Federico Rios made a quick stop for Lunchables at the Food Lion on Beatties Ford Road one morning a few years ago, when he noticed a woman sprinting across the parking lot.
Ahead, he saw what she was chasing, in this city where people are always chasing something.
The No. 7 city bus was pulling away. Rios had places to be — drop-off at Oaklawn Language Academy for the kids, then work for him — but he couldn’t keep his eyes off the runner.
“I just sat frozen, and started crying,” Rios told me recently, recounting the story while wearing a sharp gray suit near the sparkly lobby of the Foundation for the Carolinas, where he’s a senior vice president. The office is a lifetime away from where he started his Charlotte story two decades ago — back when he struggled to make mortgage payments, struggled to keep a job, struggled with everything about being a newcomer in this city of wobbly social ladders.
He swallowed a lump and finished the story. He cried that day, he said, “because I knew what it was to fucking run for that bus.”
The ending was happy. The woman caught the bus. But by then Rios already felt the weight of her sprint: Get on board, and she’d get to work on time. Miss it, and she might lose a job and whatever it affords.
I’ve spent the past few months walking, talking, listening, and consuming calories and caffeine with people all around Charlotte. My conversations have included scientists, artists, politicians, CEOs, lawyers, healthcare professionals, community activists, university leaders, and a man who told me he’d seen Jesus on the light rail. Each encounter circled the question that circles our city, always: What is Charlotte?
It’s an unanswerable prompt, because the city really never is. The city has a pulse. And the pulse is different for different people.
In one beat, Charlotte can bring you to tears.
The next can make you cringe.
The next can make you laugh. Or scream.
The next can challenge you to think about your role in our 250-year-old story.
The more you notice, the more this city is happy to flip your “What is Charlotte?” question back on you: “Who are you? And how are you showing up?”
***
Every day, someone in this collection of nearly a million souls encounters a life-changing moment. They catch the bus, or they don’t.
In just a little more than the time it takes you to read this essay, it’s statistically likely that a baby will begin a life in Charlotte or another person will take their final breath. A worker might receive a layoff notice, another a job offer. A small businessperson somewhere might sign a lease on a new space tomorrow, and another may tell their staff that it’s time to close.
Each one starts a chain of reactions. I lived in five other North Carolina towns before moving here in 2013, and in Charlotte more than any other, one individual’s success or hardship is knotted to another’s. Part of that is proximity; we’re always bumping into each other. Part of it is just the nature of Charlotte. The city makes it difficult to quarantine with your misfortune or fortune.
Ten days ago, a man trying to outrun police hit a hump in Central Avenue at the railroad tracks and flipped his vehicle into the apartment complex that surrounds the Thirsty Beaver. Then he took off and ran. It was a reckless and regrettable moment in one life, and a frustrating drain on resources for the rest of east Charlotte. Police cruisers and caution tape blocked one of our major thoroughfares during the morning rush hour, making people late to jobs and daycares and coffee meetings.
This past week marked six years since the UNC Charlotte campus shooting that took two young lives in 2019. A good number of students from that day are now in the Charlotte workforce as young professionals, and any human relations department would be wise to recognize that.
Last week the city observed one year since the deadliest day in our local law enforcement history, when four officers were killed by a man firing a rifle from a second story window in east Charlotte.
CMPD’s Joshua Eyer was one of those officers. He had a 2-year-old boy named Andrew. Eyer’s widow, Ashley, was interviewed in a new documentary CMPD produced to mark the one-year remembrance.
One part leveled me: Andrew, now 3 going on 4, asked his mom recently if they could borrow some fire truck ladders so he could climb up into the sky and bring his dad home.
***
Another Charlotte boy, grown older now: In February 2000, Trey Phills was 3 when he raised the No. 13 Hornets jersey worn by his father, Bobby Phills Jr., into the rafters of the old Charlotte Coliseum. A month earlier, Bobby had died in an automobile accident.
Twenty years later, in summer 2020, I was reporting on “tent city,” a homeless encampment that sprawled on the north side of uptown. The roster of volunteers grew and grew that summer. One was a tall young man volunteering with his mom and sister. That was Trey Phills, helping others who needed it.
That is Charlotte, too. A terrible event, tilled over by time, yields a better season.
In 2016, I spent a week covering the Keith Lamont Scott protests. No doubt the worst moment was when we heard a gunshot as the protesters gathered near the Omni Hotel. A young man named Justin Carr was killed on the sidewalk, 15 or 20 feet away from me and many others. A random bullet, fired by another protester, found Carr instead of any of the rest of us.
His son was born a month later. I waited four years to introduce myself to Carr’s mom, Vivian. We spent a day at her house off of Freedom Drive as “Lil Justin” ran around in her backyard. I published a story about how a series of decisions led Justin to the protests that night and how it altered the course of his family. Lil Justin will be 9 this fall. Vivian and I are still in semi-regular contact through social media: Whenever I post a picture of my own kids she’s one of the first to drop hearts in the comments.
Another morning, another moment, more hearts: On a Monday in March, Dot Counts-Scoggins was in her west Charlotte kitchen fixing breakfast and listening to the weekly “Motivational Mondays” presentation by Johnson C. Smith President Valerie Kinloch. Dot does this every week, but that day she heard a name that surprised her.
“We are honoring the one and only local legend … Dorothy ‘Dot’ Counts-Scoggins,” Kinloch was saying.
Dot was one of four Black students to integrate Charlotte’s schools in 1957. She walked into the old Harding High through a spray of pebbles and spit. She was 15 then; she’s 83 now. She’s used to hearing her name in September, around the anniversary, and in February, during Black History Month. But a March recognition by her alma mater? She immediately sent Kinloch a note to tell her how grateful she was.
That blurry line between strength and gratitude … that’s Charlotte, too.
***
In 1994, the New York Times labeled Charlotte a “prosperous citadel of gleeful sprawl, where the booster gene is the dominant biological strain.”
This is the cringe. Boosterism, along with its restless sibling insecurity, still live here. But to any other city I’d ask, what a shame it must be to not appreciate where you live?
I think the debate over whether Charlotte is a “world-class” city is already settled. It is that, if for no other reason than one of the requirements for a “world-class city” should be that it never stops asking itself what it needs to do to become one.
From my front porch this weekend I could hear the vibrations from a music festival called “Lovin’ Life,” a name that would seem saccharine for any other city but suits Charlotte just fine. While that was going on, once-in-a-generation artist Kendrick Lamar put on a show at our NFL stadium. No other city in three states could support that kind of entertainment in its center city.
Already this spring, the homegrown Charlotte SHOUT! festival brought in art and intellect, and the city’s arts class swooned when the Carolina Theatre, a century-old venue that sat in disrepair for 50 years, reopened its red curtains.
Two days from now this city that’s criticized for “tearing down its history” will see two of its most successful restaurateurs, Jamie Brown and Jeff Tonidandel, open a hotly anticipated restaurant in a 111-year-old church building. Just want drinks? One of our celebrated bartenders opened a cocktail bar in a 120-year-old millhouse a few months ago.
In eight days the PGA Championship, one of golf’s four major championships, will spend a week at Quail Hollow.
And this summer we’ll have the opening of phase one of The Pearl, which includes the city’s first medical school and a research campus. Few projects excite leaders more. Several people I talked to believe healthcare and research will define Charlotte’s identity for the next 50 years, the same way banking did for the past 50.
Meanwhile, a new generation of leaders is emerging, and it is increasingly a generation of women.
Presiding over the graduations at Johnson C. Smith and UNC Charlotte this month will be Kinloch and Sharon Gaber, respectively. Kinloch’s strengthened the relationship between Charlotte’s corporate community and Charlotte’s HBCU, and she wants to make JCSU a centerpiece of Charlotte’s west side, rather than a humble school surrounded by fences. And Gaber is a force who’s helped UNC Charlotte become a focal point of any conversation about our city. Its recent recognition as an R1 research institution came years ahead of schedule.
At a ceremony for that recognition in late March, I met some scientists who specialize in ticks. They’re working in the woods on the north side of town to study what species are in Mecklenburg County, and what health issues they present.
I told one of the scientists that ticks are one of my greatest fears.
“I think tornadoes are mine,” he shot back without a blink.
Fair.
Point is, people whose talents would be squashed in a larger city keep bringing them here. Outcasts from elsewhere can find themselves in the banquet class here. Meanwhile, celebrities from other cities can come and find a home under an oak and shade themselves from stardom.
Last month I listened to new Hornets co-owner Rick Schnall tell a crowd that Charlotte is a “sleeping giant.” Afterward, I spotted him walking down Tryon Street. Nobody noticed him. That’s Charlotte, too, large enough and small enough that a person can own a pro sports team and take a peaceful stroll in spring.
Double-tap that, as the tech types say: Charlotte has plenty of tensions, most notably the one between people who’ve lived here happily for generations and those who just moved in next door with a Nest cam and suggestions. But those folks can get along, in time; I’m a transplant who married a native and we’re swell.
To me the driving tension is between two cohorts of transplants — the big-city settler and the small-town kid. The second finds wonder in the city and goes broke trying to afford it, and the first lands here with enough money to enjoy it all but eventually points out what’s missing.
I grew up along a gravel road. I hunted in winter and fished all summer. When I landed in Charlotte I felt like a kid in a Golden Corral, and I mean that as high praise. So many options, so little room.
Perhaps that makes me simple. Stanley Tucci would no doubt think so. But I don’t care.
That’s the other thing: If you live here long enough you stop worrying about what people elsewhere think. Charlotte fits like cargo shorts — not always the most stylish look, but you sure can fit a lot in those pockets!
***
It’s also a North Carolina city that much of North Carolina misunderstands.
I once toured the neat little town of Edenton along the Albemarle Sound in the far northeastern corner of the state, and out of nowhere a local went on about the Great State of Mecklenburg in a way that made it plain she wanted no association with it.
This reputation should concern us, considering that North Carolina’s brand is widely adored and perceptions of Charlotte are woefully outdated. More than that, Charlotte needs North Carolina and vice-versa. The state legislature has long enjoyed taking a paternalistic approach toward governing our city, and now several local political and business leaders are putting in hours and miles to break down those walls. In any case, Charlotte keeps pumping out economic goodness for a state long known as the “goodliest land.”
We’ve long been overlooked as a city of real Southern culture. Our buildings are too corporate, our barbecue places too fancy, our inhabitants prefer bottomless mimosas to endless tea refills, and most wouldn’t recognize a persimmon pudding if they ate a whole dish.
But one could argue that parts of Charlotte, including and maybe especially its west and north sides, where community fish fry gatherings continue today and Black cowboys ride horses, are about as Southern as Southern gets.
Irony is everywhere, and that’s a pretty Southern thing, too. An influencer who comes here with a straight smile and a half-dozen machine-washable outfits can easily surpass the mayor in annual income and audience engagement, and so the mayor tries to become an influencer, which is a touch awkward for everyone … but also, we respect the effort.
A vegetarian on a run through NoDa can pass a livermush hub and an old-time hamburger joint. A health nut in South End wakes up in a neighborhood that’s home to Krispy Kreme. We build car-less apartment complexes and wonder why the streets around them are filled with cars. It’s a city where people need those cars to get from the center of town to any meaningful body of water, but it’s also a city that claims something called the U.S. National Whitewater Center. It’s a city without a major military base but one that will host the 2027 Military World Games.
And let’s consider a hallmark of the modern, Southern identity — hospitality. Charlotte gives as much as it takes. The most prolific 3-point shooter in NBA history sank his first baskets here. The most consequential preacher of the 20th century grew up on a dairy farm in south Charlotte. A community bank grew up and became, literally, the Bank of America here. The gutsiest bootlegger ever to spin tires through the hills spent the final laps of his life here.
I spent several years as Axios’s Southern bureau chief, overseeing teams in seven cities from Richmond to New Orleans. The one I found most comparable to Charlotte wasn’t Atlanta — Atlanta rarely thinks of us, no matter how much we’d like them to — it was Nashville. They long ago took the title of country music capital from Charlotte, and now they’re chasing us on transportation. Charlotte, in turn, envies their entertainment and tourism. Nashville is a terrific town, but think of how silly Charlotte would look with bachelorettes dancing on flatbeds rolling down Tryon Street.
Charlotte doesn’t want you to come through like that. We want you to stay.
***
Grit runs through Charlotte’s story, too, a rare quality for a place so pretty. We’re not, say, Baltimore, but Charlotte will punch you in the nose if necessary.
A few years ago a Greensboro businessman shut down Charlotte’s alt-weekly publication without notice. People gathered at a local dive that day and slugged PBRs to mourn. A month or so later the laid-off editor, Ryan Pitkin, helped launch another alt-weekly, Queen City Nerve. This was no small moment in the city’s media history, because a city without alternative voices has no song.
People who’ve challenged the status quo have long been part of the city, back through 1960s civil rights activists like Reginald Hawkins; to people like John T. Schenck, the first Black elected official in the city in 1868; all the way to the rebellious ones who declared independence from Great Britain here in 1775, a full year before the United States.
Modern versions come in various forms. Just the other week, one of our more celebrated author exports, Harding High grad David Joy, went viral for ripping into local elected officials in Jackson County who wanted to restore a Confederate monument. And last month I was driving down 7th Street and saw two people holding signs that told drivers to honk if they’re displeased with the current direction of the country. One was former mayor Jennifer Roberts, who faced her own share of protests during her time in office.
Resistance comes in larger packages, too.
Over time the economic winds have attempted to blow Charlotte down. The gold rush braked. Textiles became undressed by trade. Banks went belly-up. Somehow we’ve never gone the way of the Rust Belt. Charlotte not only escaped despair all those times, but people here still say Charlotte feels like an awkward teen that doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up.
They mean it as a criticism but it’s a compliment: Charlotte still feels young and full of promise, even though she’s been through a string of economic development surgeries in two and a half centuries.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the city has diversified its portfolio of industries. Its corporate leadership group is no longer just a handful of men; the Charlotte Executive Leadership Council now has more than 40 members of all backgrounds. That can make getting things done more time-consuming than in the late 20th century, when “The Group” could gather in a room and get a transportation center or museum built, but it makes the town much more durable.
And so, Charlotte keeps growing higher and higher. That brings tension, too, of course. The first concert I saw when I moved to Charlotte in 2013 was at Tremont Music Hall, which is no longer here. Some of my favorite nights were at The Chop Shop and The Double Door Inn. Gone and gone.
I can’t look up without seeing my brother. He’s in management at a concrete company, one of the many hardhat types still living in the city limits, despite the trope that we’re nothing but a white-collar town.
He moved here in 2017 and has consistently fortified new squares of the city with reinforced concrete. One of his projects was the Commonwealth development in Plaza Midwood. You remember the big controversy about that, probably, when the neighborhood’s rooftop-barflies raised hell about their skyline view being blocked by a huge cube of concrete? My brother and his company did that. I had to pretend I didn’t know the guy, for fear of a scandalous headline somewhere: “Local Journalist’s Family Ties to the Building That Ruined Sunset Views.”
Construction, though, is a key marker of Charlotte’s health, not only because of the cliche, “If you’re not a growing city, you’re a dying city.” It’s also symbolic: Buildings go up. So does Charlotte.
***
So we come back to Federico Rios, and how his Very Charlotte and Very American story converged in the parking lot of the Beatties Ford Food Lion.
Rios was raised in New York to a Colombian mother and a Puerto Rican father. When he graduated from high school, his mom took out loans to send him to Stony Brook on Long Island. By the start of school in August 2001, his money ran out.
September 11, 2001 was two weeks later. His cousin’s wife was in the second tower. Rios went home to help his family carry on.
Months later, his cousin called to say he wanted to put the insurance settlement from his wife’s death to meaningful use: He would put Rios through college. Rios earned his degree. He got married. He and his wife each had two jobs, four salaries, but still couldn’t afford car insurance, he said. So, at the recommendation of a family friend, they moved to Charlotte.
The first few years here, he thought he’d made a mistake. He couldn’t find friends. He lost three jobs in two years and had children at the same time.
Rios took a tutoring job, and then a principal linked him up with a job as a site coordinator for Communities in Schools.
In 2012, CIS executive director Molly Shaw was asked to give a TEDx talk. Instead of delivering it, she gave the mic to Rios and he ran with it. “She platformed me,” he said.
From there he found his footing on the ladder, and kept stepping, one connection to the next. He landed a job in leadership with the city in 2018, and two years ago he moved to FFTC, where he’s now the senior vice president at the Robinson Center for Civic Leadership. His list of contacts ranges from the city manager to business leaders to neighborhood advocates.
“I’m blessed,” Federico said. Then he paused and thought about it: “Which sucks, because that means others aren’t.”
No matter how high he climbs, he says, part of him will always feel like that woman running to the bus. So that’s what he devotes his work to now, finding the next person chasing a ride in this city where, if you don’t move fast, it’ll leave you behind.
This is the debut story for The Charlotte Optimist, which publishes every Sunday evening. Tell a friend to subscribe.