Category: Democratic National Convention

Knoxville + Charlotte = Same league?

While folks in Charlotte are still elated over being selected for the 2012 Democratic National Convention, The Economist magazine has deftly slid a stiletto under the city’s civic ribcage:

In its Feb. 10 issue, “Changing leagues: What landing the convention says about North Carolina’s biggest city,” the writer quotes Charlotte Center City Partners’ Michael Smith: ““We’re changing leagues.”

The magazine goes on to describe the city: “It has a couple of professional sports teams, the NASCAR Hall of Fame, a sleek new light-rail system and a decent but hardly remarkable smattering of museums and theatres. It seems just one of several pleasant, medium-sized cities—such as Knoxville, Richmond and Norfolk—between Washington, DC, and Atlanta.”

Keeping in mind that Charlotte’s estimated 2006 population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau was 630,478, it’s instructive to note that the Census Bureau also reports:

• Richmond’s 2010 population at 204,000 and Norfolk’s at 242,803.
• Knoxville? Its 2006 population estimate was 182,337.

All those years of spending, building, scrapping and clawing and climbing by the fingernails into the NBA and the NFL, building towering phallic bank and energy company skyscrapers to prove the city’s virility, were they for nothing? Can it be possible that to the rest of the world, which now appears not to have been paying the least bit of attention, Charlotte is still considered a “pleasant medium-sized city,” maybe about like Knoxville?

Ouch! Ooof! Uggghh! And grrrrr!!! You can hear the teeth grinding up and down Tryon Street.

Livermush’s time to shine

Liver pudding (aka livermush) samples, courtesy of Neese’s, at the N.C. State Fair.

This is it. When the Democratic National Convention arrives (and even beforehand) the world will be looking at Charlotte. What better time for this city to embrace its true, unique and authentic culinary heritage?

No, I’m not talking about vinegary barbecue (as today’s New York Times article reports). The Times fell for the spin. Vinegary barbecue is a North Carolina culinary heritage but is not at all unique to Charlotte or the greater Charlotte metro region. (Related note: a small squabble has broken out among barbecue fans over whether Charlotte has any great barbecue restaurants. Some say Bill Spoon’s on South Boulevard. Others favor Bubba’s off I-77 north, and some contend Mac’s has the best. Regardless, none has the fame and national following of places such as Lexington BBQ No. 1, Wilber’s in Goldsboro, the Skylight Inn in Ayden, Bridges (both of ’em) in Shelby, or even Stamey’s in Greensboro.

What does Charlotte have that the world does not? We have livermush. Don’t turn up your nose.

If you treasure authentic roots foods, livermush is ours. Why not celebrate that instead of acting ashamed? In Observer food writer Kathleen Purvis’ livermush magnum opus from 2000 (alas, I couldn’t find a link) she quotes John Egerton, the Nashville-based author of the authoritative guidebook “Southern Food.” “I don’t ever remember seeing a dish called livermush anyplace else [outside of North Carolina],’ he said. “And I hope never to see it again.” Bah!

Livermush even has a listing in Wikipedia. That page takes you to a 2004 Christian Science Monitor article on livermush. And here’s a nice roundup from October, by Andrea Weigl.

Weigl makes it sound as if livermush is an all-over-N.C. thing. It isn’t. Go to most regular-Joe breakfast places in Charlotte and this region – I mean places where menus offer biscuits and grits and sausage patties and other normal breakfast food – you will see livermush on the menu. Or maybe they’ll call it liver pudding. True, too many chain-type places owned by out-of-town corporations do not offer livermush. That’s their loss, and their lost business.

Go roughly 80 miles in any direction from Charlotte you aren’t likely to see livermush on the menu – not in Asheville, not in Columbia, not in Fayetteville, not in Raleigh. Maybe, if you’re lucky, you can buy it at a grocery store. I had my first livermush when I lived in Fayetteville, but only because Charlotte native David McKnight kept telling me to try it and told me how you just fry it up in a pan. I did. And it was quite tasty. Crunchy edges, with a soft interior, not too heavy on the liver, either. When I spent the 2007-08 year living in Cambridge, Mass., I asked Charlotte visitors to please bring livermush. Did you know it freezes nicely?

Until four or five years ago Charlotte had its own livermush manufacturer, Jamison’s. They stopped making it, though Ronnie Jamison told Purvis last summer they had contracted with “a company in the mountains” to make it. Another well-known brand is Guilford County-based Neese’s, which claims liver pudding and livermush are different. Mack’s is made in Shelby, about 40 miles west of Charlotte and possibly the livermush epicenter of the world. I was in a Shelby convenience store recently and noticed three different brands, two of them locally made. In a convenience store! Shelby of course has its Livermush Expo every year. The 2011 Livermush Expo will be Oct. 22 at Court Square in uptown Shelby.)
So please, if you’re a proud Charlottean bragging to out-of-town pols or pundits or journalists, remember what our real roots food is. And, like those green eggs and ham, if you have not tried it – you should.

Hey Dems, we do have indoor plumbing

Observer staff photo (May 18,2010) by David T. Foster III

I’m already hearing from out of town friends about their plans to come to Charlotte for the Democratic National Convention. A pal who runs the BBC’s North America bureau sent word that the BBC had already booked 50 rooms. Then he e-mailed back that “the city have told all hotels not to take bookings…..12 thousand rooms…..” Word is the DNC controls hotel room allotments. I wonder if that means we should clean the junk out of our guest rooms and pick up some income from less-well-funded members of the world’s news media.

I’ve been trying to think of what to tell our global visitors they should expect in the Queen City. You know many will arrive imagining the usual stereotypes of The South – unpainted shacks, no indoor plumbing, cousins marrying cousins, overseers and sharecroppers visible in every cotton field, mules hauling cotton to the cotton gin, hellfire and brimstone preachers thumping Bibles on every corner. You get the picture.

Do they realize:

• That Charlotte is a hotbed of Presbyterianism? (Don’t you love seeing “hotbed” and “Presbyterian” in the same sentence?) Sure, there are places where people rock ‘n’ roll and even dance, but you’ll rarely see a local elected or business official cutting the rug or belting a show tune after too many beers.

• That when our civic leadership encounters a problem, the first instinct is to form a large and interminably meeting committee to talk it over?

• That not only do our civic leaders not care about the Confederacy, or even mention it in public, they don’t even mention the past of 20 years ago. Visitors hear much about our banks, and probably get a banking genealogy worthy of the Old Testament. Commercial National and Southern States Trust (aka American Trust ) begat American Commercial, which begat North Carolina National Bank which began NCNB (No Cash for No Body, is the local joke) and NCNB begat NationsBank, and NationsBank begat Bank of America, with many side deals along the way.

But I bet they won’t hear that this Banktown stuff is rather new. For a now barely mentioned century or so, Charlotte was a textile town, with company-owned mill villages and impoverished and uneducated mill workers.

• That despite Michelle Obama’s gracious praise, and despite North Carolina’s sitting at the acme of all barbecue cultures in the nation (take THAT, Texas!), Charlotte does not boast truly excellent barbecue joints – the kind of old cinder-block building with stacks of hickory wood and smoke coming out the back where you can get the most flavorful, juiciest, crispy-edged barbecue. For that you have to drive to Lexington (if you like Lexington style) or Shelby (if you like Western style) or east of Raleigh (if you like Eastern style). Best ‘cue I’ve had in Charlotte recently was at the Sharon United Methodist Church Boy Scout troop’s annual January barbecue.

Here’s as good a description as I’ve seen of Charlotte, courtesy of a commenter on the Huffington Post article about Charlotte being chosen for the convention [I’ve added some punctuation corrections]:

“Good luck here in Charlotte (my hometown), Mr. President. It’s a pleasure to have you coming to the Queen City. Strange things happen in the Carolinas, though. Nothing or no one here is ever what they seem to be. See that farmer over there in the overalls? He’s a billionair­e. See the banker-looking guy with the tassles on his shoes? He’s bankrupt – again. See all of those folks out front there in the audience smiling? Half of them are from S.C.”

And this tidbit: My Google search to see what the BBC was saying about Charlotte found the website of the Bible Believers Chapel on Lancaster Highway in south Charlotte. No, I am not making that up.

Finally, here’s a skyline photo roundup of dated skyline shots:

• The Washington Post online article shows the Time Warner Cable Arena (site of the actual convention), which opened in 2005, STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION!

• Politico.com’s piece shows an artsy, night-time shot with a construction crane that I’m pretty sure isn’t there any more.

• And while looking for Huffington Post coverage, I stumbled on this not-so-cheery story of the “13 surprising cities where foreclosures are soaring,” with Charlotte listed at No. 4. It, too, has the arena-under-construction photo. Geez.