Downtown living on tour

A mix of traditional, modern and loft living on display

RALEIGH -- Tens of millions of dollars are being spent to make downtown Raleigh a more walkable, livable environment.

For $10, on May 20 visitors can walk it themselves and imagine what it would be like to live there.

The Raleigh Urban Design Center, part of the city's planning division, will host its second Art of Downtown Living Home Tour, featuring more than a dozen properties representing a range of housing options. Because the bulk of what exists or is under construction in the area are condominiums, that's mostly what's on the tour. But a couple of single-family homes and some apartments are also on the tour. Some of the properties are new construction, others are historic buildings that started out as industrial or retail operations and have been adapted for the needs of modern living.

Whether they're walking across creaky pine floors installed in the late 1800s or gazing into manicured courtyards that provide flashes of green amid the concrete and brick, visitors may see why 3,000 people are now living in Raleigh's core, and why 10,000 are expected to call it home in two to three years.

"What I see here today is very different from what I recall being here 20 years ago on a visit," said Mitchell Silver, planning director for the city of Raleigh. The people moving downtown, he says, are "those that want an urban lifestyle, who want to have more amenities in walking distance -- restaurants, culture, the arts, parks. It's those who want to live near where they work, and don't want to drive as much."

The properties open for viewing tend to fall on the high end of the cost-per-square-footage scale, reflecting the increasing demand. However, a couple of residents of the income-restricted Prairie Building also will open the doors of their apartments for the event, which runs from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., rain or shine.

For a complete list of the properties on the tour, go to raleighdowntownliving.com. The tour coincides with the annual Artsplosure celebration, so downtown parking may be tight. Once you find a spot, do as urbanites do: Leave your car and take to the sidewalks.

Here is a sampling of what you can see.

Hudson

Veteran downtown Raleigh workers remember this as the old Hudson Belk store, first built in the 100 block of Fayetteville Street in the 1930s and expanded in the 1960s. Many fondly recall it as one of downtown's last retail holdouts, a department store that kept its doors open until the mid-1990s. After it closed, the beleaguered building attracted pigeons and a series of speculators for nearly a decade, until Hudson Developers, owned primarily by Vaughn King, bought it and started anew.

The company hired Raleigh architectural firm Clearscapes to figure out how to use what remained of the building: little more than the structural steel, the floor plate and the elevator cars and shafts.

Today, the five-story Hudson has 64 condominiums done in what John Reese, design architect for the project, calls a truly urban style that sets it apart from most of its neighbors.

"Everything else is done in some kind of Williamsburg mold, like a suburban apartment complex instead of an urban dwelling."

Though potential buyers often tell real estate agent Dell Paschal as they enter one unit or another that they recall having lunch in the Capital Room, which must have been right here, or they used to shop for dresses over there, those memories are faulty. The two old buildings that made up the store were demolished. What stands there now is all new construction, though the architects used the original floor plan and salvaged the steel and two of the store's elevators. The only other vintage element is a collection of black-and-white photos of the original building that hang in the corridors throughout.