Charlotte from Gold to Glass: The Long Reinvention

Stand at the intersection of Trade and Tryon Streets in Uptown Charlotte and you are at the center of a city that has remade itself at least four times.

The crossroads was originally a trading path junction, the place where Catawba trade routes met, where European settlers laid out their courthouse town in seventeen sixty-eight. The first economy here was agricultural, then extractive: the gold fields that made North Carolina the leading gold-producing state for decades and filled a federal mint a few blocks away.

The second economy was textile. After the Civil War, mills ringed the city, each one pulling workers from the countryside, housing them in company villages, weaving cotton into fabric for national markets. The Piedmont became one of the most heavily industrialized regions of the South, and Charlotte was its commercial hub.

The mills closed, slowly and then all at once, as production moved overseas through the nineteen seventies and eighties. The buildings emptied. NoDa became a warehouse district before it became an arts district.

The third economy was finance. Hugh McColl built Bank of America. First Union built toward Wachovia. By the early two thousands Charlotte had the most banking assets outside New York in the United States. The glass towers on Tryon Street are the physical expression of that economy.

The fourth economy is still forming: a technology sector, a logistics sector, the Charlotte Douglas International Airport as a hub, the professional sports culture anchored by the Panthers and the Hornets and Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Every city reinvents itself when the economy that built it disappears. Charlotte has done it with more speed and more completeness than most. What it has not fully done is reckon with who paid the costs of each reinvention, which is a different kind of accounting than the kind they do in the towers on Tryon.