By Jeff Havener
April 2026
Editor’s Note: This is the second of a two-part essay exploring Smoky Hollow and the northern edge of downtown Raleigh. Part I traces the history of the area, from its origins as a rail-served industrial district and working-class neighborhood to the infrastructure decisions that reshaped it. Part II examines what this place is becoming today, and what its transformation may signal about how the city is evolving.
Today, Smoky Hollow is beginning to take on a different role in Raleigh, and you feel the change the moment you move through it.
What was once a pass-through corridor is beginning to take on the qualities of a place within Raleigh’s evolving urban development pattern, one that people move through more slowly, and increasingly, one they choose to stay in.
Conlon Family Skatepark
The Conlon Family Skatepark, located on the west side of Capital Boulevard, represents a strong example of tactical urbanism — an approach of using short-term, low-cost, and temporary interventions to test improvements in public spaces, often acting as a catalyst for long-term change.
On a site of vacated slabs and parking lots, Skate Raleigh partnered with the city to create a low-cost, temporary community-driven skate park, activating land that had long sat idle.
The skate park illustrates a broader shift in planning and development practice — the recognition that vacant or transitional land can serve meaningful public functions before permanent construction occurs. Rather than remaining idle, the site contributes to the public realm by supporting recreation, community gathering, and informal use. This approach reflects a growing emphasis on flexibility, experimentation, and incremental activation in urban environments.
The S Line
What was once a dormant freight corridor is being rebuilt into a high-performance passenger line, linking Raleigh to Richmond and the broader Northeast Corridor by connecting directly into Union Station. Trains designed to reach 110 mph will cut more than an hour from travel between Raleigh and Richmond, while separating passenger service from freight traffic and reducing pressure on parallel corridors like I-85.
At Smoky Hollow, the line does not arrive as a designed feature. It follows its original alignment through the area, crossing the future park corridor on a raised structure. It then runs alongside what will become the park, with the park design accommodating that condition.
The S-Line is often described as a rail project. In reality, it functions as a fixed piece of urban infrastructure that the city now must build around.
That condition creates a constraint. But it also creates a moment.
For the first time in this corridor, Raleigh is not layering new development around infrastructure after the fact. It is being asked to resolve them together.
Here, it cannot be treated that way.
And that is what is happening here.
Park & Green Infrastructure
Industrial development along the west side of Capital Boulevard reshaped the landscape by channelizing Pigeon House Branch, replacing natural systems with impervious surfaces, and increasing flood risk while reducing walkability.
The city now has plans to correct these errors with the construction of a linear park. The park is designed to be the “Northern Gateway” to the city and act as a catalyst for further development on the northern end of downtown. A place that once sat at the edge is being asked to function as an entrance.
Plans for Smoky Hollow Park center on transforming a former city maintenance site into a 14-acre public space focused on restoration, recreation, and reconnection. The project centers on environmental restoration, passive recreation, and reconnecting this portion of downtown to its underlying landscape.
The park will be centered on Pigeon House Branch, with plans to uncover the creek and restore a more natural flow through the site. Viewing areas, plazas, and pathways will follow its course, reintroducing variation into what has long been a flattened landscape.
Reintroducing the creek changes how the site is experienced. Movement slows. The terrain begins to shift beneath you. Shade, water, and canopy work together to reduce heat in one of the warmest parts of downtown.
The park is not just open space. It is infrastructure. The city will create a significant downtown wetland restoration effort to manage stormwater and improve water quality. Designs include priority for habitat restoration for species like the Neuse River waterdog, monarch butterflies, and great blue herons.
Recreational amenities include walking paths, flexible gathering spaces, and a History Walk to commemorate the site’s heritage. The park will also serve as a multimodal connection point, and the popularity of the temporary skate park has already influenced the permanent design, with a dedicated facility now planned as part of the park.
The site is no longer flattened. It begins to take form again, following the restored path of the creek.
The rail line crosses and then parallels the linear park. It becomes part of the space itself. Infrastructure is no longer something to work around; it becomes part of how the place is experienced. The pace shifts, and movement becomes part of that experience.
This is a small geographic moment, but it signals something larger. Raleigh is moving into a phase where infrastructure is no longer separate from place-making. It is expected to do both, and Raleigh now has to consider how transportation systems and place are being resolved together.
Multiple systems are coming together in the same place, at the same time.
In addition to recreation, the park is expected to support and reinforce additional high-density development nearby. It provides the greenspace needed in dense urban environments and supports the mixed-use character of the Glenwood South district. It will provide a rare public gathering spot for a growing number of residents moving into adjacent developments like The Line and Peace Apartments.
By the time the city began planning a new park on the Devereux Meadows site, the question wasn’t just what to build, but what story to tell. Reusing the name would have required reconnecting it to a memory that had come to carry different associations and had largely disappeared from the physical landscape. Instead, the new identity has leaned into Smoky Hollow, a name tied not to a single use, but to the broader geography and layered history of the area. The shift from the Devereux name to Smoky Hollow is a core part of the park’s mission to honor the displaced working-class and Black communities.
The park does not stand alone. And it shouldn’t. It becomes the centerpiece of the reemerging community reshaping everything around it. It begins to function as the gateway to this evolving part of downtown.
Mixed Use Development
Before the current wave of development, the corridor had already begun to show signs of life in smaller ways. Along Peace Street, places like Flythe Cyclery and Endless Grind served a different kind of user — cyclists, skaters, and people moving through the city at a slower pace than by car.
These were not large anchors or destination retail. They were local shops responsive to the conditions of the street, supporting activity that had always been there, if even without a place to be.
That shift is now accelerating. New mixed-use development has introduced residential density, ground-floor activity, and a more complete public realm that had long been absent from this corridor, as buildings begin to re-establish the street edge and activate the ground floor.
The corridor is no longer experienced only through a windshield. It is beginning to be experienced at a human scale.
In the early 2000s, Seaboard Station underwent redevelopment as a mixed-use area with retail, office, and residential components. This revitalization reintroduced activity and pedestrian life, while maintaining a connection to the site’s historical identity.
Seaboard Station highlights the continuity between historic rail-based development and modern mixed-use planning. It demonstrates that walkable, transit-adjacent districts have long been part of Raleigh’s urban fabric, even if the terminology and context have evolved.
Today, that pattern continues in a new form.
But the buildings themselves are only part of the story.
Density has arrived before the public realm has fully caught up.
Opportunities from the S-Line
The S-Line introduces something else to the site — leftover space.
Beside the line is a linear void that today reads as fragmented and unresolved. It is the kind of space that typically becomes unprogrammed, disconnected, and easy to overlook.
But here, it has the potential to become something more.
The space adjacent to the line is the real project. It is the unrealized opportunity.
It emerges from the overlap of multiple systems, rail, park, street, and development, each with different priorities. That is what makes it important. It is where that overlap becomes visible.
It is where the leftover edge begins to matter.
Rather than treating the space as residual, it can begin to function as an extension of the park, expanding the urban open space, creating continuity between the northern gateway, surrounding development, and the broader connected network of greenways and streets.
As density arrives, this kind of connection becomes essential. The success of the surrounding development will depend not just on what is built, but on how people move between it and through spaces that feel intentional rather than incidental.
The Shift
This is where the shift becomes visible. The corridor is no longer organized around moving through. It begins to organize around being there.
As the S Line connects into Union Station, the role of downtown shifts. It is no longer just a destination within the city, but a node within a larger network. A place where passengers step off a regional network and immediately connect to the street grid, transit network, and the broader system of greenways and bike routes across the city. A place where Capital Boulevard, new park space, and future development are coordinated rather than haphazardly layered on top of one another.
Recent rezoning decisions along Peace Street and adjacent to the future park reflect this shift, allowing for greater height and density in a part of the city that had long been constrained. These changes reinforce an expectation that this corridor will function differently than it has in the past, not as an edge, but as part of downtown itself.
The policy is beginning to catch up to the place.
The corridor that carries Capital Boulevard today was already in use long before the highway, first by the creek, then by the railroad, and later by the industries that clustered around it.
Smoky Hollow sits at a point where Raleigh’s edges, infrastructure, history, and future intersect. What was once an industrial edge of the city is now becoming an entry into downtown Raleigh.
It is beginning to function as the northern entry to downtown. A front porch.
What has historically functioned as a service edge is now being asked to play a more public role.
A place that once gathered people around a ballfield is beginning to gather them again, just in a different way.