There is zero more soulless than a banking town.

The term alone conjures images of imposing glass towers total of boring people who care almost null but money and how to make more of it. In America's second-largest banking center, it's an epitome that'due south been tough to milk shake.

Information technology's non a bad image, necessarily. Charlotte never had a river grab on fire or a string of federally indicted mayors. Simply to many, Charlotte is landlocked and nondescript, a city built on banking that's got nearly equally much character equally a credit card pecker. Ask anyone what they think nearly Charlotte, and they'll typically shrug and mutter something about rocking chairs at the airport.

Just in 2019, a bounding main of transplants and finance-weary locals are finding the beauty in this city and crafting a culture in the shadow of drinking glass towers.

A swoop bar as cultural icon

Photo: Google Maps

The soul of Charlotte may well be personified past the Thirsty Beaver Saloon, a funky honky tonk filled with vintage beer ads and reruns of Hee-Haw, where $4 shots of tequila go to die. It's a ane-story brick building with a cartoonish, cowboy-hat wearing beaver painted on the side, and it'due south surrounded by five-story apartment buildings.

When the programmer of the painfully generic apartments around it demanded the owner of the land to sell, he essentially told them to fuck off. Information technology was kinda like Up if the balloons were filled with PBR.

At present the Beaver stands as a defiant anchor to the Plaza Midwood neighborhood, which is dotted with odd boutiques, breweries, and restaurants. Not at all the kinds of businesses you'd expect betwixt apartment buildings touting "luxury living" and studios starting at $1,200.

From there, it'south just a short distance to other worthwhile stops. Subsequently sampling beers at both Legion and Pilot Brewing, I wandered into the Cltch boutique, lured by its brandish of Gilt Girls prayer candles.

Inside was a wonderland of pop-culture tchotchkes. Information technology's the kind of identify you saunter in afterward three beers and realize your life wasn't complete before you had a Freddy Mercury pillow doll. The collection was expertly curated by Scott Weaver, whose business organization card calls him an "possessor/raconteur."

"This city'due south got a ton of soul," he said after I complimented his collection and spent $150 on stuff I absolutely didn't demand. "You simply have to get out and find it. In that location's hole-and-corner concerts every week; the music scene is fantastic. You see all the banking over there, but the culture is here, if you know where to look."

When I returned dwelling house and gave my "Please don't practice cocaine in the bathroom" sign to 1 friend, and the "Schitt'south Creek" David Rose "I'1000 trying very hard non to connect with people right now" mug to another, they all asked if I'd gotten it on a trip to San Francisco or Laguna Beach.

"Charlotte," I said proudly. They both told me they'd never seen that kinda stuff at the airport.

An influx of transplants finds a place to try new things

Delving a lilliputian further into the metropolis's soul, I took the Lynx Blue Line light track to NoDa, a not-and then-creatively named creative neighborhood along North Davidson Street. Walking from the 36th Street station I was immediately met past a row of colorful stucco buildings housing a coffee shop, a gourmet water ice cream shop, and a fish taco joint. Farther up 36th Street I institute a alive music venue, two breweries, and murals on virtually every building.

"People are coming from all over the country to alive here in Charlotte," says Jamie Chocolate-brown over a massive chicken tender and waffle at Haberdish, her NoDa restaurant. "And they are bringing ideas and experiences here and and so essentially starting a spa or a food truck or a bar or a magazine. And I call back it'southward helping build the look of our metropolis in a totally different style."

NoDa — and nigh of Charlotte — is surprisingly devoid of chains. Despite its unfounded reputation for the generic, it was hard to find annihilation from exterior the area inside the city aside from a smattering of Starbucks and some roadside fast-food franchises. Brown said that's a testament to how residents are beginning to take buying of Charlotte.

"Our personality is simply starting to come to fruition," Brown, a Pittsburgh transplant, says. "I think nosotros've been an adolescent for a very long time. But nosotros're starting to become whoever it is we're going to exist."

What, exactly, Charlotte is is a little hard to pinpoint. Fifty-fifty later a trip through its fascinating Levine Museum of the New S, ane is left with a burgeoning desire to effigy out the metropolis'due south identity.

Founded in 1768, Charlotte's modern history begins after the Civil War. As one of the few southern cities that wasn't completely decimated past Marriage forces, it quickly drew new residents as presently as Reconstruction began.

The city boomed as a railroad hub in 1865, with most a hundred buildings shooting upward in the first iii months later on the state of war. Textile mills followed in the decades after, but few of those mills still exist. The urban center paved over history for progress in the 20th century.

"Charlotte, nosotros're always tearing stuff downwards," says Levine Museum staff historian Willie Griffin as he guides me through the exhibits. "Always had people coming here and trying to brand something new."

But this time around, the people coming to brand something new are embracing the old.

On a Friday night on a hill outside Uptown, artists are peddling sculptures made from Steve Urkel dolls while food trucks serve pad Thai outside an old Model-T factory. Information technology's the weekly Fri night fete at Camp Northward End, a beautiful red-brick factory that was a Ford plant and a missile facility for the US military before its current incarnation as an art infinite.

Camp North Stop is maybe the shining example of how Charlotte is beginning to embrace its history and utilise information technology as a place to cultivate a artistic form.

"It's ironic that old is new in Charlotte," says Varian Shrum, who moved here from Washington DC and is the development director for Campsite North Cease. "The Charlotte fashion has been to tear things down and go the newest, shiniest city it can be, which I love that appetite that Charlotte has. It'southward a city with an inner drive." Shrum adds that while a focus on the new is still nowadays, people also "respect where nosotros came from and bring that up and along in our growth trajectory."

Charlotte learns from mistakes as it grapples with gentrification

The inherent challenge in developing character — especially in a urban center as newness-obsessed as Charlotte — is displacement and gentrification. But Charlotte's Historic Due west Finish, at least for now, seems to be learning from the mistakes of other cities.

Dianna Ward, owner of Charlotte NC Tours, took me on a wheel ride through ane of the urban center's less-visited areas: the historically black neighborhoods in the West Stop that are slowly drawing new evolution.

"I just bought the building over at that place," she says, pointing to a triangular brick building currently housing a dazzler supply shop. "We're gonna put in some places people can get and get good nutrient, cheap, yous know? So the people who alive around here tin can simply walk or bike up here and get a slice of pizza or ice cream for a couple dollars."

The edifice sits just a few blocks from Johnson C. Smith University, an HBCU that'due south rapidly expanding with new dorms a few blocks from campus. Biking farther into the Due west Finish, we laissez passer by a series of colorful craftsman homes with compages from the 1940s that were built in this decade. They're the creation of the developer-realtor team of Michael Doney and Michael Hopkins, who have opted to keep the architectural integrity of the West End rather than building all the same another corridor of low-rise apartments.

"Whenever they build something, they always become into the blackness churches outset," Ward tells me over beers at Bluish Blaze Brewing. "They ask if anyone wants to purchase information technology, so people in the community get first dibs."

This is a stark deviation from what happened in Brooklyn, a predominantly black neighborhood in Charlotte'due south Second Ward that was razed in the proper name of 1960s "urban renewal," then chop-chop put off-limits to African-Americans. That's non to say Charlotte has solved the problem of displacing communities equally the metropolis grows, merely it does seem to have people — even existent estate people — who care almost preserving its heritage.

In a urban center where your voice is heard, nifty things are possible

Greg Collier, who will be opening a restaurant at Campsite Due north Stop, was the first black chef from Charlotte to receive a James Bristles nomination. He gained his fame with The Yolk, a popular breakfast and lunch spot in Uptown'due south 7th Street Public Market. He moved here from Memphis to forge his culinary career and in the process has become i of the biggest names in the Carolina culinary scene.

"Charleston is the way information technology is. You know what I mean?" he says when explaining why he's chosen to set up shop in Charlotte rather than bigger-name southern food cities. "Charleston has been that way for the last 600 years. It's the old S, like Savannah is the old South. Here in Charlotte, my voice is valued, and for me, that's extremely advantageous."

Collier wasn't the merely person to explain to me that Charlotte was, effectively, a big urban center where the barriers to entry are pocket-size. At Haymaker, at the human foot of the banking centers of Uptown, I saturday at the counter and chatted with its chef de cuisine. He tells he moved here from Brooklyn, New York, so he could practise more in the kitchen for less. The eating place's menu is full of inventive Southern stuff like crispy Carolina pork belly with sorghum glaze, and panisse with dragon tongue beans and shishito piri-piri.

Another bastion of innovation in the shadow of finance is King'southward Kitchen, a non-profit Southern food eatery that hires homeless people to train them for a career in the service industry. The idea was novel, and the service was better than the bulk of restaurants I've been to.

"I used to come downwardly hither, and if me and my friends wanted to go out all there was were steakhouses," my friend dining with me at Harvester, a native Carolinian, told me. "All finance bros. All these new places have opened up now with actually cool things on the bill of fare."

So locals, it seems, are welcoming transplants' ideas as exactly what the city needs.

In Charlotte, even the nifty outdoors is fabricated new again

Virtually twenty minutes from Uptown you'll find The US National Whitewater Centre, which is a sampling of all the peachy outdoors in one tidy 1,300-acre park. It has go a hub for nature lovers and beer lovers alike. The park offers admission to 40 miles of hiking and biking trails, whitewater rafting, kayaking, paddleboarding, and ziplines, plus a beer garden in the middle of it all.

It's another example of a new innovation in Charlotte making the nigh of the beauty that was already in that location — a 21st-century playground set among the pines on the Catawba River.

The teenagers and college students running the attractions remind me more of the rafting guides I'd met in Colorado or Washington; people more concerned with spending time in nature than spending money. Atop the center's 120-foot belfry, preparing to speed amidst the treetops as role of an viii-line ropes course, I ask the immature man strapping me in what he thinks of Charlotte.

"Charlotte, we've got a lot of people who love corking nutrient and groovy music," he says. "We're foodies with gauges in our ears and sleeves of tattoos who'll stay out all night on a weeknight to hear bad-donkey music. We're a culture and a personality, and y'all know what? Fuck the bankers."

And with that, he sent me on my style. From atop the platform, the fiscal center skyline was nowhere in sight.

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