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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.
Look at the visual effect of David Wilson's rich-hued mural along Stonewall Street and the crazy-quilt lines of the center's façade, and in the background the starkly vertical and horizontal lines of the office towers. The pattern is stunning.
For years, on that slim corner lot sat a 1950s-era Elks Club building. For another 10 years it was a parking lot. Across Tryon Street where the new Duke Energy Building (née the Wachovia headquarters) rose, I used to go to lunch at the old D N P, a meat-and-three in a block of one-story shop fronts. It had excellent hamburgers and a Greek guy named Steve Karanikas behind the counter. He didn't holler "cheezbugga cheezbugga" like the Saturday Night Live skit, but you get the idea. That was downtown Charlotte a few decades ago: plenty of small-scale and human-scale spots and some lovably bedraggled corners amid the sleek-sided office towers.
Today, little that is bedraggled remains. Explosive growth brought mammoth projects, public and private, and public-private, such as the new cultural campus of the Gantt Center, the Mint Museum of Art, the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art and the John S. and James L. Knight Theater. With the NASCAR Hall of Fame blocks away, a big chunk of downtown is being transformed.
Yet even 10 years ago, when the Center City 2010 Vision Plan was written, those huge projects hadn't been proposed, and of course weren't mentioned in the plan.
So if anyone questions why Charlotte needs another center city plan, point to those projects, and to the many condo towers, the EpiCentre and the Lynx Blue Line. In times of rapid change, you're smarter if you know where you want those changes to lead. We need another plan.
Wednesday night, the Center City 2020 Vision Plan kicked off publicly with a workshop that drew some 300 people, plus dozens more online.
Daniel Iacofano of the consulting firm MIG Inc. of Berkeley, Calif., gave a slide show, displaying scenes of urban spots around the globe, such as the pedestrian promenade known as Las Ramblas in Barcelona and the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He quoted architect/author Christopher Alexander's "A New Theory of Urban Design": "Every increment of construction must be made in such a way as to heal the city," an ideal worth remembering in all development decisions.
But it was the open-mike time that most held my attention. The event drew people who'd lived in Charlotte decades, and some who've been here just a few months, young and old, neat and scruffy, native and newcomer.
Fix North Tryon Street. Keep the small-town feel. Encourage more people to walk. Link Johnson C. Smith University with uptown. Keep the "open-door policy" for newcomers. More shopping. Skate parks for teens. More attractions for families. Build on the growing ethnic diversity. Deal with the barrier created by I-277. Look for excellent small projects - we have enough big ones already.
The remark that drew the first spontaneous applause was: Get rid of the hamster tubes (the overstreet passages).
Despite so many changes uptown since the 2010 plan, this new effort will, I hope, keep pushing some important and still-unfinished proposals from that plan. For instance, I'm still waiting for the park atop a freeway cap.
But most important - and a principle the 2020 effort is taking seriously - is to improve connections, social as well as physical, between uptown and neighborhoods outside the loop. Deliberate efforts have been made to get people from all over the county onto the 2020 Steering Committee.
Yes, with its corporate headquarters, tall towers and high land values, uptown is an economic engine for the entire metro region. It's important that it stay healthy and continue to improve.
But this is about more than money. Uptown is the physical and cultural heart of the region, too. And the city's heart doesn't belong to uptown executives. It belongs to all of us.
Disclosure: Observer Publisher Ann Caulkins is a co-chair of the 2020 Vision Plan. She hasn't told me to write this or told me what to write.
