Mary Newsom

Place matters. Alluring or repellant, welcoming or off-putting, beautiful or ugly - the look and feel and personality of a city are among the key qualities that determine its economic well-being.

You know the images that say "Southern." Kudzu on a red clay bank. A sharecropper's shack abandoned in a field of cotton (or tobacco). Moonshiners vrooming down country roads.

Amid the bloviation-fest following Tuesday's election, Charlotte's mayoral election seems to have kept on flying under the national political radar. Odd.

Mary Newsom: For a city politician to start talking about Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is a bit like diving into a murky pool. You're not sure what's swimming around that you can't see. You may worry about something toxic - or sharks! - hiding in the murk.

To get to work Friday I drove past the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture, which opens to the public today. Go visit.

Most of the kids were thrilled. "This is my first time ever to walk to school," Zachary Strasser, 6, told his mother, Amy, that morning. Another girl reportedly bounded out of bed proclaiming, "It's Walk To School Day!"

If you toss a plastic bottle into the trash in North Carolina, you may well be breaking a new state law. Since Thursday, it's been illegal to put plastic bottles into a landfill.

Developers call it "the dirt." It means whatever land is under whatever buildings they buy or own.

TV's sitcom bar, "Cheers," was a perfect, though fictional, example. The café Les Deux Magots in Paris was a real one for artists and intellectuals such as Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

For the record, Hugh McColl was not there. Ed Crutchfield wasn't either, and neither, obviously, were the late Bill Lee or John Belk. No tycoons, no power brokers, no one who could pick up the phone and command millions was spotted that morning.