Charlotte, NC: The Global Evolution of a New South City

Salad-bowl Suburbs: A History of Charlotte’s East Side and South Boulevard Immigrant Corridors

Tom Hanchett Salad-bowl Suburbs A History of Charlotte’s East Side and South Boulevard Immigrant Corridors surprising new residential pattern seems to be taking shape in American cities. Historically, dating back to the nineteenthcentury ,newlyarrivedimmigrantsclusteredintightpacked inner-city neighborhoods, often denoted as Little Italy, Chinatown, or the like. Today, in contrast, foreign arrivals are heading outward, scattering into post–World War II suburbs. Settlement geography seems to be dispersed and multiethnic, usually mingling the fresh arrivals among longtime residents. These “salad-bowl suburbs” have been most remarked upon in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. The Chicago Tribune, for instance, reported in 2005: For the first time, more Latinos live in Chicago’s suburbs than in the city . . . Latinos now make up a fifth of the six-county region . . . Latinoowned businesses have helped revitalize broken business strips in towns such as Waukegan, Cicero and Melrose Park. And Latino homeowners account for nearly half of a recent surge of 89,000 suburban houses sales since 2000.1 The trend also appears in smaller metropolitan areas, even in Pennsylvania ’s depressed Allentown where Latino suburbanites quadrupled between 1980 and 2000.2 All ethnic groups seem to be taking part, as demographer William Frey noted in his pioneering essay, “Asians in the Suburbs.”3 Intermingling of groups is evident in the suburbs of New York and Los Angeles, according to a 2000 study led by David Halle.4 Likewise in Dallas, writes reporter Pala Lavigne, old parts of the city have identifiable Latino “barrios ,” but in the suburbs “roots are spread more evenly among Mexico, India, China and other places abroad.”5 Evidence of this polyglot pattern is coming A 248 hanchett from census data and also from observers on the ground.6 It is especially visible in business areas where roadside signs shout in a multitude of languages, such as in suburban Phoenix as observed by Alex Oberle, or along Atlanta’s busy Buford Highway, as chronicled by Susan Walcott.7 Salad-bowl suburbs is a good name for this new phenomenon. A handful of specialists in geography and demography have proposed other labels for these places and the processes that unfold there—ethnoburbia, melting pot suburbs, heterolocalism—but no name has yet stuck, perhaps because none captures the multiplicity of old and new cultures coexisting side by side.8 The metaphor of the salad bowl was coined in 1959 by historian Carl Degler, who sought a better image of cultural change than the older melting pot.9 Most scholars now agree with Degler that immigrants’ cultural distinctiveness seldom melted completely away, but rather contributed flavorful fresh components to American society. The residential intermingling now happening in suburbia takes the salad bowl metaphor to a new level. Salad-bowl suburbs are very evident in Charlotte. Two immigrant areas in Charlotte developed rapidly after 1990—the East Side (along Central Avenue , North Tryon Street, and adjacent streets) and South Boulevard. Both are very suburban in aspect, characterized by ranch houses, garden apartment complexes, and small strip shopping centers built mostly during the 1950s to 1970s. Newcomers of every background live and shop here, including Latinos, Asians, Middle Easterners, Africans, and eastern Europeans. Although immigrants are highly visible, native-born whites and blacks still remain the majority of the population. This chapter traces the history that produced Charlotte’s East Side and South Boulevard corridors. Both areas got started in the mid-twentieth century as workers who had gained a little prosperity in the city’s textile mills and other factories moved outward into modest new suburban housing . These white families were joined by African Americans as civil rights movement victories took hold in the 1970s, a process that resulted in some all-black areas, but more mixed-race neighborhoods. History produced an array of affordable housing opportunities by the 1990s. And that was precisely what immigrants needed when they began arriving in that decade. A Family Story, to Begin Roy and Polly Grant are the sweetest couple, old fashioned salt-of-the-earth white southerners who will not let a stranger visit without taking away a jar of homemade peach preserves. I first sat with them in the 1980s in the parlor Salad-bowl Suburbs 249 of their modest two-bedroom brick home on The Plaza in Charlotte’s Eastside , gathering tales about Roy’s life working in Carolina cotton mills and playing stringband music. Recently I asked them to...