Category: Duke Energy building

Old/new Charlotte photos, plus – ta-da! – ‘Voltron’

If you’re a sucker for old photos of Charlotte (or you like the phallic gallery of new building photos) hop over to CLTblog, and/or to urbanplanet. Folks have posted a number of old photos, postcards and cityscape scenes, many of them from uptown/downtown, shown in varying degrees of glamor.

The photo atop this is of South Tryon Street. It strikes me dumb whenever I see it, that the city allowed that street scene – and all the similar scenes – to simply vanish. It’s more than just a lack of interest in historic preservation, although that’s part of it. It’s a loss of the collective will to create architecture with a human scale, I think. Compare that street scene to the thrusting, oh-so-macho towers depicted in the newer photos.

I’m not saying nothing new should be built. That’s silly. But what would have been wrong with saving a few blocks of buildings that look like this? If you want to see a downtown where some of the old fabric has been saved, visit downtown Raleigh. Its city planning department also has an Urban Design Center right on Fayetteville Street, its main downtown street. Go figure.

Here’s a quick plug, as well, for a great little video-with-music of the new Duke Energy Building with its lights running, a sight I have yet to see although I look out my vintage-’60s gun-slit windows at the Observer building and see the building multiple times a day.

(Just to disclose: The Observer building is NOT one you’ll see many loving photos of in those aforementioned building-photo collections. And it’s as functional as a place to inhabit 10 hours a day as it is delightful as a view.) Here’s the link to the Voltron video. (It’s embedded below.)

If you prefer different music, Justin Ruckman at CLTblog has done a three-movement series of videos, set to Beethoven’s String Quintet in C, op. 29. Check them out here.

Glass from on high

So I’m out for a late afternoon walk to clear my head, standing on South Tryon getting ready to cross Stonewall Street over to the Gantt Center, and I hear something that sounds like a small explosion. Across the street, just next to the Juan Logan work out front of the Gantt, shards of glass appear to burst from the pavement. Lots of shards.

The wind is gusting mightily – not quite hurricane force winds but maybe 30 or so mph, I’d guess. With some anxiety, I cross the street and look up, and then down at the broken glass, and all around. There are a lot of very small pieces of glass, more than you’d get with a drink bottle. It’s gray, not the color of beer or liquor bottles. I don’t see any obvious gaping holes in the glass facade of the Duke Energy building, but spot some plywood way, way up high. Could the glass have fallen from that high? Seems unlikely. But where else would it have come from?

A woman who is crossing the street toward me, who had been walking up from the other direction, says she couldn’t see where the glass came from either. Like me, she first thought it had come from the artwork in front of the Gantt Center.

I go up to Dean & Deluca, get some decaf – who needs caffeine after that experience? – and walk back to the office, avoiding either side of the block of Tryon in front of the Duke Energy building. The shards are still there. Wherever the glass came from, I think no one realizes it fell, or someone would be out sweeping away the evidence.