Here come the ‘selfie museums’
Here come the ‘selfie museums’
Plus: Big law firms set back-to-office plans for July; Bank branches take over Ballantyne; Local Covid numbers continue to fall; Latta Plantation director fires back at critics
Good morning! Today is Monday, June 14, 2021. You’re reading The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C.
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Today’s Charlotte Ledger is sponsored by T.R. Lawing Realty:
Entrepreneurs charge admission to creative backdrops and props for perfect Instagram pics; $19 and up
The Dream Selfie Museum, located off East Sugar Creek Road north of NoDa, allows people to interact with the exhibits and “is the perfect place to create memories,” its co-founder says. The official opening is this week, and tickets start at $19. It’s one of several new “selfie museums” in the Carolinas. (Courtesy of Dream Selfie Museum)
by Lindsey Banks, QCity Metro
If a picture is worth a thousand words, “selfie museums” want to provide the perfect backdrop. These attractions are becoming increasingly popular around the country, including in the Charlotte area.
This month, Charlotte welcomes its newest addition, DREAM Selfie Museum. Jeff and Madeline Carothers, a husband-and-wife duo and one-half of the team behind CLT Black Owned, opened the pop-up despite never having been to one themselves.
But what exactly is a selfie museum?
“The best way to explain it is colorful, interactive and the perfect backdrop for photos, videos, content creation, things like that,” Madeline Carothers said. “Instead of going to a regular museum where you can take photos but you can’t interact with the exhibit, a selfie museum is the perfect place to create memories.”
To create a fully immersive experience, Madeline said they created a signature scent that guests experience when they walk through the door. Inside features 15 curated stations, like a wall of vinyl records or a backdrop mimicking clouds with a lightning effect.
“I love to tell people that nothing makes any sense,” she said. “When people ask, ‘Why did you choose this,’ there’s really not a reason. We just kind of let our creative juices flow, and we painted whatever we felt like painting at the time, and it came together perfectly.”
The couple will officially open DREAM to the public on Wednesday, through August. After that, Madeline says they’ll determine whether to remain open. Visitors can book reservations online in 90-minute blocks for $19 on Wednesdays and Thursdays and $25 Fridays through Sundays. DREAM Selfie Museum is located at 4212 Raleigh St., near the Sugar Creek station for the Lynx Blue Line.
It joins other similar museums across the Carolinas. Rich Girls Museum has been a hit in Greensboro and Immersion has been a popular interactive experience in Columbia, S.C.
Outgrowing her house: The rise of social media, especially Instagram, has fueled the desire for selfie museums, said Jessica Jones, co-owner of the Home of the ’90s Museum.
Artist Inigma working on a sports mural in the Home of the ’90s Museum. (Photo: QCity Metro)
Jones and her business partner, Camille Stinson, will open the 4,000 s.f. selfie factory on July 3 in Concord. She first operated Home of the ‘90s inside her east Charlotte home. Jones had been laid off during the pandemic and rented out the home for private photoshoots and events as a source of income.
“Selfie museums offer the perfect place for a personal photoshoot for a fraction of the cost of hiring a photographer,” she said.
Once the demand started to outgrow the house, Stinson came on as a partner and they relocated to Concord.
In the new space, customers can snap photos in 12 different rooms decorated with ’90s pop culture references — from cartoons to famous athletes. There’s even a ball pit to bring back memories of popular birthday party places from the ’90s.
“The ’90s was a time that was so colorful, vibrant and happy, and things were simple, so I wanted to revisit that,” Jones said. “It’s just a time that meant something to everyone, and everyone will want to be a part and see how it’s re-lived.”
To create unique murals and backdrops for the museum, Jones and Stinson collaborated with local artists such as Inigma, DeNeer Davis, and Tajmah Allison. (Inigma created the signature “Fresh Prince of Charlotte” mural, inspired by Will Smith’s sitcom, in the original location.) For the props and memorabilia, Jones said she watches Facebook Marketplace for items and accepts donations.
The museum will be open to the public Thursday through Sunday and available for private events Monday through Wednesday. Admission is based on timed entry, $30 for visitors 12 years and older and $20 for children ages 4 to 12. Children 3 and younger are free.
Lindsey Banks is a reporting intern for QCity Metro and for The Ledger. This article originally appeared in QCity Metro and is republished with permission. You can sign up for QCity Metro’s newsletter here.
Related Ledger articles:
“Building design factor: Can you Instagram it?” (Jan. 17, 2020)
“A big vision for north of NoDa” (🔒, March 12, 2021)
Uptown gains momentum as law firms eye July return
Several of Charlotte’s top law firms say they are making moves to get more of their workers back into uptown offices at the beginning of next month — an important step in pumping life back into the center city.
While most other employment centers in Charlotte seem back to almost normal, with the traffic and lunch crowds to prove it, uptown is still quieter than it was pre-pandemic. That’s because its largest employers (cough, the banks, cough) have been the most cautious about getting back to work in-person.
Some big employers are planning for a more substantial return around Labor Day, but smaller employers are coming back faster. Some of those have had offices open for employees who wanted to go in, but now, with Covid numbers continuing to plunge, they are pushing a little harder to get workers in face-to-face, at least some of the time.
The Ledger surveyed several top law firms and found:
Moore & Van Allen, the city’s largest law firm, says most of its Charlotte-based attorneys and staff will return to the office on a regular basis after July 4.
K&L Gates says it had a soft “back to office opening” on June 1 and is having a harder “back to office opening” July 1.
McGuireWoods says it is “strongly encouraging people to get back in as soon as they can.”
Parker Poe says it has asked its employees to have a “regular and consistent presence in our offices starting this summer.”
Two other firms, Robinson Bradshaw and Fox Rothschild, said they were still working on back-to-office plans, which they expected to take effect after Labor Day. More workers are back in the office than earlier during the pandemic, they said.
Collectively, law firms account for just a few thousand of the 130,000 or so workers based uptown before the pandemic. But their approach to returning employees to the office is probably typical of other industries that are trying to figure out the future of office work.
Balanced approach: All the firms seem to be taking a flexible approach that recognizes that some workers are not comfortable being in an office setting or face childcare challenges. Several said that the differences seem to fall along generational lines, with younger workers more often opting to work from home while older lawyers and staff more eager to return to the office.
But most of the firms seem to prefer to have as many workers in the office as much as possible, to build workplace culture and improve training, especially for less experienced workers.
“As a young lawyer, I learned so much from those five-minute conversations in the doorways and hearing other people having those conversations,” said John McDonald, managing partner of McGuireWoods’ Charlotte office.
He said that in the last month, he has noticed a big increase in people walking around uptown.
“In January and February, there weren’t a lot of lunch options,” he said. “You had two or three places. We’ve seen more stuff come back and reopen. It feels like things are getting a lot closer than I thought they would get to at this time.” —TM
Related Ledger articles:
“Your office called. They want you back at work.” (🔒, May 7, 2021)
“Businesses hoping for autumn recovery” (🔒, Feb. 12, 2021)
“Uptown is a ghost town” (🔒, Oct. 9, 2020)
Airline CEOs forecast quick return for business travel
… And with more people heading back to the office, airline CEOs say they are increasingly confident that business travel will pick up the rest of this year and next year — and even be back to normal by 2023.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby, speaking at a conference earlier this month, said:
Business demand domestically is still down probably 75%, but it was down 80% a month ago, 85%-90% two or three months ago. It is beginning to gradually recover. My expectation is that it’s really not going to recover until people are back in offices, which I think is going to happen post-Labor Day. …
I think we'll see an inflection point — a bigger inflection really coming in 2022, when we are back in place. But I don’t think it will ramp up 100% immediately. But by the time we’re in 2023, I expect business travel will be back at 100% of 2019 levels.
He also said fares would probably move higher as demand picks up.
At the same conference, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said: “I think there's going to be a renaissance of business travel in our country, not just for the airlines, I think in general.” He predicted it would pick up big-time starting in September.
Leisure travel is about back to where it was before the pandemic, with the exception of international travel, which has been more limited because of restrictions. But that’s showing signs of change, too: Spain and France said last week they would start accepting vaccinated travelers from the U.S.
With travel industry forecasts, you never know how much is wishful thinking designed to create the impression that everyone is traveling again. But it’s going to pick up, no doubt. —TM
Smells like money in Ballantyne
Vine American Kitchen (Google Maps photo, top left) on Conlan Circle in Ballantyne has been leveled (top center) to make way for an apparent Chase Bank. Across Conlan Circle from that construction site, another bank is springing up — Towne Bank. The road already has a Bank of America, BB&T and a vacant Wells Fargo building.
Bulldozers are clearing the land where Vine American Kitchen once sat on Conlan Circle backing to Johnson Road at the entrance to Ballantyne. A Chase Bank is said to be springing up in its place.
Just across the street from that location are more bulldozers. The project? A Towne Bank.
Already, Conlan Circle boasts a BB&T and a Bank of America, making four banks on a relatively small stretch of road. (There’s a fifth bank building on Conlan Circle, a Wells Fargo, but that branch has closed and the building sits empty.)
Vine American Kitchen closed in 2019, and while reviews about it were mixed, area residents have made it clear on social media that they’d rather have a new restaurant take its place than yet another bank.
“Not another bank. We were hoping for a great restaurant,” posted one member of the Ballantyne Connections Facebook page.
“Well, we did need another bank in the area!” wrote a (sarcastic) poster in the Little Taste of Southern Chic Facebook page.
Longtime Ballantinians (Ballantyners?) will remember the Adams at Ballantyne restaurant that previously occupied the Vine building.
Down the street from the soon-to-be “Ballantyne bank row” sits a vacant table-service restaurant, the former Stone Mountain Grill, which closed during Covid and never reopened.
Any guesses as to what’ll go on that spot? — CB
You’re invited: Online marketing panel this morning at 11
The Ledger is holding a series of free online panels for the next four weeks about marketing in Charlotte, in conjunction with our friends at Jumbo, a Charlotte-based builder of live-streaming platforms.
The first one is this morning at 11 a.m. The topic: “New Dogs and Old Tricks: The State of Marketing in 2021.” It features panelists Adam Bernstein of Chernoff Newman; Erin Breeden of Blue Tide Creative; and Armand Brown of Tripwire.
The panels are designed to give local small business owners and marketing professionals ideas they can use to break through the noise to find strategies and tactics that reach potential customers in a time when the industry and consumer habits are shifting.
To watch, or view later online, you’ll need to register here (it’s free):
In brief:
Covid numbers keep falling: Mecklenburg County’s Covid numbers continued to show encouraging signs, with cases, hospitalizations and percentage testing positive all moving lower, the county health department said Friday. There were an average of 50 new cases a day in the last week, 67 daily hospitalizations, and just 1.9% of Covid tests were positive. There were two deaths. (Health Department)
Concord Mills shooting: One person was injured and another was in custody after a shooting Sunday outside the movie theater at Concord Mills. (WCNC)
City budget vote: The City Council is expected to pass a budget today that will increase city arts funding, give police officers raises, raise water and sewer rates and leave property tax rates the same. It will also give big pay increases to council members and the mayor. (WFAE)
Latta Plantation director calls out critics: The director of the Historic Latta Plantation fired back at critics over the weekend who had accused the historic site of organizing an event that highlighted the views of slaveowners. For Juneteenth, which marks the date of the freeing of slaves in 1865, the site had advertised an event at which participants could “hear stories from the massa himself” as well as from Confederate soldiers — and consider what the slaves’ overseer would do “now that he has no one to oversee.” Social media erupted and politicians issued statements, but the site’s director, Ian Campbell, said in a statement Saturday that “no apology will be given.” Campbell, who is Black, also blasted the “media’s corps of yellow journalist[s]” who “chose to whip the public into a frenzy” and singled out The Charlotte Observer, National Public Radio, WBTV and Mayor Vi Lyles for criticism. (WFAE)
HB2 and the movies: The head of the Greater Charlotte Hospitality & Tourism Alliance appeared to call out former Mayor Jennifer Roberts over her role in provoking the “bathroom bill” controversy a few years ago. In the organization’s weekly email newsletter, Mohammad Jenatian wrote: “North Carolina has a perfect opportunity to get back so much of the great movie production business that Georgia stole from us because of a dumb ... political decision by a former Mayor of Charlotte and then state legislators a few years ago.” Roberts said in an interview that Jenatian was “completely wrong” and “factually incorrect” because movies were leaving North Carolina before HB2. (Biz Journal)
CPCC enrollment falls: Enrollment at Central Piedmont Community College is down about 30% from a year ago, which the college says has occurred in part because low-income and first-generation students were unable to focus on studies. Reasons include unreliable wifi, childcare duties and the emotional toll of “distressing socio-political conditions.” (Observer)
Foreclosure ahead for Northlake Mall? The owner of Charlotte’s Northlake Mall has failed to make debt payments on the property and the mortgage has gone into default, according to a lawsuit filed in Mecklenburg County last month. The mall is owned by entities connected to Starwood Capital Group. The lawsuit, brought by Wilmington Trust, which represents the mall’s debt holders, could signal that a foreclosure sale lies ahead. Several shops at the mall have closed in recent months. (Biz Journal, subscriber-only)
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Taking stock
Unless you are a day trader, checking your stocks daily is unhealthy. So how about weekly? How local stocks of note fared last week (through Friday’s close), and year to date:
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Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Contributing editor: Tim Whitmire, CXN Advisory; Reporting intern: Lindsey Banks