Sunday, Mar. 20, 2011

Neighborhood group pushes for Person Street renaissance

Business: 'We hope to be the spark'

Pie is coming to the Mordecai neighborhood.

And not just any pie - curried chicken pot pie and classic chocolate pecan pie and beef bourguignon pie with a layer of pate Brisee.

With those tasty treats plus house blend coffee, a fully stocked bar and sidewalk seating, local officials hope that the soon-to-open PieBird pie shop will be the neighborhood gathering place needed to help kick the area's business district back into high gear.

"We hope to be the spark that sets this area blazing," co-owner Sheilagh Sabol Duncan said. "We want to be the start of a liveable city. "

Located at the corner of Person and Pace streets just outside downtown, PieBird is a first step in what leaders, including Mordecai Citizens Advisory Council chairman Reid Serozi, hope will be a renaissance for the North Person Street business district.

With the adjacent Mordecai and Oakwood residential neighborhoods already thriving, a grassroots movement has formed hoping to pump up the area's business corridor to match. Right now, parking is scarce and the street's successful businesses are interspersed with vacant properties, and there are few shops that cater to walk-in traffic.

"Residents want to see changes in this area," Serozi said. "They want a walkable community, with the kind of small businesses that they need for daily life, and that will draw outside traffic."

The recently organized Person Street Partnership includes local property and business owners, as well as representatives from Peace College, the Mordecai CAC and the city of Raleigh, among others. The group seeks to collaborate with the city and other local resources to create a vibrant "village center" environment on North Person Street that is walkable, safe and attractive.

Though the corridor as identified by the city stretches from Martin Luther King Boulevard to Wake Forest Road, the heart of the business district lies in the stretch around the Krispy Kreme doughnut shop, near the Mordecai House and Peace College. The partnership's big-picture idea is to increase business by catering to pedestrian traffic and enticing more drivers who commute down the street every day to stop and do some shopping. With the right mix of businesses and street improvements, local leaders say the corridor could serve as a bustling neighborhood hub and an attractive gateway to downtown.

"We are starting to look at our city streets as places of shared use, not designed just for the convenience of moving commuter vehicles through an area," said Raleigh City Councilman Russ Stephenson, who has been an advocate for the partnership's efforts. "It's about quality of life, economic development and public safety."

Now, the area is host to a string of shops, ranging from the century-old Person Street Pharmacy to a woodwind instrument store and an art gallery. But sprinkled in between are boarded-up buildings and underdeveloped land. PieBird is located next to a structure condemned by the city for noncompliance to building codes. Too many vacant or dilapidated buildings can damage an area's growth potential, said Larry Strickland, the city's inspections director.

"You see a building like that, you need to do something about it, because it's sending the wrong message about the area," Strickland said. "Even though it still may be vacant, if you do a cosmetic face lift to the front of it, that perception goes away."

The other problem is the mix of businesses in the area.

"In recent years, it has been hard to access parking, and a lot of those businesses have gone to being closed-door businesses that don't rely on walk-in traffic," Mordecai CAC traffic chairman Philip Bernard said.

It wasn't always that way. Person Street Pharmacy owner Mike James has presided over the shop on the corner across from PieBird since 1976. He can recall a time when all the retail buildings were full and the street and surrounding neighborhoods were "a small town within the city." The neighborhood boasted its own grocery store and bank. It's in the past decade that buildings fell empty and fewer shops catered to walk-in traffic, James said.

There's a precedent for the Person Street Partnership's plans. Stephenson compares the group to business owners and neighborhood activists on Hillsborough Street in 1999 whose efforts led to recently completed improvements to that street. And in the late 1980s, North Person Street business owners pushed for a revamped streetscape and were successful, James said.

"Even though we feel like it needs help now, it's still completely different from the way it used to be," James said.

To help the district back to its former glory, the partnership is asking the city for more parking, wider sidewalks and crosswalks to lure pedestrians. They want the N.C. Department of Transportation, which has jurisdiction over the street, to consider lowering the speed limit and converting it back to two-way traffic. They hope improving the area's appearance will be the first step toward attracting a wider variety of businesses to the street.

A new study on the area is slated to start sometime this year, Raleigh Planning Director Mitchell Silver said, as long as no new special projects bump it farther down the city's priority list. That study will identify what improvements are needed, who is responsible and what the costs will be. It is expected to take about a year to complete.

In the meantime, the partnership plans to meet with officials from the DOT to see about improvements to the street itself. The group also has met with representatives from the Downtown Raleigh Alliance to find out how to mesh the Person Street corridor with the rest of downtown. Downtown Raleigh Alliance president David Diaz compares the Person Street business district to the City Market buildings around Moore Square - troves of under-developed potential.

PieBird and shops like it are vital to developing that potential, Serozi said, because it provides a hangout spot to help build a sense of community.

The buzz around the shop's opening later this month is already deafening. The shop had more than 800 Facebook fans last week, before a firm opening date had even been announced. An impromptu open house a few weeks before drew more than 200 hopeful pie-eaters, Duncan said. An Oakwood resident herself, PieBird co-owner Krishna Bahl has a double stake in the district's success.

"This is a strong community," Bahl said. "Everybody's tied in together, so everyone is interested in what we're doing, and everyone feels invested."