Articles About Environment and Planning
Does uptown Charlotte need a baseball stadium, or a large public park dedicated to showcase energy technology and local food? Two well-known Charlotte architects – Marley Carroll and Murray Whisnant – take different stands. • Spectacular amenity / Marley Carroll • Don’t squander chance / Murray Whisnant The Charlotte City Council is expected to vote […]
Katydids, (also known as bush-crickets in Britain), are insects in the family Tettigoniidae. They are sometimes referred to as long-horned grasshoppers, but are actually more closely related to crickets. Katydids differ from grasshoppers in that they have very long antennae, while grasshoppers have short and thick antennae. Of the more than 6,400 species of katydid, […]
As a resident of Third Ward uptown, urban design student and enthusiastic cyclist, I frequent the streets of uptown. Most of my trips through its streets are not in my car, which means I travel at a slower pace and am better able to absorb the cityscape experience. On one of these trips through the […]
At first glance, Eastern hardwood forests seem a homogenous block of green, but if you train your eye and look closer, you’ll notice subtle differences. Wild North Carolina: Discovering the Wonders of Our State’s Natural Communities helps amateur naturalists do just that. Botanist Michael Schafale describes more than two dozen unique communities, several of which […]
Photos by Ruth Ann Grissom Related article: The abundant diversity of the hardwood forest
Tom Hanchett and I have been having this discussion – some might call it a debate – over what’s the most “urban” part of Charlotte. Hanchett, staff historian at Levine Museum of the New South, contends that the most urban corner in the city is Central Avenue at Rosehaven Drive. For weeks I have respectfully […]
The city, instead of holding its traditional spring summit conference for neighborhood groups, will offer them space and time with facilitators in July to encourage strategic goal-setting and planning. The meetings will be in Foundation For The Carolinas’ uptown meeting rooms, which can accommodate as many as 17 organizations. Trained facilitators from the city and […]
The Charlotte neighborhoods of Belmont and Villa Heights are experiencing an influx of white, professional residents in search of affordable housing close to uptown. Piedmont Courts, a housing project that dates to the 1940s, is gone, and crime is declining. Click here to read the article about the neighborhoods’ revival. Photographs by Nancy Pierce.
In February, The LandTrust for Central N.C. contracted with the N.C. Forest Service to conduct a prescribed burn on a portion of the Low Water Bridge Preserve. Approximately 250 acres were included in this burn area, and a main reason for this burn was to promote a particularly interesting species down along the river here […]
Over a decade ago, developers sought to build a downtown in a town that did not have one. Harrisburg, N.C., which is four miles east of Charlotte, was a collection of subdivisions and highway retail without a traditional center. Today, the 97-acre site remains incomplete. These photos show the state of the development in spring […]
If you could travel back in time to the Carolinas Piedmont before European settlement, some of the landscape might look a bit like this clearing in northwestern Mecklenburg County, tucked under swooping Duke Energy power lines. Here, a spring breeze whispers through slim brown stalks of last season’s little bluestem and Indian grass. Wild quinine […]
The headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service in Washington bears a quote from former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” Given the sticker shock many of us received when we opened our property revaluation notices, I imagine plenty of folks wouldn’t mind our society being a […]