THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 3, 1995 TAG: 9512010490
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHARLOTTE LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
As defined by the census, Charlotte is a region of 1.2 million people - smaller than Hampton Roads. But it's downtown has 9.5 million square feet of office space - three times as much as Norfolk - crammed mostly into a small four-block area.
The dense packing makes downtown even more visibly impressive.
The skycrapers include NationsBank, the country's fourth largest bank, and First Union, the sixth largest. First Union's recent purchases allowed Charlotte to slip past San Francisco to become the 2nd largest banking center in the country, after New York City, in terms of the assets controlled by hometown banks.
Around downtown are older neighborhoods. They include some of the city's poorer communities, as well as upscale neighborhoods of baronial suburban homes on twisting roads with enormous trees. Unlike in Hampton Roads, the elite still live close in. This has helped keep their allegiance to the city.
Outside this ring, you come to wave after wave of subdivisions with bland names strung out off main highways which in turn are flanked by big-box stores and assorted strip shopping centers.
This journey can be greater culturally than in miles. Charlotte folk like to boast of their NBA team and their bank presidents. But half the new housing starts in one of the surrounding counties involve mobile homes, and the average test scores in education are low for a state that itself ranks near the bottom of the nation.
Charlotte isn't for everyone. Compared to a New York, or even a Richmond or Charleston, the Queen city seems a bland, antiseptic place that excels at trim, green lawns but has little urban spice to it. You can find some excellent shopping centers, but you'd use a lot of gas or shoe leather looking for an eccentric coffeehouse or used-bookstore.
``It's a nice place to live, but you wouldn't want to visit there,'' is a common joke even among residents. ``My husband and I tried to go out for dinner and dancing on a Thursday night,'' said an elegantly dressed young woman at one of the local shopping mall, who had recently moved to Charlotte from Manhattan. ``They didn't even understand what I was talking about.''
Although like Norfolk, the city dates to pre-revolutionary war times, also like in Norfolk, the city's old buildings and streets were mostly razed in urban renewal and the city has little sense of history or the past about it. It's a business town, its leaders say, that excels at doing business.
This lack of history or roots, which contributes to a certain sterility, also aid the city in getting ahead. Charlotte was never a Savannah, a Charleston, a Richmond or a New Orleans, where the aristocracy of the south lived in 18th century mansions, and white-gloved ladies supervised dinner parties for 70 with their own China.
Charlotte was a town of textile mills, without the social currency of Savannah. But Charlotte folks don't ask ``what family does she come from,'' still asked in Savannah or Charleston Charlotte'e eyes are resolutely on the future.
This November, Charlotte folk will vote on whether to merge with surrounding Mecklenburg County. The merger is not as big a deal as it might be because the county and city had gradually divided services between them over the last few decades.
Charlotte already possesses most of what used to be Mecklenburg county. Charlotte benefits from North Carolina's liberal annexation laws, which essentially allow a city to annex surrounding areas whenever those areas are no longer rural.
Smaller, satellite cities surround Charlotte. They include Rock Hill, S.C., Monroe, Concord, Kannapolis and Davidson. To some extent, the towns are protectful of their identify, fearful of being subsumed by Charlotte. But at the same time, they accept that they draw their identity on a national and international scale from Charlotte.
Rock Hill, for example, puts the skyline of Charlotte on its economic development brochures.
Can you imagine Virginia Beach putting Norfolk's Dominion Tower on its economic development brochures?
Economically, the city has benefited most from its enormous airport which sits just 15 minutes from downtown and is now a central hub of the south.
This compares with Norfolk, which, when it expanded its airport in the early 1970s, built it on a small, land-locked site off Military Highway. City fathers ignored the advice of those who recommended a larger, more easily expandable site in what was then farmland in Chesapeake.
If this land had been part of Norfolk, the city might have been more amenable to letting an airport be built there. And Hampton Roads would have had the double economic whammy of a major ocean port and a major airport.
Then folks might be speaking of Norfolk first, instead of Charlotte. by CNB