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The Hillsborough Street Corridor 
(See Plate 23)
Current Conditions
This second sub-area is bordered by the State
Fairground to the east and north, and includes open
land owned by the State Fair. The area contains the
Westover community that predates most of the
development in this area; the neighborhood, mostly
single-family bungalows built on a grid of streets, is
one of the few residential populations in the vicinity.
It enjoys a small commercial center on the adjacent
main road that consists of service stations, scattered
convenience stores, and some small offices. A long-
established hardware store serves as the neighbor-
hood’s landmark. In spite of the lack of pedestrian
amenities, the corridor maintains a human scale, due
in large part to the placement of a number of build-
ings close to the street.
A planned and funded extension of a north–south
arterial road through the undeveloped land would
open up this area to regional traffic from the north in
addition to the current east–west patterns. This road
would also create a view corridor through property
that is currently forested and traversed by a number
of small streams (see Figure 8.4).
Plan Recommendations
This was clearly an area in transition. The potential
for development and redevelopment could help this
area evolve into a true urban mixed-use corridor sur-
rounded by thriving, interconnected neighborhoods
with protected green space in the form of parks and
recreation areas. The key to this transformation lay in
few large parcels of land, paramount of which was the
CHAPTER EIGHT
●
THE CITY
181
Figure 8.3
Axonometric View of the New Road
Bridge at the Fairgrounds Station. This three-
dimensional sketch was crucial in obtaining
agreement between the city highway engineers
and the university administrators regarding new 
road construction to relieve congestion at this 
busy intersection.
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tract currently owned by the NC State Fair that
would contain the future north–south road connec-
tion. The section of this road already constructed fur-
ther north on the site is hostile to pedestrians, and
pods of existing development, quite understandably,
back away from it in self-imposed seclusion.
It was important to change the character of
this road as it passes through this sub-area into a
pedestrian-friendly boulevard with multi-use paths on
either side. Large canopy trees should be planted in
the median and between the curb and the multi-use
path. With this design, we felt it would be possible to
create some strong and attractive connections with
new and existing neighborhoods.
In this part of the site, we also recommended
changes to the long-term destination and alignment
of the north–south roadway. Instead of the proposed
freeway-style flyover spanning the existing east–west
roads and the railway, and its traumatic extension
through the mature neighborhoods to the south of
the study area, we recommended an extension south
of our site only as far as an adjacent east–west arterial
highway, tunneling under a street and the rail
corridor in the process. This east-west artery takes
traffic directly to the freeway at the western edge of
the study area, thus serving the transportation needs
on the long-term thoroughfare plan without causing
major harm to existing residential neighborhoods
(see Figure 8.4). Open land exists in appropriate 
locations for this more modest alignment with a
minimum of disruption to existing and proposed
development.
The plan in Plate 23 shows the expansion of the
adjacent single-family residential neighborhood on the
west edge of the site into the State Fair property. Our
layout permits neighborhood connections to the thor-
oughfare and to our vision of a new city park and play-
ing fields that we located on either side of the new
boulevard. Some of these playing fields could be used
as overflow parking during the peak weeks of the State
Fair. We specified that this neighborhood expansion
should meet and exceed the current construction stan-
dards of the existing community. In other words,
house lots similar in size to the existing neighborhood
should be placed along narrow, landscaped streets,
containing curbs and sidewalks on both sides of the
street, and lit by pedestrian-scaled lamps. In addition,
numerous streams traverse the property, creating a
wonderful opportunity for recreation trails and
greenways. This preserves stands of trees serving as sig-
nificant buffers from the traffic on the boulevard. We
also recommended that these streams should be pro-
tected from all development activity by a minimum of
100 feet (30.5 meters) of undisturbed landscape
buffers on either side.
We designed the land between the existing east–
west street and the rail line along the southern edge
of the site as a higher density residential develop-
ment with traditional block sizes of 400–600 feet
(122–183 meters). This layout increased the residen-
tial density along the transit line at a location midway
between two stations, both reasonably close by. This
new development also contained opportunities for
small retail or office components on the first floors of
corner buildings.
The final piece in this section of the planning jig-
saw was a linear park extending from the streams on
the State Fair property beneath the upgraded east–
west boulevard, and leading ultimately to the West
Raleigh transit station described in the next section.
This linear park, lined by public streets and three-
storey apartments, would provide safe and conve-
nient pedestrian and bicycle paths to the proposed
new urban village centered around this second train
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES