Raleigh at a Glance
Raleigh’s downtown is undergoing a stunning rebirth with residential units sprouting up throughout the center city. New and superb restaurants and cutting edge entertainment venues are opening their doors to serve the Capital City’s young (median age 30.9 as opposed to the national median of 35.3) educated (44.9 percent of Raleigh residents have a college degree or more, compared to 24.4 percent nationally), and prosperous (average per capita income $25,113 compared to the national per capita of $21,587) residents. Business is booming downtown also. Downtown Raleigh is home to Fortune 500 business Progress Energy, which recently opened its new world headquarters for business in the heart of the city. While the arts are thriving throughout Raleigh, no where is the cultural and creative more robust than in the center city, site of the BTI Center for the Performing Arts, one of the South’s major performing arts facilities, a host of galleries, and the North Carolina History Museum, the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and Exploris children’s museum.
Further bolstering Raleigh’s downtown is the new 500,000-square-foot convention center and four-star headquarters hotel that will be welcoming guests in 2008. The front door of the new convention center and four-star Marriott is changing too. The Fayetteville Street pedestrian mall has been reconverted to vehicular traffic and to even greater glory as North Carolina’s ceremonial corridor. No doubt, downtown Raleigh is buffing up to become the mid-South’s convention and cultural destination.
Raleigh’s history is no less bountiful. In 1792, Raleigh was created to be North Carolina’s seat of government. To fully appreciate this uniquely blessed city, one must contemplate the history and delightfully complex composition of the state that created Raleigh. Home to the Native American Iroquoian, Siouan and Algonquian tribes, it is also the birthplace of Virginia Dare, the first child born of English parents in the new world during the first attempt by the English to settle the western hemisphere. One of the original 13 colonies, North Carolina was the first to officially call for independence with the Halifax Resolves in 1776.
A state of yeoman farmers and among the South’s first industrial areas, North Carolina was no home place to the gentry, but rather a state of working men and women who valued education and established the nation’s first state university. North Carolina’s appreciation of education also created a notable public school system and the nation’s best community college system. Though firmly in the grip of the hard times of the 1920s, North Carolina invested in a statewide network of paved thoroughfares and became known as “the good roads state,” recognizing that the lifeline of economic growth was a statewide transportation network.
That diverse composition of people, that love of freedom, that gritty work ethic, that esteem for education and that common sense approach to economic development combined to create the robust environment in which North Carolina’s capital city today thrives.