Does Centennial Parkway really need development?

With the exception of the Watauga Gateway, a pedestrian portal respectful to the point of humility, NC State University has no main entrance gate like those in the Ivy League’s walled campuses or at the courtyards of British universities, Oxford and Cambridge.

Maybe it doesn't need one.

The NCSU campus is transparent to all. Its relationship with the city defies town-gown tension and signals a comity, not present at other campuses.

NCSU cozies up to its Hillsborough Street commercial neighbors; stands quietly removed from Western Boulevard; is gently seduced by Pullen Road’s adjacent city park; joins in the fun at the fairgrounds and stadium on Trinity Road; values I-440’s complex engineering solutions; accepts that Gorman Street is what it is and doesn't seem to care and showcases its unfolding campus along Centennial Parkway.

Unfortunately, It's there — on Centennial Campus — that this fabric of amiable streets may be about to fray. As the city's Dix Park planning process unfolds, the Chancellor faces growing pressures to present to the Board of Trustees a plan for developing property that abuts the park and the parkway.

Will Centennial Parkway become the highlight corridor of Centennial Campus or just another, available-for-development thoroughfare? Its future depends upon Spring Hill, a piece of university property between the parkway and Barbour Drive in Dix Park. The university”s treatment of this property will directly impact the park, the parkway and, in turn, the campus itself.

Spring Hill is not only large and prominently situated, but encompasses the highest elevation on the park’s borders. As such, It should remain unmolested for the same reason that we avoid development on the ridgelines along the Blue Ridge Parkway, Any substantial construction there would mar the appearance and value of both Dix, as a park, and Centennial Parkway, as a signature natural corridor and iconic campus feature..

Happily, positive aspirational possibilities for the campus and the corridor converge at the critically important, segment near Dix Park:

• Its landscape, Spring Hill’s stately heights descending to a brambly wolf's lair, shielding the parkway and lands beyond with room at Blair Street for an inspired university gateway to the park.

• Its utilization — sympathetic, collaborative, fully and exclusively in-sync with the park - including possibly a botanical garden, like North Campus’s Gardner Arboretum

• Its tradition, pastoral and agricultural, reflecting the soil from which North Carolina's earliest land-grant university, sprung

• Its institutional ownership commending a good neighbor — a tangible declaration that NCSU is the servant of the whole state

A parkway, however beautiful and utilitarian, is only a pathway, until it establishes its own park-like, natural terrain, horizon and landscape. What could make Centennial Campus more distinctive than an actual intentional parkway setting for its parkway and, simultaneously, a campus, completely enclosed by nature? Talk about the Groves of Academia!

On Spring Hill, university and city planners can exclude development to avoid intrusions upon the park’s carefully contrived illusions of remoteness and isolation and the parkway’s intentional perspectives and vistas. And this can be done, not at the expense of Dix Park or the campus, but as enhancements for both.

NCSU, thankfully, is not an ordinary developer. Private developers of abutting property would have no obligation to promote the community’s efforts at Dix, although they will benefit substantially from them. They would expect, and have a right to insist upon, compensation for limits upon their use of property beyond that justified by health and safety needs. Indeed, they are free to ask: ‘Where’s the park. Is it time to begin destroying it?”

The Chancellor will have none of that. NCSU operates at another level. Though it has its own purposes and constituency, it serves everyone. The Chancellor recognizes that when others are cooperating for mutual benefit and NCSU benefits from their cooperation, then NCSU has an obligation to do its share. He is not like an individual who may exploit a situation and diminish the achievements of the wider community.

Acting for the “State” University of North Carolina, the Chancellor accepts the responsibility to align interests and harmonize goals. He looks beyond the university for comity with his other, public counterparts in ways that sustain institutional identity, maintain administrators' professional ethics and effectiveness, and further advance the campus experience as a whole. A green and invigorating Centennial Parkway, naturally buffered and building-free, will, each day, be a prelude to a think-and-do campus of exploration and discovery, creation and implementation - resounding from the traditions, resources and aspirations of the NCSU community.

This story was originally published April 13, 2018 at 12:31 PM with the headline "Does Centennial Parkway really need development?."