Boring Charlotte

[eastsider]

well, for @ least a month or so a year they set up an ice skating rink on the green. i took the fam' there last week.

[rockhilljames]

Cool! I stand SO corrected!

So...you can ice skate in downtown Charlotte on some nights.

I'm guessing that we're the only Carolina's downtown that can say that.

[monsoon]

I'm guessing that we're the only Carolina's downtown that can say that.

[graydog]

i lived in raleigh for a year in '99 and thats exactly how DT was back then... i was hoping serapis could give examples of how it has changed. by your accounts doesn't sound like it has.

as for wilmington... charlotte_native pretty much nailed it with the "asheville by the sea" slogan. i would note that i don't think wilmington's DT is quite as active as asheville's... but, thats just my experience. oddly enough, the deadest (nightlife) i've seen DT wilmington get was during the summer.... all the kiddies from UNCW are out of school.

[Charlotteman]

Getting back to the "gritty look" issue:)

Some buildings Uptown that I feel are on their way to looking gritty. Say in about 25-30 years:

1 Independence Center (starting to look a little funky already--probably the outdated architecture)

First Citizens building

Marriott City Center (was looking not so ritzy the last time I saw it)

Cameron Brown building

Courtside (the back looks gritty now)

Court 6

Wach 2 (almost there)

Charlotte Plaza (in 25-30 years it will be over 50 years old!)

[davidals]

Ah! Yeah, I forgot about that!

Well...there you go.

I was in downtown Raleigh a month ago. Maybe a lot of this deals with knowing where to go...but it seemed dead as hell to me. There was one bar that had a lot of people in it, near the Powerstation development. Everything else was crickets chirping.

Hey...how's downtown Wilmington? Always seems pretty cool when I'm there.

[Charlotte_native]

I agree with the Wilmington comments and add that there are far fewer hippies than Asheville. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

[cinco]

I don't know if I'd say Raleigh is any better than Charlotte - just different. There's a lot going on Triangle-wide, but it's still not as broad-based as it should be - good gay bars, and a lot of things oriented towards college kids or indie-rock/college-radio types (places like the Cradle in Carrboro and Kings in d'town Raleigh have had years to establish themselves), plus the big film fests in Durham, but if you don't fall into one of those demographics it's a bit more limited.

[serapis]

Things have changed completely since 1999. When I say recent, I mean in the past 8-10 months. There is so much more going on DT now. I'm not going to into details, because I hate typing. However I think you should make DT Raleigh your next visit. Charlotte's just not my cup of tea DT. I love the city as a whole however. I'm more of a fan of other large city's DT's.

[blburton]

Having heard soooo much about uptown from friends and this forum, I was very excited about seeing what downtown had to offer to make my basis on CLT nightlife. I was born and raised near Burlington, so I've also seen the skyline develop over the last 2 decades and visited CLT a few times.

Well, I was very disappointed. At 1130pm on a Saturday night, one wine bar was empty, so after looking around for another 20 minutes, we settled with a bar at the corner of 7th and Tryon (forgot the name). The streets weren't packed, nor were the sidewalks. Two other places I saw that were open just seemed so cliche and rigid. I've been in downtown Raleigh, W-S, GSO, Durham, Richmond, Baltimore, ATL, DC, and Orlando around this time of night or later and I could find much more to do. Maybe it was in a bad night? Tryon St is "the street", right? After asking a bartender what else there was to do at 1am, he mentioned ONE OTHER PLACE! wtf? I definitely didn't feel like I was in a city of 650,000. Uptown CLT was nothing great.

And yes, I also felt that parts of uptown felt like a suburban office park/Disneyworld. So "what is wrong with being clean?" Nothing's wrong with that, but I feel that destroying historical monuments, buildings, etc to be replaced by 46 unaffordable 900 story residential/entertainment towers removes character and variation within ANY city's central core - makes it look fake. Some people think that the old stuff makes an area look blighted or dirty... matter of opinion. It's similar to how beautiful or historically influential homes or land in areas that were once pristine, rolling hills are destroyed for neighborhoods with no character, thousands of cheap looking 5000 sq ft homes, hummers, and soccer moms. Of course, these neighborhoods will be clean, too.

[Charlotte_native]

Well, I was very disappointed. At 1130pm on a Saturday night, Maybe it was in a bad night?

[krazeeboi]

I'm curious about when exactly this was, too.

[voyager12]

Tryon can be maddeningly uneven. I have been there after 12:30 on Saturday nights and the street has been PACKED without a game being played or anything and other nights it's desolate. Who knows why...

[Temeteron]

Tryon can be maddeningly uneven. I have been there after 12:30 on Saturday nights and the street has been PACKED without a game being played or anything and other nights it's desolate. Who knows why...

[dubone]

I think this is all simply a lack of people living nearby. Much of it depends on the whims of people driving in. There are a decent number of people living in the wards, but they are all somewhat separated from the Tryon corridor and are often just walking around within their neighborhoods in evenings and weekends. There are, however, random times when the 'perfect storm' happens, and you have a decent number of people there. But I agree it is inconsistent. Sometimes there aren't many people there (usually the days metro comes to visit ), but other times it is teaming.

I am really expecting to see more consistency and volume in pedestrians over the next 5 years. I think 230 S Tryon will make a difference on South Tryon. In part because of the new national restaurant and other street retail, but also just to have the people living there.

South Tryon has a lot of street retail, but no one lives nearby (except the Ratcliffe, which does put a little bit of population into the Green).

A lot of the new projects announced and under construction are within a block of Tryon. That will put more people on Tryon who didn't actually drive in.

I agree with all of the comments saying Charlotte has handicapped itself by tearing down so many great old buildings. There are still a decent number on Tryon, but then there are more poorly designed office towers with nothing on the street.

[monsoon]

......

I agree with all of the comments saying Charlotte has handicapped itself by tearing down so many great old buildings. There are still a decent number on Tryon, but then there are more poorly designed office towers with nothing on the street.

[blburton]

This was Dec 23. It wasn't a particularly cold night or anything.

I'm curious about when exactly this was, too.

[Charlotte_native]

This was Dec 23. It wasn't a particularly cold night or anything.

[lptk]

By the way, and this would be more than hard to find if you were on the street, but check out the bar at Bentleys sometime -- 28th floor of one of the downtown office buildings -- awesome views expensive drinks

[Charlotte_native]

Definitely nice views. And I was pleasantly suprised by the food at Bentleys. It than at almost any other "view first, food second" restaurant in my experience (second perhaps the Perlon in Reykjavik). And I'm a sucker for a view, so I've sampled a few of these typically mediocre-at-best places.

While not very inventive or modern, the classic dishes served to my party of 4 were very nicely done.

[blburton]

Christmas weekend (Dec 23 at that) really isn't an excuse for a city of CLT's size. A college town, on the other hand, is understandable.

I guess my point is that CLT's may not be necessarily "boring", but is exaggerated and easily rivals what I could find in some of the larger NC cities... except on a larger scale. Based on what I've been reading about completed developments, as well as the slew of those up and coming, I was expecting much more.

I like that CLT seems more diverse and progressive than other cities in NC. They also have the pro teams!

Hopefully I'm not merely making excuses, but I don't think Christmas weekend is a good barometer of downtown. Now, there are plenty of non-holiday weekends that are dead also, but myself included, I think most people were out of town, doing family stuff, or at various holiday parties. I wondered if this was going to be the weekend you were talking about when you said "empty wine bar". There have been plenty of times I've seen the streets deserted, but rarely the restaurants and restaurant bars.

By the way, and this would be more than hard to find if you were on the street, but check out the bar at Bentleys sometime -- 28th floor of one of the downtown office buildings -- awesome views expensive drinks

[otherstream]

The other is that they have been replaced by boring monotonous skyscrapers that are basically dead at the street level. People always focus on the height of these things (taller is better) and never pay attention to what the architects are doing at the base. As I said earlier, it's no secret what constitutes good street design as humanity has been doing it for 2000+ years. We just don't do it in most of American and especially in Charlotte, where glitz and trendy crap is more important than substance.

[voyager12]

^That is a very good observation regarding Charlotte developer mindthink. New projects in this city are all about being larger and more monolithically cylinder than the next. Their footprints are too large and stifle street life. Thank goodness for the older ring neighborhoods.

[origin.clt]

I tend to agree with those sentiments, but the current retail and office development environments will not change in scale until Charlotte reaches a critical urban mass, allowing people to live without cars. Look at any of the major developments happening right now and they all include very intensive parking components. Until that change-over happens and significant parking can be taken out of the program requirements for new developments, small scale projects cannot get off the drawing board. I know it has been mentioned before, but look at the relatively Latta Pavilion and its recent retail woes.

In the brief time that I have worked in the architectural field, the effort to "make the numbers work" is the one thing that developers seem to share. In Charlotte's current state, that means large-scale, auto-driven development catered to suburban based retailers. I am optimistic though that once many of the major large scale projects are completed around uptown and especially along the south corridor, a sufficient patchwork of urban infrastructure will exist to allow that valuable smaller scale development to happen, again...

[dubone]

I need to remind people that no one lives on Tryon yet, except the public housing residents of Hall House and Tryon House at 8th and N Tryon. Otherwise, why would anyone be on Tryon at Christmas Eve? Most people living downtown are young and without kids, which means it operates more like a college town than a suburb, in that those residents leave an go to visit their parents. All the restaurants, retail, and office buildings were closed on Tryon and no one lives there. That sounds like a recipe for an empty street on Christmas eve. (Although, I bet it was not empty in front of the CHA buildings). I live uptown and like spending time out uptown, even when most people aren't interested, but I sure as heck was not about to go to Tryon for no reason 2 days before Christmas. I had stuff to do.

The holidays are time with families, not times for hanging on Tryon with no where to go. Is that boring? Yes.

The only solution is to have retail businesses that benefit from Christmas shopping, and significantly more residential density within a block of Tryon.