Category: Coliseum

Charlotte in the ’80s


I love how old maps show what the mapmakers valued. 
I recently came across this map of Charlotte circa 1986. (You’ll want to click it to zoom in.) It was among the things Owen Furuseth found as he cleaned out his office after almost 40 years at UNC Charlotte. Furuseth left June 30 as associate provost of Metropolitan Studies, the wing of UNCC academia under which nestles the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work.  Because Owen is a geographer and planner, he was keeping the map but he let me borrow it to copy the image.
The map’s credit line says “Charlotte Mecklenburg Planning Commission 1986.” That probably helps explain why the route for the then-unbuilt I-485 is shown, although construction on the highway didn’t start until 1988, and the full outerbelt was not completed until 2015. Notice, also, how the I-485 route shown on the map is pretty much where it eventually was built. One small exception: The northern section is south of Eastfield Road, which is farther south than shown on the 1986 map.
Those of you who’ve been in Charlotte only a decade or so might get a chuckle out of seeing the “New Coliseum” west of I-77 off Tyvola Road. The “New Coliseum,” was just under construction in 1986, the year this map was made. After it was replaced in 2005 by the Time Warner Cable Arena uptown, the Tyvola coliseum was demolished in 2007 (see its implosion here).*
Note the prominence of Eastland. That was Eastland Mall.  It’s now a vacant city-owned plot of land, after the mall failed about a decade ago. 
Note city limits of Charlotte. “Rea Road Extension” south of N.C. 51, the huge chunk of south Charlotte south of N.C. 51, and UNCC and University Place were not inside the city in 1986. 
Finally, note the relative lack of prominence of “UNCC” compared to University Place, a shopping center and suburban-form mixed-use development north of the university. I wonder what that reveals about the university’s prominence in the minds of the city-county planners. I’ll leave that to your imagination. Today the university is almost 28,000 students, a campus surrounded by some of the most gawd-awful strip-shopping-center and big-box unwalkable and unbikeable suburbia that you can envision. 
* About that Coliseum implosion video.  I had never watched that until I dug up the link today. It made me cry.  At that just-opened venue in November 1988, I and 23,000 other people watched the old Charlotte Hornets – including Dell Curry, father of today’s more famous Curry – debut to a tuxedo-and-formal-gown wearing crowd, lose by 40 points. They got a standing ovation.  Less than 2 months later, on Dec. 23, Kurt Rambis’ last-second shot defeated Michael Jordon’s Chicago Bulls. (Read the Chicago Tribune story here.) The old Coliseum hosted 364 consecutive NBA-game sellouts. We loved the Hornets in those days. Loved Dell and Muggsy and for a time even loved George Shinn, though that came to a bad end. Our then toddler daughter loved Scott Burrell.  Look him up. He was a bouncy jumper.
The coliseum also hosted Frank Sinatra, Springsteen and Mother Teresa among other icons, and the 1994 Final Four, complete with then-President Bill Clinton, various and sundry FOBs (Friends of Bill), and an Arkansas victory.
The Coliseum was built in the wrong place and was poorly designed for what NBA arenas came to need just 10 years later. But it was fun while it lasted.

Images of near-dead suburbia

Some of you may be shocked to learn this, but the Naked City Blog is only a small part of my job. I’m the director of the new PlanCharlotte.org website, part of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. The site’s goal, since its launch a few months back, is to cover, in a journalistic way, events and trends in growth, planning, environmental and urban issues from the greater Charlotte region.

Castlebrooke in Kannapolis, about 20 miles northeast of Charlotte

Yesterday PlanCharlotte and the UNCC Urban Institute posted a series of what I think are stunning images by local photographer Nancy Pierce, of a sampling of abandoned subdivisions in the region. They are haunting, depicting nature reclaiming street drains, kudzu climbing over roll-over curbs, a swimming pool in the middle of a scraped-earth lot, subdivision entry gates looking like ancient medieval ruins.

Some of the developments remain stalled, or maybe dead. The top photo is from Apple Creek in Gastonia and Gaston County, about 20 miles west of Charlotte. The one at the end of this is from the site of the former Charlotte Coliseum, where City Park was to have been a large mixed-use development of homes, offices, stores and a hotel. (A proposal to build apartments there is now in the works, the article says.)

Others, too, such as Castlebrooke (shown directly above), may be stirring to life again. As planner Kris Krider of Kannapolis tells PlanCharlotte writer Josh McCann, in retrospect, it might not have been wise for Kannapolis to annex land so far from its core, because that can strain the city’s police force and require new fire stations and water and sewer infrastructure. But the city has already made those investments, and so it needs houses to materialize, to generate revenue to cover costs.

But the photo series and the article, together, should serve as a caution to government leaders as well as private businesses. Is all growth “good” regardless or where or what it is? Can we ever knit these developments into a town or a city, or will they remain isolated pods in remote areas? Or will the kudzu overtake them in the end?

Where Charlotteans once went to see Charlotte Hornets Dell Curry and Muggsy Bogues in action

 
Click here for article.
Click here for photo gallery. 

But who oughtta be ‘Worst Urbanist’ ?

My colleague Jack Betts, who writes our This Old State blog, read the last post – Who tops ‘Top Urbanist‘ list? – and suggested this, “Be fun sometime to do a list of the Ten Worst urban thinkers… There’d surely be some NC nominees.” And he’s surely right.

I saw that a commenter on my previous posting nominated Bissell Hayes to top the “sub-urbanism list.” Right away, I started thinking about other Charlotteans (Bissell Hayes is a company, not a person, and now it’s part of Cottingham-Chalk/Bissell-Hayes) who might be on that “worst urban thinkers” list.

Of course, A.G. Odell leaped to mind. He was a big proponent of uptown, to be sure, but his ideas for “improvement” were derivative of Robert Moses, or maybe Corbusier–esque. One reason downtown Charlotte has so many blocks and sectors that seem dead is that our civic leaders (Hugh McColl among them) kept following Odell’s 1966 master plan for uptown development, when they shouldn’t have. It tries to impose a single-use pattern, as in “here is your cultural district, there is your government district, here is your entertainment district” and so on. BAD idea.

At first I thought Henry Faison deserved a spot, for Eastland and other suburban shopping malls that wither, long after he’s made his money and sold to others. But then, I thought, Faison isn’t really an urban thinker, per se. He’s just a developer doing what the city zoning and policies allow.

Here are Betts‘ suggestions:
• Whoever designed the Research Triangle Park – granted, it wasn’t urban then but now it’s an urban fortress, with concrete moat, in the midst of one the south’s largest areas of urban academic sprawl.
• And how about whoever was mayor when the old Charlotte Coliseum was built way out yonder? [The first time that happened the mayor was Victor Shaw, but this being Charlotte he appointed a committee, headed by department store executive David Ovens, to work up a plan for a coliseum-auditorium project built in 1955 way out on Independence Boulevard. And the architect for both the old coliseum and Ovens auditorium? A.G. Odell. And while its location is horrible, and the big ugly parking lots are horrible, I do like the old Coliseum itself, with that great silver dome. And this being Charlotte, we did it again in the 1980s, when Harvey Gantt, an architect and planner was mayor. Built another coliseum way out on Tyvola Road./ mn]

• Or whoever was in charge of letting Raleigh’s RBC Center get built in a place that makes visitors stand around in the parking lot after games or performances looking around in puzzlement: where are the bars, the pubs, the cafes, the restaurants, the museums? What were they thinking??????

• Or Tom White when he insisted the N.C. Museum of Art be built in an area where….(see RBC, above….) but at least there was a youth prison (Polk) handily right next door for the arts-and-petty theft crowd.