Photo by Nalini Raghavan
Charlotte’s “Firebird” sculpture, affectionately nicknamed the “Disco Chicken,” graces the plaza in front of Uptown’s Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, one of numerous cultural institutions on Tryon Street.
Charlotte, North Carolina, is one of the four non-stop destinations offered out of Baton Rouge Metro Airport. As the third destination in our four-part travel series (read about Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta), this piece recommends the Queen City’s various charms, which can be accessed for around $300 round-trip.
Tour guide Tremaine Tyson held steady the handlebars of my Segway, facing me as I balanced stiffly atop a mode of transportation that I felt was unsuitably powerful for a novice. Reassuring and patient, he upheld a steady stream of patter—about the Tigers, New Orleans, Cajun country—distracting me from the nerve-wracking Segway lesson that preceded our tour. Tyson seemed an unlikely candidate to be leading a tour group of any kind, tours being uncool among the young, which he was, and especially the kind of tour that requires you to wear a gigantic helmet. He didn’t wear one—obviously. His uniform was a Carolina Panthers baseball cap, crisp blue-and-red-striped button down, jeans, and pair of neon blue and black sneakers.
Photo by Nalini Raghavan
Tour guide and move-to-Charlotte evangelist Tremaine Tyson.
Impeccably dressed Tyson led our group of four down the wide sidewalks of Charlotte, North Carolina, like a mother duck leading her ducklings. In single file, we buzzed behind him on our rented Segways, part of a two-hour tour of Uptown Charlotte. Each one of our four-person group was new to this mode of transportation, so we were alert to his hand gestures—right arm raised meant “go right,” left arm raised meant “go left,” right hand sweeping down by his thigh meant “be careful or you may flip head-over-Segway.” At nine in the morning, it wasn’t hot enough yet to be uncomfortable, but it was far enough along in the weekday morning that Uptown Charlotte was buzzing with striding pedestrians in business attire. They all gave us a wide berth.
Tyson provided the usual string of facts and figures related to Charlotte’s history, but the real joy was listening to him talk about how his city (he was born and raised in Charlotte) had grown. He was mayoral in his pride and evangelical in his demeanor, charming us with a wink that implied he had the insider’s scoop. “It’s all about the young professionals, the empty nesters, flocking to the city from all parts of the United States and the world,” Tyson preached. “It’s about the creative class, the thinkers; they’re going to push us to the next phase of evolution. They were flocking to places like Austin Texas, Silicon Valley, San Fran, Seattle … now … they’re coming to Charlotte.”
Converted, we were all ready to move to Charlotte by the time the tour ended; one local even said she’d vote for him.
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The Queen City, as Charlotte is nicknamed, was incorporated in 1968 and has a history firmly rooted in the Old South; but these days, it stridently flaunts its Modern South creds, brandishing steel-and-glass skyscrapers and a growing light-rail system as evidence that it has left even the next-most-progressive moniker—New South—behind to embrace a twenty-first century march to prosperity. To be sure, Charlotte is known for its high standard of living, good schools, cleanliness, excellent social services, cultural institutions, and a burgeoning center city, a prosperity made possible by the city’s standing as the second largest financial center in the nation, behind New York. There’s a lot of money in Charlotte, which makes it an incredibly pleasant city to visit.
A lot of that money has been focused on center city and its heart, Uptown (what Charlotteans call their downtown). The “if you build it, they will come” strategy seems to have worked in Charlotte. Uptown has exploded, especially in the last decade, and is now not only the city’s business center, but is its strongly beating cultural heart. Blumenthal Performing Arts manages six theaters located at three different campuses along Tryon Street, attracting top-flight, Tony-award winning shows and making Charlotte a top-ten Broadway show market. Also on Tryon, literally a stone’s throw from one another, is a conglomerate of heavyweight cultural institutions collectively called the Levine Center for the Arts: Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, the Knight Theater, and the Mint Museum Uptown. Plus, the area boasts public art in all its iterations: public gardens, sculpture, fountains, and the like. “Public art is a very big deal. Anytime commercial development is planned, set asides in the budget go for works of public art,” Tyson told us.
Tyson showed off two of the city’s quirkiest sculptures, the most recent of which, The Buddy Bear, was erected in June 2014 in front of the main branch of the public library to acknowledge the strong business relationship between Germany and Charlotte, home to a number of German companies. The chubby, turquoise-and-pink creature, a spin-off of the Buddy Bear project that started in Berlin in 2001, is only eclipsed, in my estimation, by what Charlotteans call the “Disco Chicken.” Rising in front of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art, the sculpture was designed by Niki de Saint Phalle and is formally named the Firebird; but the cartoonish figure, covered from head to toe in tiny mirrors and with eager wings spread wide, can hardly support such a dignified name. Disco Chicken is its authentic soul, and it’s a favorite site for photos.
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Photo by Nalini Raghavan
A View of Uptown Charlotte
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Photo by Nalini Raghavan
Public sculpture in Charlotte, NC
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What Charlotteans call the “Disco Chicken” rises in front of the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art; the sculpture was designed by Niki de Saint Phalle and is formally named the Firebird.
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Photo by Nalini Raghavan
Historic Home in Charlotte, NC
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Photo by Nalini Raghavan
The Knight Theatre
The Knight Theatre, one of several centrally located cultural institutions in Uptown Charlotte, collectively considered the Levine Center for the Arts.
What strikes almost every visitor to Charlotte is the cleanliness of its streets, which maintain an impressive level of spit and sparkle that, Tyson said, extends to “the not so nice areas” of town. And though the demand for commercial and even residential real estate must be intense, city planners have reserved many acres of greenspace in the coveted city center—from the mature trees and whimsical ceramic birdhouses of Fourth Ward Park to the nineteen-acre Independence Park, Charlotte’s oldest, to Romare Bearden Park, the area’s newest greenspace built adjacent to the 10,200-seat BB&T Ballpark. Completed in 2013 and 2014 respectively, the ballpark (home to the AAA Charlotte Knights) and Romare Bearden Park sit atop what, less than ten years ago, was a sea of parking lots that served Uptown workers during the week and the nearby Bank of America Stadium, home to the Carolina Panthers football team, on the weekends.
By dangling these not-insubstantial carrots and by building large condominium and apartment developments, Uptown has grown from between 3000 to 5000 residents to approximately 13,500 residents. It was not unusual, on our tour, to see joggers bouncing past the business types in the middle of the day and residents walking dogs. But this progress has come at a cost. The tendency for money to sweep aside the past is particularly noticeable in Uptown, where historical buildings have all but vanished. Save for a few churches, homes, and commercial structures, Uptown is brand-spanking new. But a funkier side of Charlotte is being uncovered as the investments in Uptown trickle out to surrounding areas, allowing a little of the city’s indigenous flavor to seep out from the cracks of older, neglected neighborhoods.
The premier example is what is called the Historic South End, just southwest of Uptown and one of the neighborhoods that developed around Charlotte’s historic textile industry. As the industry’s significance faded, the area suffered a mid-century decline that began to reverse direction in the 1990s, as the old mills and warehouses were converted into creative spaces to play and work. The neighborhood has received an additional surge in growth since 2007, when the LYNX Blue Line, the light-rail line that runs from South Charlotte (beyond South End) into Uptown, began operating.
Ahead of the second phase of light-rail growth, which will penetrate neighborhoods to the northeast of Uptown to terminate at the University of North Carolina Charlotte campus, development has already begun in neighborhoods like NoDa. A still-scruffy part of town that shows the wear and tear of age and abandonment, NoDa also displays the familiar signs of grass-roots refurbishment. Four old warehouses bear hip signage that identify them as local craft breweries; a bakery popular with Charlotteans from all over, Amelie’s, has lines twenty people deep waiting to fill pastry boxes with the bakery’s rich tortes, brûlées, and its most popular item, salted caramel brownies; and the Neighborhood Theatre, previously a movie theater but reimagined as a live performance venue, hosts touring bands from near and far.
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Photo by Nalini Raghavan
NoDa
NoDa is one of Uptown’s satellite neighborhoods, wearing the signs of renewed attention as residents and businesses move in to take advantage of center city’s growth. Photo by Nalini Raghavan.
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Photo by Nalini Raghavan
NoDa
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Photo by Nalini Raghavan
Because the city’s light rail is still in relative infancy and because, beyond city center, Charlotte generally sprawls into outlying residential neighborhoods, visitors should look for hotels or B&Bs in city center — either directly in Uptown or in one of the neighborhoods serviced by light rail. Transport from the airport is available by any number of methods: taxi, shuttle, Uber—even limo, if that’s how you roll.
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The second benefit of a visit to Charlotte is that an urban excursion can easily segue into a beach vacation, mountain escape, or lakeside idyll, depending on taste and time. Atlantic beaches are a four-to-five-hour drive away, including popular Myrtle Beach and North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Groovy Blue Ridge Mountains enclave, Asheville, is two-hours distant, with all the accompanying high-altitude, outdoor fun. And a much shorter drive will land you on the shores of Lake Norman, just forty miles north of Charlotte, with 520 miles of shoreline, thirteen of which are part of Lake Norman State Park.
If you don’t have the hours to spend in a car, but would like a physical and mental challenge, you should definitely head to Charlotte’s U.S. National Whitewater Center (USNWC), a seven hundred-acre recreation facility that offers whitewater rafting and kayaking, stand-up paddle boarding, mountain biking, ropes courses, rock climbing, and zip lines—all under the big, blue Carolina sky.
As the official Olympic training facility for the U.S. whitewater slalom team, the most impressive feature of USNWC is the winding, man-made, recirculating river that boasts Class II, III, and IV rapids. They look deceptively manageable from the shore, but require a trained raft guide to lead you through the pipe. Our deeply tanned guide followed up instructions for dealing with each potentially calamitous scenario with an incongruous, yet deeply comforting, mantra: “You’ll be good to go!”
Though safety standards are strictly enforced at USNWC, the sheer joy of any of the center’s physical challenges is, frankly, the frisson of fear you taste when zipping over the river after launching yourself from a forty-six-foot tower or when high-wiring your way from platform to platform twenty-feet up in the tree canopy. From the safety of the ground, these courses seem easy enough for children; indeed, the school-aged children who practically ran through the ropes course on the day we visited seemed to possess a natural talent—or at least a more amenable body weight—for monkeying around on galvanized cable. But for the older folk, the challenges guarantee the sort of bone-deep, bone-tired satisfaction that doesn’t come along often.
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Back in center city, the Segway tour was a challenge of a different kind. By the end of the tour, we were navigating through Uptown traffic like old experts. Ankles tired from the small, unfamiliar shifts of weight required to steer our Segways, we disembarked to rejoin Uptown’s throng of pedestrians and waved goodbye with Tyson’s message ringing in our heads: “It’s time to wake up, because the world is here in Charlotte!”
Details. Details. Details.
Tours of Charlotte:
Visit Charlotte: charlottesgotalot.com
Historic South End: historicsouthend.com
City Center: charlottecentercity.org
NoDa Neighborhood: noda.org
Craft Beer Scene: charlottesgotalot.com/articles/10-ways-explore-craft-beer-charlotte
U.S. National Whitewater Center: usnwc.org
