Warren Burgess, 
City Planner, Visionary, Spokesperson, Water Colorist, Friend

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North Davidson Mary Newsome continues... Cities need catalysts, and Warren was a catalyst. He was always putting one person in touch with just the right other person, and dropping a good idea in just the right place, and in doing so altering the course of the planet. I met him almost 11 years ago. I had written a column lamenting the lack of community gathering places in most Charlotte neighborhoods. A few weeks later the phone rang and some guy said he was a city planner and he had my column posted on the wall of his office and would I like to have lunch? I figured it wouldn't hurt to know a city planner, especially someone who liked my columns. He was one of the thinnest people I had ever met, walked with a limp and handed me a book he had bought for me on a hunch -- Jane Jacobs' "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" -- which fed my curiosity about cities and pretty much changed the course of my career. We shared an interest in art and cities, in mountain streams (he loved fly fishing for trout) and, most important, in neighborhoods and how their buildings and streets shape the lives of the people who live there. He was a planner who understood that real places and people are always more important than theories and statistics. He was an urbanist, rare for a late 20th-century, Southern city. He filled notebook after notebook with drawings of neighborhoods where he did plans. He would walk the streets in a wide-brimmed straw hat, talk to people and just hang out until he absorbed a sense of the place into those thin bones of his. That's one reason dozens -- no, hundreds -- of Charlotteans met Burgess over the decades and treasured his friendship. I was forever finding out that friends of mine had already known him for years. He lived his life like a one-man community center, always getting people together in his own quiet way. And though Burgess' feet may have been planted on city sidewalks, his imagination was soaring. On the wall at my desk is his pen and ink version of North Davidson Street , looking toward the towers of uptown. But it differs subtly from reality. Burgess, in his drawing, buried the power lines, as he did in most of his sketches. He once drew a plan for a European-style boulevard along N.C. 49 at UNC Charlotte. Next time you go down West Trade Street near Johnson & Wales University , look around. In the 1990s Burgess was the city's urban designer for a Third Ward Plan that -- to its everlasting credit -- Bank of America pretty much followed in developing Gateway Center . The low-scale buildings with stores below and homes above, hiding the parking decks, those were Warren 's vision. Another of his visions is the drawing shown here, part of the 2001 Central Avenue Streetscape Plan. Notice how the Central Avenue bridge over Briar Creek has become something beautiful, reminiscent of Rome or Paris , with flags, a stone balustrade and an arch over the creek. On the creekside greenway is a bicyclist. Burgess suffered from arthritis and had walked with a cane ever since I had met him. Look closely at his drawings, and almost always you see someone with a cane. In the bridge drawing, a thin figure in a wide-brimmed hat appears to stand in the creek, holding a cane in one hand and what looks like a fishing rod in the other. Miraculously, if you know Briar Creek, he is landing what can only be a trout. Talk about the power of dreaming. Mary Newsom