Major changes are coming to downtown Raleigh, starting with opening of Freedom Park

Summertime in downtown Raleigh will bring heat and demolition. A beacon lit and a dome changing color.

North Carolina Freedom Park will open this summer, maybe as early as June. At the center of what was once a gravel parking lot, a piece of public art, the Beacon of Freedom, will illuminate the park. The words of African American North Carolinians are inscribed along walkways for future generations to contemplate.

The opening of the park is the first of several major changes to the northern end of downtown Raleigh, where most state government buildings are located. At the heart of downtown is the historic state Capitol building, with one side facing Fayetteville Street, where festivals take place, restaurants and businesses line the corridor and a Ferris wheel shows up on special occasions. The other side of the Capitol faces two major state museums, the seat of the legislative branch and the governor’s mansion.

The Capitol’s copper dome and the rest of the roof will be replaced this year, turning the blueish-green dome copper brown until enough time passes that oxidation changes its color again.

And there’s more. Thousands of state employees will move office buildings in the next few years. Across the street from what will become Freedom Park, the big white block building — the Bath Building — will be demolished this year. A few blocks away on the other side of the Legislative Building, the Administration Building is also slated for demolition.

Across the street from that building, a new dinosaur exhibit will take shape next to the giant, two-story globe.

Thousands more people will be visiting downtown Raleigh, refreshing a different side of the city. And it starts with a park.

Big changes coming to Jones Street

North Carolina Freedom Park is the catalyst for significant changes to the end of downtown Raleigh that usually gets just a certain brand of visitors.

State employees, lobbyists, lawmakers, protesters, advocates, tourists and schoolchildren frequent the northern side of downtown, also known as the state government complex.

With the rise of Freedom Park, set to open in June, it will draw even more visitors — from kids on field trips to adults interested in history — to a cultural destination or just a place to gather.

In December, the Dueling Dinosaurs exhibit featuring a Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus Rex will open, as well as a new DinoLab. Both are under construction now at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, next to the museum’s Jones Street entrance by the giant globe.

“For the next little while it might be crowded from time to time with building demolition and construction,” said Reid Wilson, the secretary of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

“But not too long from now, visitors are going to have an incredible array of places to go and see and enjoy,” he said.

And there could be even more in years to come, if a stalled African American monument is built on the Capitol grounds and a renovation and expansion of the N.C. Museum of History moves forward. Both of those projects are in Gov. Roy Cooper’s budget proposal and could end up in the final state budget.

“I think there’s going to be some transition years here,” Wilson said, “but not too far from now, the government complex is going to be an amazing place to visit. There’s going to be more interesting things to do.”

First up is North Carolina Freedom Park.

North Carolina Freedom Park opening this summer

Freedom Park, across Wilmington Street from the Legislative Building, has been under construction for more than a year on about half of the block where the state’s archives and records buildings are also located. Busloads of students on field trips to the General Assembly and museums will soon make a new stop at the park.

Built to honor and celebrate the African American experience and struggle for freedom, the park features as its centerpiece an art structure called the Beacon of Freedom that will be lit at night, and it has inscribed quotations from Black North Carolinians along several walkways.

The first student group to tour the site was a 10th-grade honors civic literacy class from Wake Early College of Information and Biotechnology in Morrisville that visited in March.

As they visited, work was underway installing quotations that line the low walls of the park’s paths.

“There are no statues here. Those words, those ideas, will be our monument,” historian Reginald Hildebrand told the students.

The meaning of the Beacon of Freedom, he said, comes “in part from what you bring to it.” That could be the Biblical promised land or, domestically, the Statue of Liberty, said Hildebrand, who’s on the park’s board.

Torry Holt of Holt Brothers Construction, which is building the park, urged the students to return once it is finished. “We’re doing something special,” Holt said.

Maria Alexa Prado, a sophomore at Wake Early College, told The N&O she usually comes to downtown Raleigh for the science museum. Now she’ll go there for Freedom Park, too.

“I’m definitely coming back, and I’m going to brag that I’m one of the first people to tour this place,” Prado said.

Classmate Kumarie Taylor said she hadn’t known the park was being built until the tour.

“Me and my family like to do a lot of African American historical things. I think it’s really cool what they did in a small area,” Taylor said.

State office buildings

Plans to tear down the state government’s Administration Building will set in motion a complicated series of state agency moves.

The timeline is uncertain, but eventually, the Administration Building — which holds several state agencies and some important government IT equipment — will be emptied and torn down.

A new education campus will be built in the Administration Building’s place. That includes a new home for the UNC System Office, formerly in Chapel Hill.

The timeline is clearer for the demolition of the Bath Building. It will be torn down this year.

That state office building has sat mostly empty for years and has been considered an eyesore.

Now the land will be turned into green space, complementing Freedom Park across the street.