Category: Davidson

100 years of N.C. state parks, but never one for Mecklenburg

North Carolina’s Mount Mitchell State Park turned 100 this year. Photo: By Two Hearted River – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16397075

The 2016 commemoration of the 100th anniversary of North Carolina’s first state park scored a huge win last week with the announcement that 2,744 acres will be added to that first park, Mount Mitchell. That will more than double the park’s size, and is a welcome tribute.

But if you visit the Find a Park website for the North Carolina State Parks Department, you may notice that unlike the Triangle, which boasts five, there is no state park or recreation area in Mecklenburg County, the state’s most populous county and one of the larger ones in size as well (ranking 38 of 100).

But did you know a state park was once proposed for Mecklenburg County? The city-county 2005 plan, dated 1985, proposed a state park in the northeastern corner of the county, east of Davidson. It did not happen. Sadly, that area, which for two decades was protected by the town of Davidson’s decision not to allow sewer service there, is now being proposed for sewer service, which likely means subdivisions, not rural farmland, will be the future.

If you’re in Charlotte, especially in the part of town with the bulk of the population (south and southeast of uptown) you may note Google’s assessment that it’s 45 minutes from Charlotte to Crowders Mountain State Park in western Gaston County, but
that simply proves Google has never actually driven to Crowders Mountain. Google says it’s an hour from Charlotte to Lake Norman State Park, which means it’s really more like an hour and a half.  Those are our state park options, folks. Any others are a couple of hours away unless you are driving at 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning, in which they’re, maybe, an hour and 45 minutes.

About that lost opportunity for a Mecklenburg state park: It says on Page 81 of the Generalized Land Plan 2005: “A major state park should be developed in the Rocky River basin, in the county’s northeast corner, to serve Mecklenburg and adjoining counties. … The county park and recreation department should enter into negotiations with the state and adjacent counties to determine and appropriate size and location.”

And I should lose 20 pounds. Some things just never happen.

I am not sure why Mecklenburg County came up short for state parks. My guess: A combination of the once-Democratic-dominated state government not being fond of the once-Republican government here, added to the likely disinclination of power brokers in “growth is good” Mecklenburg to set any prime chunk of develop-able land off limits to subdivisions.

Could a state park be built here today? I think that train has left the station. Few large sections of the county remain undeveloped. The lake shorelines are in private hands or else owned and preserved by county taxpayers. Indeed, Mecklenburg taxpayers have shouldered most of the load of preserving our parkland and natural areas, helped by a few nongovernment programs such as the Catawba Lands Conservancy. We’re left with just some words from a dusty plan – and regrets.

Another lesson from Caro: the importance of robust local news coverage

One less obvious lesson of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (which I wrote about last week) is about the value of old-fashioned, shoe-leather local reporting in exposing corruption. Several of his most powerful sections recounted the neighborhood deterioration caused by the Gowanus Expressway and the blatantly destruction to families and the Bronx from the Cross-Bronx Expressway. His anger at the lack of on-the-ground news reporting from the multiple New York newspapers of the time seemed to leap off the pages at me.

Today, in my city of Charlotte, local news reporting is a fading art, because of the destruction of the revenue base for city newspapers all over the country.  Worry, if you want, about the New York Times (which back in the day appears to have ignored most of what Caro was writing about), but I worry a lot more about the hundreds of newspapers in cities like Charlotte, Raleigh, Portland, Charleston (which just won a Pulitzer), Kansas City, Fort Worth, Biloxi, Cleveland and so forth. If you live in one of those places, it’s your local newspaper that has aspired to cover the community well and in-depth. (Are they perfect? Of course not. But who else is better positioned to noticing what is happening on the ground, and following a story that takes months or years to ooze along and that includes no murders or car wrecks? TV reporters? Please.)

Digital news significantly lowers the entry-cost for a news operation. No presses, no paper, no delivery. For years now, conventional wisdom among the chattering classes who observe the news media has been that hyper-local news sites have a built in audience and a built-in revenue base, if they can offer good content and their community is affluent enough.

Last week, a couple of excellent hyper-local, online news operations near Charlotte folded. Davidsonnews.net and its sister Corneliusnews.net covered their communities with serious, well-reported journalism. The community of Davidson, home to Davidson College, predates its surrounding suburban communities and possesses a historic and specific sense of itself as a “place,” not just a suburb. The founder and editor, David Boraks, knew his communities and knew his business.  They are affluent places with plenty of disposable income. But online advertising was not sufficient to pay reporters — even reporters of the species so familiar to journalism: young, inexperienced, smart and energetic. He did not pay himself much, if anything.

If a freeway were destroying a neighborhood in Davidson, Boraks and his staff would have been write there, chronicling it.

He folded. Online advertising and reader donations (he never put up a pay-wall) did not bring in enough money, even after nine years.

Traditional in-print newspapers have seen serious declines in advertising revenue, which has been their major income stream.  Online advertising has not picked up the slack. The Charlotte Observer has seen round after round of layoffs and buyouts, as have most newspapers in the nation.

If he were alive today, I’m fairly sure Robert Moses would be delighted at this turn of events. 

‘Do not try to design neighborhoods through a computer screen’


The photo at right arrived about 10 days ago from Davidson-based transportation planner John Cock.
Cock and I were among a group of fans of the late Warren Burgess, who died at age 56 in May 2005.
The plaque was installed a few weeks ago beside a bald cypress tree that had been planted in his honor in Davidson’s Roosevelt Wilson Park shortly after Burgess died.
Burgess – or Warren, as I’m more comfortable saying – was for more than 20 years an urban designer on the staff of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission. He was Davidson town planner from 2000 to 2003. To this day, he has a fan club of sorts, people like Cock and former Davidson planner Meredith Judy whom Warren mentored, as well as other urban designers and planners in the area, like David Walters, the just-retired head of UNC Charlotte’s Master of Urban Design program.
You may have noticed over the years that there are some occupations that lend themselves to memorial plaques,
statues, road-namings and the like. City planner is not typically one of them. But Warren was cut from a different bolt of cloth, and gave so much of his heart to Charlotte and Davidson that it’s only appropriate that it be noted somewhere.
After seeing the plaque photo, I looked back at two columns I wrote about Warren when I worked at the Charlotte Observer.  The first was in 2000, when he left Charlotte city hall for Davidson. I noticed something unusual at the sheetcake-and-punch ceremony for him at the government center. As I wrote then:
“Among the people saying nice things were Dottie Coplon, a relentless neighborhood activist who has battled both planners and developers, and Bailey Patrick Jr., lawyer and lobbyist for some of Charlotte’s most successful developers. It’s not often those two are singing from the same song sheet. But getting people together is one of the things Burgess does best.
“… The Thursday event symbolized something important about him. …  When you think about it, Warren is really just a bureaucrat, but he’s a bureaucrat with a difference: He wears his heart on his sleeve. … Sometimes, when people talk about “fighting City Hall,” it’s planners and zoning laws that they’re fighting. Burgess , who works at City Hall, understands that, but he still tries to help.” 
 He always walked over and over through neighborhoods where he was doing a plan, to get to know its terrain, its history and its residents. He sketched relentlessly, making drawings at meetings to supplement his notes. He cared – as the plaque notes – about trees, but also about creeks, front porches, sidewalks, plazas and parks, all the things that make up a city. He had these words of advice to other planners:
“A city is made up of people,” he told the farewell party. “Do not try to design neighborhoods through a computer screen.” 
When Warren died in 2005, I wrote: 
“Burgess left his fingerprints all over this city, in the plans he drew, the enduring vision he had for his city and the people and places he touched.
“Cities need catalysts, and Warren was a catalyst. He was always putting one person in touch with just the right other person, and dropping a good idea in just the right place, and in doing so altering the course of the planet.”
He spoke for the trees. But just as important, he spoke for the people who plant the trees, for the people who make up a city.

In search of ‘hipsturbias’ yet to come

Downtown Waxhaw: A ‘hipsturbia’ of the future? Photo: Nancy Pierce

Just the term “hipsturbia” makes you want to hear more. It appears to have been coined in a New York Times article in February, “Creating Hipsturbia,” which created serious buzz. It described a trend of formerly urban hipsters moving out to suburban towns because they couldn’t afford housing in the city, but who didn’t want to give up their trendy accouterments or shopping:

“As formerly boho environs of Brooklyn become unattainable due to creeping Manhattanization and seven-figure real estate prices, creative professionals of child-rearing age — the type of alt-culture-allegiant urbanites who once considered themselves too cool to ever leave the city — are starting to ponder the unthinkable: a move to the suburbs.

But only if they can bring a piece of the borough with them.”
 I took part in some lively discussion Tuesday at a Civic By Design forum on whether Charlotte or its environs has any “hipsturbia” spots or even hipsturbia-in-waiting areas. As you would imagine, even trying to define the term (much less defining what’s a hipster) was a discussion point.

  • Must places that attract hipsters be “gritty”?  
  • Does a place that planners would say is a walkable, mixed-use urban neighborhood (example: Baxter in Fort Mill, S.C.) lack hipster cred if it’s all new?
  • What about some of the region’s smaller towns with historic downtowns surrounded by standard suburbia, places like Belmont, Waxhaw, etc.? Does the presence of a traditional historic downtown overrule the dominance of suburbia?

Some of the comments:
Scott Curry, a planner with the Lawrence Group: It seems like hipsters gravitate toward cheap space, and places that offer “unregulated” environments. His example in Charlotte: NoDa, the old mill village neighborhood centered on 36th and North Davidson streets.

Other key attributes, Curry proposed: Gritty, unpolished neighborhoods. Proximity to a major metro center. And this observation: “Once a place becomes the cool pace to be, hipsters don’t want to be there anymore.” (Examples: Plaza Midwood and NoDa.)

Kevin Sutton, architect, who volunteers with NoDa’s neighborhood group: “We still have a little bit of grit.” But the neighborhood has to keep trying to keep its gritty edge, he said. Being near uptown is an advantage, although “you hit your wall when you run out of vacant buildings.” And, he said, it’s not all about physical form. It’s also about attitude, about finding your soul.

Daune Gardener, Waxhaw’s mayor, spoke about that Union County town’s effort to reinvest in its downtown and to move beyond the more recent, suburban-style development patterns. (See “Waxhaw looks to future with N.C. 16 plan.”)

Chatelaine, a subdivision between Weddington and Waxhaw, and clearly not “hipsturbia.” Photo: Nancy Pierce

 Can a place that’s a 45-minute drive from the city – with no transit service – ever be hipsturbia, even if it has a sweet, historic downtown? The audience didn’t take a vote, but doubts were expressed. Davidson and Gaston County’s Belmont were also mentioned as places with authentic downtowns but lacking the grittiness and diversity that seem to attract modern-day hipsters.

One audience member noted a map (produced by Locu) tracking hipster neighborhoods by sales of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. I mention it here simply because it’s interesting. He recalled that NoDa used to have “a theater behind the collapsed building down in the spot that collected water. … It was kind of icky. But it survived and thrived and gave the neighborhood a sense of something.” Hipster areas aren’t really places you can create zoning for, he said.

So, if vacant buildings and grittiness are essential for attracting hipsters, this question from Maddy Baer closed the evening: Why isn’t the whole east side hipsturbia by now?

Huntersville mayor’s a winner

Huntersville Mayor Jill Swain won an award Thursday from the N.C. chapter of the American Planning Association for distinguished leadership by an elected official. The group held its annual statewide planning conference in Charlotte, Wednesday-Friday. Other awards for agencies in the greater Charlotte region:

Outstanding planning award for implementation (small community): Town of Davidson for its “Circles at 30” development at Exit 30 of Interstate 77.
Outstanding Planning Award for Implementation (large community): Iredell County for its land development code.
2011 Special Theme Award for community development: Town of Davidson for its affordable housing ordinance.
2011 Special Theme Award for sustainable community planning: City of Conover, for Conover Station, and the cities of Gastonia, Belmont and Bessemer City and the Gaston Urban Area Metropolitan Planning Organization (a.k.a. GUAMPO), for “Creating Opportunities for Active Living: An Action Plan to Promote Physical Activities in the Built Environment for Gastonia-Belmont-Bessemer City.”
The Town of Davidson won honorable mention for the Outstanding Planning Award for Comprehensive Planning (small community).
Not from this region, but the statewide winners for Outstanding Planning (large community) were the City of Raleigh’s 2030 Comprehensive Plan and the City of High Point for its University Area Plan.

They’ll choose next CATS chief

Who’ll choose next CATS (Charlotte Area Transit System) chief? The four-member selection panel will consist of Charlotte City Manager Curt Walton, County Manager Harry Jones, , Matthews Town Manager Hazen Blodgett and Davidson Mayor John Woods (named by Charlotte Mayor and Metropolitan Transit Commission chair Pat McCrory).

According to a memo from Jones:

“The four members of the selection panel have conferred and agreed to move forward with the recruitment process as follows. Advertisements will be posted electronically with all national transit-related organizations, with a closing date of September 25, 2009. A profile of the Chief Transit Official position, updated during the 2007 recruitment process, will be subjected to a series of focus groups for input. The profile also will be posted on the city/county website for additional public input. The process is designed to name a new CATS CEO by November 30, 2009.”

Jones’ memo also notes that in 2015 Charlotte will host the national convention of the National Association of Counties. Hmmmm. Whole lotta politicians will be treading our sidewalks. (Lock up the silverware?) But Charlotte hosted the event in 2000 and no mass outbreaks of oratory or political skullduggery were reported.