This is a story about 16 men, a concrete mixer and a miracle. Before the guys with the bulldozers and backhoes showed up to put in new curbature, Logie Avenue, the street that I call home, didn’t exactly look like the rest of Plaza Midwood.
I doubt it’s a coincidence that the Plaza Midwood Neighborhood Association’s (PMNA) website is vague about the eastern boundary of our neighborhood, which it describes as “Briar Creek and the fairways of Charlotte Country Club preclude(ing) the streets.”
Anyone with two eyes and an official map of Plaza Midwood from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission can clearly see that Midwood ends at Masonic Street on Central, which makes Logie the last full residential street in Plaza Midwood.
But I doubt that the neighborhood association is in much of a hurry to publicize that fact. That’s probably due to the fact that while the PMNA website may brag about Midwood’s diversity, the residents of Logie are among the few Midwooders still actually living it. In the year-and-a-half I’ve owned property there, Logie has been home to retirees, lawyers, teachers, Mexican laborers, blue-collar workers, a Section 8 family, at least one drug dealer, Southern-Americans (including one family that flies the Confederate flag along with the national one), several African-American families, two goats and one journalist.
Diversity in practice is a far different thing from diversity in theory. When you live on a truly economically diverse street, you live with people with varied social skills and intelligence levels.
Generally speaking, those on the bottom rungs of that ladder don’t take care of their lawns, their homes, and sometimes even their bedraggled children. When you live next to folks who think living room furniture belongs on the porch, that the proper resting place for a car is the spot where it dies (and their clunkers always die in the front yard) or folks so beaten down by life that they couldn’t fathom why it might make sense to re-seed the lawn or replace siding, it makes little sense to pour money into fixing up your own house.
These sort of folks make up maybe a quarter of those on Logie, and like dozens of Charlotte streets in the same situation, the effect of their lifestyles on their neighbors is contagious. When it comes to paving a driveway, repainting a house or seeding a lawn, those of us who see the street’s potential are locked in a mutual investment standoff, staring each other down while waiting for someone else to take the first risk and make the first move.
The chatter among us is continuous. We fret over who the new neighbors will be. We swear in frustration when another recalcitrant property owner gets yet another extension on the condemnation of their property. And as we talk, we escalate each other’s fears that maybe we bought on the wrong street at the wrong time.
Things might have gone on as they were had the city council not approved sidewalks for our street. In the last three weeks, my street has come further along than it has in the last two years, and there’s a lesson to be learned from that.
I doubt that council members understand the profound effect the sidewalks they vote to fund can have on streets like mine. The fact that we now have an answer to our drainage problems and a safe place to walk is only the tip of the iceberg.
As the men worked, the neighbors got to know them, at first only casually, and then by name. Then it happened. The elderly owner of one of the least attractive homes on the street offered some of the men cash to pave his muddy, weed-infested driveway and walkway after their regular work hours.
In the process of paving it, they had to dig up his small front lawn and the three pathetic blades of grass growing upon it. As part of the deal, they re-seeded it, and somewhere in the process, the look of the property went from decrepit to rustic.
As word spread, folks who couldn’t afford to pay market prices for paving chased down the men with fistfuls of cash. The driveways went in like dominoes as the workers used excess concrete that would have been thrown out at the end of the day to extend driveway after driveway 10 to 15 feet beyond the sidewalks.
Folks who couldn’t afford concrete driveways paid $40 for gravel ones while others forked out small amounts of cash for additions and repairs to cracked old walkways that protruded at odd angles from the earth in their front yards.
After months of ignored calls to the city to have abandoned cars removed from three of Logie’s small front yards, the men in tow trucks were finally forced to come and cart them away, a necessity to make room for the sidewalks.
And then, before the birds could eat the grass seed, it rained. Though I would hardly describe most of yards on my street as lawns, the color green is beginning to rival the color brown on Logie, and the fever is beginning to catch. In the same afternoon, not one, but two new sprinklers were spotted where sprinklers had never been seen before, whirring and ticking across newly seeded lawns. An old man was seen adding manure to long-forgotten flowerbeds and planting flowers.
Around the time they finished the first side of the street and began paving the other, something else happened. People I had never met before began to come out of their houses and walk the street. As I worked past dark to seed and hay my new lawn courtesy of the workers who dumped a few hundred pounds of dirt in my yard and spread it for me with a tractor two women cut their walk short to pitch in and help me finish, cheering with me as I cut my new sprinkler on for the first time.
An as I feel asleep that night I began to wonder what strategically placed sidewalks and some additional curbature could do for some of the other struggling neighborhoods in this city.
Worth considering, isn’t it?
This article appears in Oct 17-23, 2001.
