Category: NoDa

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, I’ll 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. Here’s 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 wasn’t 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 weren’t 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 wasn’t 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.

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?

My picks for best places to stand in Charlotte

I asked your opinions – and thanks for sharing, everyone – but didn’t give mine.

Yesterday I pointed to a list (link here to blog, and here to list) about the best places to stand in the U.S. and asked about Charlotte spots. But I didn’t include any of my own choices. These things require pondering, you know.

I concur with those who mentioned Queens Road and the cathedral of oaks, and the magnificent corner of Kingston and Lyndhurst avenues (see photo above) in Dilworth. Indeed, I spotlighted both places in a piece I wrote some years back about Great Streets in Charlotte. Brevard Court uptown was another in that series.

My favorite spots to stand in Charlotte (for today, at least) are listed below. Note, I’m including only inside the city limits, so Crowders Mountain is out, as well as various funky downtowns in other municipalities like Matthews or Davidson. And ask me tomorrow and I may have a completely different list. NoDa on a gallery crawl night is great. Looking out from the 60th floor of the BofA Corporate Center is great – but not open to the public.

Here’s my list:

3. In line at Price’s Chicken Coop (at left) just after you’ve bought a quarter-dark dinner (or chicken livers) with tater tots and the hot grease is just starting to soak through the cardboard box.

2. The vaulted passage way alongside The Green uptown – one of the best designed spaces in the city. It just makes you feel grand to walk down it. The fans overhead are a nice touch for a hot climate.

1. Inside the First Presbyterian Church sanctuary on the Sunday before Christmas, with the old burnished wood, the royal blue carpets and cushions, as the brass and timpani and cymbals play and everyone is singing “Joy To The World.”

Got vacancies? Try artists

It’s a continuing problem in Charlotte: Neighborhood gentrification (e.g. NoDa), combined with relentless and wasteful demolition of old buildings shrinks the spaces for artists, even while the city’s arts community is trying to grow. And while the role of the arts in redeveloping ailing neighborhoods gets much lip service, the city and its major NGOs (non-governmental organizations, for the non-wonks reading) haven’t succeeded in doing much to help provide housing.

Here’s a piece about a program run through the Boston Redevelopment Authority, that uses the affordable-housing requirement for large projects (and note that it’s a REQUIREMENT) as well other city-offered incentives. (Interesting factoid: The BRA director is John Palmieri, who from 2002 to 2004 was the City of Charlotte’s director of economic development.)

Note this line in the linked-to piece above: “Boston already requires that at least 15 percent of units in large new residential buildings be priced based on income limits.”

Hmmm. The recently released “Housing Charlotte 2007 Implementation Committee” had a subcommittee to look at that kind of idea, called “inclusionary zoning,” but the name of the subcommittee was “Incentive-Based Inclusionary Housing Policies.” A mole on the committee tells me anytime anyone mentioned anything about “mandatory” they were reprimanded and told the recommendation would be for only “incentive-based” techniques (i.e. voluntary).