Category: Carolinas Medical Center

Clearing the air on the Liz Hair Greenway

Liz Hair Greenway, near Carolinas Medical Center. Photo courtesy Mecklenburg Park and Recreation Department

The cloud of cigarette smoke on the Liz Hair Greenway just below Carolinas Medical Center should be clearing up shortly. If you’ve walked or biked the narrow pavement of that greenway between Morehead Street and East Boulevard, you’ve probably gone past the smokers. They’re mostly visitors or staff from the hospital, which forbids smoking on its property. The greenway is handy, and sometimes the hospital security guards even point it out to smokers.

But Tuesday, Mecklenburg County commissioners passed a new ordinance that makes most government buildings and most parks in Charlotte and Mecklenburg smoke-free. (In Charlotte, the Park and Recreation Department is a county, not a city, agency.)

As a compromise from the original proposal, six county-run golf courses and 18 parks that are considered “regional parks” are exempted. So you’ll still have to choke on second-hand smoke in Freedom Park, Reedy Creek Park and other regional parks.  (A list of those parks is at the end of this post.)

The problem on the Liz Hair greenway stems from both the location of the hospital and the narrowness of the greenway between Morehead Street and East Boulevard. That section was built in 1988, back when many people here considered greenways risky spending. Today, it’s one of the most popular greenways as it connects Freedom Park to the new, wider and more generously landscaped Little Sugar Creek Greenway near the Metropolitan development. It’s narrow and crowded, and that means greenway pedestrians and cyclists are pretty much eyeball to eyeball, and lung to lung, with smokers.

An October 2012 article in the Charlotte Observer, by Michael Gordon, described the scene this way:

“For about 20 paces of shade beneath Medical Center Drive, Charlotte’s health-conscious and not-so-muches squeeze into the same county-owned space. Neither is particularly happy with the arrangement. ‘Generally, I hold my breath when I come through there,’ says Collette Nagy, a Charlotte writer who biked under the bridge late Sunday morning, her dog Pepper riding in a knapsack on her back. ‘But I feel sorry for them. I wish they’d get unhooked. I don’t think verbal abuse will help.’ “
Here’s how Gordon described the scene: “At times, there’s very little room for all the humanity to squeeze through. Around noon, about 10 smokers and their children were sitting or standing around the bridge, as a surge of greenway users – many with their children – dodged and weaved around them. There were near-collisions and some frowns. Even in the open air, the smoke under the bridge can be thick.”

The problem of smokers even drew a mention from a Portland, Ore., visitor, on the website Trip Advisor: “Hold your breath if you cruise past Carolina Medical Center at lunch time – the staff is out smoking on the greenway.”

Regional parks where smoking will still be allowed:

Parking decks coming to your neighborhood?

Central Piedmont Community College deck at Seventh and Charlottetowne has angered the Elizabeth neighborhood

Although the 9-1 vote (Warren Cooksey voted no) creating the Wilmore Historic District was the biggest headline out of the City Council’s Monday night meeting, the most interesting discussion took place around a somewhat obscure proposal from the city planning staff.
Several council members appeared to think the provision would allow parking decks in residential areas where they are now barred. (For the record, this is not what it would do, as you’ll see if you read on.)
But you can’t blame people for some confusion. The measure was on the agenda as a public hearing on Petition No. 2010-033, described this way in the lovable language of the planners: “… a text amendment to add new regulations making parking decks constructed as an accessory use to an institutional use exempt from the floor area ratio (FAR) standards, when located in the single family and multi-family zoning districts, provided certain requirements are met …”

The exemption from FAR standards (don’t even ask, I have been writing about planning for 15 years and I’m still not totally clear how FAR works) is intended to offer an incentive to institutions such as churches, colleges and hospitals to build parking decks instead of surface parking lots – in areas where the decks are already allowed but because of the FAR standards they’re more expensive to build. And with the appearance requirements, such as plantings, the decks would look a wee bit better, too.

“I have a problem with parking decks in residential districts,” at-large council member Susan Burgess said.

Planner Tom Drake, who was at the microphone: “This is not a precedent here.”

Burgess (incredulous tone): “In R-3 and R-4, surface parking and parking decks are permitted?”

Drake: “Yes.”

Burgess: “How did that happen?”

Drake: “They’re accessory uses.”

Burgess: “Has that always been the case?”

Drake: Yes, in my 20 years here (I paraphrased his lengthier reply. Meanwhile, Planning Director Debra Campbell and planner Sandy Montgomery, sitting in the audience, nod vigorously.)

Of course, if you’ve gone past Carolinas Medical Center or numerous large churches or Queens University (fixed from “College”) in the past 10 years you’ll see plenty of large parking lots and decks built in residential areas. Heck, CMC owns huge chunks of the Dilworth neighborhood and it isn’t likely they’re going to get deeply into the real estate business, but rather they’re going to build more medical facilities with vast parking facilities.

Parking is a huge dilemma for Charlotte and most other cities. No one likes a parking lot next door, but get us into our cars and we LOVE parking places. (See my recent column on the topic.) What this provision would do, if it works as intended, would encourage those institutions to build vertically instead of spreading asphalt across three or four times the land area a deck would cover. Sounds like a good idea. Assuming everyone can figure out what it means …

What’s happening to East Boulevard?

A neighborhood activist in Dilworth tipped me off to property that’s changed hands along East Boulevard, at the corner of Garden Terrace and East, where East Boulevard Bar and Grill has lodged for decades. EBB&G is moving (has moved?) up the street.

Word on the street is that Carolinas Medical Center bought that property and has “plans.” I know a meeting is planned in coming weeks between hospital officials and Dilworth neighborhood leaders.

This much I know to be true: Many Dilworthians worry about the hospital’s continuing expansion. Yes, expanding is understandable for a large, urban medical center. But CMC’s campus so far is a suburban office-park-style configuration: lots of surface parking lots, parking decks with no other uses, oversteet walkways, grass that isn’t a public park where you can play Frisbee or have a picnic, etc. etc. Not suitable for an in-town neighborhood.

But even if new buildings are better designed, as I hope to see, CMC’s campus is still a gigantic single-use footprint. In an urban setting, that’s not a good thing.

The city’s zoning standards allow suburban office-park parking and other suburban-style hospital uses in any neighborhood if the property is zoned for office or commercial, etc.

Some of this block is zoned multifamily, so maybe there will be a chance for neighborhood and/or planner input. Let us hope. But a scroll through the Carolinas HealthCare System’s board of directors shows a lot of big names – the kinds that too often make elected officials bark prettily, lie down and roll over.

A check of online property records for parcels in the old EBB&G block (which includes the site of the former Chez Daniel restaurant, among other businesses) lists as owner Robinson Bradshaw & Hinson, a well-connected law firm (Russell Robinson, Robert Sink, Richard Vinroot, etc.)

I checked with a helpful city planner, who knew of no conversations about development plans for the block.

In September, the Observer’s Karen Garloch reported that CHS president and COO Joe Piemonte said the hospital system didn’t have specific plans for its East Boulevard property. “We’re kind of standing pat … and monitoring very closely for maintenance. Some of those buildings need to be torn down,” he said then.