A group of Raleigh developers and a Washington real estate firm have been selected to build a 125-room hotel on Hillsborough Street across from the N.C. State University Bell Tower.

N.C. State officials announced the selection of Bell View Partners and The Bernstein Companies on Tuesday.

The university’s endowment fund has spent the last several years buying up property across from the tower in an effort to make the site more attractive to developers.

The project is the latest in a flurry of redevelopment activity along Hillsborough, which was given a $10 million makeover by the city last year.

Earlier this month The Brewery, a popular live music venue, was demolished to make way for a drugstore, a parking deck and apartments.

N.C. State began soliciting redevelopment proposals for the 1.3-acre of property it owns in the spring.

The hotel would include ground floor retail and a restaurant.

The project would occupy the stretch of Hillsborough between Enterprise Street and Maiden Lane, replacing both Sadlack’s Heroes and a retail center that is currently home to Schoolkids Records.

Registration is under way for the fifth annual City of Oaks Marathon and Rex Healthcare Half Marathon, which will take place at 7 a.m. Nov. 6 and will feature a new start-finish location.

Competitors can register at www.cityofoaksmarathon.com for the 26.2-mile marathon and the 13.1-mile half marathon.

The new start and finish line will be at N.C. State’s Bell Tower.

At UNC Chapel Hill today, the buildings and grounds committee of the university's board of trustees was humming along with standard business, signing off on the hiring of architects and approving designs for proposed buildings.

And then, a screeching halt when the group began to review plans for a large new parking deck near Kenan Stadium.

This is a place that takes aesthetics seriously and has a real taste for red brick. This new, 755-space parking deck to be built where the Ram's Head parking lot is now would be built not with brick but with precast concrete. Those are pre-made slabs of concrete in a variety of light colors, either flat-surfaced or textured.

Why? The price is generally right. In this case, the $28.4 million project would be at least a million bucks more if brick was used rather than precast concrete, and, as planners pointed out, this project has a tight budget with no wiggle room.

But trustees weren't exactly, um, how should we put this - enthralled - with the idea of a massive new building all in concrete plunked in the middle of this heavily-brick campus. In fact, a coming expansion of Kenan Stadium and its football center will be done heavily in brick. 

As trustee Nelson Schwab put it:

"With its material and color, I just think it's going to stick out."

This is no small project, so trustees signed off on the design only after creating a contingency plan. If the university, in going out to bid on the project, happens to get lucky thanks to these tough econonic times and gets a winning bid considerably under budget, campus planners may shift gears and infuse at least some of the new parking deck's facade with brick.

Once construction begins, it will probably take about 16 months.