Business law firm Brooks, Pierce, McLendon, Humphrey & Leonard LLP added eight new attorneys to its Raleigh roster in the last seven months, leading the firm to seek new space to ease its growing pains.

The firm, which has offices in Greensboro and the Wells Fargo Capitol Center in downtown Raleigh, added two attorneys in March and six more since August to help satisfy growing demand in the Triangle.

As a result, the firm will be leasing more space in the Wells Fargo building, said Mark Prak, a Raleigh partner. Brooks Pierce already occupies the 16^th floor of the building, about 18,500 square feet.

“Many firms in the profession have been getting smaller since 2008,” Prak said. “We’re improving our capability and growing our Raleigh presence in a way that we can serve a large number of businesses who are here in the Triangle area.”

Empire Properties, owned by downtown Raleigh developer Greg Hatem, will receive a $50,000 loan from the city of Raleigh to retrofit a Hargett Street space for its newest tenant-- a digital media company Foursaken Media.

Foursaken Media specializes in building gaming apps as well as projects like websites and software. The company is run by four brothers, Tom, Jamie, Miles and Connor Jackson, who have been working with Hatem for about a month, he said. You may have heard of the first app game they developed: New York Zombies.

The Raleigh City Council approved the loan Tuesday, giving it terms of 3 percent interest for 10 years with a five-year call. The loan is a part of the Downtown Loan Pool program, which was created in 2004 with the goal of extending financing to businesses along Fayetteville Street.

Red Hat has signed a letter of intent to lease Two Progress Plaza, the 19-story building on Davie Street now occupied by Raleigh-based energy company.

Red Hat spokeswoman Leigh Day said the letter of intent is nonbinding and that no formal lease has been signed as of yet.

The Raleigh software firm plans to move all of its Raleigh workers, roughly 600 employees, into the building sometime in the future.

The timing of the move has not been determined, Day said.

Red Hat announced earlier this year that it would move to a new headquarters somewhere in Wake County. The company was also considering constructing a new building on several sites in downtown and around the country.

The pending merger of Duke Energy and Progress Energy made Two Progress Plaza a possibility.

The latest proposal for a light-rail route through downtown Raleigh would veer into the central business district with service for commuters in the state government complex.

But it wouldn't go south of Morgan Street or east of Wilmington Street. Transit planners say each of the routes still in consideration is a combination of benefits and shortcomings (see today's Road Worrier column with reader comments).

The Raleigh City Council plans a 90-minute workshop session Aug. 1 at 5:30 p.m. with its Passenger Rail Task Force, which recommended the new route known (sorry!) as the D6A Hybrid.  Then at 7 p.m., a public hearing to receive citizen comments.

The city announcement says only the D6A-Hybrid route will be discussed at the Aug. 1 workshop and hearing.  But Eric Lamb, the city transportation planning director, who favors a different route, says all options will be on the Aug. 1 agenda.

Read more about transit route options at ourtransitfuture.com.

Developer Greg Hatem has closed his newest restaurant, Fai Thai, just three months after it opened in the downtown Raleigh space formerly occupied by Duck & Dumpling.

Hatem said today that he closed the restaurant so that its dining and kitchen space could be used to handle catering requests at his other downtown restaurants.

“We’ve turned down one to two events a week just in our spaces,” he said.

Hatem’s other downtown restaurants include Sitti, Gravy, Raleigh Times and The Pit.

Hatem partnered with William D’Auvray, formerly chef-proprietor of Fins and bu.ku, to open Fai Thai.
 

Tyler’s Taproom, which signed a lease in downtown Raleigh's Seaboard Station before the economic downturn took hold, now expects to open the restaurant this fall.

Construction has begun on the more than 10,00-square-foot restaurant, which will include the space previously occupied by Tookie's Grill.

The restaurant will also feature an outdoor deck and bar facing Peace Street.
 
“We are excited about finally making our Raleigh location a reality,” Tyler Huntington, president of Tyler's restaurants, said in a release.  “It took a while to get all of the pieces together, but the wait has been worth it. In the end we will have more space, room for private events, and a great patio area.”

This will be the fourth Tyler's in the Triangle.

The others are located in downtown Durham's American Tobacco Campus, in downtown Carrboro and at Beaver Creek Crossings in Apex.

Construction on the new space is expected to be completed this fall.

The new Contemporary Art Museum in downtown Raleigh, which opens Saturday,  April 30, will feature works by artists Dan Steinhilber and Naoko Ito, both of whom use recycled and reclaimed materials in their art.

Read more about the new museum here.

North Carolina's largest sustainability festival, Planet Earth Celebration, returns to downtown Raleigh on April 16.

A second downtown Raleigh condominium project is reverting to an auction to reduce inventory.

The Residences at Quorum Center announced this morning that it would auction its remaining 14 condos on Sunday, March 20 in the downtown Marriott on Fayetteville Street.

Starting bids for the condos range from $120,000 to $325,000.

On Halloween last year, West, the 17-story condo project in Glenwood South, auctioned off 32 of its units and recorded $8 million in sales in a single day.

The auctions are a response to a downtown marketplace where a handful of condo projects are going after a shrinking number of prospective buyers.

As the sluggish sales environment has dragged on, more and more projects face pressure to reduce inventory.
 

Alfred Williams Co., an office furniture dealer that opened its first office on Raleigh’s Fayetteville Street in 1867, is returning to downtown.

The company, which has two facilities in North Raleigh, has purchased a two-story building on Salisbury Street that it plans to renovate and convert into a showroom and new corporate office for its roughly 50 employees.

“I’ve always had a strong interest to go back downtown,” said owner J. Blount Williams, the great-great-nephew of the company’s founder.

“It’s a great place for our employees to work and I think it’s a more dynamic place for our customers to visit and sort of puts us back into the fabric of the community.”