Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Welcome back to Teardown Tuesday on the Development Beat. Today we take a quick look at the demolition of the Palms Apartments, located just inside the beltline off of Lake Boone Trail.
Built in 1966, the garden-style apartments housed between 12 and 24 units per building, which ranged in size from 11,000 to 24,000 square feet.
Wake County
A 2002 photo of the Palms Apartments
The property was purchased for $9.5 million in July of 2008 by a company named Grubb Palms LLC, a subsidiary of Grubb Ventures. Interestingly enough, Grubb is currently planning a mixed-use development at another just-inside-the-beltline spot.
Grubb Ventures still has the property listed on its web site; as of this writing, a description for the property was still available here. It reads:
“Nestled in a naturally wooded setting, The Palms Apartments offer large one, two and three bedrooms apartments located directly on the greenway. The community is conveniently located at I-440 and Lake Boone Trail, close to I-40, downtown Raleigh, Crabtree Valley Mall, Rex Hospital, NC State University and Meredith College.”
City of Raleigh
A site plan for the Greenway Village at Lake Boone project, which will be replacing the Palms Apartments.
It goes on to boast about its premier “inside the beltline” location, and the fact that there is a CAT bus stop right outside, although we assume it doesn’t get much more “outside the beltline” that taking the CAT bus. To be fair, this reporter has ridden the system, and found it to be mostly reliable.
The $877,566 demolition will be handled by Harold K. Jordan & Company.
Monday, February 2, 2015
A project years in the works — the initial rezoning case was filed in 2010 — is finally coming to fruition, as permits were issued January 29 for a new 3,844 square foot BB&T Bank branch.
The bank will be constructed on an empty parcel of land at the intersection of Falls of Neuse and Litchford Road in North Raleigh. BB&T purchased the property in June of 2013 for $1.5 million. In February of that year, the rather nice-looking home that once sat on the parcel was demolished.
The aforementioned zoning case changed the use of the land from residential to office and institutional 1, paving the way for the new bank branch. In the application, a wide number of uses for the property were barred, including a rifle range, a fraternity and a kennel/cattery. Cattery? Are those … real? And are they hiring? To be honest though, any of those uses sounds more interesting than yet another bank branch. My dad would probably agree.
Wake County
This house once sat on the property where the new BB&T will be built
Although it was the then-property owners who filed the initial zoning case, it was BB&T which filed the site plan two years later. The site plan described a slightly smaller build-out at 3,200 feet, and noted that it would include, as most banks do, a drive-through.
The new, $725,000 bank will be built by Ashland Construction, which, among other projects, handled the construction of the Harris Teeter at North Hills.
