Tonight’s Raleigh Neighborhood College class was on Raleigh’s Parks and Recreation department. Topics covered the many Raleigh parks, Raleigh’s greenways, and the maintenance the Parks department does.
I found it to be a most enjoyable topic and took pleasure in quizzing the staff for all the questions I’ve saved up. I think I unintentionally dominated the questioning, though normally the whole class gets involved. I suppose parks and recreation isn’t as controversial as some of the other topics, but I sure wanted some answers!
After the staff mentioned a few parks and I piped up how I knew them well, a few of my classmates began to kid me. “So, just how many places have you lived?” joked one! I guess I know the city better than I think.
One thing I learned is that the Hodges Street section of the Middle Crabtree Trail greenway is indeed open. Vic, the head greenway guy, says it opened Tuesday morning.
“We drove the footings so far this time, they’ve hit bedrock,” he said proudly. If anything manages to take the footings out now, he said, the greenways will be the last of our worries!
Having the greenway whole means if we wanted to, we could slip out our neighborhood, hit the greenway, and ride it all the way to Crabtree Valley Mall! We’re on the eastern end of a long line of continuous greenway: over 11 miles!
Vic says the greenway consists of 60 miles at this point but 270 miles are in the overall master plan. He hopes it won’t be long until we’re at 100 miles. That dwarfs any other greenway system in the area. Its just one more reason that Raleigh rocks!
Bonus link: The N&O’s Joe Miller wrote about the Middle Crabtree Trail in today’s Lifestyles section. He also blogged about the confusion over whether the full greenway was open. Its a shame that neither the print edition nor the online edition shows the great photograph of the wetlands that ran with the Wednesday teaser for the article.