Category: arts

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

Getting creative with Blue Line Extension design

This is about something that was not the big headline from the Charlotte City Council tonight.

The big news, of course, was that the council passed a new budget that raises the city’s property tax rate by a little more than 3 cents, from 43.7 cents per $100 assessed value to 46.86 cents, to pay for a huge bundle of building projects. Those projects include a cross-city bike/ped trail, renovating Bojangles Coliseum (the original 1950s Charlotte Coliseum on Independence Boulevard), building a new 911 call center, and so on. (Read more here. And here’s a link to the city’s budget department.)

But during the dinner meeting, the council heard a short presentation from a couple of planners about an idea to help the new light rail line look a little better than the first one, the Lynx Blue Line. “Some of the components of the Blue Line we wish that we could have done better,” Planning Director Debra Campbell said. So for the Blue Line Extension, city planners and the Charlotte Area Transit System are looking to use some of the already budgeted art-in-transit funds to dress up a number of the walls, bridges and other light rail equipment whose design can range from boring to bleak.

Example of a standard wall finish (taken from tonight’s slide presentation) is above, right.

Now, however, designs have been drawn for concrete for walls that is molded with a flowered pattern. Here’s an example of a typical wall, and then the one CATS and the city hope to build, instead. (All images courtesy of the City of Charlotte.)

And the nicer way to build a wall:

Here’s a rendering of how some of the more artistically designed walls might look:

The light rail bridge that will be built over Harris Boulevard near UNC Charlotte could have an artistic railing, with a pitcher plant design on the piers:

And, for about the 200th time, council member Andy Dulin complained about the gray and orange color scheme on the bridges along the already built Lynx light rail line. Those colors were chosen by artists, he said, and he thinks they are unattractive.  I don’t always agree with Dulin but he is spot on in this assessment. The color that was supposed to conjure the red clay soil of the region instead conjures a Home Depot sign. The blue-gray of the Southern sky is more like battleship gray.

The planners assured Dulin that orange and gray would not be used.

Winston-Salem gets artsy on its interstate

Cheers to our fellow N.C. cities, Wintson-Salem and Greensboro. Each won a six-figure grant from the Mayor’s Institute on City Design.

The most exciting project is the one in Winston-Salem, which received $200,000. The Arts Council of Winston-Salem created a coalition among the N.C. Department of Transportation, the city, and the Chamber of Commerce to make sure urban designers and artists have a role in the NCDOT replacement of 11 bridges along Business I-40. The goal: Assemble artists and urban designers to create a master plan that provides guidelines for design, lighting, sound walls, and bridge abutments, as well as water features, public art, and festival space adjacent to the rights-of-way.

It would be great if Charlotte’s Center City 2020 Vision Plan came up with a similar coalition, and went after similar money.

Greensboro’s $100,000 grant to this project. The grant foes to Action Greensboro, a not-for-profit organization in the N.C. Piedmont that coordinates citizen initiatives on enhancing the Greensboro. Action Greensboro is funding public art for a renovation of an abandoned railroad. The art will include 12 decorative iron , through which will be seen two 60-foot graphic panels depicting parts of Greensboro’s history.

The greenway encircling downtown Greensboro sounds like some Charlotte plans (remember the uptown loop greenway from the 2010 Uptown Plan, or the John Nolen greenway plan from early in the 20th century?) – as yet unfinished. Note the photo with the Greensboro plan, shows work by artist Jim Gallucci. Want to see some of his work in Charlotte? Visit the bridge over Briar Creek on Central Avenue.

What does ‘professional’ theater really mean?

Here are some facts about professional, Equity and union theater, courtesy of Observer theater writer Julie York Coppens. This is to clarify some of the comments on my previous post, which make some factually murky statements. And it’s all relating to the now-shriveling efforts by Steven Beauchem to try to find community support for a regional, professional theater to replace the defunct Charlotte Rep.

There are several pro theaters in the Carolinas — all more successful than Trustus, which one commenter mentioned: The most obvious are Flat Rock Playhouse, Playmakers Rep in Chapel Hill, Blowing Rock Stage Co. and Triad Stage in Greensboro.

The union/non-union question is worth addressing, Coppens says. When people say “professional regional theater,” they mean (among other things) a company affiliated with Actor’s Equity, i.e., most of the talent and crew are union and so earn what might be called living wages.

The pro companies listed above live at various points of a sliding scale Equity has devised to allow smaller and emerging professional theaters, which have lower potential box-office income, to hire fewer union members and to pay those at a lower rate than the larger, more established houses do. Thus, all are professional/union, but only Flat Rock (as far as Coppens knows) is fully so — though even Flat Rock relies on a lesser paid army of “apprentice” laborers and chorus members who are working toward Equity status.

Charlotte’s two remaining professional theaters (Actor’s Theatre and Children’s Theatre) provide occasional work for Equity members under Guest Artist contracts, but not at a pay level or of a consistency for someone to live and work here long-term. That’s why so many of our best artists have left town. Steven Beauchem was trying to establish an Equity-affiliated company, which you really can’t do for less than a quarter-million. Presumably most of the talent, especially at first, would be jobbed in from NY or Chicago.

Charlotte’s fringe theaters (like BareBones) call themselves professional. Is it professional if the actors are making $100 for four weeks of work? But “professional” also refers to a company’s orientation, its artistic ambitions, its emphasis on product over participation. Says Coppens, “I know some amateur/community theaters that show more professionalism, in the way they work and in the product they put on stage, than a lot of fringe theaters do. The old lines are blurring.”

The Observer plans more coverage of the Rep-replacement issue in coming days.

Charlotte: Graveyard for theater?

Is Charlotte a city where the arts are healthy? You be the judge. The latest, unfortunate wrinkle in the city’s theater scene is that Steven Beauchem, a theater enthusiast who was trying to see if support exists here for professional regional theater to take up where the now-defunct Charlotte Repertory Theatre left, has called it quits.

Here’s what Beauchem wrote, in a lengthy e-mail. In a nutshell, he concluded that “Charlotte isn’t ready for locally produced, regional-level, professional theatre.” There simply isn’t enough community-wide support to make it feasible to found such an effort, he came to believe. The Catch-22, he notes, is that to demonstrate that support exists you have to put on some productions, and that to put on productions you have to have support. (And all you libertarian types, “support” doesn’t mean govt money.)

It’s wrong, he says, to blame the Arts & Science Council or the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center.

I’d love to hear what theater-lovers (and others) think about Beauchem’s efforts and his conclusions.