Dorthea Dix Should Be The South's Central Park

Raleigh's one path to being a world class city requires unprecedented ambition.

RALEIGH, NC | North Carolina’s Capital City anchors a metro that doubles in size every two-plus decades. It is regularly listed with Austin as #1 or #2 in this or that: the best place for millennials to raise a family, start a business, or relocate.

But Raleigh remains a “second city”. It is good—and some parts are great—but it’s not world-renowned. It’s not a place that people from all over the world have to come and see. It’s on no one’s bucket list.

Raleigh has one--and only one--path to becoming a world-class city. It goes through the city’s greatest untapped natural resource: Dorothea Dix Park.

Although the vision is ambitious, it isn’t rocket science—it’s city-building. Raleigh needs to anchor itself in Dix Park’s potential by summoning civic commitment and political courage.

A GOOD START, BUT NOT ENOUGH

The good news? We don’t have to start from scratch. Dorothea Dix has a master plan, complete with a video explaining the implementation.

Here’s what we’re working with: The site spans 308 acres. It comes pre-packaged with serious amenities: open fields, the North Carolina State Farmers Public Market, and dozens of still-unrenovated historic buildings. Those buildings alone total over 1 million square feet of usable space—roughly the size of Durham’s American Tobacco Campus (perhaps the East Coast’s best adaptive reuse project).

Critically, the current plan mostly ignores the land flanking the park—Downtown South, Pullen Park, Governor’s School, Central Prison, Lonnie Poole Golf Course, NC State’s Centennial Campus. All of these sites offer serious real estate for bold, urban infill.

By North Carolina standards, the vision sounds enormous. But zoom out even a little, and the scale starts to look modest. In my view, North Carolina has a long-standing humility problem. The real barrier isn’t space or feasibility. It’s a kind of civic modesty that keeps cities here from asking for more. Maybe it’s time to outgrow that.

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MORE IS EXACTLY WHAT SHOULD BE PURSUED HERE

Dorothea Dix should be developed as The Central Park of the South. Yes, you read that correctly. That Central Park.