Category: UNCC Urban Institute

Time-traveling to a lost era in city history

I spent rather too much time yesterday looking through a new website that lets you view old maps of Charlotte a century ago, pegged to the 100th anniversary Friday of artist and native son Romare Bearden’s birth. The site, www.bearden1911.org, (put together via a partnership of the Levine Museum of the New South and UNC Chapel Hill) superimposes old photos and information about Bearden on an old Sanborn map. You can see old building outlines, where the streets used to be. (Note the small lot sizes, compared with today.).

I got interested, also, in the companion site www.charlotte1911.org, another collaboration by the Levine’s historian, Tom Hanchett and UNC. It uses 1911 Sanborn maps and city directory information to show you, for instance, where people holding different jobs were listed as living. You can locate where the boarding houses were, by race, as well as attorneys, mill workers and “bag agents.” The slider bar lets you superimpose an aerial photo of today’s buildings atop the century-old maps.

Of course, using this site, I scrolled out to see my own neighborhood  –  a subdivision whose official plat name is Pharr Acres. I’d heard it was “old man Pharr’s farm.”  Yep, there on Providence Road, just south of  Briar Creek, is a dot labeled “W S Pharr.” Into the late 1970s the large, old farmhouse house still stood. Like so much else on the map, it’s gone now, with a cul-de-sac subdivision in its place.

The Bearden site also offers some opportunity to mourn, including for the segregated world into which he was born, and for the loss to this city of a talent like his, when his parents moved North in search of a better life. As Levine historian Hanchett says in his article for the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute’s website (disclosure: my workplace) “Bearden’s 1911 birthplace: A fateful time for Charlotte,” a city where downtown neighborhoods had been comparatively integrated was hardening into rigid segregation during the years before Bearden’s birth. A new city park was closed to black residents. Black passengers were ordered into the back of streetcars.

But as you look through the Bearden locations and see photos of what’s there today,  mourn this, as well:  Most of it is gone. The good, the bad, the spacious front porches, stores, churches – almost everything. Including, in some cases, even streets  What you’ll see in photos showing today’s scenes in the places where Bearden and his family lived is not newer buildings – after all, cities do evolve – but surface parking areas, empty grass-covered lots. It’s one thing when old buildings are lost but replaced by newer ones that also over time contribute something to the city’s life and, then, its history. That is not what has happened here. We’ve just lost the reminders of the past, without gaining anything. At least this online exhibit can, if only virtually, restore something of what went before.

Photo: Artist Romare Bearden, born in Charlotte 100 years ago, moved to New York. His great-grandparents are shown in the photo next to him, on the porch of their Graham Street home in Charlotte.

A drive through the layers of a city

(A shopping cart, removed in recent days, at the desolate North Park Mall.)

I probably shouldn’t admit this, but when I took my new job at UNC Charlotte, the one thing I dreaded was my new drive to work. For more than two decades I’d commuted 4.2 miles to downtown from a neighborhood near Wendover Road along streets lined, for the most part, with half-century-old oaks. Depending on the hour and the traffic karma, it took as little as eight minutes up to (on rare occasions) 25.

My new drive is 12 miles, along streets decidedly unlike Providence and Queens roads and Morehead Street. Even apart from the extra time out of my day (it’s a 25- to 30-minute trip) and extra auto expenses to absorb, I was not looking forward to it. This new commute goes through neighborhoods that had little urban beauty even when new, and now are decidedly down-at-the-heels.

 But I was wrong.  What I lose in visual splendor is giving me a better-rounded view of the city.
The commute takes me through parts of Charlotte that of course I’ve seen before – I’m a journalist, remember – but never daily, or even weekly.  And an occasional cruise up Eastway Drive is not at all the same as seeing it daily, because it’s those routine views that inevitably shape our understanding of and expectations for, the places we inhabit – what urban design writer Kevin Lynch (who worked in Greensboro early in his career) described as “mental maps.”

Knowing, intellectually, that Providence Road runs through some of Charlotte’s most affluent neighborhoods isn’t the same as absorbing, every day for years, the sight of tree-shaded sidewalks, well-watered lawns and well-proportioned four-lane streets. For years I’d drive through neighborhoods built as early 20th-century streetcar suburbs. Now I see car-oriented suburbia, much of it tattered. But despite its lack of obvious beauty, it offers something just as interesting, which isn’t easily found in those more static neighborhoods: a quality of visible transition through time.

I drive north to where Wendover becomes Eastway, then all the way to North Tryon Street, finally turning onto University City Boulevard. Along the way, I notice massive oak trees which don’t get near the publicity of Myers Park’s but are just as impressive. A few years ago I spotted chickens in someone’s yard across the street from the Aztec Apartments, and enjoyed the sight. This was before the chic urban chicken craze hit the city. Now, though, while I have looked daily since late June, I have not seen a single fowl there. On Tuesday night, however, I did see, near the Kilborne intersection, a white rabbit hopping along the grassy verge.

I drive past strip shopping centers of various ages, in varying degrees of transition, decay and stability, and marvel at how Eastway Crossing at Central and Eastway has kept up its rental spaces over decades. How will it fare after its Wal-Mart closes, once the new store on Independence Boulevard a mile away opens?

Nation Square, a new strip center on North Tryon Street.

I notice that the view of  50-year-old Garinger High School, designed by renowned local Modernist architect A.G. Odell, is all but obliterated by mobile classrooms plopped out front. I have become familiar with the extremely rough Norfolk Southern Aberdeen, Carolina & Western railroad tracks between Sugar Creek Road and The Plaza, possibly the bumpiest on any major thoroughfare in the city. I eye taquerias, Latino grocery stores and African braid salons, and today I caught a glimpse, as I zipped past, of a small business near Shamrock whose sign read: Cambodian Video.

Once on North Tryon Street – which has been a designated light rail transit corridor for, oh, about 13 years – I
marvel daily at how much new retail development has gone up in recent years that’s not at all transit-friendly: Amid mobile-home graveyards and the vintage Holiday Motel sit numerous newly constructed small strip centers and even a fast-food joint with drive-through windows.
I stopped one recent morning at one of the newest strip centers, Nation Square, which houses a handful of businesses including Panaderia Odalys, a Mexican bakery. I sampled cookies with guava and other sweets and was surprised to learn that Odalys is a small chain, with outlets in, among other places, High Point, Asheboro and other nearby Carolinas cities. Who’d have thought?

One of the bleakest spots is North Park Mall, where Eastway ends at North Tryon. Those jutting sawtooth skylights on its roof evoke the old Richway store of the mall’s founding in the 1970s. Richway later became Target, which left the mall more than a decade ago. A Kroger Sav-On became a Bi-Lo and now sits empty. The mall is all but derelict, with weeds and pockmarks in its parking lot. Right next to it, a much newer strip center seems fully occupied with small businesses – braid shops, salons, etc.

Baked goods at Panaderia Odalys at Nation Square

The overall condition of that section of east and northeast Charlotte is of concern, naturally.  Some areas (that strip center on The Plaza at Eastway, for instance) all but shout “disinvestment.” But it’s the evidence of change – thriving ’60s and ’70s suburbia that has passed through down-at-the-heels and, in many places, into immigrant entrepreneurialism – that make this drive so much more interesting. With so many small-scale businesses, you see more evidence of changes than along the oh-so-sedate section of Providence Road lined with the big Myers Park churches or along Morehead Street, where most of what changes is Carolinas Medical Center consuming ever more land. It’s more intriguing to spot a new taqueria, an African grocery store or something called Cambodian Video.

My daily commute now shows me a living city, one changing visibly from decade to decade, its modest neighborhoods evolving with the outflows and inflows of different people from different places.  I compare that with uptown Charlotte; for all its wealth of nightclubs, restaurants, museums, sports arenas and people, uptown’s virtually all-new development has mostly obliterated evidence of the multi-layered past. Cities have memories, made visible in the layers of buildings, pavements and history. We all need to be able to see the evidence of what went before us, what James Howard Kunstler called chronological connectivity. In his 1996 book, Home From Nowhere: he wrote: “Connection with the past and the future is a pathway that literally charms us in the direction of sanity and grace.”

For me, it’s the places where small stores go in and out of business, where new signs sprout in Spanish or Vietnamese or English, that are making it easier to sense the past as I travel toward the future.

Cities and freeways: Carmageddon or Carmaheaven?

I’ve been blogless too long. (Didja miss me?) First up on my list of readable stories to share: The Carmageddon miracle.

Carmageddon was the feared massive traffic tie-up expected in Southern California when the 405 Freeway had to close down for the July 16-17 weekend. Guess what? No traffic problems. People stayed home. (Experts who have studied the phenomenon of induced traffic were probably not surprised.) The Los Angeles Times has a wrap-up here: “ ‘Carmageddon’s’ good karma.” (Link thanks to Planetizen.com). And Planetizen’s own Tim Halbur weighed in, noting that the whole episode illustrated the folly of depending too much on one transportation mode alone – automobiles.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, credited with coining the term “Carmageddon,” dubbed what happened “Carmaheaven.” The New York Times’ Timothy Egan called the whole weekend an “urban epiphany.”  His description: “No, the big lessons of Carmageddon are not about transportation. They are about something else, something less easily quantified. They are about the small salves in life that make a day easier, or even memorable. When millions of Angelenos decided to hold a block party, or go to the park, or ride a bike, or play soccer, or spend half a day at the farmers market, or take advantage of free admission at some museums, they found a city far removed from that awful commuter stress index.”

And along those lines, this article, “Livable cities don’t have freeways,” refers to a Brown University study that found a city’s population can decrease 18 percent because of the building of a major highway. (See this interview with Brown’s Nathaniel Baum-Snow.) That’s one of the ways, notes conservative economist Edward Glaeser, that the government has disproportionately subsidized suburban sprawl.

Back to the Future?  UNC Charlotte urban design Professor David Walters has a piece on the website of the UNCC Urban Institute (disclosure: that’s my new employer) looking at how, despite admirable progress in many ways, many of the development problems facing the Charlotte region in the 1990s are still with us. Maybe, Walters suggests, he’ll start kicking up a fuss again and bring on more of that 1990s’-style hate mail.

Consolidation – promises kept?

Talk’s on the upswing again, and not just in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, about trying to run local government more efficiently by consolidating. And at his media briefing today, Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx gave yet another big plug to the idea, saying, “It’s hard to shape community priorities when you have resources siloed.”

A timely new piece on the website of UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute takes a look at what happened in 18 other city-county consolidations. The big headline? No real efficiencies were proved.

I asked Foxx today if he’d read the report, and what he thought about its findings. He said that while he believed there would be cost savings if Charlotte and Mecklenburg County governments merged, “I don’t think that is the only driver.” He thinks local government should be structured differently.

The UNCC report is by the authors of a new book, “City-County Consolidation: Promises Made, Promises Kept?”: Suzanne Leland, associate professor of political science at UNCC, and Kurt Thurmaier, director of the Division of Public Administration at Northern Illinois University.

Here’s what they conclude:

• Consolidation can improve economic development
“… Consolidated governments have performed more effectively in economic development than their comparison counties. … This is one promise the majority of consolidated governments delivered on.”

• Consolidation does not necessarily lead to more efficient government

“Our study yields little systematic evidence that consolidated governments operate more efficiently than their comparison communities. While about half of the cases in our sample seem to have lower rates of expenditure growth … the other half of the sample does not produce the same data.”

• Pro-Merger Campaigns delivered on most of their promises

In most cases (not all) they write, “the evidence is quite strong that the particular promises made to voters were kept, with very few exceptions.”

Watch Cabarrus sprawl! And Catawba too!

OK, I’ll admit my bias. I thought Union County would be the biggest sprawl-zone in the Charlotte region. Turns out the honor may go to Lincoln County. (It depends on how you’re measuring, of course.) Here’s why I say that. As I was adding the link to my post about mountain development, I spotted something interesting on the UNCC Urban Institute website: an interactive set of maps of the counties in the Charlotte region that depict visually the development from 1976 to 2010, and projecting forward.

So I did some exploring. I started with Union County, home to Weddington, Marvin, Indian Trail and numerous other one-time crossroads just over the Mecklenburg line that have become full-fledged towns. Here’s the link. (Click on the option for interactive map.) A county that in 1976 was almost completely undeveloped (shown in green) by 2010 was fully a third covered in development. From 1976 to 2006 its population increased 171 percent, but its land area that was developed increased 878 percent. What that means, of course, is that the land was developed in a low-density pattern. And here we go again, a tidbit for fiscal conservatives: Multiple studies show lower-density, spread-out development makes delivering of government services (police/fire protection, streets, water/sewer lines and so on) far more expensive per person than a more tightly knit developmental form – you know, the way things looked before about 1970.

But then I started looking at some of the other counties in the region. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a Mecklenburg interactive map. That one would have been eye-popping, I expect. (Update 1:55 p.m. Thursday: Thanks for the help, commenters. Here’s the link to the Mecklenburg map, which was working when I checked it at 1:53 p.m. Thursday. And yep, it’s eye-popping. Interesting also, besides seeing the green disappear, to see the “protected lands” increase.)

But of those I checked (Anson, Iredell, Lincoln, Catawba, Cabarrus and York) Catawba probably had the most visibly dramatic change. Cabarrus was dramatic as well.

But this Lincoln County stat blew me away: While its population increased 86.2 percent from 1976 to 2006 its developed land area increased by 1,450 percent.

Watch Cabarrus sprawl! And Catawba too!

OK, I’ll admit my bias. I thought Union County would be the biggest sprawl-zone in the Charlotte region. Turns out the honor may go to Lincoln County. (It depends on how you’re measuring, of course.) Here’s why I say that. As I was adding the link to my post about mountain development, I spotted something interesting on the UNCC Urban Institute website: an interactive set of maps of the counties in the Charlotte region that depict visually the development from 1976 to 2010, and projecting forward.

So I did some exploring. I started with Union County, home to Weddington, Marvin, Indian Trail and numerous other one-time crossroads just over the Mecklenburg line that have become full-fledged towns. Here’s the link. (Click on the option for interactive map.) A county that in 1976 was almost completely undeveloped (shown in green) by 2010 was fully a third covered in development. From 1976 to 2006 its population increased 171 percent, but its land area that was developed increased 878 percent. What that means, of course, is that the land was developed in a low-density pattern. And here we go again, a tidbit for fiscal conservatives: Multiple studies show lower-density, spread-out development makes delivering of government services (police/fire protection, streets, water/sewer lines and so on) far more expensive per person than a more tightly knit developmental form – you know, the way things looked before about 1970.

But then I started looking at some of the other counties in the region. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a Mecklenburg interactive map. That one would have been eye-popping, I expect. (Update 1:55 p.m. Thursday: Thanks for the help, commenters. Here’s the link to the Mecklenburg map, which was working when I checked it at 1:53 p.m. Thursday. And yep, it’s eye-popping. Interesting also, besides seeing the green disappear, to see the “protected lands” increase.)

But of those I checked (Anson, Iredell, Lincoln, Catawba, Cabarrus and York) Catawba probably had the most visibly dramatic change. Cabarrus was dramatic as well.

But this Lincoln County stat blew me away: While its population increased 86.2 percent from 1976 to 2006 its developed land area increased by 1,450 percent.