ken zirkel

So I’m visiting Charlotte, NC for the occasion of my sister’s wedding. (more on the wedding later). I was fortunate to have a morning to walk around the “uptown” district, the heart of the city. I was expecting to like Charlotte a lot. My first impression of the city was a highly efficient airport, and a neat little green space near my hotel, with lots of whimsical public art and small buildings. For one thing, I was pleasantly surprised to find so much good, accessible public art here. I live in a city with a renowned art school, and most of our public art is confined to cold abstractions along the waterfront. And I was told that Charlotte is getting a light rail line in the near future.

I guess I expected more of the same kind of smart, human-scale planning, but I found uptown Charlotte to be a disappointment.

I think it crystallized for me when I visited Charlotte’s Levine Museum of the New South. That museum Encompasses Southern history from the Civil War to the present. Well, first of all, that concept hits on one thing about the urban “new” South: they have worked hard to eradicate so much of their history before 1865. The Civil War is hardly such a demarcation in the Northeast. If anything, we preserve our pre-Civil War history more than our more recent history. But I digress. (or do I? I think this attitude toward history is part of my problem with the South).

In that museum, I saw a handful of photos from the early part of the 20th Century, say around the 1920′s or 1930′s. No big deal was made of those photos. But they showed a Charlotte with beautiful early Chicago-style skyscrapers, those 8-to-12 story buildings like you see in great New York neighborhoods like Chelsea and Soho. The kind of human-scale buildings you don’t see anymore, the kind of buildings like we have in my local city. Charlotte doesn’t seem to have any more buildings like that.

I suppose they knocked all that down in a wild abandon. Charlotte is loaded with those enormous modernist and post-modernist skyscrapers of 30 stories or more that tower over the landscape. Charlotte seems to have modeled itself on midtown New York, the cold, hard, kind of architecture where the only greenery is in big pots, and the plazas were windswept and cold on this autumn morning. I wasn’t able to find any sort of historic district, or even modern approximations of it. There’s the uber-city downtown, surrounded by the suburbs. There’s no middle ground, no liveable urban city. (I suppose it’s here somewhere. I might be missing something. But still.)

This is what comes about, I suppose, when you allow unfettered capitalists complete control over your city planning. There are few amenities in the downtown area, and I guess that’s OK because I don’t think anybody lives here. Any activities other than capitalism (and, I guess, art) are relegated to the suburbs anyway. As far as I can tell, there’s no housing, just a few museums, and not much retail shopping, movie theaters, live theaters, grocery stores, or such. The business of downtown, it seems, is strictly business.

I think it’s important to keep this in mind, because so much of my New England river city still retains that precious urban “middle ground”, but each new mega-development threatens that. Charlotte seems, to me, to be a (negative) example of what can happen if we let the desire to attract big national corporations to be the only planning consideration. Surely there is a way to hold on to some of the richness of the architectural past while moving into the future.