Indy Weekly: Keep Hillsborough Street Funky

Hillsborough Street's facelift finally got underway earlier this month (schematics courtesy the Raleigh Planning Dept. via the Indy here, here, here), and the Independent Weekly has been running features on the street all week, including this outstanding examination of the thoroughfare's past and future:

It's not all tinsel and triumph on Hillsborough Street. It's also neglect, disjunction and the history of Raleigh, good, bad and whatever you'd like to make of the "Pink Panty," a strip club that operated not so long ago on Hillsborough Street across from the Christian Science Church.

Yes, Hillsborough Street had its decadent days, and a time before that when it was vintage, and a time since when it became the congested traffic mess it is today. Maybe it has a bright future.

Strike maybe. As we contemplate the construction destruction that has suddenly ripped into Hillsborough Street this month, consider that with the right mix of new and old, town and gown, sufficient density to support transit but not so much that it jams the neighborhoods and clears out the funk, Hillsborough Street can again be the place where Raleigh's disparate parts are joined in an authentic urban whole.

Lots of stuff in there that I never knew. There used to be a strip club on Hillsborough? And a group of bars with an illegal rooftop swimming pool? Not to mention a basketball team that actually won things. Man, they had all the fun back in the day.