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The skyline in Charlotte’s South End is about to change again. A new 43-story tower is scheduled to be finished by 2028. For more on this and other business news of the week, Tony Mecia of the Charlotte Ledger Business Newsletter joined WFAE’s Marshall Terry for our segment BizWorthy.
Marshall Terry: Where exactly in South End is this tower going and what are the plans?
Tony Mecia: At the corner of Moorhead and South Tryon streets. People might remember the Uptown Cabaret, at least maybe by driving by it. It’s going to be on that site: a 43-story office tower, 346 apartments, 356,000 square feet of office space. This is part of the Queensbridge Collective project. The developer is Riverside Investment & Development. They've already built another tower on that site. It's already up and it looks finished from the outside. They're still finishing it from the inside. That's a 42-story residential tower. This will be right next to that.
Terry: You and I have talked extensively on this segment about there being a drought in office building construction in Charlotte, partly because of difficult finances and the continuation of hybrid and work-from-home schedules. Is this South End tower a reversal of all that, or is it a reflection of the 'flight to quality' trend we've talked about?
Mecia: There certainly has been a drought in new office construction. It's very hard to get financing for that nowadays. So this is a little bit of a reversal. I will say I think they're really helped by the fact that they had a lot of the space pre-leased.
Moore & Van Allen, which is the city's largest law firm, is going to be moving from the Bank of America Corporate Center to this new tower. To get financing, you really have to have a lot of these leases in place and lease commitments, because the banks want to know that you're actually going be able to fill these spaces and it appears like they will be able to.
Terry: Speaking of law firms, let’s take a moment now to remember a Charlotte man who built one of North Carolina’s most prominent law firms. Russell Robinson II died last week at 93. What made him such an iconic figure?
Mecia: He founded the law firm Robinson Bradshaw in 1960, that has grown to be Charlotte's third-largest law firm. He and his wife are also philanthropists, giving generously to UNC Charlotte, the Duke Endowment, the Morehead-Cain Foundation, and a lot of other local causes.
Terry: Finally, a new movie that was shot in Charlotte is set to premiere later this month at the Carolina Theatre uptown. Is this one of those Hallmark movies that all have the same plot? Because I know some of those have been shot around here before, not that there's anything wrong with that.
Mecia: I certainly don't want to give away any spoilers, but it is based on a true story of something that happened in Charlotte about 20 years ago. The movie Roofman stars Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, and it's about a man named Jeffrey Manchester who was known to drop into McDonald's restaurants and rob them by going through the roof. He later hid out in the Toys “R” Us on Independence Boulevard for a number of months. There is, I know, a love interest in this, but I don't think it's going to end up like a Hallmark movie because Jeffrey Manchester is still in prison for his crimes. The movie is going to premiere at the Carolina Theatre on Sept. 23, and it's going to be released nationally in October.
