Cheers first: The Mallard Creek/CoulOak Junior Softball All-Stars claimed the Little League World Series title yesterday, beating a team from northern California 6-4 in the championship contest. Along the way the Charlotte squad topped teams from Czechia, Puerto Rico, and Quebec.
Also yesterday, Panthers’ legend Luke Kuechly, just 35, became the second-youngest player ever inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Watch his full speech. It includes a special shout-out to longtime PR executive and loyal Optimist reader Steve Luquire.
Now, this week’s Optimist: You told us in our May survey that you’d love to see more stories from places outside of Charlotte. When I worked at Our State magazine, one of my favorite assignments was a “Tar Heel Town” feature, where we’d plant ourselves in a place and explore not just what the town had going on, but where it fit within the larger picture of North Carolina.
Rock Hill’s generated lots of discussion this summer, with several big economic development wins. So Logan Cyrus and I ventured down a few times. In an unexpected twist, gaining a better understanding of Rock Hill helped me better understand Charlotte. The conversations added a little extra context to local issues like I-77, infrastructure for sports teams, and why it’s important to broaden the lens through which Charlotte sees itself.
The comeback next door
One of the four Civitas statues that welcomes visitors to Rock Hill. The statues, commissioned in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and sculpted by Audrey Flack, have nods to the town’s once-thriving textile industry. Photo by Logan Cyrus
The son of a woman who flew across the Atlantic in the Hindenburg bursts into the building where he’s reinventing the textile industry in the Carolinas.
“Where are they?” Derick Close says, all gruff and gravelly, as if he’s looking for vandals.
He’s just looking for me and a photographer. We’d arranged to meet at Springs Creative, the 139-year-old family business he runs in Rock Hill, but Close is a few minutes late and needs to make up time. He’s flying out to Dallas tonight, then to Korea tomorrow for a few meetings, then to Shanghai to throw a retirement party for a longtime employee, then to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to visit his team’s new offices there.
We can hear someone whisper, “They’re in there.”
Close pokes his head into the room where we’ve been waiting, spots us, and says, “Right where they’re supposed to be. Good,” then turns around and walks away.
When he returns, he brings in his team. He zooms through introductions, firing off titles for staffers that may or may not be their actual titles. It’s a running gag; Kathryn Lawrie has been vice president of residential sales and merchandising for more than a year, but Close tells me she runs marketing.
“And this is Claude,” Close says, leaving me to figure out later that Claude’s his son. Claude is the company president, and eventually he’ll be CEO, making him a sixth-generation leader of this remarkable business that’s central to the remaking of this resilient South Carolina city.
We’re in the Baxter Mill Archive, which houses a private collection of 1.5 million sketches and swatches and other design pieces the Springs family has collected and preserved since 1887. It’s the largest design archive of its kind in the country, including a Renaissance-era cut velvet, 1930s Snow White prints, and 18th-century robes from Uzbekistan that were once given to soldiers as medals. “You’d look good in one of those,” Close hollers from across the room when he sees me looking at the robes. It was like this on both of my visits this summer: he’s always just kind of … around. Here and everywhere at the same time.
In the back are rolls of wallpaper that mix classic settings with characters from Disney, Marvel, and Lucasfilm. One roll is of an 1800s water terrace scene, but if you look closer you can see Spider-Man hanging upside down from a tree.
An old scene, with a timeless character, made for the future. It’s just the kind of thing a hack writer, certainly not me, would use as a metaphor for an entire city.
Rock Hill, y’all.
Charlotteans may remember it as the city where the Panthers planned to build their headquarters and practice facility along I-77, before the deal fell through, setting off months of disputes between the city and team owner David Tepper. But just four years later, Rock Hill is on the verge of turning its harshest civic humiliation into a triumph.
Last month, the city and its surrounding county, York, finally agreed on terms to land the global plasma-therapy maker Octapharma, which promises to build a $1.5 billion manufacturing campus on the former Panthers site, and to bring 1,500 jobs averaging over $100,000 annually. Economist Mark Vitner called it the “week’s biggest win” in his newsletter about the South’s economy. That news followed a June announcement that Novant Health will invest about $300 million in a new medical campus on the same site, adding about 250 jobs.
That’s upward of 1,750 jobs and $1.8 billion invested in Rock Hill, announced just this summer. People in Charlotte seem to be noticing. One post on Threads last week, questioning Rock Hill’s status as a “suburb,” was met with swift corrections from Charlotte residents eager to claim the South Carolina city as part of us.
Rock Hill leaders say they’re a little of both. Yes, they’re connected to Charlotte by highways and history, and yes, they hope to help drive the region’s life-sciences economic development wave. But in conversations I’ve had with them since June, they’re eager to note that Rock Hill won’t lose its identity, not on their watch.
“We are a community that is born of grit,” Mayor John Gettys told me.
You can find that grit in places like the world-class textile archives, housed in a repurposed printing and finishing company building now called the Thread, and owned by a fast-talking, business-minded CEO whose mother was none other than the revered naturalist and conservationist Anne Springs Close. Anne basically wrote the blueprint for living a full and meaningful life in Charlotte, or anywhere else, hiking Kilimanjaro three times, carrying the Olympic torch, and preserving thousands of acres of greenspace for future generations.
TOP: Rock Hill Mayor John Gettys looks out over Main Street from a conference room at his law practice. BOTTOM: John Richards throws a ball with his dog Prince at Fountain Park in downtown Rock Hill. Photos by Logan Cyrus
A few blocks away from the archives, Gettys looks out the window of his second-story law offices over Main Street. It’s now lined with breweries and restaurants and shops, with a boutique hotel in the works.
When I ask him how the view’s changed, he brings up the roof.
In the mid-1970s, a new shopping mall along the interstate sucked the economic life out of Rock Hill’s downtown, just a few miles away. So leaders put a roof over Main Street, turning the heart of the city into a climate-controlled shopping arcade. It didn't work. The roof came off in 1993. The city held a “Raze the Roof” party.
"It was the right decision when we put it on," Gettys says of the roof, "and it was the right decision when we took it off."
That's how leaders talk in Rock Hill. Make a decision, live with it, and move on to the next one.
The city, which will celebrate its 175th anniversary next year, was founded when two landowning families agreed to let the railroad come through their properties along a rocky ridge.
"When you're born on top of rock, you got to work real hard to get something in the ground,” says Gettys, who was raised here and whose great-uncle was a U.S. Congressman. “And that's just really been our story forever."
Few years tested that resolve more than 2022. When the Panthers’ headquarters deal collapsed, the ensuing legal drama became a bitter public debate over who was more at fault. The company Tepper created to run the project filed for bankruptcy, and eventually reached about $100 million in settlements with Rock Hill, York County, and contractors. Rock Hill bought the property, which sprawls along Palmetto Parkway and Mt. Gallant Road, out of bankruptcy for about $26 million, Gettys says.
“When we had individuals and others trying to lay blame at the city of Rock Hill, when you had talk radio and other publications in Charlotte picking the hometown person versus this little community that obviously was ‘in over their head’ — I'll put that in quotation marks — the people of Rock Hill were very encouraging,” Gettys says now.
The structures on the site came down. Access roads were gated with no trespassing signs. Residents had all sorts of ideas for it. Some circulated a petition arguing that the site would be perfect for a — you guessed it — Buc-ee’s.
Instead, Gettys and other officials did the hardest thing a wounded city can do. They waited. They wanted good-paying jobs in a forward-thinking industry.
South Carolina commerce secretary Harry Lightsey mentioned to Gettys that he’d seen studies showing life sciences could become a major industry in the region. A 2023 study listed biopharmaceuticals as the top possible industry for the site, CBJ noted.
North Carolina was emerging as a national leader. Life-sciences is now the second-largest sector in the state, with about $82 billion in economic impact, officials said at the N.C. Biotech Summit in Charlotte last year. Gettys and Derick Close, who lives in Charlotte, began tapping on the window at the state line, working with the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance to get the word out that future investments were welcome here.
Meanwhile, the city did less-sexy work of beefing up water and sewer lines. It also worked on that old cliche about economic development being a team sport. City leaders brought York Technical College and Winthrop University into the conversations as part of the sales package. York Tech recently purchased the old Business Technology Center, giving it a home for workforce training. And Winthrop is adding an engineering degree in advanced manufacturing. The city plans to put public money into each institution, to strengthen the partnerships. "Our job now is to make sure these jobs go to our people," Gettys says.
Still, despite all that work and collaboration, the Octapharma deal almost fell through. In late June, when Gettys expected to be celebrating, York County’s council wanted to adjust the economic package to include more money for schools. The city and county spent much of July in testy and very-public negotiations, before agreeing to the terms near the end of the month. When I visited with Gettys last week, he was lighter than he’d been in our earlier correspondence in July. He said he didn’t want to dwell on that dispute, saying only that it was “challenging.”
Make a decision, live with it, and move on to the next one.
Except for one thing.
“Do you still watch Panthers games?” I ask Gettys.
“No,” he says. “Gave my PSLs away.”
It highlights the larger friction point I’d come to ask him about — how Rock Hill stays Rock Hill, while also being part of Charlotte.
To answer that, he quotes his predecessor, former mayor Doug Echols.
“We have to think of Charlotte as a campfire,” Gettys says. “You want to be close enough to stay warm, but you don’t want to get burned.”
Red clay peeks through the underbrush at the old Panthers site just off Exit 81. Photo by Logan Cyrus
The former Panthers site is now just one large rolling field, green and hopeful as a breath waiting to be exhaled.
Elsewhere, elements of Rock Hill’s future have already been constructed. Downtown’s filled with places to eat and drink. Some have Charlotte roots — Amelie’s is there, and Old Town Kitchen and Cocktails is run by the restaurant group that owns Goodyear House in NoDa — while others could only have been born here. Kounter, for instance, honors the history of the Friendship Nine, a group of Black students who staged a 1961 sit-in at the former McCrory’s Five and Dime on the same site.
The Lantern Hotel is scheduled to open next spring inside the 75-year-old former Andrew Jackson Hotel. Jim Shore, the artist whose folk-carved Disney figurines sell worldwide, is building a storefront and museum a block from Gettys' law office.
Rock Hill, with about 78,000 residents, is the fourth-largest city in the Charlotte region. It has challenges like any other. Gettys has devoted much of his eight years as mayor to reducing the poverty rate, dropping it from 18.5% when he took office to about 13% now. Of course that comes with the tension over displacement and affordable housing, but Gettys says he’s focusing on creating “jobs that make housing affordable.”
A similar tension is at the center of the I-77 toll lanes debate in Charlotte, which Rock Hill is watching closely from afar. A few Rock Hill city council members firmly oppose tolls, but others see the lanes as key to ensuring reliable travel times for goods and services from the airport and downtown Charlotte. Gettys says he can see both sides.
“It's like everything in politics right now: You just sit back and wait until those that have the ability to make decisions can bring to the table more value than what they initially brought,” he says. “Money is not value; money is an element to get to value.”
One thing that’s been particularly valuable for Rock Hill is sports. The city’s long been known as a capital for high school football, but in the past decade it’s become home of cycling, cornhole, and disc golf. When ESPN comes to town for the cornhole world championships each year, the pros climb the parking decks between matches and take bets dropping bags from the top deck onto boards below. "There's a whole economy going on," Gettys laughs.
Gettys is buying into it. At 58 with three grown sons, he and his wife just put a contract on a condo on Main Street, just to be closer to what’s next.
And somehow, that “what’s next” includes textiles.
TOP: The Springs Creative team at Baxter Mill Archive. BOTTOM: One of the millions of swatches archived at Baxter Mill. Photos by Logan Cyrus
People have been writing obituaries for textiles in North and South Carolina for decades, to the point where it was hard to imagine them ever being reborn.
Global markets are a funny thing, though.
Springs grew to 24,000 employees across 42 plants in its heyday, before the industry went offshore in the 1990s. Springs sold to a Brazilian conglomerate in 2007. But after that company struggled to make a profit, Derick Close tells me he bought back the South Carolina plants “for 10 cents on the dollar,” and started over.
About five years ago, Close says, the industry’s math began to flip, as overseas production became more expensive. Technology’s only accelerated that shift since.
“This has nothing to do with Trump. The prices started to inch up, and then you had COVID, and then you had container prices go from $3,000 to $23,000,” Close says. “Everybody could see all of a sudden doing business overseas ain't as easy as it once was. When prices were 50 cents an hour in China, and everything was wide open, an idiot could do it.”
Springs’ supply chain has increasingly become local. Milliken spins polyester in Spartanburg, S.C., for less than countries overseas can spin it. That polyester then goes to a mill in Fort Lawn, which Springs bought back from the Brazilian company. It’s not a mill in the traditional sense anymore; it’s mostly a digital printing lab. The creative hub in downtown Rock Hill creates the product design, sends the files to the printer, and suddenly this old company has moved into an operation where it can get large quantities of product out the door within a day. Springs maintains contracts with Walmart and other big stores, and on the day we visited lat week, its creative team was at L.L. Bean's headquarters working on a project.
The higher-end stuff is where the archives come in. Springs has long had licenses to use Disney products for crafts and quilting fabric by the yard. But the license was strict, in that each design had to follow Disney’s style guides. Last year, Springs team members flew to Disney’s headquarters to pitch them on the idea of redrawing the characters by hand, and blending them in with some of Springs’ archived design patterns and scenes. Disney said yes.
Springs is the only company in the country, at least in the fabric and wallpaper industry, that has such leeway with Disney’s characters.
The result is an elevated line of wallpapers and fabrics, with Spider-Man in the water terrace, or Star Wars creatures hiding in a 19th-century animal print, that Springs is marketing to higher end chains like Pottery Barn. Lucasfilm liked the Star Wars print so much, it wanted it for the walls of its own entryway.
"They've basically taken the handcuffs off," says Kathryn Lawrie, the sales executive Close still calls the marketing lead.
Lawrie, in some ways, symbolizes the economy Rock Hill is trying to build in other industries. She came to Winthrop as an undergraduate two decades ago from Columbia. She says it was “a suitcase college. I packed up and left every weekend because there wasn’t a restaurant, a bar. There was nothing to do.”
Now, she says, “I couldn't think of a better place to have a young family.”
She spends her days working alongside the next generation of design students from Winthrop, which has classrooms and space next door to Springs. The students just walk down and use the archives for creative inspiration. Springs has hired several Winthrop grads right out of school.
Before I left last week — long after Derick Close tornadoed off to wherever he needed to be next — Kathryn told me something that stuck. She waved her arm around the archive, the only one like it in the country, and talked about how a single 100-year-old design can serve dozens of clients over time.
"What design is really new anymore?" she said. "It's all inspired by something. There's always a root to every story."
It’s just the kind of thing a hack writer, certainly not me, would use as a metaphor for an entire city.
Baxter Mill Archive is trade-focused, but tours are available by appointment through baxtermillarchive.com.
First Presbyterian Church is seen through an architectural feature at the aptly named Fountain Park in downtown Rock Hill. Photo by Logan Cyrus
News & notes …
A 28-year-old NoDa resident who goes by the name Olive managed to get 1,000 people out for a hot dog-themed bar crawl in Plaza Midwood last weekend, and she pulled it together in just 45 days. Lindsey Banks, a rising star among young Charlotte journalists, told the full story in Wednesday’s Charlotte Ledger.
"I just look at a hot dog, and I just feel like it makes me smile," Olive told Lindsey. "The whole point was just to build community and just support local businesses."
A Texas developer plans to build two 19-story towers off of Carnegie Boulevard in SouthPark. They’d be the tallest buildings in the neighborhood, Axios’ Alex Sands writes.
Alex also dove into Charlotte’s ability to perpetually attract young people. Mecklenburg County’s 25- to 40-year-old population jumped by about 4,600 people last year, and the age group now makes up about a third of the workforce in some of the region’s fastest-growing, highest-skill industries.
It’s a new/old story for our city, which has long invested in a young workforce. In the late 1990s, the focus was Gen Xers. The 2010s were the era of millennials. Now, these new stats indicate we’re doing it again, with Gen Z.
Angie Myers is the new CEO of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, after serving in the role in an interim capacity for about 15 months. Myers joined the library in 2013 as finance director, before becoming CFO in 2018.
NoDa’s Neighborhood Theatre is scheduled to reopen Tuesday after two months of renovations. The first show, Franz Ferdinand, is already sold out.
The alt-weekly Queen City Nerve shut down print operations last week, and is going fully digital. The issue isn’t audience, editor Ryan Pitkin wrote. The Nerve still had a 93% print pickup rate across the city. But advertising revenue has dropped considerably.
What else to do …
The Stellar Gospel Music Awards are in Charlotte later this week, with multiple days of free markets, concerts, and community events leading up to next Saturday’s awards show at the Spectrum Center. QCity Metro has your guide.
It’s a good time of year to plan a day trip around wine. Raffaldini Vineyards in Ronda announced in its newsletter last week that its fall release is here, and it includes the long-awaited Montepulciano Riserva and Sagrantino wines. They were created using the ancient appassimento method of drying grapes, which has seen a revival around the world in recent years.
What we’re following …
A man with a long arrest history recorded video of himself punching a woman along East Boulevard. The awful videos, which have gone viral online, show the woman unconscious on the sidewalk, holding a gift balloon. She went to a hospital with “serious but non-life-threatening” injuries, CMPD said.
The attack occurred on June 30. The family of the man, Di-Quan Hunt, contacted police on Monday after seeing the videos on his social media feed, then again on Thursday to give them his location, WSOC reported. CMPD arrested Hunt hours later. Hunt’s sister told outlets that he has “paranoid schizophrenia, PTSD, and bipolar disorder” and that the family fears what might happen if he’s released into the general public again.
Lots of layers to this story, and we’ll follow it this week. Hunt’s feed also includes video of him threatening a woman on South Boulevard, before she sprints off. CMPD is hoping to speak to that woman, and any other potential victims in Hunt’s past.
Pay phone stories …
Last week we asked for your favorite pay phone memories, in response to the photo essay from Logan Cyrus. One reader replied, “You're going to be so sorry you asked for all these GenX and elder millennial answers!!”
Update: I was not sorry. Here are a few.
Least favorite memory: Calling movie theaters for movie times and having to wait through alllll the different movies and showings just to get to the film I was interested in.
Favorite memory (albeit, a dark one): I went to high school in the early 90s and there were two pay phones outside of the cafeteria. We often spent our lunch periods calling friends who were at home sick on any particular day. I was home sick the day that Kurt Cobain took his life and ended up reporting the news to all of my friends who had absolutely no idea. I spent the day glued to MTV, fielding phone calls throughout 4th, 5th, and 6th period lunches updating the entire school with details as they became known. — Sarah R.
I worked at the Ben & Jerry’s in Myers Park in the mid-1990s. The shop had an unobstructed view of the pay phone at the Shell gas station on the corner of Providence and Cherokee/Laurel. One afternoon, I took the liberty of writing down the phone number associated with the pay phone. When things were going slow at the scoop shop and an unsuspecting pedestrian would pass by the phone booth, I (or some other bored B&J’s employee) would call the number. Nine times out of ten the “victim” would answer the phone. We would typically ask the person if they saw a toy poodle (or some other breed) in the parking lot of the Shell station. “He’s really friendly. All you have to do is call his name, and he should come running up to you!”
This gag never failed (or got old) for the duration of my tenure. It was all in good fun and a great way to invite people (especially the occasional Queens College Co-Ed) to walk over to the shop and enjoy a scoop of ice cream for being a good sport. — Matt K.
My foremost phone booth memory is from college days with me calling my parents “collect” with them knowing to refuse the call, understanding that it meant I was standing there waiting for their much more affordable call back to me. #system — Jay A.
Coffee with the new Latin American Coalition director …
His journey encapsulates something that’s key to Charlotte’s identity. He was raised in New York by a Colombian mother and Puerto Rican father, suffered a generation-altering tragedy when his aunt died in the September 11, 2001 attacks, then moved to Charlotte and struggled before forming the relationships that helped him move up the social and economic ladder.
I love the guy. We had coffee at Vavela Cafe in University City on Thursday to discuss his latest career move: Last week he was appointed interim director of the Latin American Coalition.
The Coalition, formed in 1990 amid the construction of the Bank of America tower that brought Latino workers here, is the longest-serving Latino organization in North Carolina. It has a family wellness center, an economic and workforce center, a legal clinic, and offers youth education support.
Rios says one of his goals is to better tell the story of the Coalition to the broader Charlotte community. He noted last fall’s Border Patrol raids as an example of how the city turns its attention to the Latino community when there’s high-profile trouble. But the work of the Latin American Coalition, and other organizations serving immigrants, happens year-round.
His job, he says, will be “ensuring that people know all that the Coalition is doing and all the many ways it's serving the community, and feel motivated to give of themselves, especially in this pivotal moment.”
“I hope that my confidence in the organization, as proven by me taking the role, gives other people confidence and trust that it's a great investment. It’s a great place to give and direct resources to.”
More updates from the Optimist archives …
Tom Gabbard has an optimistic outlook on the future of live performance in Charlotte. Photo by Logan Cyrus
Tom Gabbard will retire as Blumenthal Arts’ CEO by the end of 2027. However, he’ll remain an adviser for Blumenthal and arts organizations around the world, according to a release.
We published an in-depth profile of Gabbard in February that traced how, since Gabbard arrived in Charlotte 23 years ago, Blumenthal has become one of the top arts organizations in the U.S.
Blumenthal says it will conduct an “intentional international search” for its next CEO.
From right to left: Pal Lawrence Okam, brother Kenny Graff, former neighbor Nick Bryan, and me.
I shot 4-under par yesterday.
Well, I shot 4-under par with the help of three teammates in a best-ball format. Hardly the greatest score, or even that good. But we had a blast, and the event isn’t about going low.
The Paraison Invitational, organized by friend and entrepreneur Yandrick Paraison, has grown into one of Charlotte’s can’t-miss tournaments and day parties. It also showcases how diverse the game is, counter to popular narratives, as we noted last year. The carts are always filled with names of corporate leaders, young entrepreneurs, and the occasional politician. Once I randomly found myself talking with the nephew of Charlie Sifford.
Congrats to Yandrick on building something that matters. Also, our team used my drive on that hole in the photo above. A rare occurrence.
