Goodnight Raleigh - a look at the art, architecture, history, and people of the city at night

Hotel Raleigh, Raleigh, N.C. [Updated]

The Park Hotel, later named Hotel Raleigh, was built in 1893 at 138 West Martin Street. It was designed by the enigmatic A.G. Bauer, who also designed the Governor’s Mansion and the old Meredith College building downtown.

Read more »

Introducing ‘Project Bird’s Eye View’

In 1872, Camille N. Drie set out to document the city of Raleigh, providing a “Bird’s Eye View” of the city. It was just a few years after the War Between the States, and back then Raleigh was a relatively small capital city in the South. Despite how it appears, his map was not drawn from a hot air balloon. Instead, he made a series of drawings from vantage points across the city and later stitched them together.

Although the intricately detailed drawing shows hundreds of structures across Raleigh, there aren’t many still standing. Project Bird’s Eye View is a new series in which we will document the remaining structures from this historical map and provide a small bit of history of the building over the years.

The first entry is 227 S. Wilmington Street, now home to Slim’s Downtown Distillery.

Read more »

Demolished: The Balentine’s Cafeteria Building

Over the course of the past few days, concrete munchers have been hard at work dismantling the building at 410 Oberlin Road in Cameron Village.

Now the building is completely razed, and new construction activity will soon be taking place near the busy intersection of Oberlin Rd. and Clark Ave.

Read more »