Feb. 21, 2002

A worry: NoDa's new heart will cost its soul

DIANE SUCHETKA

Staff Writer

Last week's announcement that one of Charlotte's most prominent developers will build new shops and condos in the heart of NoDa is one more sign that the gentrification of the city's funky art district is speeding up.

Some people worry the new projects will make the neighborhood unaffordable for the artists who've made NoDa what it is. Others say it's exactly what the neighborhood needs to survive.

"It's a turning point," says David Walters, who teaches architecture and urban design at UNC Charlotte. "It really is a transformation point. It's right on the cusp."

The Crosland project, announced last week, involves tearing down Pat's Time For One More -- the beloved neighborhood bar -- and the galleries on each side of it, and turning them into 14,000 square feet of shops and condos.

But other changes also are coming to the now trendy mill village that surrounds the intersection of North Davidson and 36th streets, three miles northeast of uptown.

Construction of new condos and shops is scheduled to begin in weeks. This summer, the city will start a new road to move traffic off North Davidson Street. And K.C. Terry, owner of NoDa's Fat City restaurant, has plans to redevelop his property into condos and shops too.

But none of those hits Charlotte's emerging artists and their supporters as hard as the coming demolition of Pat's Time For One More.

"There's no other place like it in town," says Steve Holt, the artist who began running the bar a few years ago. "It's kind of a little melting pot for the classes here. I say it's the only spiritual vortex in Charlotte."

Working class, cutting edge

NoDa, known as North Charlotte until about five years ago, is a neighborhood of mostly small houses dating to 1903, when a group of textile leaders developed farmland into a village of small houses for their workers. The last mill closed in 1975, and drug addicts and prostitutes began moving in.In the 1980s and '90s, artists began buying the old boarded-up shops to showcase their work, and the neighborhood landed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Now you can sip a latte at the Smelly Cat Coffeehouse, hear Doc Watson or Donna the Buffalo at the Neighborhood Theatre and order a tempeh reuben at the all-vegetarian Kelly's Café.

Pat's Time for One More sits in the middle of all this -- a dim, smoky bar discovered by the masses thanks to the Friday-night gallery crawls that draw them to the neighborhood twice a month.

When the artists moved to NoDa, Pat's went from working class to cutting edge.

Today, it's where Charlotte's homemade cable comedy show "Z-Axis" is filmed. It's where bands like Dead Beat Baby play. It's where the city's emerging artists go when the muse won't come to them.

It is the heart of NoDa.

NoDa can't stand still

What worries some is that new development will make NoDa too expensive for the artists and others who've given the area its character.

"The more genteel, the more built-up the neighborhood gets, the less chance artists have of co-existing here," says Starr Davis, who paints in a studio across from Pat's. "When I moved in here in 1992, they were saying this area is going to get loved to death. And this just might be the outcome of that."

Artist Randy Crawford worries about what might replace the edgy galleries that displayed his work.

"I hate to see NoDa kind of turn into a SouthEnd or an uptown. I'm just kind of afraid it's going to be all yuppified. It's kind of like watching your kid go off to kindergarten -- you are proud of him, but you're kind of sad too."

But Crosland Vice President Eric Vargosko says he wants to preserve the neighborhood's character.

"If the first floor were to be all art galleries, we would consider the project a success," he says.

NoDa needs this change to survive, says Paul McBroom, owner of Neighborhood Realty, who, with his wife, owns the Neighborhood Theatre.

"The same thing was true of Elizabeth that's true of this neighborhood," says McBroom, who was a pioneer in that neighborhood in the mid-1970s. "It can't stand still. Either it goes forward or it falls back."

In the middle are people like Davidson planning director Warren Burgess, a former urban designer in Charlotte's planning department who helped plot NoDa's emergence as an arts district.

"There is a diversity and an ambience out there that is matched nowhere else," says Burgess, whose artwork has hung in NoDa galleries. "But I also know that if you go out there on any weeknight, there's very little activity and some people still have a negative perception of the area.

"This is one of the more difficult issues. It really is."

Middle-class consumers

What's happening in NoDa, says UNC's Walters, is part of the normal evolution of a city's art district.

"When you look at the history of cities, this is the cycle that happens," says Walters, whose wife, Linda Brown, has her oil paintings on exhibit in NoDa now. It's what has happened in places such as Little Five Points in Atlanta and TriBeCa in New York.

"Artists or other sorts of creative folk move into a run-down area, sort of renovate it and make it interesting to the middle class, who come along and consume the ambience."

Then, Walters says, one of two things happens.

"The project runs out of steam and the area just gently drifts back into the fringe, or it's so successful it's rather like a chrysalis and it becomes a butterfly. And artists can't afford butterflies."

What's happening in NoDa now, he says, is good for the whole city.

"I think in 10, 20 years' time, we're going to have a really thriving urban center. But there won't be any of the people there who started it.

"They'll have moved on and started something else."