I’ve been pondering this for several weeks now: is a world without its own best pecan pie really a world that I want to live in? Fortuntately, I always end up remembering that I never really liked pecan pie all that much to begin with. I’m usually OK after that.

All the same, I’ll miss Anderson’s. At least, though, its owners chose to close. The owners of Athens, my favorite diner just up the street, didn’t have that option. Athens is being demolished so that CPCC can build another neo-Colonial building. There’s nothing Ch

There are a few new photos in the Triad gallery, if you’re so inclined.

It looks like the end for Eastland Mall in Charlotte as it loses one of its two remaining credible anchors. It’s sad, really, but I saw it coming twenty years ago when I managed a surf and skate shop across the street from the place. I’m actually pretty surprised that its taken so long for it to get to this point.

I guess when you’ve worked in a dying mall, you recognize the signs earlier when another one starts to go south. Back in 1986, after only eleven years in operation, the lustre was already fading at Eastland. The more upscale Southpark, a few miles away, had stolen all the “buzz” with a remodel and a generally more impressive array of stores. Eastland never recovered; it was still healthy, but no one seemed very excited about it. It was just sort of a utilitarian place that was starting to feel just a little bit tired, not unlike the entire neighborhood surrounding it.

By 2005, when I moved back to Charlotte for a year, the mall and the neighborhood had pretty much had it. It’s an unfortunate truth in the United States that as an area’s complexion becomes increasingly brown, capital tends to start fleeing to other areas. Regardless of whether this flight is due to racism or economic reality, the disinvestment eventually becomes emotional as well as financial, and the area begins a slow, steady decline into urban decay. East Charlotte is well into that slide now. It was inevitable even before the gunshots and gang violence started that the mall would be an early casualty.

It’ll take a year or two before it all comes to an end. The really ugly period, though, will be about five years from now, when Eastland is a big, vacant, rotting carcass whose stench has befouled the entire neighborhood surrounding it. This will be the period just before it’s either torn down and replaced by a Wal-Mart, or perhaps taken over by some government entity.

It’s too bad. Eastland had a good, thirty-plus year run. That’s more than Carolina Circle got.

Another bland generic apartment complex is being marketed as the hippest thing to hit Charlotte in years.

I can get past the requisite “creative class” mumbo jumbo (ground level retail space for art dealers? a climbing wall? yeah, right…) and the absurdity of the notion that one can actually build a “hip, urban village” from scratch. I can get past Doug Smith’s erroneous assumption that “shiny, brand new, and above all, dense” is synonymous with “urban”. I’m used to it. I’ve been reading his columns (not to mention sites like Urban Planet) for years.

What’s bugging me specifically about this article, though, is the fact that Doug is still using a stale, trite term like “thirtysomethings”. For god’s sake, can we please retire this hackneyed cliché and its younger sibling “twentysomethings”?

For those who don’t remember, a largely subpar TV series that went off the air about fifteen years ago is responsible for this annoying shorthand for the more digestible “people in their thirties”. You can’t find reruns of the show anymore (there’s at least some justice in the world) but the title will apparently haunt us forever.

Ten years ago when “thirtysomethings” was still being used regularly in the bar reviews of almost every magazine in the country, it was already stupid and annoying and not at all “fresh”. Today, it grates on the nerves in sort of the same way it used to horrify the Brady kids to say “groovy” in 1974, long after the rest of the world had moved on.

It must be stopped. Now.

  

After a quick drive through Pittsburgh and a quick breakfast at my favorite diner there, we hit the road for home. As is the case on most days like this, the excitement was largely gone and was replaced by the drudgery of driving. To make things more fun, it was pouring down rain all the way from Pittsburgh to Winston-Salem. We had dinner at a diner and Beckley, and we went home.

Drama aside, it was a great trip.