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For decades, drivers coming into downtown Raleigh from the south on U.S. 401 passed a wooded hillside just before the road turned into McDowell Street. Those trees are gone for good.
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What’s taking their place in the near term is an underground parking garage and the extension of a street that now dead-ends atop that hill.
Kindley Street will be extended down to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, creating a new intersection on the east side of the bridge over U.S. 401. It will provide access to a development at the south end of downtown known as the City Gateway district.
The company creating the district, Capital City Urban Development, bought the land that once contained an exit ramp from Martin Luther King to northbound U.S. 401. That ramp closed earlier this year, a step in developing 6.75 acres the city rezoned a few years ago to allow office, hotel or residential towers up to 40 stories tall.
As it extends Kindley, Capital City Urban Development is working with the city and the N.C. Department of Transportation to restore access from westbound MLK to northbound U.S. 401. Contractors have begun to alter the cloverleaf on the south side of MLK and create a new left-turn lane.
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The new intersection, with the revised cloverleaf, should be completed by the end of the year, said Asher McGlothlin, development manager for FirstFloor, the Raleigh company behind the Gateway project.
The first phase of the Gateway project is the Mira, a 2-year-old apartment building perched above MLK. The second will be the underground parking deck, the first automated garage of its kind in North Carolina. The two-level deck, with spaces for 228 cars, also should be completed by the end of the year, McGlothlin said.
The parking garage will be open to the public from Kindley Street while other parts of City Gateway are developed. The next phase, McGlothlin said, is a hotel that’s expected to rise next to the parking deck on McDowell Street.
The garage will be covered with a 27,000-square-foot plaza with an astroturf surface, raised planters and a system to collect stormwater, McGlothlin said.
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