General News

Talk of the Towns is a PlanCharlotte series visiting planners from the 14-county Charlotte region. This installment takes us to Lincolnton. Lincolnton is a city of 10,486, a former textile town and the county seat of Lincoln County. Laura Simmons has been the city’s planning director since 2010. She talked about intersection improvements, downtown development […]

A few years ago, a woman in the Uwharries called to tell me about a mysterious occurrence she had witnessed. She and her husband were driving home late one evening after a high school football game. Rounding a curve on Okeewemee Road, they saw an owl swoop down and try to snatch a small creature […]

Since the housing crash of 2008, there’s been a lot of talk about Americans downsizing. Some sang the praises of tiny houses. Millennials, some said, are rejecting lawns and large homes for apartments in the city. Some went as far as to predict McMansion-filled suburbs turning to slums. Meanwhile, recently released U.S. Census estimates show, […]

With its scenic rock outcrops and bluffs, swift rapids, diversity of wildlife, and beautiful pastoral setting, the Rocky River is a little known paddling pleasure found in our region. Starting in Mooresville, it continues into Cabarrus, Union, Stanly and Anson counties, before joining the Pee Dee River. I have had the good fortune to do […]

PlanCharlotte.org is asking readers to nominate spots in the Charlotte region that need a design makeover. (See our first installment in this series here.) Urban designers Keihly Moore and Alex Borisenko have launched a website, www.completeblocks.com, where they’re proposing a series of urban design retrofits, many of them nominated by readers. Among their designs so […]

The following is an excerpt from Chuck McShane’s new book, A History of Lake Norman: Fish Camps to Ferraris, published by the History Press. Flood plains don’t respect our artificial political boundaries. So when the waters filled up Lake Norman, a 660-acre peninsula of Mecklenburg County just south of the Iredell County line remained dry, […]

“Downtown was the center of the universe. And then it all changed.” Matt Cullen, CEO of Rock Ventures, a major real estate player in downtown Detroit, was speaking to out-of-town visitors and describing changes in the once thriving, now seriously ailing Motor City. I was in town for a conference (Meeting of the Minds 2014) […]

The following is an excerpt from Chuck McShane’s new book, A History of Lake Norman: Fish Camps to Ferraris, published by the History Press. “Lake Norman may seem as fixed a part of the hillsides that enfold it,” began the Charlotte Observer editorial on Oct.1, 1977. “But it is a baby, scarcely older than a […]

The Cecropia moth (Hyalophora cecropia) with a wingspan of 5-6 inches, is the largest moth found in North America. They are a member of Saturniidae family, or giant silk moths, and inhabit hardwood forests east of the Rocky Mountains in the U.S. and Canada. They live only 5-6 days typically and are mostly nocturnal, but […]

The following is an excerpt from Chuck McShane’s new book, A History of Lake Norman: Fish Camps to Ferraris, published by the History Press. Twenty miles south of the Cowan’s Ford Dam, Charlotte was booming in the 1980s. After deregulation of the interstate banking industry, locally headquartered North Carolina National Bank and First Union battled […]