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| People fill a plaza at the Mint Museum in Uptown Charlotte. In many cities overstreet skywalks are blamed for taking too many people off the sidewalks. Photo: John Chesser |
Uptown Charlotte is not alone in having a series of overstreet walkways that keep pedestrians off the streets and in so doing, damage (by splitting up) the potential customer base for uptown retail.
As pointed out in this Associated Press article in Salon, “Cities face new urban problem: their own skywalks,” points out, “a debate is growing over what to do with the cozy corridors, bridges and tunnels that have helped create urban ghost towns.”
Cincinnati dismantled half of its system. Baltimore took down seven bridges. Other cities are questioning them.
Charlotte imported its idea from Minneapolis in the 1960s, when suburban expansion and white flight were in full flower. In the 1960s and ’70s the city bus stops were along uptown sidewalks, so the sidewalks were crowded with bus riders, many of them people of color. The overstreet walkways went from white-collar office to white-collar office. Hence an informal segregation took root.
Today of course you see people of all races both on the sidewalks and in the overstreet walkways. The Transportation Center is where people wait for the buses, in a covered facility with seating. And I must disclose that I, too, sometimes take the overstreet walkways when the weather is particularly nasty.
Many urban planners don’t like the skywalks, but … too bad! The city of Charlotte gave away the air rights over its public streets to the corporations building the office towers, which wanted to connect them to other towers or to parking decks. In general they have 99-year leases. For a brief time in the 1990s the city planning department tried to discourage new skywalks. But planners were no match for the pressure from the banks formerly known as First Union and NationsBank and others who were building tall towers.
So it appears we’ll be skywalking in Charlotte for at least another half-century.