Downtown Elevated Plaza
Written by: Tahoma
Horizontal space has been at a premium for decades. Everybody wants prime real-estate, and it's easier to build outwards than upwards, so it was inevitable that things would start getting squeezed tight as everyone tries to put as much crap as they can in what little space they can afford. Raleigh's city council didn't much care about the matter since we've been living pretty cramped for decades and grown desensitised to it, but that changed once it started affecting commerce and profits: There simply wasn't enough expansion in storefronts, streets and public buildings to keep up with the increase in population moving through the core of the city, and even in the more spacious stores the entrances and roads were quickly becoming choked in the number of people trying to get in and out.For a while, serious Injury and death from getting crushed in crowded areas were a statistically significant occurrance in Raleigh, almost as much as vehicular injuries and fatalities. Things kind of reached a head when a suit from SK axphyxiated in a lunchtime-rush and ended up in a coma.So how did we solve the matter, or at least delay the inevitable? Easy, you build more streets above the streets! If you exchaled sharply in amusement at that solution, you're not alone. Raleigh and most of its public saw the project's creator, Shih Yaochuan, as a walking novelty for over a decade of proposing the project until it was finally looked at seriously by the city council. Seventeen years after that, Mayor Francis Mcdowell declared the opening of an entire second floor to the downtown area suspended in the air by monumental supporting-buildings and everyone felt like the world was a little less real as a result. The crazy thing? It actually worked. Despite the logistical nightmare of rerouting some of the city's infrastructure through the elevated roads and getting a handful of buildings to support the titanic weight, Shih Yaochuan had managed to effectively double the floorspace of Raleigh's downtown area, which not only would solve traffic and pedestrian congestion for a while, but it also effectively doubled the number of storefronts and streetside-properties in the area, with some properties opening a second entrance and others even renting the space above for other tennants to open entirely seperate shops on the new streets The center of this monstrocity was so flush with new space that they even slapped a public park down in the middle of it, hence why it's called an elevated plaza and not an elevated strip-mall.
My favourite place is the three-star fine dining restaurant that's directly underneath a McHughs opened on the upper level. You can order a serving of Foie gras and compliment it with a soyburger and fries, and the waiters will go upstairs and get the latter to serve it on fine tableware.Of course, this made the ground-level property a little less desireable, what with the sunlight replaced with flourescent bulbs and the occasional sewage-leak from above, but when has economic progress not came at the cost of the schmucks below?
Purpose / Function
The Elevated Plaza was constructed to alleviate limited pedestrian space by acting as a second layer of transit and doubling the number of potential entrances and exits to properties, including providing a second layer of infrastructure routed through the bottom of the second layer.
Alterations
Numerous projects have been added onto the already overengineered behemoth, partly to correct small faults in its original design as well as to improve quality of life for the streets below.
Ever seen a mayor do an official opening for a new set of street-lights, ribbon cutting and all? Raleigh has.Plans are also being discussed on possibilities involving expanding the whole thing, building new load-bearing buildings by way of eminent-domain and connecting it to the central plaza.
Architecture
The plaza's design was for its first few years an extremely utilitarian design, with every structure being made from high-strength reinforced concrete and build for maximum load-bearing capabilities over any aesthetic sense. Once the cash started rolling in and city-council felt confident that their gamble paid off, the plaza's had a handful of large-scale renovations to decorate the whole space in a surprisingly tasteful art-deco style, right down to adding brass decorations to the emergency-ladders down to the ground streets.
History
The plaza's designer, Shih Yaochuan, was nothing if not an optimist. His whole life was spent designing theoretical superstructures and monuments that took advantage of the construction practices being discovered by the handful at the time, but ultimately none of his ideas were seen as anything more than novelties, concepts that would never get closer to being realised than as a fancy drawing to woo investors and academic exercises for students in architecture and civic-planning. Raleigh's city-council was no different, and for over a decade Yaochuan would shuffle into the council meetings with his trid-projector and increasingly detailed slideshows, and the council-members would see them as a chance to catch a few minutes of shut-eye and little more.
That all changed however in the year of '52, when to Shih Yaochuan's combined delight and horror, his lofty ideas were noticed by Saeder-Krupp Heavy Industries. Second-hand sources say that the meeting between Yaochuan and one of Lofwyr's representatives was like a child showing off his cool idea for a robot-car to his parents condescendingly ooh and aah-ing at the unrealistic dreams, but whatever words were exchanged SK found themselves charmed by the idea and agreed to back Yaochuan's next attempt at proposing the concept through their construction-oriented subsidiary Bouygues.
With the council appropriately wowed by Shih's idea, now backed by a major investor, construction began early the followiing year. Bouygues went all out in laying out the foundations, its investors eyeing eachother nervously as they all suddenly realised just how much could go wrong: One failed acquisition of property, one square-meter of groundrock that didn't meet load-bearing standards, even a moderate lapse in available workers or resources could see the project dead in the middle of its construction and their investors down an amount of money whose exact number would fail to register in the minds of mere mortals like us.
And there were some slip-ups, inevitably. Ornery property-owners that needed extra 'persuasion' in signing over their square of dirt, economic recessions causing hiccups in getting the hilarious amount of cement and iron needed, and a handful of accidents and workplace fatalities. Despite all the scares these caused, the project managed to defy all expectation and fundamental laws of murphy and finish not just on time, but to a pretty acceptable standard.
Ignoring the one electronics-store that got fucking annihilated from a falling road-section, mind you.The plaza was 'officially' opened in '69 but businesses and pedestrians were using it for a couple years before, because Raleighites have always been ready to run down construction-workers to get to work on time. The City Council quickly and succesfully pushed the plaza as a new icon and landmark of the city, augmenting their already profitable success with a boost in tourism, while Saeder-Krupp capitalised on Bouygues' getting in good with city-infrastructure and expanded their own corporate presence in Raleigh. As for Mr. Shih Yaochuan himself: Despite finding himself sitting on more cash than he could ever spend and having offers sent to him left and right from other corps and countries wanting a slice of the megastructure pie, Shih ended up donating most of his money into foundations and educational grants for architecture, and retired on what was left to a quiet life of drawing up ambitious feats of construction that would never leave the drawing-board. Good for him, if y'ask me.
Alternative Names
The Upper District, Upper Raleigh
Type
Market square
Parent Location
Included Locations
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