The creek the city loved to hate

March 28, 2015 3:07 PM

Charlotte, NC is unusual in not being located on the coast of an ocean, lake, or major river. Instead, it has Little Sugar Creek: The creek the city loved to hate
posted by hydropsyche (13 comments total)

Charlotte, NC is unusual in not being located on the coast of an ocean, lake, or major river.

This doesn't seem to be unusual around Denver. We obv. don't have oceans. Or lakes. Or major rivers in a large swath of the country.

We have mountains though. And deserts. And desserts, if you've left a little room.
posted by alex_skazat at 3:34 PM on March 28, 2015 [2 favorites]

It's not even unusual for the Southeast. See for example Atlanta.
posted by madcaptenor at 3:39 PM on March 28, 2015 [3 favorites]

Of course, Atlanta was an obvious spot to build a settlement because of its proximity to a major airport.
posted by aaronetc at 3:49 PM on March 28, 2015 [53 favorites]

These two sentences could describe every urban waterway in the US:

Little Sugar’s intimacy with some of the city’s oldest neighborhoods made it vulnerable to centuries of callous treatment from residents, businesses and government, including sewage and industries’ chemical waste. Machines dredged and straightened its bends. Engineers riprapped its banks with rocks. Highways and parking lots hid it.

I feel a bit sorry for the engineers who did all that work. It was seen as necessary and positive at the time, but now it gets universally criticized:

In a 2005 interview, long-time Charlotte engineer Pete Verna remembered his work for Rouse, who had decided in September, two months before the opening, more parking was needed. Verna complied. “I covered all that,” Verna said. “I covered the creeks.”

The way we have treated urban waterways is just shameful. Happily there are starting to be some daylighting projects, and as greenways become recognized as positive urban amenities it's getting easier to ease off on the heavy engineering and develop lighter touch approaches. It's ridiculously expensive to reconstruct urban waterways, though -- it's high risk (for obvious reasons, with all the houses and infrastructure), adding gazillions to the engineering and design costs, permitting will take years even with no lawsuits, and the construction work is terribly difficult because of the layers of infrastructure and tight working conditions. (And for both the design and construction, there just aren't very many qualified and experienced companies, since it is a new field, which also can drive costs up.)
posted by Dip Flash at 3:55 PM on March 28, 2015 [4 favorites]

It's not even unusual for the Southeast. See for example Atlanta.

Atlanta was possible because of the railroads. Commerce and transport was mostly done by water in Colonial America, since land transport was difficult and dangerous.
posted by thelonius at 4:04 PM on March 28, 2015 [3 favorites]

If you like heavily polluted waterways, you'll love the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal*

* - No, you won't
posted by double block and bleed at 4:37 PM on March 28, 2015

The city I live in has a river, an important one to the city's history, that they buried in culverts in the 1950's and 60's in the name of "urban renewal". They buried it to a depth of 20 to 30 feet. They've done studies to see what it would take to daylight the river, and it would be a massive undertaking that would disrupt a large area, cost 10+ million to implement, and end up as a 30 foot stretch of river about ten feet wide and 30 feet below street level with a "river walk" along it on one side. So it would be nice to look at, I suppose. But there's no real interest by the city population to do it and no money anyway. So the current plan is to embed colored concrete along the river's path through town.

There were good reasons to bury it. It was used often as a garbage dump. There were 7 bridges throughout downtown, and the trash and sludge would catch on the bridge footings and back up the water, causing flooding. The city sewers ran to part of it, which caused all kinds of algae bloom and a strong smell. In early years, the river was stronger with very minimal water level management, and now the flow is so controlled where the river comes into town that it's little more than a small creek in most places.

Given the current city government's complete lack of authority (we are being run by the state) and current level of corruption (about 8 on a 1 - 10 scale, 10 being prison sentences for everyone from the mayor on down), I think we should let the sleeping river lie.
posted by disclaimer at 5:44 PM on March 28, 2015

What's a springblock in this context? An enclosure around a spring?
posted by Joe in Australia at 5:44 PM on March 28, 2015

"Charlotte, NC is unusual in not being located on the coast of an ocean, lake, or major river."

This assumption, addressed by several people above, is something I've been thinking about recently while playing the excellent city-building game, Cities: Skyline. You literally cannot begin your city without access to a body of water, because while the game allows you to build a water tower (presuming some invisible city wells, I suppose) in lieu of a river/lake pumping station, it doesn't allow you to build a sewage treatment plant until the city has grown. At the outset, only a "water drain pipe" into a river or lake is available.

I've been reading Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London urban fantasy series since the first one was published a few years ago, and I find the idea of all these rivers, many of which are hidden and/or are completely built-over and subterranean, fascinating.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:10 PM on March 28, 2015 [5 favorites]

This sounds like a much longer version of the Muddy River on the Boston/Brookline line, which long ago had a good part of its (fairly short but also polluted) length put into an underground culvert - which did inconvenient things such as overflowing into the Kenmore Square MBTA station, disrupting the Green Line for months while the station was repaired. The Army Corps of Engineers is in the middle of a restoration project that will include "daylighting" the river near the Landmark Center, i.e., eliminating the culvert and returning the river to as close a natural state as you can get when you consider all the landscape tinkering Frederick Law Olmsted did with it to make it particularly bucolic.
posted by adamg at 7:07 PM on March 28, 2015

Um, there is the Chattahoochee River at Atlanta. Not the biggest river, but a river.
posted by amtho at 8:39 PM on March 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

alex_skazat: "This doesn't seem to be unusual around Denver."

How do you not know about the Platte? The city came up around it.
posted by boo_radley at 11:07 AM on March 29, 2015

Thanks for sharing ! I live in Charlotte but hadn't seen this before. The Sugar Creek greenway really is lovely and has added a lot of character and activity to that part of town. It's also part of a larger effort called the Carolina Thread Trail, which spans 15 counties in North and South Carolina.
posted by Sweetie Darling at 4:15 PM on March 29, 2015 [1 favorite]