Red Hat Amphitheater – Terrible Planning by the City

The sad tale of the Red Hat Amphitheater is, at its root, an example of the city of Raleigh’s inability to plan.

Who’s to blame? Well, I’d have thought the City Manager would be coordinating all this. Guess not.

And I guess the Mayor was too busy keeping the downtown “vibrant,” which it decidedly isn’t these days.

The City had years to plan for the replacement of Red Hat when the time came to expand the Convention Center, and to scrape off the existing – and always temporary – Red Hat venue to make room for the expansion.

How many years? Well, if you count from when Red Hat was built, and built to be temporary, the answer is 14 years. If you count from when the Raleigh Convention and Visitors Bureau started putting money together for the Convention Center expansion, that was 2018 – when consultants hired by the city said, yes, a bigger convention center would be viable – so the answer is 6 years.

So, at least 6 years, but really 14 years, to figure out where a permanent downtown amphitheater should be located.

At the end of this process, the City produced a “plan” to build a new Red Hat on a site that is too small for it. That’s the long, short and short-sighted of all this.

Raleigh wanted at least as many seats in the new Red Hat as in the old one – 6,000 seats, or more. To squeeze that many into the too-small location they chose, they’d need to build a tiered amphitheater, with a mezzanine level and upper level(s).

Which would be feasible, maybe, but at a cost 2x or perhaps 3x as much as building a one-level concrete pad like the temporary – and cheap –Red Hat built in 2010.

Now the City says, well, we can’t afford to build a better Red Hat, with tiered seating. And the site we picked out is too small for a one-level Red Hat. So here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna splay out the one-level version across South Street and onto a spit of extra land that the state DOT will “almost certainly” sell us on the other side of South Street.

So to build a second-rate “permanent” Red Hat, South Street must be closed to traffic between McDowell and Dawson Streets so that the new Red Hat can sit on it. So says the City.

What’s wrong with closing South Street? That’s a topic for another day, but let’s just say now that a series of one-off lack-of-planning decisions have previously decimated the downtown street grid, and worse, there’s no serious transit alternative to driving into downtown; so if you want to kill what downtown businesses remain, keep making it unpleasant to drive there from the west.

And from the east.

But wait, isn’t the whole point of a downtown amphitheater to boost the businesses downtown who are – many of them – hanging on by their fingernails?

Yes, it is.

But the key point today is, the City Manager hid from the City Council the bad lack-of-planning that’s occurred until the last possible moment before handing them her Hobson’s Choice: a Bad Amphitheater, or No Amphitheater at all.

Her message to them:

City Council MUST vote to let this happen, which means you MUST vote to close South Street, and by the way, we’re telling you this in May, you don’t meet for a month in the summer, but when you come back in September, you MUST approve our second-rate plan OR … else.

Because we’re gonna expand the Convention Center, come hell or high water, and we’re not waiting one more year for anything, and we will scrape off the old Red Hat, and as for you, City Council, either rubber-stamp our second-rate plan which we revealed to you at the 11th hour, or else be blamed for killing off Red Hat and killing all the downtown businesses who depend on it.

Why the rush? Why have we hidden our “plans” from you to the last possible moment? Why were the residents of the neighborhoods adjacent to downtown kept in the dark?

Uh, ask the mayor.

Livable Raleigh Editorial Team

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