Month: August 2008

Talking about whether to cap I-277 uptown and put something atop it, one commenter today (Anonymous 3:48 p.m.) said-

“Mary, you forgot to mention the supermarket and hotel in Newton that traverse the Mass Pike as you drive into Beantown. This stuff makes sense guys.”

I appreciate the thought, but that hotel and grocery (Shaw’s, I think) look like rather awful places to hang out, I have to say. I much prefered the grassy lawn between Harvard’s Science Center and the gates of Harvard Yard and the Memorial Hall. That grassy lawn was a cap over a high-volume street in Cambridge.

In other words, design and location matter, too.

Note today’s article on the issue by Clay Barbour. It shows which developer is buying property where along tht section of I-277. I’d link to it, but it doesn’t seem to be appearing anywhere on CharlotteObserver.com that I can find. You’ll have to dig up the on-paper newspaper. Note, there’s a cool map with the printed story.

(At right: Digital rendering of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway atop the Big Dig in Boston.)

All is takes, you see, is for a developer to be interested, and suddenly the city decides it’s interested, too. At least, that’s how it might look to a cynic. (Moi? Mais, non!)

It’s been more than 10 years since the idea was first proposed to cap I-277 and put a park there. It’s been eight years since it was included in the Center City 2010 plan.

Next week, the city’s transportation department will take a serious look at the possibilities. It’s part of a four-day design workshop to look at I-277 and its interchanges from Mint Street to Kenilworth. The freeway cap is sure to come up, I’m told.

Here’s a tidbit that might be more than coincidental: Developer Afshin Ghazi of the EpiCentre has bought a spot of land uptown at Tryon and Morehead, overlooking the I-277 gulch. He’s a smart guy and he knows that in other cities, freeways have been capped and developable land created. Columbus, Ohio, put a retail development above a freeway. In Boston the Copley Place shopping mall sits over the Mass Pike. And Boston’s famous Big Dig (above) is really a freeway that’s topped with a park. Of course, in Charlotte we wouldn’t have to do that expensive digging part.

The caps themselves aren’t all that expensive — at least, not in the relative terms of massive freeway construction budgets. But putting development on a cap would boost city revenues. It will be interesting to see whether the original idea for a park survives.

Also, I hear that the consultants who’ll do the workshop, HNTB, have been hired in Kansas City to help explore a freeway cap there.

Read my Saturday column in the Observer — here’s a link to the Opinion page for CharlotteObserver.com — and I’ll tell you more about what’s happening.

Ted Alexander of Preservation North Carolina phoned Thursday to report that two historic houses in Dilworth had been sold to an owner who’ll preserve them.

Ted left a voice mail and he’s now out of the country, so I don’t have publication-worthy confirmation on the buyer’s name. He said the closing was Wednesday. The houses, at 329 E. Worthington Ave. and 1818 Euclid Ave., had been up for sale by an investor.

As I wrote in a column last year, the zoning was 22 units an acre, and it was likely the two lots could have been packaged, the houses demolished, and apartments or condos built.

The houses were modest, both dating to the early 20th century and, as PNC President Myrick Howard put it, help tell the story of Dilworth, a neighborhood designed with homes for the wealthy, the middle class and workers. “If all the worker parts are lost,” he said, “the story’s lost.”

As I reported last year, other cities such as Raleigh, protect their historic districts better, by not allowing large-sized additions to small houses if they’re out of keeping with the scale of the neighborhood. Charlotte, you’ll not be surprised to learn, does not. The fabric of Dilworth, a local historic district, is being changed by steroid-sized expansions. At least these two modest houses will survive to convey to future generations what the neighborhood used to be like: a place for people of high, middle and lower incomes.

PNC stepped in and bought the houses. They resold them with protective convenants in place to preserve them.

At last, vindication.

While researching totally other topics, I found this piece in Sunday’s New York Times magazine addressing at length the question of whether it’s OK to zoom to the front of the vacant lane when a merge looms, and the other lanes are full of drivers patiently waiting their turn.

Remember the piece I did last month, “A contrarian look at lane-merging”? It hit a nerve, with most people firmly on the side of those who wait patiently in line. You’ll note I didn’t say I do this. I don’t want people shooting me the finger, or maybe bullets. I just said it would be more efficient if people just did alternate merging.

The scientists who study that sort of thing — and amazingly, there are many — appear to conclude that if the world were full of perfectly behaved drivers, it would be more efficient if everyone used all the lanes possible, but left enough space in front so the mergers could merge without anyone having to stop.

This will happen, of course, about the time that all our kids do their homework with no nagging, bluebirds sing in the meadows all day and everyone learns the proper use of it’s versus its.

Nope, not Charlotte. Atlanta. The New York Times tells us Atlanta’s “defender of trees” got the ax. Many people speculate it’s because he’s more vigorous about citing developers for tree-cutting infractions than the other people in his office.

This got my attention: “Builders must pay hundreds of dollars for every tree they uproot, even with the city’s permission. … The penalty for violators is far heftier: One developer was recently fined $24,000 for illegal tree clearance, and Tyler Perry, the movie actor and director, was penalized $177,000 for unauthorized deforestation on his property.”

Atlanta’s fired arborist said he had issued 70 citations for illegal tree removal this year, while the five other arborists in his division issued a total of 29 citations. This does not sound like Charlotte, does it?

I called Laura Brewer, Charlotte’s senior urban forestry specialist. Charlotte’s tree ordinance doesn’t make builders pay if they uproot trees except for city-owned trees in city right-of-way. Even then, unless it’s a big tree they’re usually allowed to plant a replacement tree as compensation. That’s one reason for the slow loss in the city’s tree canopy.

As far as private development, Charlotte’s ordinance protects only a few of the trees on private development. On single-family developments a 10 percent tree save is required, although a developer can plant new trees instead of saving existing ones. On commercial development, only the trees in the setback must be saved, if they’re 8 inches or larger in diameter.

I asked Brewer if the city had fined any tree ordinance violators in the past year. “I don’t believe we have.” The city would rather have trees than fines, she said: “Usually, what we’ve done in the past is require mitigation.”

She said a new ordinance is being proposed that would require commercial developers to save 15 percent of the trees on site, rather than those in the setback.

A study in 2003 by American Forests found the total acreage of trees in Charlotte fell almost in half between 1984 and 2003, from 63,000 to 33,000.

My buddy Joe (and earlier, Tom Hanchett) shared a fascinating, though lengthy article in The New Republic by Alan Ehrenhalt about urban “inversion” — not the kind where hot polluted air settles over a city — but a demographic shift.

His point is that Chicago and other cities are seeing more middle- and upper-income people moving to the center, and low-income families and immigrants moving out to the far suburbs. He attributes it to several factors: de-industrializaton, less crime, young people eager for urban life, and traffic.

It includes several mentions of Charlotte, which is experiencing the kind of inversion he writes about. Here’s one:

In downtown Charlotte, a luxury condominium is scheduled for construction this year that will allow residents to drive their cars into a garage elevator, ride up to the floor they live on, and park right next to their front door. I have a hard time figuring out whether that is a triumph for urbanism or a defeat.

In Atlanta, he says, “the middle-class return to the city is occurring with more suddenness than perhaps anywhere in the United States,” and most people say it’s due to traffic and gas prices.

Jerry Fleeman of Gastonia e-mails with this (sarcastic) query:

“Given the many past columns and blogs surely you will write on the evils of the McMansion built by the TV show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” in the Windsor Park neighborhood of Charlotte.

A 1,900 square-foot single-story house was transformed into a 5,100 square-foot multi-story mansion. Surely this house now adversely impacts the neighborhood. Some quotes from the Observer story: “At 5,100 square feet, it barely fits on their Sudbury Road lot. “
And, “Its tall roof soars over the Windsor Park neighborhood, where modest one-story brick homes are the standard.”

Whaddaya think?

I’ve been wondering how much thought went into making the house as energy efficient as possible. Does anyone know? I’ve not been following it closely. Is there daylighting? Passive solar? Any solar panels? Geothermal heating? Recycled materials?

I hope some provision is being made to help this family with what are likely to be much higher utility bills (unless the house is “green”) and higher property taxes.

I’m taking a vacation day today and possibly tomorrow, so no new Naked City news for now. (Try saying that 5 times, fast.)

To the readers asking how to set up an RSS feed: When I use Firefox as a browser there’s an orange box in the window where the URL shows. Click on it and you’re asked how you want the feed to work.

Naked City is listed under the “blogs/columnists” link that shows only if you scroll your cursor over the “Opinion” tab at the top. The blogs/columnists link showing when you open the new home page give you only “News” blogs/columns because the “News” tab automatically opens. For Sports, Editorial Page, Entertainment or other columnists you have to click on the appropriate tab.

Meantime, what’s the reaction to the Observer’s newly designed Web site? It’s now charlotteobserver.com instead of charlotte.com. The charlotte.com URL will keep working for a while but it will disappear at some point, so be sure to fix your bookmarks.

Cheers.

Some folks are aghast that Charlotte Center City Partners President Michael Smith would cast aspersions on the Overstreet Mall system uptown of sidewalks and hidden shops. In an Observer article published Thursday, Smith said the overstreet system “is dilutive to creating a vibrant center city.”

One of those aghast is Bill Little, who owned the BB&T Center — home to many interior retail spaces — until selling to an REIT a couple of years back. He consistently defends it. Here’s a portion of a letter he wrote to the Observer:

“Mr. [Michael] Smith fails to see the big picture. Overstreet Mall is more than a series of pedestrian bridges connecting coffee shops and newsstands. Think of it, rather, as effectively bringing millions of square feet of office space under one roof. I know of no other U.S. city east of the Mississippi where more office space — not to mention hotels, parking, retail, performing arts centers, and residential buildings — can be accessed under cover.”

I’m on Michael Smith’s side. People who say they want more stores downtown aren’t going to get them until at least three things happen.

First, better designed retail space has to be available — the kind where you can walk past the store windows, see inside and go right in. You know, like old storefront buildings (example: inside the Latta Arcade) and like stores in shopping malls. Those mall folks understand window shopping. Architects who design office towers and grudgingly throw in required ground-floor retail space do not.

Second, uptown needs a retail cluster. People like to shop where other shops are. Again, the shopping center developers understand this. Uptown not only doesn’t have this cluster, there’s little hope it will get one. The retail spaces built in recent years (required by the uptown zoning) are too scattered. The older retail spaces that might have served to link them together have almost all been demolished for the new towers. The only solution would be building a sort of outdoor-air shopping mall uptown. That’s expensive.

Finally — you knew I’d get here — Overstreet Mall should transition to business support tenants: Printing companies, shoe repairs, cleaners, etc. I’d say it has to go, but the city in its infinite wisdom granted what amounts to perpetual rights-of-way over the streets. So the tunnels will be with us for years to come.

Why do you think shopping malls locate at interstate interchanges? Traffic. Uptown, the traffic is feet. In Charlotte too many feet are diverted into the overstreet system. Or conversely, too many feet are people on the sidewalks with no clue the overstreet system exists or how to get there. In either case, potential retailers suffer.

Yes, I confess I use the overstreet system when it’s pouring rain or I need to get into one of the buildings. I understand some symphony-goers were shocked and appalled that they were expected to — gasp! — set foot on the sidewalks and walk when the overstreet passage between the Blumenthal and its deck was taken down. But it’s perfectly possible to have an excellent shopping district without those tunnels.

If you want strong retail uptown, not the half-hearted retail we now have, eventually Overstreet will have to change.