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EDITOR'S NOTE: Doug Smith is retiring June 5. This is the 18th in a series of his most requested columns. This encore column first ran in the Observer on Wednesday, August 29, 2007. It caused many readers to wax nostalgic about the old days. See the comments at the bottom of column.
People who haven't visited Charlotte for a decade are dazzled by how rapidly it's changing. Residential and commercial development are flourishing near Interstate 485 at the far reaches of the county, and people are returning to the urban core - not just to work, but to live. Imagine what natives have witnessed. As my Harding High School class of 1962 prepared for its 45th reunion recently, I asked readers to venture back in time and describe the difference between Charlotte then and now.
About 50 people replied by phone and e-mail to my newspaper column and my blog on Charlotte.com. They painted a picture of Charlotte pre-Next Big Thing, a city with a small-town atmosphere that preceded the metropolitan center we live in today.
But the trends that emerged in that era, from the exodus to the suburbs to the rise of the office towers, are still shaping our region's growth.
The population in 1962 was 212,000 compared with about 664,000 today. The tallest uptown building then was 20 stories compared with today's three-times-taller Bank of America Corporate Center.
But to readers, the biggest difference between then and now is not so much what Charlotte has gained but what it seems to have lost, especially in lifestyle. Here's a summary of their comments:
In the 1960s, the Carolina, the Imperial, the Charlotte and the Tryon movie theaters were still operating in the center city. That's where young people typically spent Saturdays unsupervised with the blessing of their parents.
Among uptown must-dos back then: peanuts and juice at Tanner's on Tryon; steamed hot dogs and chocolate-covered doughnuts at S.H. Kress' at Tryon and Trade streets, a photo with your honey in the booth at Woolworth's on North Tryon, Sunday lunch with the family at S&W Cafeteria on West Trade Street.
Everyone had manners, attended church on Sunday mornings and carried alcoholic beverages (pre-liquor by the drink) into their favorite restaurant in a brown paper bag.
The milkman delivered to your door. The service station attendant wiped your windshield, checked the oil and pumped your gas (23 cents a gallon). The family car was just that - a single car.
For fine dining, you went to the Epicurean (now gone) on East Boulevard. No bagel shops, no New York pizza bars, no taco stands. Everyone spoke the same language: Southern.
Without home computers, video games, VCRs and DVD players, children explored the neighborhood on bikes or roller skates and played outdoors until the streetlights came on.
Urban renewal hadn't begun in Second Ward, at that time a thriving African American neighborhood. The revitalization wave had yet to sweep through First, Third and Fourth wards.
The city wasn't as diverse in race or culture. The influx of newcomers hadn't begun, and school desegregation was just beginning to take hold.
Auto dealerships were clustered uptown, where car-crazed boys tried every fall to peek around papered-over showroom windows for a glimpse of the new models to be unveiled.
If you lived in Charlotte, you more than likely rode the city bus to shopping, school and entertainment. All bus transfers were at The Square (the intersection of Trade and Tryon streets).
For residents of Concord, Rock Hill, Gastonia, Monroe, etc., the center city was the retail hub for the region with such stores as Belk, Montaldo's and Ivey's (where shades were pulled on Sundays to discourage window-shopping).
By the 1970s, Park Road Shopping Center and Charlottetown Mall were luring shoppers away from the urban core. Suburban theaters eventually replaced the uptown movie houses. And the center city became a ghost town after workers departed at 5 p.m.
Government and civic leaders soon realized that if they didn't reverse the trend, the city would rot at the core. Charlotte leadership earnestly began trying to attract more residents back to the center city and to improve its vitality by clustering cultural, dining and entertainment there.
In the 1970s, the Overstreet Mall helped preserve some remaining retail in the center city, but later attempts to create a magnet specialty center - City Fair - weren't successful.
Through the 1980s and 1990s, the expansion of the city's big regional banks led to more office towers. And during that period, uptown often was referred to as the city's largest office park.
Aided by public and private investment, cultural and residential revitalization gained momentum in the early 1990s, helping to mitigate the office park image and pave the way for this decade's Next Big Thing: the high-rise residential boom.
Over the past four years, developers have proposed, finished or started 20 residential towers plus four office towers. Charlotte Center City Partners predicts the uptown population will grow from about 10,000 today to more than 21,000 by 2012.
Readers responding to my question say growth has brought more traffic, longer commutes, demolition of vintage buildings and school overcrowding. But they don't see every change as negative.
They say Charlotte's economy has generated jobs, created more housing choices and given consumers a greater variety of restaurants and stores than ever.
They also note that the Charlotte region can claim the NFL Panthers, the NBA Bobcats, Lowe's Motor Speedway and, in a couple of years, the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
But I'm afraid that the Charlotte so fondly recalled by natives will remain just a memory. In 45 years, I wonder: how will we remember Charlotte 2007?
Readers Remember:
"One of the changes I laugh about is food and restaurants. Wow! Today we have everything we could want (then) there were no bagel shops in Charlotte. When my parents would drive to Atlanta, they would fill up their car with as many bagels as their back seat would hold."
LYNNE LEVINSON SHEFFER, Charlotte "I pondered long and hard about whether I wanted to drive all the way out to Cotswold (about 3 miles) from my one-bedroom apartment near Mercy Hospital ($85 a month) to date a girl who had been recommended to me. I did."
ALEX COFFIN, Charlotte "We'd travel to Charlotte (from Rutherfordton) to take in a concert at Ovens Auditorium. And on the way home, we'd search for a place to buy a late evening snack. Well, there was nowhere to purchase anything to eat between Charlotte and Rutherfordton in those days. We ended up taking sweet rolls and a Thermos of coffee."
DR. BILL SHAPIRO, Rutherfordton "Overwhelmingly, the chief lifestyle difference for the 1960s child was the time spent outdoors. We stayed outside and explored nature every daylight hour that we were not in school. In stark contrast to today's mothers, our moms did not seem to worry."
KATHY FORBES, Waxhaw "We felt safe. No one had heard of terrorism, and nobody brought guns, knives, etc., to school. Charlotte is too big!" ETHEL MCMILLAN, Charlotte
"I used to live on Sardis Road, and when I wanted to call our grandmother, it was long distance to her house on College Street."
CAROLINE YANCEY, Charlotte
