So, you know that huge parking deck at 11th and Brevard streets in uptown Charlotte that’s just kind of been sitting there for years, partly finished, with no cars in it? Well, that could be about to change. For more on this, and other business stories, I’m joined now by Tony Mecia, of the Charlotte Ledger Business Newsletter, for our segment BizWorthy.
Marshall Terry: OK. You write that this deck was basically completed all the way back in 2017. So why has it sat there empty all this time? And what are those unfinished concrete pillars poking up all around it?
Tony Mecia: Yeah, those are both good questions — and they're questions that people have had for a number of years. This is a parking deck that, like you said, was completed in about 2017 by Levine Properties. It was originally supposed to be part of a larger development that included some apartments and some ground-level retail.
For whatever reason, the apartments never got built and the parking deck has sat there empty. Now, though, it sounds like it might be coming back to life — there might be some plans to try to open it.
Terry: I do want to quickly note that Levine Properties is WFAE's landlord of our uptown building not far away. So what's the latest with this project? Is this parking deck going to open soon? And what about the other things that we're supposed to be built around it?
Mecia: I'm not sure that it would be soon, necessarily. But we do know that Levine Properties submitted some filings to the city of Charlotte last month that said that they're interested in opening the parking deck. They said they would like to open it as a standalone deck.
There are apparently some issues with city code on that site where you can't just open it as a standalone parking deck. It requires some approvals. It might require a little bit of work done to the site. There are these concrete pillars that are sticking up that sounds like might start to be removed. But it has more than 1,300 spaces. A lot of people are hoping that that could happen.
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Terry: On to some food news now — the owner of beloved Charlotte restaurant Alexander Michael's is being sued over what?
Mecia: So Alexander Michael's is a restaurant in Fourth Ward in uptown Charlotte. It's been in existence since 1983. It's in a building that is almost 130 years old. It's always on the list of best restaurants in Charlotte.
The restaurant and the restaurant's owner are being sued by the landlord who bought the property in 2022. The landlord said he was deceived when he bought the property because he said the restaurant and the previous owner altered the lease right before the closing to make it less favorable to the building's owner. And that's important, he says, because if there are any changes in ownership or if there's a new tenant going in there, that it will trigger the need to update Alexander Michael's to current code, which would cost thousands of dollars, the owner says. The owner is a company called 24th Street Partners.
The other interesting piece in this lawsuit — it says that the current owner of Alexander Michael's, a man named Steve Casner, that he has indicated that he's going to sell the restaurant, that there's going to be a new owner of Alexander Michael's. So it's possible that there could be some changes afoot.
Terry: Finally, this week you dedicated a whole Ledger edition to stories about books, including an interview with local author Joy Callaway. We don't have time to get into everything you two talked about, but I am curious about her starting off in public relations before becoming an author full-time. What did Callaway say it takes to break into publishing and also the business of promoting and selling novels?
Mecia: She's got two books out now that came out in the spring. One of her recent books is set at Camp Greene, which is a World War I military camp in west Charlotte. She said she likes to get into the mentality of the character. She sort of banged one [book] out over a number of months and then did the second one after giving her brain a little bit of a rest.
As far as the marketing side of the books, she did talk a little bit about being on book tours, going to Costco and having people come up to her and say they had ideas for books about mermaids and UFOs — but she better not take their material or they would sue her.
Support for BizWorthy comes from the law office of Robertson and Associates.
