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.