Workshop Details New Town Designs

By Michael Chen

Staff Writer

About 30 residents and local officials gathered Saturday for Chapel Hill's second downtown design workshop to discuss what the Chapel Hill Town Council has identified as "opportunity areas."

These areas are sections of downtown Chapel Hill that could be enhanced with mixed-use developments that would provide housing, business offices, retail stores and parking for residents.

Such areas include sections of West Rosemary Street, Parking Lot No. 5 at the corner of Franklin and Church streets and Parking Lot No. 2 at the southeast corner of Rosemary and North Columbia streets.

Saturday's meeting, which ran from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., was led by Chapel Hill Planning Director Roger Waldon. After he provided a brief overview of the discussions of the last meeting, Chris LeBlanc from Designvis presented computer visualizations of the propositions from that meeting.

The attendees then split up into small groups to discuss the specific proposals of each opportunity area. Afterward, each group presented its ideas.

Architect Josh Gurlitz's group discussed Parking Lot No. 2 and said the town should create a development that would attract more visitors to the 22,000 square-foot plot.

"We need to provide more pedestrian circulation into this area," he said.

Gurlitz recommended a four-story development over the lot with a 330-space parking lot underground, retail shops on the first floor, business offices on the second floor and about 24 residential units on the third and fourth floors.

Discussions about Parking Lot No. 5 were led by UNC's Department of Facilities Planning and Construction architect Dianne Bachman and Robert Humphreys, executive director of Chapel Hill's Downtown Commission. Similar ideas were suggested for this site, but there was more emphasis on safety in terms of lighting and patrol.

"We want to draw people to the lot while keeping it a safe place," Bachman said.

Architect Peter Batchelor said the town should use the lot to better link East and West Franklin streets.

"Lot 5 is the golden opportunity for Chapel Hill to create a signature space in the middle of Franklin Street for public space," Batchelor said.

Underground parking, residential units and office spaces would be incorporated into the development as well. Humphreys pointed out that the number of stories built above ground would have to be proportional to the levels of parking underground. "We must consider that for each level of parking, we must build at least twice that number of levels above ground," he said.

Humphreys also suggested adding a traffic light at the corner of Franklin and Church streets.

A third group discussed West Rosemary Street and determined that the key issues were to provide a parking deck with at least 500 spots and continuous sidewalks along both sides of the street.

The Chapel Hill Planning Board will gather all the suggestions from the past two meetings and prepare to present them to the Town Council by May 13.

The City Editor can be reached at citydesk@unc.edu.