At sunset this evening, the trunks and limbs of 88 trees along each side of Fayetteville Street will be lit up with hundreds of tiny lights, from Memorial Auditorium down to the state capitol.
The initiative, sponsored by the Downtown Raleigh Alliance (DRA) and Duke Energy, is designed to enhance the aesthetic appeal and vibrancy of what local leaders would like to be commonly known as “North Carolina’s Main Street.”
But the lights aren’t the only changes that are coming. The City of Raleigh, in partnership with DRA and designers from the firms McAdams and SWA, is planning a redesign of the entire corridor “from building face to building face,” according to Dave Toms, a landscape architect with McAdams, who spoke at an open house at the City of Raleigh Museum Monday evening.
These changes could include adding more seating and outdoor dining options, preserving and enhancing the street’s majestic oak trees, making improvements for pedestrians, adding more lighting and public art, and updating or eliminating existing structures, such as benches, newsstands, and planters.
“We want Fayetteville Street alive, bustling, morning, evening, afternoon, every day of the year,” said Toms. “To do that, everyone who steps onto that street needs to feel safe. They need to be welcomed. They need to feel comfortable. And they need to say, ‘Wow.’ It needs to be memorable. They need to think it’s an incredible place to be and be glad to have the opportunity to be here.”
The streetscape plan got under way at the beginning of the year after the DRA identified “reactivation strategies” for Fayetteville Street as a priority in its Downtown Raleigh Economic Development Strategy five-year plan that the nonprofit published last summer. In addition to the streetscape redesign, its recommendations included redesigning City Plaza, improving the customer experience, celebrating the Black business district, adding family-friendly programming, installing more housing, and capitalizing on connections to the convention center and Red Hat Amphitheater.
“The core of downtown centered around Fayetteville Street is disconnected from investments in other districts downtown and lacks some of the color and vibrancy of these newer districts,” the report states. “To thrive, the core needs a compelling vision that prioritizes street activity, improves connections to nearby assets and attracts a variety of different people—not just office workers.”
While designers have already drafted a few ideas for what the refresh could look like, a public engagement campaign to get community feedback—including an online survey—continues through the summer and into the fall. The designers will make final recommendations and design standards to the city council in the fall, with the goal of the council adopting the plan in early winter 2026. The budget for the project, according to the city’s website, is $500,000.
The designers are proposing two different streetscape design concepts (which you can view in the survey linked above, or see images below) that the public will have to choose between (or decide if they want to incorporate elements of both).
The first, “Procession and Celebration,” emphasizes Fayetteville Street’s history as a ceremonial street dating back to its 1792 origins as surveyed and platted by William Christmas. Matthew Biesecker, a landscape architect with SWA, said his team kept coming back to old photos of Raleigh and Fayetteville Street as a place where celebrations happen.
“We felt these images were very captivating,” he said. “We want to still create this kind of richness in terms of experience in this new design as well.”
The second concept, “Exalting the Oaks,” makes the trees along Fayetteville Street the central and unifying design concept.
“You can find inspiration from a tree in a silhouette, its leaf shape,” Biesecker said. “[If] you cut through a tree, you look at the rings, we think that it’s a really interesting way to perceive an oak tree, because the rings represent time. And we think that that representation of time throughout history, since the 1792 plan, is a really interesting design idea to play around with.”
To that end, the designers are looking at rings and circular designs that they could include, for the tree planters, for example, or for paving bands at different intersections or a shade structure or water feature.
Biesecker said the final plan will aim to make Fayetteville Street more lively with fresh aesthetics by subtracting, adding, and refreshing existing elements.
“The current aesthetic is a little traditional,” he said. “It’s [about] creating a public realm that has vitality. We want to make a street that is alive … We also want to celebrate Raleigh. I love the culture and the history of the state, and we really think that if there’s anywhere to celebrate the history of Raleigh and North Carolina, this is the place.”
The designers have identified several current conditions on Fayetteville Street and ways that they could be improved through a streetscape redesign. These include:
- Widening the space for dining and retail directly outside of businesses
- Improving tree grates and pavement wear and tear around the oak trees lining the street, and potentially adding circular planters around the trees that provide seating
- Reducing the 5-to-11-foot buffer between the curb and planters that is, in Biesecker’s words, “a lot of real estate being given to people exiting their cars”
- Reclaiming that space to potentially liven up inactive commercial facades for outdoor dining, outdoor amenities, or outdoor retail sales
- Redesigning intersections and crossings along Fayetteville Street with special paving or bumped-out paving to reduce the width of the street at intersections
The city is hosting several “ask a planner events” this month, and residents will have several more opportunities to weigh in with city staffers before a final design plan goes to the city council for approval.
“If you love [the plan], let us know. If you hate it, let us know, we’re fine either way,” Biesecker told the crowd on Monday. “We want to hear what you like, what you don’t like, and maybe most important, what our blind spots have been.”
The tree lighting takes place tonight at 7:40 p.m. on Fayetteville Street.
Send an email to Raleigh editor Jane Porter: [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].