605 Main Street

With great fanfare Carrboro unveiled the 2020 Community Planning Project. A way to catapult Carrboro into the future- well-planned and thoughtfully. With our abundance of liberal minded, environmentally aware, college educated residents I knew I could sit back and watch Carrboro effortlessly glide into the future(and maybe even become the #1 small town in the country- to hell with just the top ten!). We would raise the height of buildings, but since it would be done tastefully it would not change the character of the community.

And then came 605 Main Street. According to an unnamed Carrboro alderman the building slipped in under the radar and through a loophole in the law which left everyone(except the ecstatic builders) scurrying around looking for some duct tape to close the gap.

But enough about the loophole...let's look at the building. Proudly taking it's place as one of the largest and most visible buildings in Carrboro, she majestically sits on West Main Street, becoming the gateway to the cozy little homes that line West Main Street as far as the eye can see.

The Architects wisely made it look like 5 apartment/office buildings, an elevator shaft and a thoughtful storage unit at the east end of the building in hopes that people passing by would think of it as 7 quaint little buildings instead of one huge behemoth.

That might have been pulled off except for the fact that the whole bottom(with the exception of the Elevator Shaft and storage unit buildings) at street level is..... a parking garage with openings protected by bars(to either keep the cars safe or disguise the fact that it's a parking lot!).

In another masterful move the building was constructed a sidewalk width away from the street which to me seems like it closes off space instead of opening it up, but maybe I'm missing the more subtle points of urban architectural planning and that by doing the opposite of what logic would tell us to do, it IS actually opening up space by closing it off. The other effect this has is that the power lines running along the street are only an arms length from the window, with one lucky tenant getting electron microscopic quality view of the transformers and wires outside their window.... but we shouldn't worry about those of us inside the buildings, community planning is for those of us on the outside of the buildings!