Bearden Park in Third Ward, Uptown Charlotte

[Guest]

The bride changing room is brilliant. It's clear they thought about how the park would actually be used.

Agreed! I'm pleasantly surprised. I cannot wait to see this park opened.

[Neo]

I meant to post this over the weekend but I didn't get a chance. I took this panorama of the construction site last Friday (September 28, 2012). You can see a little of the ballpark construction as well.

[Guest]

It looks like you have Ford Explorer and Police Car smart cars :-) because of how its cut. HAHA

[cha]

Hey all! I'm overseas right now and like to check in on this particular project, but can't seem to find reliable updates anywhere on the net.. if anyone happens to walk by or have any cool views and could snap some pics I'd love to see the progress! Thanks.

[UptownCLTwalker]

A lot of activity on the job site. Any chance for a photo update?

[CLTNative]

Update from this afternoon:

[15895]

You know The Residence in Is just Cheesing away.They went from being connected to a Giant Parking Deck in the middle of Blocks and Blocks of Parking lots to Prime Real estate...

[jednc]

Update from this afternoon:

That top picture really does help me realize just how transformative these two projects will be to this side of town. It will feel completely different in these blocks once things are complete, not just like they've added something to the existing neighborhood.

[grodney]

It's all taking shape now: info kiosk, arbor, Maudell's Garden, water feature, restroom and bride room, etc.

[southslider]

Never noticed before that the area where old commercial buildings once stood opposite Brevard Court is ironically called "Memory Walk." The park will be nice, but it's sad it couldn't have incorporated what few storefronts Charlotte has remaining, and especially where a cluster of them could create some critical mass to counter an otherwise sterile yet shiny Uptown.

And yet we wonder why the apartments replacing Twelve won't have any significant retail. Looks to me like the private sector is only following the public sector's lead in sterilizing our streets.

[Urbanity]

Looks to me like the private sector is only following the public sector's lead in sterilizing our streets.

Personally I wouldn't draw that conclusion. I think the private sector follows what the private sector thinks will make money and not the design aesthetics of the public sector.

As for the buildings that were there - they were not that great/memorable to me enough to save at the expense of a larger park footprint. I honestly think their absence and the subsequent unblocked view of the park/stadium area may ironically add more retail activity (on weekends) in that there will be an incentive for Latta Arcade to be open on weekends with through traffic.

[atlrvr]

Ironically, though those buildings that were torn down looked old, they were actually built in the 1980s. I guess that is old for Charlotte

That said, I agree that it would have been nice for them to remain, though the sidewalk was awfully narrow around them, and this plan probably encourages pedestrians more than keeping them.

I'm not sure that it is a case of private sector following public sector lead, but rather a case of both sectors recognizing the lack of demand for retail. Catalyst still sits empty 4 years after being built and are on their 2nd or 3rd broker trying to find retail tenants. My guess is they will once the park is finished and another retail tower is built next door.

Finally, the new Childress Klein tower, while not currently having any retail space, I assume could easily accomodate some in the future. Half the ground floor is used by a variety of model floor plans. Once the building is stabilized at 95%+ occupancy, there is really no reason to have that many model units and would convert to retail space when demand justifies it.

I'm really excited about this park.

[southslider]

Retail needs foot traffic. College Street is now becoming more of a retail street, thanks to Epicenter (a critical mass), which then forced some re-thinking of adjoining Founders Hall and Overstreet to compete. But unfortunately, only chains can usually afford higher rents to chase any foot traffic. Add the factor that drugstores, bars and restaurants have higher volumes of sales per square foot, and you have an Uptown devoid of retail, except drugstores, restaurants and bars.

Naturally, by the time a business becomes a chain, it is an old idea, though obviously a successful one. But every chain started initially as a new idea and as a small business. Those new ideas took risk. Risk requires cheaper rents. And so new ideas need old spaces. But as long as Uptown lacks old spaces, it will also lack new ideas.

Absent baseball games, and the resulting sports bars, there will be little retail potential around this new park. All of the new rooftops can help balance the foot traffic somewhat during non-office hours. But any commercial spaces will be caught in the Catch-22 of too new and pricey, yet also too few and dead.

If only there was a variety of old and new spaces, then there would be more risk-taking innovation to spur street life. The first Amelie's could have never afforded the rent in Uptown (or the old NoDa now becoming too high-rent). The second Amelie's is even held hostage to Uptown's high-rent, risk-averse sterility, being open very limited hours and reduced to a very small space.

[15895]

Well, I plan on using a vacation day to attend the Gateway Station workshops. That is our biggest hope for making retail in uptown flourish. Romare Bearden is an important part of the puzzle though. Maybe Romare can replicate some of the Freedom Park Events. I'm sure we all frequent Freedom; It'd be huge for uptown if uptown can produce Freedoms' activity. I don't blame Catalyst and the parking deck for not being able to attract tenants. The surrounding blocks have limited pedestrian activity. Obviously thats changing before our eyes.

[dubone]

I argued for the keeping of those buildings during the design charettes and the designers outright reacted as though I were a lunatic, like "we are designing a park", so of course why would they save a building in the way. The only part of the House of Jazz building that was from the 80s were some terrible facade renovations and embellishments. The building itself was built in 1932. That is hard to fact check now, but I absolutely did earlier when I posted about and fought for incorporating the old buildings into the park.

I prefered the look of the 1920s building at what had originally been the corner of Poplar and 2nd. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that they have widened MLK/2nd and Church with street parking and wide sidewalks. The House of Jazz building was actually in that section because it was so tightly squeezed into the corner, with virtually no sidewalk alongside it. So it actually was not in what you see as "Memory Walk" but rather where the sidewalk and street parking is, maybe up to where a couple of those 3 trees are on the bottom right of the park plan.

I absolutely was for saving the building, but in the end, the park designers had some valid retorts. The 1980s renovation had genericized the facade, saving it would have choked off the sidewalks to the stadium and into the park, and it would have blocked visibility of the park from Church and MLK intersection. All in all, it is the Charlotte Way.

I pushed the case for saving the building which now has the House of Jazz during the public meetings about designing the 3rd Ward Park. The bottom line for them was that saving it would hurt the ability to widen the pedestrian environment along MLK and Church and would take away from their primary purpose to add open space uptown.

The building was built in 1932 during the Great Depression, and had facade changes a few decades ago. It isn't historical in the strict sense, but it is an interesting pre-WWII building that has existed through dramatic change in Charlotte.

I'm much more interested in saving the Polk/Coddington Building on Trade Street than this small old storefront whose facade has already been significantly altered. However, it says a lot about our city that despite having only a dozen or so pre-WWII commercial buildings uptown, the powers that be are continuing to wipe them out.

The initial design of the park included a fairly large building for bathrooms. It also showed only a grass lawn in the space currently occupied by the House of Jazz building. I was very frustrated, and shared my thoughts during the public meeting, that they would tear down an existing 1930s building on their land to build a small barely-useful lawn, and then spend park money building a new building for bathrooms. My thesis was they could retain 1 or 2 sections of the House of Jazz building (note the building is in 4 sections) and put their bathrooms in that. That way, they could bring the building back from the curb of MLK to improve pedestrian capacity, but retain enough existing space to avoid building a new building and avoid tearing down the entirety of the old building.

In the end, perhaps as a result of our comments, they ended up increasing the size of the 'formal oval' and adding more interesting landscaping to that corner of the park. Also, they ended up shrinking the size of the new bathrooms and blending it better into the plan to reduce the appearance of the building of a large new facilities building while tearing down an existing building.

[nonillogical]

I've been agreeing with southslider's sentiment about the problem with having only brand new retail spaces for a while now, but I think that size is also a major issue. Every new development we get with retail seems to be intended from the start as a place for an 80+ seat high-end restaurant. Would it be attractive to any developer to take that same amount of square footage and give us a bunch of tiny spaces with storefronts? Places that a coffee shop, jewelry store, small boutique, etc could fill out and afford? It still wouldn't be as ideal as an eclectic mix of storefronts that have evolved differently over the years, but if someone were willing to offer small bare-bones spaces and give lots of buildout freedom to the owners, I'm sure there would be a lot of interest.

[grodney]

Windows are in the kiosk, and some roofing is on the kiosk and arbor.  I walked down there the other day and saw the big chunks of raw stone seen in the third photo.  From up here I thought they were just stacks of cinder blocks or something.  Anyway, not sure what those are for.

 

These are all from one 8MP photo from my phone, just cropped and zoomed, so apologies for less-than-stellar quality.

 

 

 

[carolinagarnet]

Thanks for the update!

[southslider]

3rd Street closed today with traffic now shifted to 4th and Mint Streets.

[Matthew.Brendan]

Really great to have this perspective on the park. The overall shot is really amazing with the ballpark coming together at the same time. Talk about a total transformation of the area. I am so excited for both!

[Guest]

By golly you're right.  My view is partially obscured by Catalyst, but I can probably still snap some photos as it progresses.  Assuming there isn't a webcam, of course.

Could you snap a picture of the area sometime? I would love to see the progress on the park especially. 

[dubone]

It's a shame the Knight's webcam is not angled from Graham so that we could see these other two sites in the background.  

[navigator319]

Here you go... taken 5min ago

[Guest]

Here you go... taken 5min ago

Recently they predicted Late March we would have grass in... Does that actually seem possible to you guys?

[kermit]

At the park? Yes, when I was here last weekend it did look like they are a month (of good weather) away from begining landscaping.