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A year ago, the Downtown Raleigh Alliance’s annual State of Downtown event featured some ideas for solving one of the city’s most vexing challenges: how to connect downtown with Dix Park, three-quarters of a mile away.
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Perhaps the most ambitious proposal was a gondola that would carry people over the busy roads, cloverleaf interchange and railroad line that create a barrier between the 308-acre park and downtown.
This year’s downtown alliance event featured a new idea, one that proponents say is both visionary and realistic.
They call it The Oakline, an elevated landscaped walkway that would largely follow existing streets but pass over the busy roads on three new bridges.
Mitchell Silver, a City Council member who was the city’s planning director for nearly a decade, says he’s been puzzling over the disconnect between Dix and downtown for 20 years, since before the city took control of the former psychiatric hospital campus. Silver says The Oakline is the best idea he’s seen.
“When I saw this proposal, they cracked the code. They actually figured it out,” he said in an interview. “To me, it’s a project that must happen to truly connect downtown to Dix.”
The Oakline originated with the designers and developers of City Gateway, a 6.75-acre mix of apartments, hotel and office buildings taking shape at the corner of McDowell Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Robbie Ferris, the architect whose company First Floor is developing City Gateway, shared renderings of what the path could look like at the Downtown Raleigh Alliance event Wednesday.
“What you’re seeing here is intended as a garden promenade that’s lifted up above the traffic,” Ferris said.
Ferris, city officials and the Downtown Raleigh Alliance hope to launch a feasibility study this fall that would provide more details about The Oakline, how much it would cost and how it might be financed. Because the route largely follows public right-of-way, including the inside of the cloverleaf where McDowell meets MLK, government support will be critical, said Barry Buckman, who is leading The Oakline design team at SfL+a Architects.
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“One of the bigger things the feasibility study needs to do is give the public entities — in this case DOT, the state, the city of Raleigh — something they can look at and figure out how it fits into their long-term plans,” Buckman said.
The Oakline would begin in front of the Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts and follow Kindley Street over the railroad tracks and through the City Gateway project. It would then cross a new bridge over MLK Boulevard, before turning west toward Dix and crossing two more bridges over McDowell and Dawson streets and South Saunders Street.
Sig Hutchinson, a former Wake County commissioner and long-time advocate for pedestrian and cycling trails in the Triangle, told the crowd that someone could walk the length of The Oakline in about 16 minutes.
“Level, continuous, car-free and shaded most of the way,” Hutchinson said. “Going to the park is going to be as delightful as being in the park.”
The name Oakline evokes other urban trails, including the Atlanta Beltline, Miami’s Underline and another elevated walkway, the High Line in New York. The former railroad line on the west side of Manhattan was converted to a landscaped, 1.45-mile linear park in 2009 and draws millions of visitors a year.
Silver, who served as New York’s parks commissioner for seven years before returning to Raleigh, said as downtown becomes a bigger destination for conventions and other events, it’s critical the city provide an inviting walking path to Dix Park.
“Most people who visit cities want to see great public spaces, but you can’t get there. There’s no easy way to go,” he said. “To create an experience that’s a 15-minute walk will be transformative, not only for the park but for downtown as a destination.”
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This story was originally published August 27, 2026 at 4:24 PM.