Flyover Friday: Inside Charlotte's next big bank tower (free version)
Plus: New restaurants headed to SouthPark; The Charlotte Post pivots in the pandemic; A look at Charlotte's quarries; Ballantyne residents react to apartment plans; No Mallard Creek BBQ this year
Good morning! Today is Friday, August 28, 2020. You’re reading The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C.
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The scoop on Ally Charlotte Center uptown: 26 stories, retail, hotel, translucent light wall … and a big oak tree
The Stonewall Street corridor uptown has seen a flurry of new buildings in the last few years. One of the most prominent, at the intersection with South Tryon Street, will be the new 26-story Ally Charlotte Center.
The outside of the building looks finished, and construction crews have turned their attention mostly to the building interiors. It will be home to the Charlotte operations of Ally Financial as well as the headquarters of Crescent Communities, which is developing the project. There will also be a 22-story JW Marriott hotel and restaurant/retail space designed to enliven the site, which is expected to open in the spring of next year.
In today’s episode of Flyover Friday — our weekly short-video series brought to you in collaboration with The 5 and 2 Project — we give you an exclusive look at Ally Charlotte Center from the air and inside:
And there you have it!
We’ll roll out each new episode in this newsletter on Fridays to our full list of subscribers, so if you have friends who might be interested, tell them to sign up:
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Catch earlier episodes: If you want to catch up on earlier episodes of our independently produced drone-video series — such as last week’s on Camp North End — head to our dedicated Flyover Friday webpage that houses each installment as it is released:
Charlotte’s quarries looking rock solid
Even if you’ve lived in Charlotte for a long time, you might not know that the area is home to a handful of quarries scattered throughout the county.
OK, maybe you’ve never even stopped to think about local quarries. But they’re there, and they provide a huge portion of the area’s construction materials for roads, driveways, sidewalks, foundations and so on.
Beloved Business: The Charlotte Post sees challenges, new opportunities during pandemic; ‘we’ve been digging our way out’
The Charlotte Post, which operates out of offices in northwest Charlotte, has been a longtime voice for the region’s African-American community. It began as a publication called “The Messenger” in 1878 and took the name the “The Charlotte Post” in 1906.
Beloved Business is an occasional Ledger series checking in with some of the Charlotte area’s best-known local companies.
The last five months have been a dizzying time for any news outlet, and the veteran newspaper The Charlotte Post has seen its share of challenges, both to its business model and its coverage.
The newspaper — founded in 1878 and run by brothers Gerald and Robert Johnson and Tania Johnson, Gerald Johnson’s daughter — is Charlotte’s longest-serving newspaper. Its focus is covering the Charlotte region’s African-American community.
Print advertising makes up 90% of the newspaper’s revenue, and the start of the pandemic caused ad revenue to drop about 40%. Many of the stores where the Post distributes free copies closed when the stay-at-home order went into place.
“We thought this year was going to be a great year,” said Gerald Johnson, “and it turned out the pandemic hit, and we’ve been digging our way out of it ever since.”
The Post retained all of its staff and a strong January and February helped it weather some of the financial blow, and as businesses have slowly reopened, some advertising revenue has returned. Still, the publication realized it needed to make diversifying its sources of income a priority, Gerald Johnson said.
New initiatives: It rolled out some new initiatives: creating and hosting live events, establishing a series of newsletters, asking readers for donations and implementing a stronger subscription program.
Elements of reporting also shifted. Meetings and interviews had to be conducted virtually rather than face-to-face.
Online push: The Charlotte Post had already been working to craft a stronger digital publication, but the pandemic sped up those efforts.
Maintaining a regular digital publication and establishing the newsletter helped increase online and print subscriptions.
“We don’t make a whole lot of money off of subscriptions, but at the end of the day it’s helping because it’s really taken off,” Gerald Johnson said. The Charlotte Post’s online subscriber base grew by 37% since the pandemic, he said.
Protests following the death of George Floyd helped drive an interest locally in black-owned businesses, which Johnson said has helped increase circulation for the Charlotte Post, especially in areas outside of west Charlotte, which had been a focal area for the newspaper.
Many of the new subscribers are not African-American, he said, and the broader audience has brought new rewards.
“One, it brings in more revenue, but two, it shows an interest in the community we serve,” Johnson said.
“Everybody should be interested in what’s going on in the African-American community, African-American or not,” he said. —DG
A bunch of new eateries headed to SouthPark area
A handful of new restaurants will be opening in SouthPark in the next few months at the new Apex SouthPark development that’s under construction on Sharon Road across the street from SouthPark mall.
The new restaurants/eateries include:
The people of Ballantyne weigh in on plans for new apartments
The news that The Ledger first reported Wednesday about plans for 455 new apartments and townhomes on Johnson Road in Ballantyne isn’t sitting well with some nearby residents, who say the area is already overbuilt and can’t handle more cars and students.
The Ledger reported that Crescent Communities is seeking a rezoning that would allow it to build a development called Novel Ballantyne on 19 acres near the intersection of Johnston and Marvin roads.
In brief
Ronnie Long released: Ronnie Long, an African-American man from Concord who was convicted of raping a white woman in the 1970s, had his conviction vacated and was released from prison Thursday after 44 years behind bars. Long had maintained his innocence but was convicted in 1976 by an all-white jury that included members who had connections to the victim, a 54-year-old widow of a former textile executive. Decades of appeals were supported by a growing body of proof that police, state officials and the prosecutor withheld key evidence from Long’s lawyers at his trial. (Observer)
Mallard Creek BBQ cancelled: The 91st annual Mallard Creek BBQ, where North Carolina barbecue and politics mix, is cancelled this year. It is traditionally held on the fourth Thursday in October, just before Election Day. In a statement, Mallard Creek Presbyterian Church, which puts on the event, said it explored alternatives like take-out only but realized canceling is safest because “the time-honored tradition of slow-roasted pork over hickory wood — and making our Brunswick stew and coleslaw from scratch — requires very close contact of our Church volunteers for a week.” (Joe Bruno on Twitter)
Tech HQ: A Danish tech firm named Umbraco has chosen Charlotte as its U.S. headquarters, WRAL Tech Wire reported. A spokeswoman told The Ledger the company works out of a WeWork building on South Tryon Street and has three local employees. It hopes to grow to a “two digit staff number within two years,” she said.
Air travel increases: Some 1.99 million passengers traveled through Charlotte’s airport in July. That’s more than the 1.57 million who were there in June but fewer than half of the 4.4 million travelers though Charlotte in July 2019. (Biz Journal, subscriber-only)
Bullish on urban center: Townhouse developer Hopper Communities says it still sees strong demand for homes in Charlotte’s urban core. It filed rezoning plans this week for 20 townhouses in the Belmont neighborhood, is under construction in west Charlotte and plans to close soon on land for 79 units in the Lower South End area. “Millennials are our target homebuyer ... those are the folks coming more and more to market,” founder Bart Hopper said. (Biz Journal, subscriber-only)
School reopening discussed: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is upgrading the air filters at schools and has just about all of the personal protective equipment it needs to reopen classrooms, school officials said at a meeting of an advisory panel on Thursday. But officials said staffing might be a challenge. The panel focused Thursday on CMS preparations for a return to school and did not discuss in detail what Covid numbers need to be to reopen schools. (WSOC, WFAE)
Programming note: The Ledger’s Cristina Bolling discussed her attempt to buy a washing machine in a segment that aired on WSOC last night. “I went to more stores, kept looking online, called out to places and was coming up empty, really, for quite a few days — weeks, even,” she told Action 9’s Jason Stoogenke. She was also filmed loading towels into her new Maytag. You can see the full segment on WSOC’s website. Cristina wrote about her washing machine hunt for The Ledger two weeks ago.
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Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Contributing editor: Tim Whitmire; Reporting intern: David Griffith