When North Charlotte turned into NoDa

The corner in NoDa where a scruffy deli-live music venue called Fat City once lived. Where the dumpster sits in this photo is where, 20 years ago, you would find bongo circles on Friday nights. Photo: Google Street View

Through a roundabout way, someone emailed me something I wrote in 2002 for The Charlotte Observer about the NoDa neighborhood. It seems, today, oddly prescient.

Almost two decades later, I can look at the neighborhood, which retains some of its original spirit, and at the column I wrote and see a description of organic, urban change, the kind where small investments create a diversity of uses, and where over time you see what Jane Jacobs called “the self-destruction of diversity,” or “the tendency for outstanding success in cities to destroy itself – purely as a result of being successful.”

I tried to add a link to the piece in the The Observer’s archives but a Google search didn’t turn up anything. So instead of helping my friends there with a few clicks, Ill make a pitch for daily metro newspapers, which are essential to understanding the place where you live and holding your government (which is, in reality, all of us) accountable. Heres how to subscribe. Better yet, buy an ad.

Feb . 22, 2002: Loving NoDa to death?

The first time I saw the NoDa arts district, it wasn’t NoDa and it wasnt artsy. It was the early 1980s, and I was looking for a bakery up on 36th Street that someone had recommended.

I found the bakery, just off North Davidson Street, in a down-at-the-heels neighborhood of emptied-out storefronts. Next door was an aging theater, which I think housed a church, though my memory on that point has dimmed.

The neighborhood was a memorable remnant of another time and an older Charlotte. It was obviously a mill neighborhood, with a nucleus of half-century-old store buildings and, lurking a block or so away, the hulks of a couple of brick mills. Surrounding it clustered small, almost identical wood-frame mill houses.

By the ’80s a ghost-town air was seeping into the mortar. Its businesses were fading; their location far from booming south Charlotte meant the aging buildings werent even being demolished but were settling into a twilight of abandonment.

As it happened, I knew that the little mill neighborhood had a name: North Charlotte. North Charlotte is singled out in The Observer’s stylebook, the official reference we use for capitalization, punctuation, spelling and other usage. North Charlotte merited its own entry because of its capital-N North, which recognized it as a distinct neighborhood, not just anything in the general northern part of town, which would be lower-case-n north Charlotte.

The cake I bought at the bakery wasnt all that great. But having discovered North Charlotte, I kept an eye on it over the years. I thought it had potential. It seems I was right.

Around 1985 an artist couple bought a dilapidated block of buildings on North Davidson and in 1990 opened the Center of the Earth Gallery. Other arts types followed, including former used-car salesman Terry Carano, who opened a populist gallery in a scruffy building across Davidson.

People in this buttoned-down, money-hungry banking city flooded North Charlotte for gallery crawls, concerts, coffee houses and off-the-wall theater. The place was unique in Charlotte: It was scruffy – the opposite of upscale – and it had a sense of place. You could find weird art, people playing bongos, vegetarian food and other deviant urban pursuits. People loved it.

After a few years, people started calling it NoDa, as in North Davidson. I guess they thought it would be hip, like SoHo in New York. Looking back, that might have been the clearest sign that North Charlotte’s authenticity was at risk.

NoDa is booming. Real estate signs uptown hype NoDa lofts. New restaurants and bars are open.

Last week came news of a development proposal. The scruffy building housing the un-slick Pat’s Time For One More bar and two weirdly populist galleries is to be demolished. In their place would go a well-designed three-story building with stores and condos.

As urban buildings go, this one will be better than about 98 percent of everything getting built in Charlotte. Yes, it will bring investment to the neighborhood. Yes, cities evolve, and this evolution is a sight better than what is evolving out on the outerbelt. And yes, amazingly, über-suburban developer Crosland will do this little urban infill.

But. But.

Can you tear down the blue-collar bar and the most avant-garde and wacko gallery and still hold on to what attracted the young, alternative thinkers to start with? The cheap gallery space and the bar serving truckers, punks and artists are an essential part – though not the only part – of the formula that turned North Charlotte into NoDa.

Can NoDa survive the loss? Maybe. I hope so.

But of course, that’s NoDa. I think North Charlotte may be gone for good.

Density and parking: W.W.J.J.(Jane Jacobs) D.?

View of proposed development from Caswell Road. Image from documents filed with City of Charlotte

I’ve spent the last few days re-reading parts of the writings of Jane Jacobs, in advance of a talk I’m giving Thursday in the NoDa neighborhood (6 p.m. at the Evening Muse, free and open to the public) as well as the 100th anniversary of her birth May 4, 1916. (See an inspiring list of Jane’s 100th events at janes100th.org.)

So when I read about neighborhood opposition — and more significant, opposition from District 1 City Council member Patsy Kinsey — to a proposed development in the Elizabeth neighborhood on the basis of density and a worry about parking, I was primed to consult Jacobs’ writing. WWJJD? What Would Jane Jacobs Do? Spoiler: I think she would be OK with the development but would be more worried about what she called “the self-destruction of diversity.”

Ely Portillo’s article in The Charlotte Observer lays out some of the opposition. The proposal (see the rezoning documents here) is for a 60-foot-high development of 123 apartments, with 15,000 square feet of shops and restaurants, at a triangular corner at East Seventh Street and North Caswell Road.

Portillo quotes neighborhood association member Melanie Sizemore saying that while developers and the neighborhood have worked together they haven’t resolved all the issues. Two big sticking points: density and parking. They’re afraid the number of proposed parking spots isn’t generous enough and will mean congestion in the surrounding neighborhood.

Today, Charlotte Agenda writer Jason Thomas, referring to remarks at Monday’s public hearing, opines that it shows “just how lost our City Council is.” (See “The City Council is making baffling decisions on urban planning.“) Thomas praises it as beautifully
designed and well-thought-out and compares it favorably to other recent apartment projects the council approved, including one right across Seventh Street, that he says are uglier.

But the supposed need for more parking? Listen to Jane Jacobs, a brilliant observer of and thinker about cities: “The destructive effects of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This is in the book’s introduction, in which she excoriates planners for cluelessness and for oblivion to reality as they blindly follow theories of how cities should work and ignore evidence that their theories are flawed. “… Planners … do not know what to do with automobiles in cities because they do not know how to plan for workable and vital cities anyhow — with or without automobiles.”

One of those failed planner theories is that density in cities is bad. Jacobs’ book proves the opposite: It’s essential to a healthy, functioning city.  But during the 20th century the “density is bad” theory embedded itself in the minds of well-meaning, “progressive” planners and neighborhood advocates. So did the idea that traffic congestion and lack of parking will kill a neighborhood. Jacobs’ observations showed how that’s another fallacy. In recent decades many planners themselves have abandoned the “density is bad” theory. But it’s clearly foremost in some people’s minds.

(An aside: Jacobs’ assumed that cities would have demolition protection for older buildings and the courage to impose height limits, which are tools used to protect the needed diversity of building age and scale. But demolition protection and height limits are lacking in Charlotte.)

Is Thomas fair to expect all City Council members to be urban designers or planners? That would be nice, but it’s unrealistic. That’s why the city pays a whole department of people to advise them on such matters and to ensure that city ordinances produce the kind of development the city’s plans call for.

Quick quiz:

1. Are the plans what they should be, or are they vague feel-good statements?
2. Do the ordinances produce what the plans call for?

OK, you score 100. The policies set forth in many of the plans are vague (“Protect and enhance the character of existing neighborhoods.”). And the ordinances don’t produce what the plans call for. The city hired consultants (Clarion) who told them so. Three years ago. Moving at a pace that makes glacial melting look rapid, the city is only now starting work on rewriting its zoning ordinance.

Why not, in the interim, apply a few patches for areas that need them? I’m thinking of places facing rapid demand for new buildings, where the old multifamily zoning allows developments that deface the sidewalk experience: South End, Elizabeth and Plaza Midwood for starters. Patches could be some tailored-to-the-area zoning overlays, or they could boost the urban design standards in a few of the zoning categories such as MUDD and TOD.

But back to Jane Jacobs. What was that about the self-destruction of diversity? She noticed that successful, popular neighborhoods with a diverse set of buildings, businesses, homes and uses tended over time to lose that blend:“Self-destruction of diversity is caused by success, not by failure. … The process is a continuation of the same economic processes that led to the success itself.”
As a neighborhood becomes more popular, she wrote, the new development will tend to be whatever is most profitable. That’s how capitalism works. Over time, the neighborhood loses its diversity. “So many people want to live in the locality that it becomes profitable to build, in excessive and devastating quantity (emphasis mine), for those who can pay the most. These are usually childless people, and today they are not simply people who can pay the most in general, but people who can or will pay the most for the smallest space.”

Does that sound familiar?

The kind of problem a city is

This new piece by the Atlantic’s CityLab.com writer Michael Mehaffy looks at the newest thinking about cities, and concludes, in essence, that Jane Jacobs was right. (see“5 Key Themes Emerging From the ‘New Science of Cities.”)
Mehaffy writes: “In the past few years, a remarkable body of scientific research has begun to shed new light on the dynamic behavior of cities, carrying important implications for city-makers. Researchers at cutting-edge hubs of urban theory like the University College London and the Santa Fe Institute have been homing in on some key properties of urban systems—and contradicting much of today’s orthodoxy.”
The researchers, Mehaffy says, are finding that they’re essentially proving the value of much of what urban writer Jane Jacobs (not a planner, not an architect, not an academician) explored in the 1950s 

through the 1990s:

 
“Jacobs was also famous for excoriating the backward-looking “pseudo-science” of that era’s planning and architecture, which she said seemed “almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.”  She urged city-makers to understand the real “kind of problem a city is”—not a conventional problem of top-down mechanical or visual order, but a complex problem of interacting factors that are “interrelated into an organic whole.”

He quotes physicist Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute saying they are just doing “Jacobs with the math.”

The five key themes?
1.Cities generate economic growth through networks of proximity, casual encounters and “economic spillovers.” The creativity and prosperity of cities like New York, Mehaffy writes, is “ a dynamic interaction between web-like networks of individuals who exchange knowledge and information about creative ideas and opportunities.” Many of those interactions are casual, taking place in “networks of public and semi-public spaces—the urban web of sidewalks, plazas, and cafes. More formal and electronic connections supplement, but do not replace, this primary network of spatial exchange.” 
2. Through a similar dynamic, cities generate a remarkably large “green dividend.
3. Cities perform best economically and environmentally when they feature pervasive human-scale connectivity. “…to the extent that the city’s urban fabric is fragmented, car-dependent or otherwise restrictive of casual encounters and spillovers, that city will under-perform—or require an unsustainable injection of resources to compensate.” (Sound like any place you know?) 
4. Cities perform best when they adapt to human psychological dynamics and patterns of activity.
5. Cities perform best when they offer some control of spatial structure to residents. 
These theories seem to point to future difficulties for auto-oriented, disconnected Sun Belt-form cities such as Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta, etc.—places that today are growing like gangbusters. Can those cities recover the old networks of connectivity they had when they were small, pedestrian and streetcar-oriented towns of the 19th and early 20th centuries?

Charlotte to hold 2 ‘Jane Jacobs Walks’ May 4

If you know who Jane Jacobs was and understand the role her work has played in revolutionizing thinking about cities and planning since the 1960s, you’ll understand why her birthday is a time to encourage city-dwellers to get to know their own places a little better.

For the second year in a row, PlanCharlotte.org the online publication I run for the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute is sponsoring a Jane Jacobs Walks in Charlotte. For more information, visit JaneJacobsWalk.org.

New for this year: We’re sponsoring two walks, in two different parts of the city. The walks are part of a movement around the globe to celebrate on the weekend of Jacobs’ birth. 

1. Like last year’s Jane Jacobs Walk (read about it here, and here), one will be a munching tour of East Charlotte, led by historian Tom Hanchett of Levine Museum of the New South.
 
2. The new, additional Jane Jacobs Walk will focus on South End its history, redevelopment and urban design successes and challenges. That one will be led by UNC Charlotte architect and urban design Professor David Walters

Details on Walk No. 1: Saturday May 4, 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m.

Hanchett, on his “Munching Tour,” will encourage participants to look at the immigrant-run restaurants and stores in East Charlotte as embodying some of the elemental principles of Jane Jacobs’ writing about cities how they absorb newcomers and allow for entrepreneurial businesses, even if the setting is not necessarily affluent or glossy.

We’ll sample foods at several restaurants as we walk.

RSVP: Email mnewsom@uncc.edu. The maximum number of participants for Hanchett’s walk is 18. Bring cash for purchasing food samples, and wear comfortable shoes. We’ll let you know beforehand where the exact gathering spot will be.

Details on Walk No. 2: Saturday May 4, 3:30 p.m.-5 p.m.

On the South End tour, Walters will discuss Jane Jacobs’ principles for lively city neighborhoods, and point to ways South End exemplifies them in some cases and lacks them in other cases. Walters directs the Master’s in Urban Design program at the UNC Charlotte School of Architecture.

We’ll look at developments along and near the Lynx Blue Line. The walk will end at a neighborhood pub, Big Ben, at Atherton Mill along the Lynx tracks.

RSVP: Email mnewsom@uncc.edu. There is no maximum number of participants but please register so we’ll have an idea of how many people to expect and to let you know beforehand where to gather.  Wear comfortable shoes.

In case of rain, we’ll still be walking. Bring umbrellas.

Taking issue with New Yorker’s Lemann on cities, and other random links

It seems a healthy chunk of that segment of New-York news media that isn’t picking through the compost heap of Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s case remains obsessed with New Yorkers’ love-hate relationship with bike lanes. John Cassidy of The New Yorker magazine a few months back ranted on a blog “Rational Irrationality,” about the expanding lanes. Here, “R.A.” of The Economist skewers Cassidy’s economic arguments, in “Tragedies of the commons/The world is his parking spot.

Just last week (June 27), the New York Times ran an overview of the ways many European cities are trying to make driving and parking so uncomfortable that people choose to walk, bicycle or take transit.  Of course, this is a technique that needs to be imported to the U.S. with caution. Many U.S. cities, especially in the Sun Belt, make is all but impossible to walk, bicycle or take public transportation. And even in New York (see above) not all are thrilled with the idea that a bicycle lane might – gasp! – remove parking spots.

Also in the New Yorker (June 27 edition), Nicholas Lemann of the Columbia School of Journalism reviews a series of books dealing with cities, “Get Out of Town/Has the celebration of cities gone too far?”  (Subscription needed to read the full article.)

Lemann gives an overview of, among other things, the city-suburb wars, of Richard Florida’s Creative Class theory,  of Edward Glaeser’s new book, “Triumph of the City,” and of “Aerotropolis,” a new book written in part by UNC sociologist John Kasarda, who helped mastermind the still-underperforming Global TransPark in Kinston, N.C., though Lemann doesn’t mention that infelicitous angle. As an aside, the state-funded creation of the TransPark, in a rural part of Eastern North Carolina, shows the degree to which Glaeser may be right about the importance of cities in generating wealth.

For a smart guy, Lemann is remarkably shallow in some of his analyses. For instance, he says Glaeser is not an admirer of Jane Jacobs.  To be sure, Glaeser (showing his own shallow analysis), contends that Jacobs’ fights to save Greenwich Village turned the village into a low-density, high-priced haven for the wealthy, because the preservation prevented skyscrapers. (Here’s my own take on Glaeser’s book, a review of “Triumph of the City,” for OnEarth.org.)  Has Lemann read anything other than Jacobs’ “Death and Life of Great American Cities”? Her next book, “The Economy of Cities,” listed in Glaeser’s bibliography, clearly prefigures much of Glaeser’s own economic theory in “Triumph”: that cities and the proximity they create allow innovation to happen.

Lemann concludes by saying that in 20th-century America, many more people found what they were seeking in American suburbs than in cities: “They tended their gardens, washed their cars, took their children to Little League games, went to PTA meetings and to religious services.” Come again? Other than the part about gardens, is he saying city dwellers didn’t do or value any of those things?  As an academic at Columbia University, surely he’s heard of the work of Kenneth T. Jackson, an urban historian at Columbia, whose “Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States,” explained how the federal government’s policies starting in the 1920s subsidized suburban development and hindered development inside established cities. (Glaeser also makes this point, with some vigor.) In other words, we’ll never know how many Americans would have moved to suburbia had the economic playing field been level.

Still up for more reading: The New York Times had an intriguing article Sunday, “Detroit Pushes Back with Young Muscles,” about how Detroit – which many Americans associate with urban blight exponentially worse than any other U.S. city – has instead become a magnet for creative young entrepreneurs. In the past 10 years, “downtown Detroit experienced a 59 percent increase in the number of college-educated residents under the age of 35, nearly 30 percent more than two-thirds of the nation’s 51 largest cities.” And the long list of initiatives to attract and nurture entrepreneurs is impressive. Anyone taking notes at the Charlotte Chamber, and in city government here? 

Happy Fourth of July.

TEDx Charlotte – Are we innovative yet?

10 a.m. – Waiting for TEDx to start, in basement auditorium at Knight Theater, looking at psychedelic floral video displays in darkened auditorium. Architect Tom Low of the Charlotte Duany PlaterZyberk Audience and founder of Civic by Design is pacing up front along with Manoj Kesavan, another local architect who’s one of the TEDx Charlotte organizers. We’re supposed to be learning about and experiencing innovative ideas, I think.

I should probably have read the material better. But this has been a week of 11- and 12-hour workdays. This morning before heading here I had to set out sprinklers for our newly re-seeded lawn, clean up last night’s dirty kitchen, make breakfast, fix a torn hem on my slacks, emails a friend who’s about to be unreachable, to set up the time and place for a lunch date, etc. etc. It reminds me of something I read recently, attributed to Jane Jacobs: An efficient city can’t be an innovative city. I conclude this applies to personal lives, too. Too many tasks, duties and to-do-list work eats away at the time your brain needs to float free.

So I wonder: Have the past decades of workplace pressure for increased “productivity” – which means fewer workers, more work, faster work, longer workweeks, constant availability to the office – has all that had an effect on U.S. innovation?

Corbu? Or You?

Yesterday I posed the question of who should be on the list of worst urbanists – spinning off Planetizen.com’s entertaining Top 100 Urbanists list.

The easy, cliched choice would be Le Corbusier, the brilliant but destructive architect whose vision for the city of the future was one of tall towers surrounded by large lawns and big highways. In other words, this guy invented Charlotte’s suburban office park development Ballantyne, as well as this nation’s many failed public housing towers. But Corbu was avant-garde and influential, and many others took up his theories. This was especially true in the U.S., where they dovetailed nicely with the auto and petroleum industries’ push to get everyone into automobiles and driving a lot.


But thinking of Le Corbusier made me think of General Motors and its famous Futurama display at the 1939-40 New York Worlds Fair, depicted at right. Surely the automobile and petroleum industries – with their powerful influence on Congress and highway funding and with GM’s purchase of many urban streetcar systems in order to dismantle them – did more to shape the nation’s cities for the worse than any one architect could.

But then, of course, it’s worth remembering that while Le Corbusier did influence huge numbers of architects in this country, Walter Gropius and his colleague Sigfried Giedion (who wrote “Space Time and Architecture”) probably influenced more, during Gropius’ many years at the Harvard School of Design. So maybe Gropius and Giedion should be on the list.
But again, wait. Architects challenge us to think. They may be wrong but who, really, decides what gets built? It’s government that makes the rules that shape our cities. What about Herbert Hoover, who before he became president was Commerce Secretary and commissioned the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, which to this day underpins most land use ordinances in America and whose very foundation rests upon the theory that separating uses is the way to a safe and healthy city or town. As Jane Jacobs later showed us, it really isn’t.

The federal government funded the interstate highway system, envisioned as a way to connect cities. But when it entered the city it caused open, ugly wounds to the urban fabric that continues to damage cities to this day.

It was the federal government whose rules for backing mortgage loans created the redlining that cut off access to credit for anyone who A) was black, or B) lived anywhere near black people, or C) was one of a variety of so-called undesirable ethnics, such as Mexican or Bohemian or D) lived anywhere near any of those so-called undesirable ethnics.

It was the federal government, again through its financing rules, that encouraged the sprawling, low-density suburban subdivision design that vanquished more urban dwelling forms.

Consider: The government is by the people, for the people and of the people. It’s all of us. So maybe that worst urban thinker arrow should spin around and start pointing at all of us?

Charlotte architect one of ‘Greatest Urban Thinkers’

The late Jane Jacobs leads the vote so far with at least 660, but Lewis Mumford (270) and Kevin A. Lynch (281) are virtually neck and neck. The horse race? An online contest by the Web site Planetizen.com for Greatest Urban Thinker. Here’s a link.

I was cheered to see Charlotte architect Terry Shook (below) on the list, though rather far down it, with 7 votes last I looked. S.C.-based developer Vince Graham is also on the list, with 5 votes.

It’s an interesting list and provocative intellectual exercise, because you have to ponder whether some of the anti-urbanists, such as New York’s Robert Moses and Le Corbusier, were more influential than urbanists such as Mumford and Jacobs.

The Planetizen gang decided to leave a bit muddy the issue of whether “influential” should mean “brilliant thinker about cities” or “had the biggest impact.” Here’s what they say:

“What about Le Corbusier, who remains an influential figure in architecture but has been labeled Enemy Number One by urban planners? Like Time Magazine, we’ve left the definition deliberately vague to encompass those who’ve had the most influence on the way we think about cities and/or how cities are shaped, for better or for worse. “

I e-mailed Shook (a UNC Charlotte alum) to alert him to his appearance in company of Mumford, Lynch, Daniel Burnham and other Big Names. He replied: ” Really? … Any idea on how I got on there?” (Which I’m pretty sure means he wasn’t voting for himself … )

You can vote for up to 15. Have at it.
One last note: If you’re interested in reading about how Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses fought one another in New York over a series of urban redevelopment projects (Jacobs won the battles) look for “Wrestling With Moses,” by Anthony Flint of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. I’ve read it; it’s well-researched, well-written and quite entertaining.

Why razing NoDa really isn’t a good idea

Plenty of you disagreed with my previous analysis of the threat to NoDa from the transit-oriented development. Many people said, in essence, it’s dump, tear it town. I predict you’ll get your wish within the next 10 to 15 years.

Those of you enthralled with all-new development that wipes away anything that was there before seem to think it’s about nostalgia. It isn’t. It’s about entrepreneurs and small businesses, the very basic elements that build a local economy.

New buildings have expensive rents. Old buildings have cheaper rent. Old buildings breed entrepreneurs. It’s not the architecture, it’s the price of the space.

As urbanist writer Jane Jacobs put it, “Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. … If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction. … New ideas must use old buildings.”

In addition, companies that lend money to developers to finance new developments typically require that the space be leased to “proven” retailers, in other words, chains. That’s why you don’t see small, local businesses going into new buildings. Starbucks is welcome. Smelly Cat Coffeehouse isn’t.