well, first of all, there's a difference between a traffic circle and a roundabout. Secondly, you are right, but it's not intuitive at all with the Hillsborough Street roundabout due to it having exits into both one lane and two lanes. This was not an ideal intersection for debuting a two lane roundabout especially given that 99% of drivers passing through it for the first time will have never previously navigated a two lane roundabout in their entire life. The results clearly speak for themselves. I think most of us would agree on here that most drivers are idiots (funny how everyone thinks this about everyone except themselves), but despite this fact you don't see carnage in the streets with people crashing into each other all over the place. In this roundabout, though, the accident numbers clearly show a problem. It's such a bizarre engineering mindset to say reality be damned, the engineering says it should work so it has to work.

6/5/2012 12:06:38 PM

I figure it just weeds out the people that shouldn't be driving there in the first place and they avoid the intersection for the rest of their lives

6/5/2012 12:20:30 PM

Sounds like it might have actually done that a little bit:

Quote :

"But the car counts have gone down since then, not up, from about 21,000 a day in 2007 to 18,000 last year."

6/5/2012 12:24:47 PM

Quote :

"I don't think this is completely fair. I have no issue with the roundabout either, but that's because I lived a quarter mile away and was already quite familiar with it before it was even built (not to mention I'm a transportation planner). Once you've gone through it and know how it works there shouldn't be a problem either. However, for anyone who has never driven through it before and is approaching it for the first time, I can see how there would be quite a bit of confusion. The signage leading up to it looks like some sort of alien symbol"

I completely agree. I lived in Raleigh for 10 years but moved away a few years back and was back in town a few weeks ago and went through this roundabout. I didn't have any trouble with it, but it did present a lot of...newness...and opportunities to do something wrong all in one small area and I can see how it would be very confusing to a large amount of people. I would love to live in a world where we could just say "Look, if you can't drive through something like this, then you can't drive at all" but unfortunately it doesn't work that way.

6/5/2012 6:39:38 PM

I'm not saying people shouldn't drive at all, just that they should avoid that intersection if they don't understand the traffic rules surrounding it. Maybe they should make Hillsborough part of the driving test around here lol.

6/5/2012 6:47:56 PM

^^^ wasn't that part of their goal?

6/5/2012 6:49:12 PM

Yeah, they wanted to shift through traffic to more appropriate streets like Western and Wade.

6/5/2012 7:03:47 PM

Quote :

"I guess if your IQ is close to that of a potato it's difficult. I don't think most tdubbers have that issue"

i don't either. there was a tone to my post you failed to recognize

6/5/2012 7:27:52 PM

I wasn't calling your IQ into question. You're a tdubber, aren't you

6/5/2012 8:15:53 PM

There is a plan that was recently submitted to the city by FMW development for what looks like a 4 story, 13 unit apartment building at 2604 Hillsborough Street. This would go between the Hillsborough Building and the Wells Fargo (there is currently a house there that was at one point used by the university and called the "Hillsborough Annex." The plan shows about 1000 square feet of retail along Hillsborough.

6/23/2012 8:26:00 PM

Last I was aware of the university still had operations in the HLB Annex/house. If I'm not mistaken the unversity was leasing it from Mitch Hazouri (owner of Mitch's). Perhaps he is interested in selling?

Nice old house, even after having been converted to office use (The people who work in that building were in the same university unit as me for a while) but it's out of place on that section of Hillsborough, to be sure.

6/23/2012 10:32:39 PM

^^ Interesting. That would be a fantastic location for mixed real estate like that. I would have loved to rent an apartment right across the street from DH Hill.

6/25/2012 9:39:08 AM

I just read over on some thread on New Raleigh that Hillsborough Street Textbooks is kaput. Is this true?

7/8/2012 6:00:46 PM

yep, it's available for lease

7/8/2012 6:16:55 PM

for what it's worth, i have heard through the grapevine that the owner has a tenant lined up for it

not that it's a lot of info, but if that's true it means it won't be sitting there vacant, which is nice

7/8/2012 6:21:12 PM

2 things I'd like to see open there are a bar or a legit State merchandise store like the Go Pack store on Wade. It's got a decent amount of room, I just hope it doesn't turn into another pizza place.

7/8/2012 6:57:08 PM