40 years that built today's Charlotte

The early 20th century's "Watch Charlotte Grow" Drum and Bugle Corps. Because Charlotte always wants to grow. Photo courtesy of the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.

 

At 9 a.m.Tuesday, I’ll be on a panel of four long-time Charlotteans on NPR station WFAE 90.7, discussing what Big Things have influenced Charlotte in the past 40 years. It’s part of WFAE’s celebrating its 40th anniversary. Learn more here. I hope you can listen in, or better yet join us in person.

My fellow panelists – historian Tom Hanchett, documentary filmmaker Steve Crump, WCNC’s Larry Sprinkle – and I aren’t likely to agree, which should be part of the fun. But since I had to reflect and ponder anyway, here’s what I listed as the most significant things shaping Charlotte since 1981. Note: To me this did not mean the biggest news stories, such as the DNC or the Jim Bakker televangelist expose for which the Charlotte Observer won a Pulitzer. I went for things that seemed, in hindsight, to have been essential in shaping the city we live in today. Here are my Top 10. They’re in NO priority order, lest someone start quibbling that one was more significant than another.
 

Harvey Gantt elected the city’s first Black mayor in 1983. I admire Gantt for all he’s contributed over the years, but I don’t know that he had more influence than any other mayor. Nevertheless this was a significant milestone for the city’s racial atmosphere and hugely significant in shaping the city’s image as, well, not as racist as a lot of other places in the South.
 

The 1989 merger of Piedmont Airlines with USAir. This created a huge East Coast airline with a major hub in Charlotte. (Though I still miss the down-home customer service of Piedmont.) Ask business leaders and they’ll verify that the multiple flights in and out of Charlotte make this a very attractive place to start a business, grow a business, or relocate a business.
 

The 1996 launch of the historic Charlotte Trolley in 1996. The nonprofit used historic Charlotte streetcar #85, rescued from a field in Huntersville and restored. It was run by volunteers along the tracks starting beside Atherton Mill, near what’s now Luna’s restaurant, ending at Morehead Street. This little fun run became a big demonstration project that people would ride rail transit, even when IT DIDN'T GO ANYWHERE. This, arguably, was the spark that lit the fire that eventually became today’s white hot development market in what’s now called South End.

The 1998 transit tax referendum (and a 2007 re-vote). Yeah, the tax doesn’t produce as much money as needed, everyone now agrees. But this was a major affirmation that Mecklenburg voters were willing to tax themselves to build mass transit. And of course

With Price’s closing, South End loses the last vestige from before “South End”

 

I took this photo Thursday, after an hour in line waiting to get into the soon-to-close Price’s Chicken Coop. Almost another hour went by before I got to order.

A grease-spotted takeout box, familiar to generations

I stood in line two hours today to order chicken from Price’s Chicken Coop, the iconic fried chicken takeout joint on Camden Road in South End that had just announced it will close in two days, on Saturday.

 

While I waited, all nostalgic with a bunch of mostly strangers, for that familiar grease-stained cardboard box and the amazingly tender Price’s fried chicken gizzards, my friend David Walters sent some emails reminiscing about the neighborhood where he had a studio for 26 years. He agreed to let me publish it.

And yes, I got gizzards and fried chicken livers, and a 1/2-chicken dinner (dark meat) to split with friends. It was, of course, delicious. 

 

Price’s Chicken and Memories of “South End”

From David Walters:

 

The loss of Price’s Chicken Coop on Camden Road in Charlotte’s South End has brought forth an outpouring of regret for the passing of the “old South End.” This echoes a similar flood of emotion when the old Common Market location closed in 2016, just a few yards away from Price’s.

 

It was particularly striking, then and now, that the predominant feeling was one of angst that “South End wouldn’t be South End” any more. As someone who worked in an art studio for a number of years before that invented name and brand surfaced, I feel those emotions rather miss the point that Price’s was there long before South End was a twinkle in a developer’s eye.

When my wife, painter Linda Luise Brown, and I moved into our studio on Camden Road in 1990 (where the large bulk of Dimension Fund Advisors now sits) the area was an urban wasteland, vacant sites, weeds, barbed wire, and corner drug deals. Just few small brick buildings bravely faced this bleak landscape, most notably the offices of The Charlotte Post, the city’s African-American newspaper, the design and fabrication workshops of Gaines Brown Design, some artists’ studios (rented out by Gaines Brown at rates artists like us could afford), and two places to eat a few yards from our studio door: Price’s Chicken Coop and a little blue plate special place, the New Big Village (lamb on Thursdays!) run by an elderly Greek couple.

For several years my wife and I made art in our Camden Road studio, surrounded by the detritus of urban neglect, venturing out only to eat either at Price’s Chicken or the New Big  Village. Above our studio, a videographer lived illegally in a self-made bedsit in the old 1900s building. Back then, Charlotte zoning made it illegal to live in a “commercial” district. So everyone was very circumspect about this fledgling, guerrilla, mixed-use urbanism. But we needn’t have worried. No one came down south from uptown in those days, fearing crime and violence. So we were left on our own.

But a series of individual initiatives the 1990s saw the emergence of what we call South End today.

The Greek family eventually sold to Jennifer and Steve Justice, who started Phat Burrito (where Flower Child is now). Then Gaines Brown, who had cleverly assembled a lot of property that no one else considered valuable, sponsored a series of artist’ street fairs on Camden Road, and helped lead the effort to renovate an old, pre-war Charlotte streetcar #85. Volunteers crewed the streetcar and rolled it up and down the rusting tracks for a few hundred yards, pushing or pulling a small wheeled generator.

 

This historic forerunner of our light rail line became a tourist attraction, and combined with the art fairs, began to change the public perception of this former slum-like district.

Meanwhile, at the south end of Camden Road, local developer Tony Pressley renovated the old knitting mill buildings around the water tower and he, Terry Shook, and others got inspiration from a visit to Dallas’ “West End,” where old industrial buildings had been repurposed into an entertainment district, and the McKinney Street trolley was a tourist attraction. Charlotte’s trolley ran weekends for six years, carrying thousands, and building enthusiasm for the future light rail. Trolley service ended in 2002 to allow construction of the new light rail track.

Thus were the seeds of “South End” cast upon the cracked asphalt, and the new, invented district arose from the weeds.

Price’s is truly the last functioning survivor of the old business district that served the Wilmore and Dilworth neighborhoods along Park Avenue in the block between Camden and South Boulevard. What is now “South End” was once a thriving industrial district between the residential neighborhoods of Dilworth and Wilmore before it fell into decay, with Park Avenue the retail spine connecting the two neighborhoods. Doug Smith, a retired Observer business writer who previously worked at the long-defunct Charlotte News, once told me how as a boy growing up in Wilmore in the early 1950s he and his family would shop daily and weekly along that one-block stretch of Park Avenue. It had everything they needed, a grocery store, a pharmacy and several local small businesses.

That local lifestyle was not to last. Doug Smith explained how he and others were lured away by the glitzy delights of the new, ultra-modern Park Road Shopping Center (opened in 1956), just a few minutes away by car. White families moved away from Wilmore, the industries  closed, and the once thriving connections between Wilmore, the Park Avenue commercial district and Dilworth decayed and slumbered for a generation.

Linda and I fell victims to the inevitable displacement of urban gentrification, losing our studio in 2016 after 26 years. But we still have a studio in South End (now at C3 Lab on Distribution Street). After 31 years we are still in the ’hood. The area is so different of course – unrecognizable is probably the best word – but we find it’s still a good place to work and create art.

The main difference, other than the physical environment, is that now we appear to be the oldest folks around! But in many ways, those of us like Linda and I
who’ve spent decades in and around academia find these new battalions of artistic Millennials and Gen-Z-ers oddly comforting. We are simply used to being surrounded by young, creative minds.

It is getting harder to keep up (and dodge the scooters!) but there’s still a lot of fun in trying.

Bulldozers and the failure – or success – of imagination

   The 1930s Masonic Temple in downtown Scranton, Pa., is now the city's Cultural Center. Apologies that  the photo doesn’t do the building justice (thank you, electric wires).

 

SCRANTON, Pa. – I’ll get to why I'm in Scranton a bit later. I went for a Saturday morning stroll around downtown Scranton on a cloudy, temps-in-the-’40s day. Headline for those unfamiliar with northeast Pennsylvania: Scranton is not a booming Sun Belt city. One clue among many: There is an Anthracite Heritage Museum here. The city’s population is about 77,000, down from a peak of 143,000 in 1930. The surrounding Lackawanna County has also lost population, from 310,000 in 1930 to about 210,000.

Probably not coincidentally, 1930 was the year the Masonic Temple and Scottish Rite Cathedral was built a couple of blocks from the large courthouse square in downtown Scranton. (More history here. The architect Raymond Hood, was one of the Rockefeller Center architects.) I spotted it as I walked past and was struck by the different fates of Scranton’s Masonic Temple versus Charlotte’s. Today, Scranton's Masonic Temple is a well-used Cultural Center.

 

Charlotte’s Masonic Temple was built in 1913 – designed by architect  C.C. Hook, whose works, while nowhere near as famous as Rockefeller Center, were well known and admired locally, including the old City Hall on East Trade Street and the Duke Mansion in the heart of Myers Park. But even though it was a local historic landmark, the temple was not preserved and turned into a valuable community space.

 

Charlotte's Masonic Temple met the fate of so many of the older buildings filled with memory and character in uptown Charlotte. It was demolished for a development project. To be specific, the bank known then as First Union (subsequently known as Wachovia and now Wells Fargo) and its real estate division decided it needed a fancy plaza in front of a vast, shopping mall-esque atrium on South Tryon Street. So they tore down the Masonic Temple and built a green metal kiosk in its place. For a time it held a sort of Chick-Fil-A outpost. It's an appropriate metaphor for the imagination skills of a bank partnering with an office tower developer in the 1980s: thinking a national franchise fast-food joint is a better use of uptown space than a building that could have another century or so of useful community life. For instance, a cultural center. Or maybe, as the town of Shelby did with its Masonic Temple, renovate the building to become residences overlooking their uptown square.

 

Of course the demolition proposal drew protests from many, but local protests are no match when millions of dollars in development profit are on the table. In hindsight, the loss of that preservation battle pretty much told office tower developers they had carte blanche to demolish any old building in the way of mega-developments. So they did. The columns were hauled off to the neaaarby small city of Rock Hill to become welcoming totems to the city. (Not my faavorite idea but still a bit of aa thumb in the eye to its larger neighbor to the north.

 

Like the temple, the Chick-Fil-A is gone and now you see just a sort of small, useless green structure. To the right is a postcard photo of the old temple, courtesy of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s website. Below is a Google Street View image (2018) of what replaced it. The larger lesson – to my observation barely half-learned (and that’s generous estimate) by Charlotte’s development and regulatory powers – is that when haste to build whatever is the architect-planner-developer fad of the moment means demolishing of older buildings, opportunities are lost. 

 

A kiosk, typically unused, sits on the site of the Masonic Temple.

Observe how the local economy’s entrepreneurship scene is strengthened by the new enterprises that flock to the spaces in Optimist Hall and Camp North End, both of them restored former industrial sites. Observe the brewery scene in South End, made possible by the unused old industrial buildings that once languished there. Observe the fledgling artsy area north of NoDa – itself possibly the most lauded example of how old buildings nurture both the arts and new businesses – as old buildings become home to new projects. 

Scranton Cultural Center

 

* * *

 So ... why Scranton? I’m here for a festival to celebrate the city where urbanist thinker and writer Jane Jacobs grew up and learned her keen powers of observation. It was her intellect and ability to notice that led her to recognize the chasm between the theories and proposals from architects, planners, developers and traffic engineers and how their projects worked in the real world: what was lost, what if anything was gained, and what cities and city economies really need to thrive.

 

The festival, Observe Scranton, was organized by a nonprofit whose board I chair, the Center for the Living City, and whose executive director, Maria MacDonald, grew up and still lives in Scranton. It’s been several days of events, starting with the book launch on May 4 (the late Jane Jacobs’s birthday) of Jane Jacobs’s First City: Learning From Scranton, Pennsylvania by Glenna Lang. The idea is to encourage residents to look at their own city, observe what's working, see its possibilities, and get engaged. Next up is to help other cities that might want their own Observe event.

 

I guess we’e reimagining uptown Charlotte again

Image from draft of the 2040 Center City Vision Plan, of what might (in some distant future) be a large park where the Norfolk Southern rail yard is today, on North Tryon Street

A few thoughts follow, after I listened this morning as Michael Smith of Charlotte Center City Partners briefed the City Council’s Transportation, Planning and Environment Committee on the 2040 uptown plan, known as the All In 2040: Center City Vision Plan. (Watch the meeting here.) That plan will be part of the massive Charlotte Future: 2040 Comprehensive Plan. (See draft here.) The Center City plan is still being drafted with a final draft due in May.

 

I love the idea of a new Second Ward High School, as this plan proposes. This keeps being proposed by the city, and hasn’t happened. Maybe the city council and the staffs from the city planning department and the Charlotte Department of Transportation should burrow into why. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has its own elected school board; do they favor this idea? If yes, maybe the problem is that the school board doesn’t raise its own tax revenue; the board of county commissioners must fund school building construction.

 

The idea for a high school uptown is not new. I recall at one point – maybe 15 years ago? – the concept arose, paired with the proposal that the new high school be a magnet school with curriculum focusing on the arts, and banking/finance. It always made me chuckle to think about the students who’d go there. I imagined a Venn diagram of that student body with no overlap whatsoever.

 

Another proposal Smith talked about, saying the idea was afloat in the community: a big park on the site of the Norfolk Southern rail yard on North Tryon Street. That would be awesome indeed. Here’s a story I wrote about it in 2018 when some UNC Charlotte urban design students proposed it. But I didn’t just chuckle. I guffawed at the idea that Norfolk

Weedy obstruction gets whacked

Weeds that blocked the sidewalk have been removed. Now, anyone want to report that campaign sign illegally posted in the right-of-way? Photo: Mary Newsom

Here’s a quick update to “A good walk spoiled," about the problem of vegetation, leaves and mud obstructing sidewalks. (Headline: Report it to the city via 311, via the “CLT+” smartphone app, or online here – it’s considered a nuisance report).

After reporting it to 311 on Aug. 11, I got a call Monday, Aug. 17, from a city code enforcement inspector. He needed a specific address for the perennial problem on the Runnymede Lane sidewalk – he had to know which inspector’s territory it was in. Google Maps provided addresses for several houses that back onto Runnymede, whose owners may well not know they’re responsible for cleaning the sidewalk on the other side of a large stockade fence at the rear of their lots. It’s a spot where leaves, mud and other debris have stacked up for years.

So, hopeful sign!

Then I asked about the weeds invading the sidewalk on Providence Road where it crosses Briar Creek. The inspector told me that Duke Energy owns the property. He indicated that sometimes Duke is not speedy in getting things like this taken care of.

So I decided to appeal to the City Council member for that district - Tariq Bokhari. I emailed him about it, and got a nice reply from a staffer, who said she had reported it to Duke.

It was cleared out on Wednesday.

I can’t say for sure that getting an email from a City Council member lit a fire under the power company or whether they’d have gotten to it anyway.

But … good for Duke for clearing that sidewalk. The sidewalk is now passable, if not pretty, and you can even see the creek. (Its water this morning was reasonably clear.)

And in the future, let’s hope the city can make that sidewalk language in the city code less troublesome.

A good walk spoiled

At least there’s a sidewalk. But shouldn’t walking be more comfortable than getting slapped in the face with overgrown weeds? Photo: Mary Newsom

It was a morning walk along pandemic-cleared Providence Road. That means the street was seeing dramatically fewer vehicles than the 32,000-some it normally carries. And for once the pandemic was helpful, because the sidewalk was so obstructed in several spots that a couple of times I had to walk in the right lane of Providence Road. During rush hour. I was briefly – only very briefly – thankful for Covid-19.

That morning walk in late July spotlighted an under-reported but notable flaw in the City of Charlotte’s management of pedestrian life. Yes, the city to its credit has more than 1,900 miles of sidewalks. And yes, the city long ago stopped charging property owners for sidewalk repairs.

But what about keeping sidewalks passable? That’s iffier territory. My experience along Providence shows why, too often, walking is uncomfortable. That’s one reason people with options will opt to drive. It matters. Unless we want to live with ever-growing traffic and ever-worsening climate change from burning fossil fuels, we should be encouraging more people to walk, not drive.

Providence is a major artery (it’s a state highway, N.C. 16), but for about 6 miles through the city it acts like a neighborhood street (not a “road.”) It’s flanked by front lawns, homes, churches, stores, a park, etc., many of which

Sun Belt cities are driving much of our urban growth. Let’s study them

Charlotte shares many urban problems with other boomimg Sun Belt cities. Photo: Daniel Weiss/Unsplash

This article has also been published by my former employer, the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. Read more of the institute’s offerings.

The U.S. population, like that in Charlotte, is growing, and much of the growth is in the cities of the Sun Belt. A new report from a Houston university research center says the country should be paying more attention to Sun Belt cities like Charlotte – treating them as a specific genre that needs its own body of research.

“Unfortunately, much of American urban policy is crafted – and, indeed, much urban policy research is conducted – with traditional Northeastern and Midwestern cities in mind,” says the report from the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University.

Released June 11, “The Urban Sun Belt: An Overview,” (download it here) lays out reasons why Sun Belt cities differ in key ways from other regions’ cities and deserve more attention – including the cities’ dramatic growth in recent decades.

Here’s one small example of why Sun Belt cities may need their own research: The term “Sun Belt” itself has no official definition. It was coined in 1969 by political analyst Kevin Phillips. So demographers and others must craft their own. For this report, the Kinder Institute defined the Sun Belt as spanning the continent from Los Angeles to Miami, below the 36’30º parallel. That takes in metro areas in North Carolina, Tennessee and Oklahoma but leaves out, for instance, California cities north of the Los Angeles metro area and Nevada cities north of Las Vegas. The report focuses on metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) of 1 million people or more.

And it concludes with an ominous analysis: Sun Belt cities may be particularly hamstrung, compared with older cities, in dealing with urban problems.

Chart: Rice Kinder Institute for Urban Research

Why should the rest of the nation care? For one thing, more and more of the nation now lives in those Sun Belt cities. The report offers some astounding facts:

Between 2000 and 2016, the 22 Sun Belt metro areas with more than 1 million people accounted for

After Covid-19, what happens to cities? What we know – or think we know

Uptown Charlotte’s Brevard Court, before Covid-19 shut down bars. Photo courtesy of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute

 After Covid-19, cities will change forever. Here’s a sampling of predictions I’m seeing:

People will avoid close physical encounters. Or maybe not. Maybe they’ll flock to crowded bars and restaurants after weeks of lockdown.

Stores, bludgeoned by pandemic closings and high rents, will close. So will smaller, non-chain restaurants. Cities will become blander and more homogenized.

Or maybe this: For a while small businesses will die and renters will flee. But that will reduce demand, so landlords will lower rents. Newly cheap spaces will lure innovators and entrepreneurs, artists, restaurants and shops to formerly homogenous, high-dollar areas. Their return will reinvigorate neighborhoods once dominated by national chains and luxury homes.

People will move to small towns, smaller cities or suburbs because they’re afraid – even more than before – of urban density and urban protests. Or, maybe, they’ll move after enduring years of extreme housing costs.

At the same time, more workers will telecommute – willingly or not – and office real estate will go begging. That, too, will change property values in cities, and hurt stores and restaurants catering to office workers.

As more workers telecommute, rush-hour congestion will melt away. Or maybe, rush-hour congestion will spike as people who once commuted on transit will opt to drive to work. And as more people move to suburbs, traffic there will get worse.

Or maybe none of those things happen.

We who write about cities are quick to make predictions. Some will prove prescient. Some won’t. But nobody really knows. Cities aren’t all alike. New York’s texture, way of life and pandemic experience are not Charlotte’s, or

Anti-vaxxers. Boosterism beating science. Sound familiar?

Charlotte's first zoning map from 1947 shows development patterns that continue today almost 75 years later. Hanchett's book, with a new preface, describes how government actions like zoning shaped today's racial and economic segregation. Today's wealthiest area of south and southeast Charlotte appears here in green at the lower right corner, because the map is not oriented north-south.

“Today’s decisions, consciously or unconsciously, rest on the platform of the past.” 
–– Tom Hanchett, Sorting out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975, second edition

People who find history boring and irrelevant must have scars from repeatedly touching hot stoves. The past has lessons, if we’ll listen. This is about a couple of century-old events in my city, Charlotte.

My original plan here was to write about the second edition of historian Tom Hanchett’s Sorting out the New South City: Race, Class, and Urban Development in Charlotte, 1875-1975. It’s a stunning book, one I regularly recommend when people ask what to read to learn about Charlotte. When I first read it in 1998, it was like having a light flick on in a darkened room; you see things you previously sensed only in shadowy outlines.

The meticulously researched look into how Charlotte’s neighborhoods went from racially diverse after the Civil War to strictly segregated told a story new to many of us – not the fact of segregation but how it happened across decades. He described how government – local, state and federal – was a key actor in creating and enforcing racial segregation. (To learn more about government’s role in U.S. housing segregation, see Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America.)

Hanchett, the retired historian for the Levine Museum of the New South, today is historian-in-residence at the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. His powerful new preface brings his work up to date and makes the point that since current inequities of wealth, well-being and education resulted from deliberate government action, then government action can help reverse them.

But … pandemic. Most Americans are now stuck at home, trying to stay 6 feet from anyone outside, many having lost jobs. We’re all viewing the world through a coronavirus lens and living through a history-making pandemic, the most serious since the 1918-19 flu, estimated to have killed at least 40 million people globally.

These days some politicians urge reopening stores and businesses, and not a few Americans agree, saying the cost to the

When North Charlotte turned into NoDa

The corner in NoDa where a scruffy deli-live music venue called Fat City once lived. Where the dumpster sits in this photo is where, 20 years ago, you would find bongo circles on Friday nights. Photo: Google Street View

Through a roundabout way, someone emailed me something I wrote in 2002 for The Charlotte Observer about the NoDa neighborhood. It seems, today, oddly prescient.

Almost two decades later, I can look at the neighborhood, which retains some of its original spirit, and at the column I wrote and see a description of organic, urban change, the kind where small investments create a diversity of uses, and where over time you see what Jane Jacobs called “the self-destruction of diversity,” or “the tendency for outstanding success in cities to destroy itself – purely as a result of being successful.”

I tried to add a link to the piece in the The Observer’s archives but a Google search didn’t turn up anything. So instead of helping my friends there with a few clicks, I’ll make a pitch for daily metro newspapers, which are essential to understanding the place where you live and holding your government (which is, in reality, all of us) accountable. Here’s how to subscribe. Better yet, buy an ad.

Feb . 22, 2002: Loving NoDa to death?

The first time I saw the NoDa arts district, it wasn’t NoDa and it wasn’t artsy. It was the early 1980s, and I was looking for a bakery up on 36th Street that someone had recommended.

I found the bakery, just off North Davidson Street, in a down-at-the-heels neighborhood of emptied-out storefronts. Next door was an aging theater, which I think housed a church, though my memory on that point has dimmed.

The neighborhood was a memorable remnant of another time and an older Charlotte. It was obviously a mill neighborhood, with a nucleus of half-century-old store buildings and, lurking a block or so away, the hulks of a couple of brick mills. Surrounding it clustered small, almost identical wood-frame mill houses.

By the ’80s a ghost-town air was seeping into the mortar. Its businesses were fading; their location far from booming south Charlotte meant the aging buildings weren’t even being demolished but were settling into a twilight of abandonment.

As it happened, I knew that the little mill neighborhood had a name: North Charlotte. North Charlotte is singled out in The Observer’s stylebook, the official reference we use for capitalization, punctuation, spelling and other usage. North Charlotte merited its own entry because of its capital-N North, which recognized it as a distinct neighborhood, not just anything in the general northern part of town, which would be lower-case-n north Charlotte.

The cake I bought at the bakery wasn’t all that great. But having discovered North Charlotte, I kept an eye on it over the years. I thought it had potential. It seems I was right.

Around 1985 an artist couple bought a dilapidated block of buildings on North Davidson and in 1990 opened the Center of the Earth Gallery. Other arts types followed, including former used-car salesman Terry Carano, who opened a populist gallery in a scruffy building across Davidson.

People in this buttoned-down, money-hungry banking city flooded North Charlotte for gallery crawls, concerts, coffee houses and off-the-wall theater. The place was unique in Charlotte: It was scruffy – the opposite of upscale – and it had a sense of place. You could find weird art, people playing bongos, vegetarian food and other deviant urban pursuits. People loved it.

After a few years, people started calling it NoDa, as in North Davidson. I guess they thought it would be hip, like SoHo in New York. Looking back, that might have been the clearest sign that North Charlotte’s authenticity was at risk.

NoDa is booming. Real estate signs uptown hype NoDa lofts. New restaurants and bars are open.

Last week came news of a development proposal. The scruffy building housing the un-slick Pat’s Time For One More bar and two weirdly populist galleries is to be demolished. In their place would go a well-designed three-story building with stores and condos.

As urban buildings go, this one will be better than about 98 percent of everything getting built in Charlotte. Yes, it will bring investment to the neighborhood. Yes, cities evolve, and this evolution is a sight better than what is evolving out on the outerbelt. And yes, amazingly, über-suburban developer Crosland will do this little urban infill.

But. But.

Can you tear down the blue-collar bar and the most avant-garde and wacko gallery and still hold on to what attracted the young, alternative thinkers to start with? The cheap gallery space and the bar serving truckers, punks and artists are an essential part – though not the only part – of the formula that turned North Charlotte into NoDa.

Can NoDa survive the loss? Maybe. I hope so.

But of course, that’s NoDa. I think North Charlotte may be gone for good.

Open Streets, funding culture and arts, densifying single-family zoning, etc.

This photo shows the event known as Manhattanhenge, when the setting sun aligns with the east-west street grid in New York City. I took it July 12, 2018, at Rockefeller Plaza in midtown Manhattan. It has nothing to do with this blogpost. I just like the picture. And I like the idea of Manhattanhenge, named after England’s Stonehenge. And I like a good street grid.

I haven’t posted for weeks, due to a variety of life events including travel, the flu and a death in the family.

So to give Naked City Blog readers something to read that is not Trump news, here’s some of my writing from recent months published in The Charlotte Observer and Charlotte Five, which some non-Charlotte readers may not have seen:

How should Charlotte pay for the arts?

Does Charlotte really need an environment committee?

This festival is just the start of opening up Charlotte’s streets

The racist roots of single-family zoning

‘Charlotte doesn’t have a brand’? Here’s an idea

The famed Excelsior Club, possibly to be demolished, in keeping with local tradition. Photo courtesy Dan Morrill

Even in the chest-pumping venues of deep-booster Charlotte, an inkling of the problem sometimes creeps in. Janet LaBar, the new CEO of the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance even said it out loud in an interview with the Charlotte Observer. “I think Charlotte doesn’t have a brand,” she told reporter Deon Roberts.

The comment came up today at a regular weekly rump session over eggs, biscuits, livermush and bacon with a group of mostly long-time Charlotte residents, several of them Charlotte natives. I recalled the one-time civic discussion of a possible monument at The Square, the symbolic heart of the city at Trade and Tryon uptown. There was a time when folks were trying to figure out what could be an image that would capture the city’s essence. The late Doug Marlette, then the Observer’s editorial cartoonist, proposed an Eternal Barbecue Pit. Of course, other N.C. barbecue fans noted that Charlotte was famed, not for barbecue, but for being a place without authentic N.C. barbecue joints. Whatever.

What got put up at The Square was four didactic, symbolic statues representing Commerce, Industry, Transportation, and The Future. Visiting poet Andrei Codrescu once described them on NPR as Socialist-Realist and noted that the gold nuggets pouring on a symbolic banker’s head looked like turds.

And there’s a nice old-fashioned-looking clock in a small park on one corner. That park is modeled on the terrain of the Pacific Northwest, or maybe it was the Appalachian mountains – neither of them exactly representative of Charlotte’s terrain. It was built after the city used eminent domain to take and demolish the only antebellum store buildings uptown, which were offering not a heavily symbolic statue but actual Commerce.

Which leads me to the idea our rump session this morning devised. Because when asked, what iconic image does “Charlotte” bring to mind, people said: There isn’t one because Charlotte tears everything down.

After discussion digressed for a short time into various houses folks had owned and raised kids in only to see new owners tear them down for bigger houses, the idea emerged organically. The iconic image of Charlotte is of buildings being torn down.

Hence this modest proposal: Create a monument to Charlotte that is a building. It might be a small model of a historic building that should have been preserved. Maybe the Hotel Charlotte. Maybe the Independence Building. Maybe the Masonic Temple. I hope the Excelsior Club does not join this list.

Then every year on the city’s birthday, the model building is demolished. A new one goes in its place. It will last one year, and then, with pomp and ritual, it too is demolished. And so on. Erasing the past, year after year after year.

Greening the greenway

 Trees about to be planted beside Briar Creek Greenway. Photo: Mary Newsom

I was walking a short new segment of greenway beside Briar Creek on a sunny day and, about a mile south of the Mint Museum Randolph, I spotted a mass of young trees in plastic pots.

Of course I had to inspect them. Each plant had a TreesCharlotte tag identifying the species. I had stumbled on a large planting project destined for later in the week for that section of the greenway.

This was a cheerful discovery. The greenway, built by the Mecklenburg Park and Recreation Department, runs generally beside a stretch of Briar Creek, from the Mint Museum Randolph and its park downstream to Meadowbrook Road. That creek segment has just been re-engineered in a project by Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Storm Water Services. The project aims to improve water quality and mitigate flooding. But it left the creek banks bare.

Looking upstream along toward the Mint Museum Randolph, with the Eastover neighborhood at left. The Storm Water Services creek project left the Briar Creek banks bare. Photo: Mary Newsom

The planting is a partnership among TreesCharlotte, the Catawba Lands Conservancy,  which protects several dozen acres of wetlands woods through which the greenway runs, and Piedmont Natural Gas, which paid for the trees and which will help with tree stewardship.
TreesCharlotte’s goal is to protect and expand Charlotte’s tree canopy, which is diminishing because of development as well as the aging out of trees planted a century ago.

It was good to note that the more than 200 trees planted were almost all native species. Here’s a partial list, based on labels on the trees I saw:

Witch hazel blossoms in late winter.

Paw paw (Asimina triloba)
Little Gem magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora)
Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana)
Fringe tree, and spring fleecing fringe tree (Chionanthus virginicus)
Scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea)
White oak (Quercus alba)
Burgundy hearts redbud (Cercis canadensis)
Oklahoma redbud (Cercis canadensis)
Overcup oak (Quercus lyrata)
Cherokee princess dogwood (Cornus florida)
Red buckeye (Aesculus pavia)
Arnold promise witch hazel (Hamamelis mollis).

Of that list only the witch hazel (pictured at right) is a non-native. This particular variety is a cross between a Japanese and Chinese witch hazel. Other species to be planted include tulip poplar and black gum.

Why does it matter that they’re native species? Invasive plant species are a huge and growing threat to our environment and its biodiversity. They crowd out native species – think kudzu or wisteria – which alters food sources for wildlife, including insects. Among the major problem plants are privet, English ivy, Japanese stiltgrass and honeysuckle. (Learn more here and here.)

Piedmont Natural Gas’ participation is part of a required mitigation for environmental disruptions elsewhere.

Magnolia trees awaiting planting. Photo: Mary Newsom

Is the “economic development” tail wagging the transit dog?

Map from Charlotte Area Transit System shows current plan for the Silver Line light rail, which would be built after funding is found for it. A closer view of the west section of the route is below.

Some controversy continues over the decision by the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) to route the proposed Silver Line light rail outside of the heart of uptown Charlotte, bypassing the most convenient transfer points with the existing Blue Line. ) See “Five key takeaways from Charlotte’s newest transit plan”)

The Silver Line would run from Matthews, through uptown, out Wilkinson Boulevard to the airport and west to the Gaston County town of Belmont. One idea studied would have run it through uptown via a tunnel under Trade Street. That would add roughly $1 billion to construction costs. In my reporting, I referred to the tunnel idea as costing less to operate over time and shortening travel time considerably. But Brock LaForty, the Carolinas area manager for the consultant WSP, which CATS hired to study Silver Line routes, contacted me to make clear that WSP’s analysis found the tunnel route would save two minutes per trip, a difference he and CATS officials both called marginal, and he said WSP had not analyzed whether the tunnel would cost less to operate over time.

The statements about travel time and lower operating costs were the personal opinions of Ron Tober, a former CATS CEO with extensive transit planning and operating experience in multiple cities, who was working for WSP as a consultant on the project.

Tober’s remarks created a bit of a stir between WSP, CATS and Tober. Tober told me he was deliberate in speaking out about CATS’ decision to opt for a route bypassing the heart of uptown Charlotte and the Charlotte Transportation Center in favor of one farther north, along the side of the Brookshire Expressway. Tober said he recognized there might be blowback if he went public with his concerns. And there was. Tober was to have left WSP at the end of March. Instead, he left last week.

CATS Chief Executive John Lewis told Steve Harrison of WFAE, Charlotte’s public radio station, that the decision not to select the tunnel option was influenced by the city’s goals for economic development. “From a purely mobility standpoint, the tunnel was a great alternative for us,” Lewis told Harrison, but said CATS couldn’t look only at mobility. “Lewis said CATS is a part of the city of Charlotte and the city has other goals, like economic development. The area around I-277 is mostly empty today,” Harrison reported.

He quoted Lewis: “And being a part of the city, we had to look at it beyond just the mobility aspect of, how do we move people from one point to another” Lewis said. “There were the economic development goals, there was supporting affordable housing.”

Remember, Lewis works for City Manager Marcus Jones. And the City Council, as well as many others in the community, have deep and appropriate concerns about the city’s need for more affordable housing. Putting affordable housing along the city’s new light rail lines is a longtime – if under-realized – goal.

But look at the areas near the Brookshire and North Tryon Street where the Silver Line would go. The area is already redeveloping and gentrifying. Residents and small businesses in Belmont, Optimist Park, Druid Hills, Lockwood and the Greenville neighborhood are already worried about land prices zooming upward. (See “North End Is Hot, But Can It Handle Coming Change?”) It isn’t as if those areas will see no new development without the light rail. To contend the Silver Line is needed for “economic development” is – to put it diplomatically – misguided. Some might even say untethered from reality.

Plus, there is no funding to build the Silver Line. Today’s GOP leadership at federal and state levels are either virulently anti-transit or just not interested in spending more money on it. Any new taxes to support CATS and the Silver Line would need a state legislative OK and would presumably involve surrounding counties which have not in the past two decades offered to tax their own residents for transit. Do not hold your breath that anything will happen until well after 2020, and quite possibly 2030. In other words gentrification will have swallowed the area now being eyed as needing economic development long before the Silver Line gets built. A deep concern that development needs a boost is, to my eyes, misplaced.

Is this just the latest impatient development push from Charlotte’s uptown leaders, who have not in my 40 years of residence here ever met a glitzy development project they did not welcome? Are they embarrassed that North Tryon Street is not yet glossy enough? After all, there are two facilities for the homeless on North Tryon near where the Silver Line would run, and the area can look at bit down at the heels. Can’t have that, can we?

I’m not a transit analyst and not equipped to say whether long-term cost savings of the tunnel would make up for the extra cost to build it, or whether the inconvenience of the Silver Line bypassing the heart of uptown will be a serious impediment to ridership, or not. That deserves clear-eyed study. The local nonprofit Sustain Charlotte contended just that in comments to the Metropolitan Transit Commission. Assessing the way the route will affect real estate development deserves some clear thinking as well.

“Economic development” brings higher land prices to an area. That makes affordability even harder to provide. The city has not to date ensured that any affordable housing gets built near its existing light rail line. It hopes to rectify that, which is admirable and I wish them well. But so far those plans are embryonic, not a proven and successful strategy.

So do they want “economic development,” or do they want affordable housing? It is very hard to have both at the same time in one place, especially if that place is in an extremely hot development market, like Charlotte.

I’m left with this question: Should the city reject without further study what may be a better mobility option – which would benefit all transit riders – in hopes that its still elusive transit-oriented affordable housing wishes bear fruit?

A closer view of where the Silver Line would run through west Charlotte, across the Catawba River and into the town of Belmont. Map courtesy of CATS

Five key takeaways from Charlotte’s newest transit plan

The chosen Silver Line route is shown in green, at right, along 11th Street. The blue line shows where the Trade Street tunnel would have run. Other options not chosen are a surface route along Trade Street (purple) and a route along the existing Blue Line.

No tunnel uptown. A light rail line crossing the Catawba River into Belmont. Finally light rail to Pineville?

When the Charlotte Area Transit System’s policy body on Wednesday unanimously adopted an update to its 2030 Transit System Plan, those optimistic visions became part of the official CATS planning process.

Note to readers: CATS doesn’t currently have money to build any of those things, estimated to cost $6 billion or more. Just so you know.

But here are some key takeaways from what the Metropolitan Transit Commission adopted.

1. No tunnel uptown. CATS hired consultants WSP (the former Parsons Brinckerhoff) to study a tricky issue – how would the proposed Silver Line (formerly known as the Southeast Corridor), get across all the freeways encircling uptown, then through uptown and head west on its route to Charlotte Douglas International Airport and over the Catawba River?

CATS’ existing light rail line, the Blue Line and Blue Line Extension, travel through uptown on a pre-existing rail corridor. The proposed Silver Line would not. It’s planned to run alongside Independence Boulevard and then head west, thereby adding the former West Corridor to the Silver Line. Any way you look at it, getting that sucker through uptown will mean complicated engineering and high costs.

One option WSP proposed was to tunnel under Trade Street to the existing Charlotte Transportation Center, a hub for most bus routes as well as a Blue Line light rail stop, and up West Trade Street to the not-yet-built Gateway Station, which would also hold a new Amtrak station. Gateway Station is also envisioned as the terminus for the long-proposed-but-still-distant Red Line commuter rail to north Mecklenburg. More about that later.

The MTC opted not for the tunnel but for a route running the Silver Line above ground, beside 11th Street, then alongside the existing Amtrak route beside Elmwood Cemetery, over to Gateway Station and then heading west to the airport. It’s less expensive to build, although the tunnel route would have cost less to operate, over time, the consultants said, and would have shortened Silver Line travel time considerably. (Update as of March 8: Brock LaForty, the Carolinas area manager for WSP, says the consultants’ analysis found the tunnel route would save two minutes per trip, a difference

Hate tax revaluation time? Then let’s do it more often. Seriously.

Tear-downs that make way for large new houses, like these in the Cherry neighborhood, drive up property values of smaller, older houses nearby. Photo: Mary Newsom

It’s tax revaluation time! Are you excited? We aren’t either. Seeing your property value skyrocket is only fun if you are planning to sell it ASAP.  For most of us who aren’t real estate speculators, higher values don’t mean more money shoots into our bank accounts, because we can’t easily convert property into extra income unless we decide to raise goats, chickens or marijuana in the back yard.

Nevertheless, revaluations are an important equity tool. If you wait years to do them, you’re giving a tax benefit to wealthier property owners with rising values and giving a comparative tax penalty to properties whose values did not go up as much, or not at all.

If that sounds confusing, read on.

Mecklenburg County has been revaluing its property every seven or eight years. That means someone whose mansion was valued at (we’ll keep to round numbers here) $1 million at the last valuation has been paying taxes on that figure,

How did Charlotte’s big bike-ped trail run out of money?

Not for recreation only: The Little Sugar Creek Greenway beside Kings Drive in Midtown makes a convenient route for shoppers. The Cross-Charlotte Trail is envisioned as both recreation and transportation. Photo: Nancy Pierce

What should we make of the news this month that the proposed Cross-Charlotte Trail, a joint city-county project, is some $77 million short of the city money it needs to be finished?

That’s essentially what the Charlotte City Council was told Jan. 7 – that to complete the 26-mile bike-pedestrian trail across the county would require an estimated $77 million beyond the $38 million in city money previously allocated (and mostly spent).

Did costs balloon along the way? Why was the council seemingly blindsided? And what happens next?

Plenty of finger-pointing has ensued. City Manager Marcus Jones told the Charlotte Observer, “I’m going to own this.”

After talking with a variety of folks about the trial and its funding problem, my conclusions:

Time to have that uncomfortable talk. I mean about parking.

A Walmart in east Charlotte offers a gracious plenty of parking. Photo: Google Maps satellite view

It’s a question without easy answers. But that just makes it even more important to confront, and find a guiding strategy. It’s time for Charlotte to talk about parking.

Parking is both blessing and curse for any city built – as Charlotte mostly was – around private automobile use.

There’s a lot to curse. An admittedly incomplete list of problems parking lots cause would include the way they devour valuable land space that could hold housing, stores, workplaces, parks, community gardens, tree canopy, pretty much any use valued by city residents. (See below for a short list of what could go into one parking space.) They send storm water runoff cascading into local surface waters (i.e. creeks), polluting them and causing more frequent flooding onto the floodplains where foolish development was allowed. Remember Hurricane Florence in September? Get used to it, as climate change brings more heavy rainstorms. They add to the urban heat island effect, pushing the rising summer temperatures even higher. And the need to provide parking creates significant headaches for small businesses.

And finally this: With so much parking both “free” and available, we almost always hop into the car instead of asking, could we walk? Bicycle? Take a bus or light rail?

But parking lots can also be a blessing in a city built to make driving the automatic choice for almost all of us. For most residents here, any alternatives to private automobile travel – walking, bicycling, scootering, transit or ride-shares – aren’t available or competitive in terms of time, hassle and cost. And when we drive, we need temporary lodging for our vehicles.

I was reminded of this late last month. Rain was pelting the asphalt as I wheeled into what looked like the last available parking spot at Cotswold shopping center, then sloshed across the asphalt for last-minute Christmas shopping. I was glad to find even that terrible parking place.

But should two weeks in December really determine the size of parking lots year-round? It’s January now, and across

Charlotte fantasies, past and future

UNC Charlotte design student presents plans imagining a transit-oriented neighborhood, North Park. Photo: Mary Newsom

It was 250 years ago this week, Dec. 3, 1768, that the City of Charlotte was officially born with an act by the royal governor of the colony of North Carolina. (Read that charter here.) Monday, the city celebrated in a ceremony uptown with a sound stage and music so extremely amplified that you couldn’t talk to anyone, with birthday cake and food trucks.

Jim Williams as Thomas Polk

It wasn’t a fancy, planned-for-two-years kind of celebration – no fireworks, parades with visiting dignitaries, planes flying banners overhead. But of course, officialdom in Charlotte for as long as I’ve lived here has been more interested in pushing future growth and prosperity than in examining and learning from the past.

That 1768 charter designated five white men to be “city directors,” and one of them, Thomas Polk, was loitering near the sound stage Monday, waiting for the noon speechifying. Polk, or really, local history enthusiast Jim Williams, was resplendent in a black tricorne hat, buff-colored waistcoat, and knee breeches and frock coat of the color that 200 years later would be known as Carolina Blue. Polk – the real one – was a shrewd fellow of Scots-Irish ancestry who before eventually moving on to Tennessee played a key role in the city’s first – but by no means last – spec development.

Polk and a few others, on their own dime, built a log courthouse where two trading paths intersected, in hopes of giving the young town a competitive edge to be designated the Mecklenburg County seat. Which would, of course, make their own property more valuable.

It worked.

And for a city on the make, what could be a more fitting foundational story?

WE MOVE FROM 1768 TO ... SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE

After the noontime birthday festivities that celebrated the past, I headed off to hear, instead, about an imagined future –