Ideas

Innovation built University City and continues to shape us. Here are some examples of University City firsts in the Charlotte region. Know of others? Let us know and we’ll add them to the list:

NC’s first mixed use development
We take it for granted now that you can work at an office at University Place, stroll around the lake to sip a glass of wine, dine and listen to music under the oaks, then take a short walk home to your condo, apartment or cluster home. Long before Phillips Place and Birkdale Village, mixing development uses was a novel idea when UNC Charlotte professors Jim Clay and Doug Orr suggested it in the early 1980s and held a design conference to see if they could interest an equally creative developer. They did. Carley Capital Group took up the challenge and created what has remained our city center for 25 years.

Region’s first restaurant with a true wine cellar
Slugs, University Place – When University Place opened in the mid-1980s, it included a showcase for one of the region’s most creative restaurateurs (and Newell native), Slug Claiborne. Boardwalk Billy’s now occupies the site of Slug’s University Place. Besides fine dining, the restaurant featured party rooms upstairs and, for discerning wine lovers, an expansive wine cellar beneath the restaurant. The vault is available for private parties in what is a truly unique setting, and about 100 customers store their wine there as well, says Wine Vault owner Tim Wallace. Call Christine, the Wine Vault Manager, at 704-548-9463 for details. By the way, the Wine Vault’s upstairs seating area is also available for parties.

First satellite hospital
We don’t think twice about having great medical services just a few minutes from our University City homes and offices. But when Carolinas Medical Center opened its University City location 25 years ago, the new facility truly was groundbreaking. Before then, if you needed hospital care, you needed to go to Charlotte’s medical zone around Myers Park. Carolinas Medical Center opened our satellite location as part of a coordinated effort by several groups to strongly support growth in northeast Mecklenburg County. The coming of IBM and the sudden surge of new businesses at University Research Park led to a housing boom. And all of those people needed nearby medical care. That care continues to be of value. CMC-University has the second busiest emergency room in the hospital system. Its recently expanded birthing area serves the largest concentration of women of child-bearing age in the region.

Charlotte’s first true business park
That’s our University Research Park, which came into being in the late 1960s when Charlotte was mainly an industrial and shipping hub. Visionary business and civic leaders saw the success of  Raleigh’s Research Triangle Park, nestled between three major universities, and thought, “If Raleigh can, we can.”
And so they did, despite having NO university yet, and absolutely no research capability to attract new companies. The park took off in 1979 when IBM announced it would build a manufacturing facility here. The IBM name lured many other companies. Today the park covers nearly 4 square miles. Its single biggest building is the Wachovia-Wells Fargo Customer Information Center on Harris Boulevard. At 2.1 million square feet, it dwarfs any structure outside of center city. The park’s 25,000 employees help make University City the region’s biggest employment center outside of center city, as well.

First super-wired business park
Business park developers didn’t need to think about the Internet, fiber optics, and redundant power grids in a business park before IBM and the data centers arrived in University Research Park. Today one of the park’s big attractions is the network of power and communications lines – recently updated with a fiber backbone network by AGL Networks.

First high-tech manufacturer
Charlotte was a regional trading center at the heart of the Carolinas textile and furniture industries in the 1970s when IBM announced it had an option on hundreds of acres inside the fledgling University Research Park. IBM built the manufacturing plant in 1979 and eventually employed about 5,000 people making computer cards, ATM machines and printers before phasing it out. The coming of IBM sparked explosive growth both in the research park and University City.

Charlotte’s first and only nature preserve
Breaking with tradition resulted in a massive benefit for University City – Reedy Creek Nature Preserve.
The city of Charlotte bought nearly 1,000 acres for the park way back in 1981 – an unusual step on three counts. First, the city had, until then, only built small parks with sports fields and playgrounds. Second, the land lay outside the city limits! Third, no one lived nearby.
But city leaders could see the future need and acted. In 1991, city and county park operations merged. Reedy Creek Park and Nature Preserve remains the county’s largest preserve not located along the Catawba River, on the county’s western edge. Nearly 150 kinds of birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians live inside the park, which also preserves the record of man’s habitation here dating back thousands of years.

First international Public Radio hit program
How many communities have launched an international radio career? Fiona Ritchie came to UNC Charlotte in 1981 from Ireland to teach psychology. She soon realized that much of the music she heard, particularly from the N.C. mountains, had strong ties to her homeland. Small wonder, since the Scots-Irish who settled here brought their Celtic music with them. Ritchie launched “Thistle and Shamrock” at WFAE public radio to play Celtic music from both sides of the Atlantic. She later moved back to Ireland, but the radio show continues to entertain Public Radio listeners three decades later.

Pioneering high-tech multi-school village  
The four schools clustered along IBM Drive and Neal Road in University Research Park began in the mid-1990s as three grand experiments:  a unified K-12 approach to learning; a workplace magnet for University Research Park employees; and a new technology-based system by IBM to help parents and schools stay in touch. The bold experiment called Governors Village lasted only a couple of years, but in that short time it attracted millions of dollars of technology-grant funding from IBM and thousands of volunteer hours from parents.

Speedway firsts
Long before people thought of us as University City, race fans were flocking to the 1.5-mile superspeedway just north of the county line. Charlotte Motor Speedway now hosts the No. 2 biggest sports event in the country. That accomplishment alone should get Bruton Smith into the NASCAR Hall of Fame. But you don’t win in NASCAR by getting a lead and playing it safe. In 1984, Smith startled the racing world by building the first year-round condos overlooking any sports facility. Heck, they were the first condos, period, in University City! Eight years later, another light bulb went off, and Smith added a permanent reflective lighting system that let cars run at night without glare, shadows or light poles.

First suburban municipal service district
You might say, “Huh?” But this web site is just a small example of what an MSD can do for a community.
North Carolina created MSDs initially to help towns and cities market their downtowns. These are actually special tax districts, with the small additional property taxes going to fund such crucial services as planning and marketing. Our Charlotte Chamber chapter realized several years ago that we needed the benefits of an MSD, even if we weren’t a true town or city. The state legislature agreed. University City Partners now oversees the district, which encompasses UNC Charlotte, University Research Park, University Place and nearby commercial and office areas. University City Partners has pushed for light rail and the outer belt, developed plans for our business district and research park, and worked hard to secure new businesses ranging from IKEA to Electrolux. 

First Chamber branch
We take them for granted now – Chamber chapters for the many submarkets of Charlotte. But it took University City pioneers to launch the first one. The story we hear is that once the real-estate market took off in the mid-1980s, builders and developers began to see a need to share information. After all, Charlotte had never seen a brand-new market emerge so quickly. They formed the University City Area Council and began to invite other businesses and even neighborhood representatives to their monthly meetings. The group’s success eventually led the Charlotte Chamber to suggest a union. Today the Charlotte Chamber has seven chapters. 

First desktop-published community magazine
Charlotte has had many newspapers over the years, including some tied to local towns. University City Magazine is Charlotte’s first and oldest community magazine – and it is the first publication made almost entirely via computers and laser printers. Apple had just introduced its revolutionary Macintosh computers and laser printers when The Charlotte Observer decided to try creating a free stand-alone publication for this rapidly developing market. An ad designer and reporter-editor, both newbies to desktop computing, took on the assignment from an office overlooking the lake at University Place. The magazine got to the printer on time, despite a hard-drive crash the day before deadline that wiped out the entire 48-page magazine. The first cover, by the way, of the September 1988 issue, was a rear view of a grazing horse, in a meadow along University City Boulevard.