Here's another sign that life in Charlotte is slowly getting back to the way it was before the pandemic: The uptown lunch crunch has returned.
Lunchtime in uptown used to mean lines in restaurants and in front of food carts and packed patios and plazas. But COVID-19 effectively put a stop to that. Now, some of those hungry workers are back — though not quite at 2019 levels just yet.
“Bank workers are coming back,” the Charlotte Ledger business newsletter’s Tony Mecia told WFAE’s Marshall Terry on this week’s BizWorthy. “Bank of America said that its workers were coming back March 1. Wells Fargo has set a date of March 14, which is this coming Monday. So, those numbers are coming back, and that's creating more lines that you would have traditionally seen from a few years ago at some of the lunch hot spots in the 12 o'clock hour.
“A lot of places have closed permanently or temporarily, but the hope from a lot of workers that I talked to is that some of those will open up and alleviate some of these lines during the prime time.”
Speaking of people being out and about… Folks who are fond of exercising on Charlotte’s popular Little Sugar Creek Greenway are running into bad news: The section between Morehead Street and East Boulevard is closed for the next two years.
Little Sugar Creek greenway is closed in the midtown area. We knew this project was coming. The stretch along the hospital is closed for two years during construction and improvement projects. #bikeclt (will post more on the closure start/end location and alt-route shortly) pic.twitter.com/D9mJCUJHu6
— CLT Bike Commuters🚲 (@CLTBikeCommuter) March 8, 2022
“Atrium Health is redoing its Carolinas Medical Center campus, and at the same time, the city and county are seeing an opportunity to redevelop that greenway,” Mecia said. “So, it's really in conjunction with what Atrium Health is doing right there. But you know, anybody who's been on that greenway, it's kind of a narrow path… So, they're going to widen that greenway. They're going to make some improvements that make it less prone to flooding.”
You can listen to the full BizWorthy conversation above. Here’s a quick look at what else Mecia and Terry talked about this week.
- There’s a bit more discussion of uptown getting more lively.
- There’s some discussion about the dispute between billionaire David Tepper’s sports company and the city of Rock Hill, South Carolina, over the development of a new Carolina Panthers headquarters.
- Some residents in the Union County town of Weddington are raising concerns over an 80-acre development project at the intersection of Providence and Weddington roads.
