Don’t get Jerry Kirk wrong—he likes the new NoDa. “It’s still fun,” he says. “It’s just not an arts district.” He’s a slight, fast-talking man with a baseball cap that covers his baldness, a beard gone white, and a denim jacket with a lapel pin from Rococo Fish, a long-gone gallery that used to be a neighborhood cornerstone. “That’s been on there for years,” Kirk mutters, referring to the pin.
NoDa was a rough neighborhood back in the mid-1990s. Artists would don matching hats that read “SECURITY” and, flashlights in hand, patrol the streets. But the crowds had discovered the gallery crawls and the characters who came out for them, and the two blocks of North Davidson Street between 34th and 36th streets vibrated with an energy Charlotte had never seen. Somebody would start pounding on bongos, and the drum circles would swell into the dozens, then hundreds. The air was rich with smoke from sources legal and illegal, and people would drift between the galleries and the legendary dive bar Pat’s Time for One More.
It’s far more sedate now. Kirk and his wife come by regularly to grab a bite at Haberdish, or coffee at Smelly Cat, or just to walk the dog and people-watch. If he didn’t have a history with it—if he weren’t one of the signers of the declaration of NoDa, as it were—he’d probably enjoy it more.
That’s the problem: He does have a history with it, and this being Charlotte, the outward signs—the old mill houses and auto shops you could rent for a few hundred dollars and scrawl drawings on after a few beers—are damn near gone. “It’s no longer an art district. It’s an entertainment district, and it’s too crowded,” he says. “It’s too packed, and it just keeps getting worse.”
“I collect stuff,” says Kirk, shown here at his home in Ballantyne. He posts old newspaper clippings, fliers, photos, and other items to his “NoDa in the 1990s” pages on Facebook and Instagram. “I have all the history.” Photo by Logan Cyrus
He still paints from a room in his Ballantyne East home—deep south Charlotte, of all places—which he shares with his wife, Lisa, a North Carolina Air National Guard colonel. But he’s not as inspired as he once was. He’s 64, and he understands how his complaints about the latter-day NoDa might sound like the kvetching of a guy in his 60s reminiscing about the good old days.
The thing is, though, it really was something, a scene that for a decade or so, from the early 1990s until the early 2000s, was the closest Charlotte ever got—or probably ever will get—to a genuine, organic arts-and-culture district, the kind of neighborhood cities pay consultants millions to curate and brand.
Kirk, once a cornerstone of that version of NoDa, has evolved into the keeper of its memory through a Facebook page and Instagram account, both titled “NoDa in the 1990s.” This year, he plans to self-publish a book, Memories of NoDa: Reflections on Being an Artist and Participating in the Evolution of an Art District, with his collection of photos, fliers, newspaper clippings, and stories. It’ll be the first comprehensive archive, in book form, of the neighborhood as it was in its bohemian heyday.
Now is the time for it. NoDa is reckoning with its past, or the idea that it ever had one. It’s one of the most common complaints about Charlotte: What little history and culture it has gets torn down and replaced by apartment complexes. If you want to see that happen in real time and full color, take a walk around NoDa. The Brooks’ Sandwich Shop property on North Brevard Street, home to some of the city’s best burgers for 50 years, is up for sale. Over on 36th Street, massive apartment buildings take up entire blocks. The YMCA of Greater Charlotte is looking to sell the Johnston YMCA on North Davidson Street, here since 1951, as close to a community hub as the neighborhood’s ever had.
Developers have flocked to NoDa for years, but this is the first time I’ve sensed that the last vestiges of the old neighborhood are being wiped away. It’s an odd, very Charlotte-in-2024 sensation, especially considering I helped gentrify it: I moved to NoDa in 2006. Lately, this transformation is happening with bullet-train velocity throughout this high-priced construction zone of a city, where it’s getting harder and harder to find a decent, affordable place to live. Charlotteans enjoyed a less manufactured, more reasonably priced environment not long ago. These weren’t ancient times. These were the 1990s, for heaven’s sake. How has this happened so quickly?
I thought Kirk, who’s been here since 1991, might help me figure that out, or at least give me an idea of what I missed—and maybe what you did, too. “Charlotte, to me, was NoDa. There was not a whole lot going on anywhere else,” he says. “You felt like you were stepping into history. There was nothing remotely like it around. You felt like you were not in Charlotte. You were in a historical place filled with character and potential. It just felt like a place that was waiting to be woken up.”
Kirk needed to be shaken awake, too. A native of Falls Church, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., he’d wanted to paint since he was a child. In his 20s, he was a graphic artist, cartoonist, and commercial artist, experience that came in handy later when he worked as an art director for a couple of marketing agencies in Charlotte. But he struggled to find work as a freelance artist and, frustrated, enlisted in the Air Force. He spent four years in the service, where he met Lisa, who found the wild blue yonder a more promising professional path than he did. The military’s regimentation wasn’t for him.
While stationed in Plattsburgh, New York, a small town near the Canadian border, a friend told him about an arts community that had sprouted in Charlotte. Paul Sires and Ruth Ava Lyons had opened an independent arts gallery, Center of the Earth, in a decrepit former mill village near the city center, and it was beginning to draw other artists and creative types. The Kirks had never been to Charlotte, but they knew it was warmer than Plattsburgh: They came to town in 1991 and found an apartment off Independence Boulevard.
Soon after, Kirk answered a newspaper ad seeking art and artists, placed by Terry Carano, a used-car salesman in his late 40s who had become obsessed with oil painting. Carano had set up a studio and makeshift gallery at Oakleaf Auto Sales at East Sugar Creek Road and Eastway Drive, across from Garinger High School. “I told him I was a painter,” Kirk says. “I had an apartment full of paintings that I’d been doing in Plattsburgh. He said, ‘Bring ’em all.’ So I loaded ’em on top of my car, strapped ’em down, drove to Sugar Creek, and he hung all of them in his little gallery behind the car lot.”
Carano had unruly, reddish-gray hair and a beard to match, which led to an obvious nickname: Van Gogh. A small group of artists coalesced around Carano, calling themselves Friends of Van Gogh. “He was a redheaded bundle of energy from New England, and he was just off the hook,” says artist, musician, and Friend of Van Gogh Rusk “Mac” Masterton. “He loved the artwork, and he was a talker, and, yeah, he got this whole thing together.”
Kirk began to find his identity as a painter. He developed a visceral, richly colorful, expressionistic style inspired by the color of the neighborhood and the work of painters like Edvard Munch. Kirk began to promote the neighborhood and its arts scene; after Carano left Charlotte in 1994, Kirk evolved into an unofficial spokesman for Eclipse Art Group, an offshoot of Friends of Van Gogh.
Eclipse Art Group, 2003 (from left): Raed Al-Rawi, Frank Haas, Rusk “Mac” Masterton, Kirk, and Randy Crawford.
The neighborhood kept growing. In spring ’95, K.C. Terry opened Fat City Deli at Davidson and 35th, and that was like a squirt of lighter fluid. “It was like the one element that was missing,” Kirk says. The food was great, bands like The Avett Brothers played sets there, and the neighborhood partied into the night.
If you scroll through the clips and photos Kirk has posted on the “NoDa in the 1990s” Facebook page, you can see that many NoDa businesses were in old body shops and once-abandoned stores. Some establishments kept that grubbiness even after renovation, but already, the artists smelled something else in the air. As great as Fat City was, Kirk and the core group of artists noted uneasily that the bar was outdrawing the galleries. “Fat City was like that one thing the street needed to push it over, and it did,” Kirk says. “And that’s when the developers started paying attention.”
In 1995, Kirk took a photo of North Davidson Street, looking toward uptown from 36th. There’s Center of the Earth to the left and artist and bartender Steve Holt’s Wrightnow Gallery on the right, outlined against a threatening, slate-gray sky. “What is that brewing in the distance?” Clark Whittington, a former co-owner of Rococo Fish, commented on Kirk’s “NoDa in the 1990s” Facebook page. “The storm of gentrification?”
Fat City Deli (rendered by Kirk) opened in 1995 and became the neighborhood’s main hangout—but also drew the attention of developers, who eventually turned the space into the Fat City Lofts apartments (below).
Courtesy, Logan Cyrus
It was inevitable, in other words. This is a city whose leaders made up their minds decades ago that Charlotte would emphasize the new. What we see all around us, buildings thrown up overnight and neighborhoods you can’t recognize from six months ago, are the long-term consequences of that choice. Was it the right one? You could argue forever about that, and I sit uneasily with it. I never experienced NoDa in the 1990s and wish I had. But as the neighborhood began to transform in the mid-2000s, I bought a house there, figuring it’d be a cool place to live and a good investment. It’s been both, although the appreciation has come at a price.
I knew the city would eventually open a light rail line through NoDa: That happened in 2018, completing the transformation. That’s why the last traces of old NoDa are disappearing, which is bitter and sweet in equal measure. My decision was financially sound, but I miss the neighborhood I never lived in, the one I helped change.
“It will never happen again,” Kirk says. “The thing that made NoDa happen was that it was in a neighborhood that was decrepit, there was nothing happening, everything was cheap. Right? You could go down there and rent a building for virtually nothing. Where can you do that now?”
It came down to money, as it always does. The first domino toppled in 2002, when Pat Nevitt, owner of Time for One More, teamed with Crosland on a mixed-use development that supplanted the bar and a pair of studios managed by artist Steve Holt. Fat City shut down a year after that, although the neighborhood association fought to keep the facade, which now fronts an apartment building called Fat City Lofts.
The last of the old galleries, Center of the Earth, hung on until 2010. The 2008 economic crisis stalled numerous construction projects around the neighborhood, but once the recession faded around 2013, property values screamed skyward throughout Charlotte. Sires and Lyons paid $40,000 for the Lowder Building in 1986; in 2023, Mecklenburg County assessed the property’s value at $4.8 million.
In 1997, Kirk, at the time an art director for Burke Design Group, produced a video about the NoDa arts scene. Toward the end of the video, the artists and gallery owners try to predict the future. “It starts out as a very pure thing, where money really doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Holt says. “But as time goes on, and the values in the neighborhood go up, as they already have started to do, we’ll go through the cycle just like every other neighborhood. Twenty years from now, this’ll just be a tourist trap. All the artists will be gone.”
Holt died of cancer in 2019, which means he lived long enough to see his prediction come true.
NoDa retains some of its character as a quirky, arts-based neighborhood, but the galleries that distinguished it in the ’90s are long gone. (Logan Cyrus)
NoDa has become a neighborhood for bars and restaurants like Growlers Pourhouse, Ever Andalo, and Roy’s Kitchen & Patio. (Logan Cyrus) They’ve supplanted ’90s favorites like Center of the Earth Gallery, 23 Studio and Pat’s(below), and Fat City Deli.
Courtesy, Kirk
On a gray, chilly Saturday afternoon in February, Jerry and Lisa Kirk drive up to the old neighborhood. Lisa peruses the boutiques and street vendors while Jerry and I take a walk. We duck behind Cabo Fish Taco. “Yeah, man. Back here, this was all a gravel parking lot,” he says, sweeping his hand across the trash-strewn area behind Cabo. “And across here, we’d have a stage where the bands would play. We’d get 200 or 300 people packed in here, watching the bands, smoking dope—you know, ’cause it’s kind of hidden.” Pat’s Time for One More was next to where Cabo is now. “There was the back door to Pat’s,” Kirk says, gesturing. “You’d go into Pat’s, grab yourself a beer, come back out, listen to the band play. And then right here—”
He sees something in a corner. “Oh, man. Oh, shit!”
Kirk jogs over and gazes at a pair of faded white murals on red brick, one in the shape of an arched doorway; the other, to its right, a small rectangle. The “doorway” was a wall mural of a gallery to represent the neighborhood at the time. The rectangle was painted—by Terry Carano, Kirk believes—with an abbreviation in red capital letters, running diagonally from top left to lower right: NODA. Both date from summer 1991, just a few months after Kirk and his wife had moved here from New York. That little rectangle is a landmark.
“This is the first visual use of the word ‘NoDa’ ever,” he says. “Right there. Ever.” He directs me to his Instagram account, where he’s posted his own photo of the original. Later today, he’ll post photos of this discovery with a long note that reads, in part: “I was both shocked and thrilled to see a remnant, no matter how faded, of the original NoDa amidst all of the changes that have taken place over the decade. I’m going to admit that I got chills.” You have to look very closely to tell it ever existed.
“I had no idea it was still here,” Kirk says, astonished, behind Cabo. He’s more animated than he’s been since we met. That jolt of 1990s energy persists as we walk around to the front of the building.
GREG LACOUR is the editor.