What’s going on at Camp North End? A look at one of the city’s most ambitious developments

What: 75 acres. Six buildings. 1.2 million square feet of building area. Camp North End, situated between Graham Street and Statesville Avenue just outside of Uptown, is massive, and one of the most ambitious developments in the city.

The site has a colorful history, opening first in 1924 as a Ford factory pumping out Model Ts before the U.S. Army took over in 1941 to use it as a Quartermasters Depot and, later, a missile plant — Charlotte Army Missile Plant. From 1975 until last year it served as a Rite-Aid facility. Now, ATCO Properties & Management wants to transform it into a thriving mix of housing, retail, artist space and restaurants.

Tenants like Hygge Coworking, Goodyear Arts and Junior Achievement are moving into the historic buildings. Eventually, Camp North End could be home to 1,500 new apartments, a hotel, 200,000 square feet of shops and restaurants, and up to 1.5 million square feet of office space.

We talked about what’s new at the development, and how you can visit, on this week’s CharlotteFive Podcast.

Who: Varian Shrum has been the community manager at Camp North End since January, planning events, reaching out to the surrounding neighborhoods and sharing the site’s story. Before Camp North End, she worked at Charlotte Center City Partners as a Community Development Associate, working to improve the city’s urban areas like Historic South End. She was also named a Knight Foundation Emerging City Champion and won a Knight Cities Challenge grant in June.

Anything else?

– Before we talked about Camp North End, Shrum told us what led her to Charlotte, and how one nannying job changed her career path.

– And Sallie and I described what we would do on a perfect day in South End. There’s a lot of eating and drinking involved, naturally.

Basically, she’s killing it, doing all kinds of amazing things around the city.

The CharlotteFive Podcast — presented by The Charlotte Observer and powered by OrthoCarolina — is a weekly podcast that aims to get you Charlotte Smart, Fast with fun, interesting and useful news about the city. It’s hosted by Corey Inscoe and Sallie Funderburk, and produced by Richard Brooke and 2Waves Media.

You can find The CharlotteFive Podcast on Soundcloud, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and TuneIn. You can follow us on Twitter @Charlotte_Five, on Instagram @cltfive, and on Facebook, and you can shoot us an email to charlottefive@charlottefive.com.

This story was originally published September 13, 2017 at 12:00 AM.