#shared office space in winston-salem

[thrivecoworking]

Room to Grow: An Entrepreneur Shares His THRIVE | Coworking Journey - THRIVE | Coworking

Mike White has built connections and collaborated with a diverse range of individuals, from video producers to dog-sitters. He emphasizes how THRIVE can play a crucial role in helping businesses grow by fostering strong relationships and creating valuable partnerships across various industries.

[xfmaweezy]

Story Rating:M | Read on AO3 here

Fox Mulder, Dana Scully, Diana Fowley

Ninety Minutes

Summary: Diana is forced to relive the events in Ninety Seconds

The cab dropped her half a block south of Callahan’s, a favorite watering hole for the guys in blue of Winston-Salem, and she’d been pacing the same two squares of sidewalk for ten minutes while considering her motives. It had only been a month since she’d contemplated similarly in the elevator of Fox Mulder’s apartment building, and she wasn’t particularly keen on a repeat of that evening.

By some cruel twist of fate, Diana had found herself on yet another task force working closely with Fox and his tiny partner, who was still wearing a cast on her broken left wrist. But it wasn’t the case that had her all out of sorts, it was her visit to Fox’s apartment after the apprehension of the convicts—a visit she’d convinced herself was only about the X-Files—that set her mind and her heart adrift. She hadn’t been able to function properly since, a dangerous state of mind to be in given her line of work. But she couldn’t get the image of a half naked Dana Scully out of her mind, nor the syrupy sweet affection Fox lavished upon her as she clung to him, unaware of Diana’s presence.

She’d finally begun to adjust somewhat to the knowledge that not only did she still have feelings for Fox, but he was in love with someone else. She thought she’d begun to adjust, until ten days ago when she was called onto this case in North Carolina and reunited with Fox and his partner. For the past week she’d been able to maintain a friendly and professional affect, but now that the case was over she found her resolve crumbling. If she could just get through tonight she’d be able to retreat and lick her emotional wounds in private.

Seeming to reach a decision within herself, she straightened her shoulders, cinched the belt of her overcoat, raised her chin and strode toward the pub.

The sound of celebratory laughter spilled out into the night air on a cloud of tobacco smoke as she pulled on the brass handle of the heavy pub door. There was much to celebrate: no injuries, a potential homegrown terrorist in custody, and nothing paranormal to report. But try as she might, she could not feel the joy from a job well done.

Diana hung her coat on the rack near the door and made her way through the throngs of investigators crowded around the long bar. From the suited field agents to uniformed local beat cops, everyone appeared to be having a good time, several reaching out to pat her shoulder or shake her hand as she weaved her way to a darkened, less hectic area of the room.

She located several empty stools in a corner by the server’s station and took a few seconds to scout the place before sitting. Callahan’s was a large open area with a bar bracketing one end. A small stage sat along the pub’s back wall and booth-style benches lined the opposite wall, facing the stage. The space between was filled with chairs and bar tables pushed together, where detectives and officers from various agencies were sharing anecdotes and pitchers of beer, and heckling the brave souls who dared to take the mic on karaoke night.

Diana slid onto a stool nearest the Guinness tap and scanned the crowds around the bar. Most of the suited men she knew or recognized, and thankfully none were Fox. From her vantage point she’d be able to see if he arrived. She felt that unease begin to creep into her core again, and as she did, she reminded herself that if she could make it through what she witnessed a month ago, she could make it through this night. Thankfully, they were in a public place with peers and coworkers, so there would be no chance of a repeat of the events in Fox’s apartment. Besides, it was late and Fox was never the type to socialize anyway. Still, after the surprise last month, she would keep an eye on the door.

“Hey, why so serious? Aren’t you supposed to be celebrating?” Diana was brought back to the present by the voice behind the bar. She found herself briefly disarmed by the near familiarity of his moss green eyes and generous nose. “What can I get for you?” the younger man asked.

“I’ll have an Old Fashioned,” she said.

He crooked a smile and rested his palms on the bartop as he leaned toward her. “Surely such a fine investigator as yourself has noticed that while we may be in the south, this is an Irish bar,” he said, winking.

He was flirting with her. As she opened her mouth to respond in kind, the investigator on stage began to beg Jolene not to take her man, and Diana chuffed, “Okay, smartass. How about an Old Fashioned Jameson?”

“You got it,” he said, knocking his knuckles once on the wooden surface between them, and then walked off to make her drink.

The pub door opened and several of those who had been crowding the bar exited, some giving one last wave as they spilled into the cooling night. She was in a good position to people watch, and tried to relax as she took in the lighthearted and joyous atmosphere. It really had been a big win for everyone involved. Diana pulled in a deep breath, let it out slowly, and swiveled her stool toward the seating area.

As she observed two uniformed officers nearest to her, a gap opened up in the crowd and she was able to see more of the room. It was clear those at the tables had been in the pub for a while, their conversations more animated and boisterous than their peers standing around the bar, their raucous laughter occasionally drowning out the tipsy singers.

Diana startled as the tables broke out into applause and wolf whistles, and the woman on stage took a bow. She recognized the woman as Stacy Pickett, one of the lead investigators from the Charlotte ATF Field Division. She was a tall, attractive blonde who had hit it off with Fox immediately. Perhaps most surprising to Diana was that the woman seemed to hit it off with Agent Scully as well.

Diana tracked the blonde as she slinked across the floor, slipping between gaps in tables and accepting high fives and shoulder pats, and made her way to a previously unnoticed darkened corner of the room.

The sound of a heavy glass against wood alerted Diana that the bartender had returned with her drink.

“Old Fashioned Jameson,” the bartender said. “It sounded so good I made one for myself. Mind if I join you?”

“Drinking on the job?” Diana asked, taking a sip of the dark amber liquid and closing her eyes as the warmth moved through her chest.

“I know the owner,” he shrugged. Diana laughed as he pointed to his name tag: David Callahan.

“Sláinte,” she said, raising her glass and taking another sip.

Away from the bar, the blonde now stood next to a half-booth table. Diana could just make out two figures on the bench seat and one in a chair across the table from them. The woman pointed to the man on the bench, indicating “You’re next,” before the lone figure she now recognized as SAC Samson of the ATF pulled her onto his lap. The man on the bench laughed, the familiar sound breaking through the din and the smoke and landing a solid punch right to her gut.

Diana’s heart began to pound a deafening pulse in her ears. She took a large swig from her drink, draining the glass and setting it down heavily on the bar. Fox was here. And he’d been here for a while.

He stood up from the bench, exposing his smiling partner who was tucked into the corner, as the karaoke host announced, “Next up, all the way from the nation’s capital, the Rocket Man, the Myth, the Legend, give it up for Special Agent Fox Mulder!”

“You ready for another?” the bartender asked.

Diana cocked her head toward the bartender to acknowledge him and answered with an almost imperceptible nod.

Fox made his way to the stage, encouraged by hoots and whistles from rowdy colleagues. He had made an impression on the task force, his profiling and investigative skills proving vital and his quick wit and dry humor creating a sense of unity, rather than competition, among the various agencies working the case. Diana had to admit that his partner’s expertise in forensics boosted Fox’s confidence, his attitude, and his reputation. Knowing that Fox was a whole new and improved person, and accepting that the tiny redhead always at his side was the cause for it, was a jagged pill Diana hadn’t yet learned to swallow.

Chants of “Spooky! Spooky! Spooky!” broke out from the table in the corner and Fox smiled broadly as he took the mic.

“I saw you dancin' out the ocean

Running fast along the sand

A spirit born of earth and water

Fire flying from your hands

In the instant that you love someone

In the second that the hammer hits

Reality runs up your spine

And the pieces finally fit”

Diana’s eyes burned and she dropped her head. There was no worry about embarrassing herself by tearing up, no need to scramble for an excuse and blame the smoke or allergies for the moisture in her eyes. She was pretty sure she’d cried every one of her tears into her pillow a month ago.

“And all I ever needed was the one

Like freedom fields where wild horses run

When stars collide like you and I

No shadows block the sun”

Diana looked over to the stage again when the entire room joined in on singing the last line of the chorus.

“You're all I ever needed.

Ooh, Baby, you're the one.”

He was singing to her. In a crowded room of his peers, he was declaring his love for his partner. And people were cheering.

Diana swiveled her seat to face the bar, swallowing the lump in her throat, just as the bartender returned with her second cocktail. She could tell by the color in the glass he’d mixed this one even stronger and she made a mental note to double his tip.

“Mmm. So that’s why the long face, huh?” he surmised. “The one that got away?” he asked, hitching a thumb toward the stage as Fox continued his serenade.

“Oh, you’re good. Maybe you should come work for us,” she said, sarcastically, smirking up at him from behind her glass.

Diana began to feel the effects of the Jameson and she welcomed the relief. She was just so tired. Fox was the only good thing about returning to the states. She had been excited about reconnecting with him. His loyalty and his relentless search for answers about Samantha were the only things Diana was sure of, and she’d counted on those things, needed those things, in order to accomplish her mission. Instead she’d found herself heartbroken, confused, exhausted and in very real danger of failing. Her mind hadn’t been quiet for a month, and the whiskey was a welcome, though temporary, respite.

David Callahan and his magic elixir successfully distracted her from the thoughts and feelings she’d been drowning in. She nursed the last few sips of her third before grabbing her coat and slipping unnoticed out into the cool night to wait near the alley for her cab.

To her relief, she never ran into Fox, never had to school her features and fake a smile, never had to congratulate his partner—his professional partner whose cast was decorated in drawings of alien heads and “Spooky was here” scrawled in Sharpie. Karaoke was still in full swing. She’d wanted to leave before she was subjected to The Dana Scully Serenade, Part II.

The corner was dark and she hoped the cab would arrive soon. She sobered some in the chill of the night and was slowly being consumed again by the heavy weight of her life’s choices. Without Fox on her side it was hard to keep convincing herself she was doing the right thing.

Diana sighed heavily and leaned against the back corner of Callahans. The sound of a door banging open only a few feet away echoed in the quiet night and she stiffened, suddenly on guard. Music bled briefly into the alley and she settled again, expecting a waft of acrid smoke from a hurried break or the banging of a dumpster lid.

But there was no smoke, and no garbage. Only the sound of whispers and shuffling feet. Diana finally peeked around the corner into the alley—and immediately regretted it.

Not even six feet from her, Fox stood with his partner pinned to the alley wall. Agent Scully’s skirt was rucked up over her hips, allowing her legs the freedom to wrap around his waist and her ankles to cross, cradling him more tightly against her. Her pumps clattered onto the cobblestone and his hands ran from her knees, over the lace trim of her thigh highs, to her bare ass, giving it a squeeze. He whispered into her mouth filthy words, telling her how she made him feel, how hard she made him, how he couldn’t wait to be inside her again, that he loved how wet she always got for him. He ground his hips into her and she whimpered.

Diana turned and ran. She shouldn’t have come. This wasn’t just a reenactment of what she experienced in his apartment. This was worse. This felt like punishment. And she deserved every bit of it. She deserved it for leaving, for following the MUFON women, for every Morley she smoked—all of it.

Her ride approached and she signaled it to stay where it was. She arrived at the cab breathless, her hands shaking as she pulled on the door handle, crawled into the back seat, and collapsed.

The cabbie waited as she took a minute to collect herself and close the door. “You okay, Miss?” he asked, handing her a few tissues.

Diana was unsettled by her reflection in the cabbie’s rearview mirror. She must not have been out of tears after all. Black streaks of makeup trickled down over her cheeks while her chest heaved and her hands continued to shake. She looked worn and old and used up. Ninety minutes, she was in that pub. It took only ninety minutes for her outsides to match her insides. An hour and a half to completely wreck her. The realization was just what she needed to pull herself back together.

Swiping away the tears and makeup, she pulled her shoulders back and held her head high. “Yes, thank you. Will you take me to the Marriott, please?”

The cab pulled away, passing the alley where Fox loved Dana Scully. The place where she’d received an epiphany. The place where she made a choice to survive as long as she could, until Fox needed her.

And she was thinking. She was always thinking.

@today-in-fic

[admiralty-xfd]

Culmination

This is chapter 8. To go to the beginning please click here.

NAVIGATION

SCULLY

(post all things)

Monday morning.

Oh God, oh God, oh God.

She smoothes out her skirt and adjusts her hair as she stands outside the basement office door. This is, without a doubt, going to be the single most awkward day of her life. Even if everything goes fine, the huge change in their dynamic is going to be ever present.

A vivid flashback of the night before enters her mind and she tries to push it away. How is she going to work with him with that on her mind? When he is in her immediate space every minute?

She really hasn’t thought this through properly.

What if he’s upset with her for leaving in the middle of the night? What if he regrets it all and tells her it can never happen again?

Or worse, worse, what if he simply carries on like nothing ever happened? That's been their modus operandi for longer than she cares to remember. She hopes at least that much has changed. She prays that much has changed.

There’s really only one way to find out. She takes a deep breath and opens the door.

He’s there, feet up on the desk, reading a case file.

Jesus, he’s gorgeous.

He notices her enter and puts the file down, starting to get up. He grins, a playful glint in his eyes as if he has something up his sleeve. She gives him a small, inquisitive smile.

He faces her, the desk between them. Slowly, he moves his arms to one side, and with a sweeping whoosh he pushes every single item from the desk to the floor. As she looks on in mock horror, he pats the desk and waggles his eyebrows deliciously, with a smile that could melt Antarctica.

She bursts out laughing, wholesome bubbling laughter she rarely lets anyone see. Leave it to Mulder to figure out how to so perfectly break the tension.

“Oh, my God. I can’t believe you just did that.”

“I’ve been planning that all morning,” he replies proudly. Standing with his hands on his hips, he surveys the damage. “I thought maybe it would be worth all the cleanup.”

She laughs again, so relieved. Oh, it was.

Suddenly he’s come around the desk, crossed the carpet and is standing right in front of her, searching her face. Whatever permission he’s looking for in her expression he must find because now he’s kissing her, right there in the office.

She’s so relieved and happy he’s not upset or distant that she lets him kiss her, kisses him back, even seriously considers throwing him down on the desk right then and there and fulfilling another one of her well-worn fantasies, but something about being at work puts her in her right mind and after a moment she gently puts her hand on his chest and stops the kiss.

As he pulls away he looks confused. She can tell he’s wondering if he misinterpreted everything, and that’s the last thing she wants him to think. They’ve come too far to take a step backward now.

Her eyes meet his, sharing an unspoken truth, and she can see him relax. They’ve always been good at communicating with just their eyes, when they’re both willing to see.

She takes his tie in her hand and tugs at it a bit, the cool silk suddenly feeling like one of her own possessions. “Not at work, Mulder.”

He puts both hands up in resignation and grins at her. “Yep, sorry. You’re right.”

He backs up and leans against the desk. God, he looks so good in his suit. It’s the gray one with that cornflower blue shirt she loves. She revels in a simple freedom she can now enjoy without all the awkwardness: just the sight of him.

He continues. “I couldn’t help myself. To be able to do that, it’s… it’s new. I like it.”

“I like it too.”

They unabashedly gaze at one another for a few moments. It’s possibly even better than sex, at least right now, to finally be able to just look at him and not have to quickly avert her eyes to study the wall or a plant or an X File.

They understand one another in a new way, maybe not completely, but last night they both admitted a singular truth to each other that neither could deny for much longer, and that alone is so freeing.

“Why didn’t you stay?” He sounds a bit nervous. She tries to give him a reason not to be.

“I don’t know. You fell asleep, and I just… it sounds silly, I know, but it’s your space.” He looks a bit hurt. “I had to go home to get ready for work.” He doesn’t seem to be buying any one of these excuses. “I don’t know. At the time it felt like the right thing to do. I’m sorry. I’ll stay over next time, if you want me to." Her eyes widen as she catches herself. “You know, I mean, if... there’s a next time.”

His body loses its tension as he smiles, seemingly accepting her mea culpa. “I certainly hope there will be.”

She relaxes a bit and smiles. “Well.”

She knows they are supposed to talk about what happened but she doesn’t want to here, not now. And if she’s being perfectly honest with herself, maybe not ever. They’ve never been great with conversations that have to do with personal stuff and she’s not surprised it’s no different now.

She wonders how long they’ll be able to keep this up without having to talk about it. Maybe fucking and not talking about it is all this will end up being. She inwardly curses their inability to behave like grownups.

They are interrupted anyway by AD Skinner. Mulder’s eyes dart to the doorway as Scully hears footsteps and she whips around, the imposing figure of their boss standing there, taking in his surroundings.

For the first time ever, she feels self-conscious around him, as if he’s judging her. It’s hard to tell if he suspects anything, but it’s hard to tell with Skinner about most things. One thing is for sure: she doesn’t want him to know what’s going on between her and Mulder.

“Good morning, sir.”

She thinks she sounds normal, but who knows? Mulder shifts to standing from his leaning position on the desk and his hands go to his tie, straightening it. He nods at their boss and smiles. He never smiles at Skinner before nine in the morning and between the smile and the scattered mess across the floor by the desk she worries the jig may be up.

“Uh..” Skinner surveys the floor, confusion knitting his brow. “Everything okay in here?”

“Yeah, we’re... redecorating,” Mulder offers lamely.

Oh, my God. If she could, she would sink into the floor. And they’re already standing in the basement.

“Do you need something, sir?” Scully tries to move this along.

She suspects Skinner knows what’s going on as well as everyone else in the FBI they’ve ever crossed paths with over the years. She curses the unfairness that they hadn’t started sleeping together years ago, since everybody probably thought they were anyway.

Skinner’s gruff voice is all business. “I’m headed to Winston-Salem for a security detail, some high-up whistleblower at a tobacco company set to testify tomorrow morning. I wanted to check in with you two before I leave.”

“Oh. Uh… we’re fine!” she says a bit too brightly. “I think we have plenty of paperwork to keep us busy here for a couple days at least... Mulder?” She turns around almost maniacally and he’s doing everything he can not to look at her.

“Yep. We’re good. Have a nice flight, sir.”

Skinner narrows his eyes.

“Stay out of trouble, okay? It would be nice for once to not have to get a call about you two while I’m out in the field.”

Mulder crosses his arms. “We don’t have any plans for trouble, do we, Scully?”

“No, sir, trouble is not on the agenda this week.”

Skinner looks at the mess on the floor, looks at the desk, gives them one final long look, and walks out.

It isn’t until she hears the elevator doors close that Scully lets out a breath she doesn’t realize she’s been holding. She tilts her head slightly to eye Mulder behind her, then spins. “This could get complicated.”

“Only if we let it, Scully,” he replies conspiratorially, as he bends down and starts picking up the mess. “Aw,” he pouts and shows her an unfortunate casualty: his alien mug, the handle broken off.

“I guess planning this all morning didn’t involve moving your favorite mug off the desk?” she teases.

“Well, I admit I did have other things on my mind.” His voice has dropped an octave. His eyes lock with hers and her stomach contracts.

“Okay, seriously Mulder, you need to cut that out, or this is going to be an extremely long day.”

He grins. “Message received.”

She crouches down to help him pick up his things. They clean up the office in a companionable silence and when they finish, they both stand and look at each other, not saying a word.

“Please tell me you do actually have something work related to talk about,” she finally says.

“Thought you’d never ask,” he exhales gratefully as he picks up his projector remote and hits the button.

MULDER

(Je Souhaite)

He doesn’t really remember ever being this happy. Maybe when he was a child, before Samantha disappeared, before the darkness started closing in on him. Snippets of memories still occasionally flash across his mind of a time when things were simple, even normal. He hasn’t known much of anything except darkness for most of his life.

But when Scully is near, he can almost see his way out. In moments when they were together before, and moments when they are together now, she is the one thing in his miserable existence that can bring him joy, can bring him hope. For the first time in his life he wonders if there could be something else ahead, something different.

The darkness is powerful, however, and it hasn’t released its grasp on him yet. He’s used to it, and while he knows it’s probably not healthy, it’s a comfort. An addiction.

Maybe now he can become addicted to her instead.

The last few weeks have been a wonderful blur. Every day a new endeavor, a new adventure, but instead of discovering new monsters and conspiracies they are discovering parts of each other they’ve been unable to before now.

They are navigating a transition from friends to something else, even though they aren’t quite sure yet what that is. They’ve gone from standing unbearably close without the ability to bridge that distance, to having trouble keeping their hands off each other.

They've also been making and breaking new rules. Such as:

Rule #1: never at work. They’ve broken this rule exactly four times. He‘s not sorry.

Rule #2: no telling anyone else they know. Not family, not friends, not fellow FBI agents. They don’t say why, but they both know it’s because even they don’t know exactly what they are, not yet.

And rule #3: never, ever discuss what any of it means or what they mean to each other. This one they hadn’t actually verbally formulated, it just seemed to be a rule neither of them would break.

It feels juvenile, not talking about exactly what their relationship is becoming. But he’ll gladly take it, because juvenile or not, it’s better than ever.

He’s always wondered how having a sexual relationship would alter the way they interacted with each other while at work, and luckily they seem to be able to slip in and out of professional mode more easily than he anticipated. But it hasn’t stopped him from constantly thinking about their last liaison and their next one. It’s been fun having some actual real sexual encounters with her to replay over and over through his mind, to replace the hundreds of fantasies he’s had to make up over the years.

He thinks of the Lazarus Bowl premiere in Los Angeles, the two of them trying to get the movie’s stink off themselves in the back of a limousine, making out like a couple of teenagers headed to prom. They’d become experts at hiding their new relationship from the people they needed to, this poor limo driver a rare exception. The combination of the Bureau credit card Skinner offered them, a bit too much champagne and groping hands that couldn’t quite wait until they got back to Scully’s hotel room had added up to one of the greatest nights of his life. Technically, it hadn’t been a work trip, they agreed. Mulder’s room remained vacant that night.

He thinks of her apartment, which he really prefers, where he slept over after they’d beaten each other senseless under the influence of some troublesome doppelgängers. He loves being at her place, it feels like more of a home to him. Not only because it feels like her, but because he can’t help but associate his own place with loneliness.

And even during their case in North Carolina, before he thought he might die from exposure to the tobacco beetle larvae in his lungs. He almost has to laugh at the ridiculous situations the two of them get into while on this job. It took two weeks for him to recover and it was the longest two weeks of his life. Then when he thought the nicotine treatment might have sparked an addiction, it only took a single stern look from her to veto that idea.

Now they are on a flight to Creve Coeur, Missouri for an X File having to do with a man who inexplicably lost his entire mouth. Air travel is now a special form of torture for him, forced to be in such close proximity with her while thinking about whatever it was they’d done the night before. He’s read the case file twice and the movie is some terrible disaster with Sandra Bullock in a rehab facility.

Scully’s reading a book, but he knows she isn’t really reading because she hasn’t turned a page in ten minutes. He wonders if she’s thinking about him. He has nothing else to do, so he just watches her. It’s always been a favorite hobby of his, whether he’d admit it to himself or not. She’s pretending not to notice. After the fifth or sixth time he shifts uncomfortably in his seat, she closes the book and turns to him.

“Mulder. You have to settle down.”

“I’m sorry, I’m trying. You look so cute with your reading glasses on. You should wear those more often.”

“Staring isn’t polite.”

“It’s not staring, it’s gazing, Scully. And it’s all I really can do in such a public area when we aren’t even supposed to be doing anything in the first place, so carry on with whatever it is you’re pretending to read.”

She puts her book in the seat pocket and raises the armrest between them. She kicks her shoes off, tucking her legs underneath her, and interlaces their fingers together as she rests her head on his shoulder.

“You need to relax, Mulder. No one is watching us.”

“Fantastic. Wanna join the mile high club, then?”

“Oh, are you a member?”

“Well, no. But I wouldn’t mind applying.”

He can hear her laughing softly and settles his head on top of hers. They fall asleep for the rest of the flight, and no one around pays them any mind.

***

There’s a huge yacht in a trailer park, Anson Stokes’ dead body is invisible, and Mulder is pretty damn sure there’s an actual jinni involved. And maybe, just maybe, Scully has finally got the hard evidence she’s sought for longer than he cares to admit.

They’ve agreed not to fraternize while on the job but it’s been a long day and he just wants to be near her.

Fuck it, he thinks, he’s never been one to abide by the rules. He hopes someday they’ll be able to break them all but for now he’ll settle for this one.

He knocks on her motel room door, no answer. He knows she’s in there so he uses the key she gave him to let himself in, you know, just in case. He’s not really worried but if he has to use it as an excuse he will.

“Scully?” he calls tentatively into the room and closes the door behind him.

Quiet for a second, but then:

“I thought we agreed no fraternizing while on assignment, Mulder.” Coming from the bathroom.

Ooh, she’s in the bathtub. If she was doing anything else in there she’d definitely have told him to get lost by now. He grins mischievously to himself and tiptoes over, nudging the door open a crack. He doesn’t look in yet but talks through the door.

“I have some very important casework to go over with you Scully, and it really cannot wait another minute.”

He hears her sigh, the water sloshing a bit as she moves. “Muuuuuulderrrr. I have the researchers from Harvard Medical coming in tomorrow to look at my invisible man and I’m trying not to stress out about it. Can’t you come back later?”

He decides to torment her a bit more. “I believe this is very important stuff, Scully.”

“Fine, I’ll be out in a minute.” He can tell she’s rolling her eyes.

He enters the room to stop her, “No, no, you stay put. I’ll just go over it with you in here.”

She raises a quizzical brow but obliges. One thing he knows for sure about Scully, she would never willingly get out of the bathtub, not if she can help it.

“Mulder, what are you up to?”

“Nothing!” He overplays his affronted look.

A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth but it quickly disappears and she groans. “I haven’t really been feeling very well tonight.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I don’t know, my stomach feels weird. Just kind of nauseated. Maybe nerves, I suppose.”

He sits on the toilet seat and lifts her nearest foot out of the water, places it in his lap and massages it.

“That’s sexy, Scully.”

“I’m not trying to be.”

His eyes travel along the path of her body underneath the bubbles, leaving just enough to the imagination for him to handle knowing they won’t get anywhere tonight.

“Well, you’re failing miserably.”

She smiles and closes her eyes, laying her head against the back of the tub. It occurs to him she probably hasn’t heard this enough over the past seven years, certainly not from him. She’s deserved better. He makes a mental note to tell her more often.

“Anyway,” he continues, rubbing her foot. “This very important… work related... stuff.”

“Now I feel bad,” she says, eyes still closed. “You were just trying to be cute and I ruined it.”

“Nah, it’s okay,” he replies. “I didn’t really plan it out much. As is evident by my lack of actual work-related stuff to talk about. Although I do think we should find that jinni woman and question her in the morning.”

She opens her eyes. “You have fun with that, Mulder, I get to show a group of stuffy scientists an actual invisible man tomorrow and I’m having a really hard time thinking about anything else right now.”

Mulder sighs. “Well all right, then,” he starts to put her foot back into the water but she guides it back up into his hand.

“Almost anything else,” she grins.

***

After her crushing disappointment following the disappearance of Anson Stokes’ invisible body, Scully isn’t in the best of moods the following day. Mulder isn’t terribly surprised but gives her some space anyway. Besides, the jinni has given him three wishes to make and he needs to focus. He doesn’t want to waste them.

That night, after the fiasco with the wishes is all over, he invites Scully to his apartment.

“Caddyshack, Mulder?” she snorts, noting his movie choice.

“It’s a classic American movie.”

“That’s what every guy says. It’s a guy movie.”

He grins. “You invite me to your place, and we’ll watch Steel Magnolias.” He’s kidding. He knows she’d be more likely to pick The Exorcist.

As the movie starts up, he takes a sip of his Shiner Bock. He’d tried to make the world a better place today with his three wishes, he really had. Unfortunately he’d accidentally blown his first two wishes and then there was really only one thing left to do.

He looks at Scully, knowing she’s wondering. “I don’t know if you noticed, but I never made the world a happier place.”

“Well, I’m fairly happy. That’s something,” she says, smiling up at him.

He grins. How the hell did he get so damn lucky?

“So… what was your final wish, anyway?”

He looks at her and takes a sip of his beer. “You really want to know?”

“Yeah.”

“I wished her free.” He makes a finger waving gesture.

Scully’s eyebrow goes up and she breaks into a huge smile. “You wished her free? You mean like in ‘Aladdin?’”

“What?”

“The Disney movie. You literally picked a Disney ending.”

“Never seen it.”

“How have you not seen it?”

“I’m more of a turd-in-the-pool kind of guy.”

She turns back to the movie and takes a swig. “Yeah. I sure know how to pick ‘em.”

He puts his arm around her and pulls her in close, kissing the top of her head.

“Give me a break, all right? It was the right thing to do.”

She shrugs. “I can think of a few things I’d have asked for.”

“Like what?”

She looks up at him. Then turns back to the TV and smiles to herself. “I’ll never tell.”

He can think of a few things himself, but in the moment he knew there was only one right answer. “Well, I’ve already got the only thing I’d have wished for,” he says.

She turns to look up into his eyes, his gaze magnetic. “You know, I never thought of you as a romantic. You really keep me guessing, Mulder.”

He sets his beer on the table, leans in and kisses her, one hand around her shoulder and the other taking her own beer out of her hand.

They don’t make it very far into the movie.

Thanks for reading! See you back here for the next chapter tomorrow. To continue reading, click the link at the top of this post.

[rocketwerks]

Mrs. Jane King Ice, Coal, and Wood Co.

1811 East Cary Street

Built, 1856

Demolished, unknown

[CDRVA]

A chilling sequel to Richmond's commercial ice story.

(Civil War Richmond) — 1867 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Map of Richmond — showing location of ice house

Mrs. Jane King's wholesale and retail ice, coal and wood establishment, at 1811 East Cary Street, has been a notable one of Richmond since 1873. It is in its thirty-sixth year. The house was founded in 1856 by her husband, David King, who was succeeded by John M. McGowan. [RVCJ93]

(Find A Grave) — Mrs. Jane King, AKA “The Ice Queen”

David died in 1873, and the following summer, Jane’s brother, who had started up the ice business again after the war, died suddenly at the peak of the summer season. John McGowan was buried on Sunday July 12, 1874, and that Monday, with her children and worldly belongings barely off the train, from Ohio, Jane opened the icehouse for business. When a schooner tied up that morning with a cargo of ice, it was met by the resolute 44 year old Scots-Irish widow, in billowing black and a stair step row of boys at her side. Schooner captains who said they’d be damned if they’d talk business to a woman, found that they wouldn’t be paid if they didn’t.

(LOC) — Beers Illustrated Atlas of the Cities of Richmond & Manchester, 1877 — Plate L — showing location of Ice House

Despite a nationwide depression, and a large mortgage her brother had taken to expand the business, she pushed the business back into the black. After managing the ice house for five years, in 1879 she bought the business back from her late brother’s estate. The office and icehouse at 1811 East Cary Street ran a city block to Dock Street. She earned a reputation as an able and straight dealing merchant, in an era when women were not accepted out of the parlor, much less on the docks giving orders to seafaring men, longshoremen, and wagon drivers, as well as the 30 men with their 21 ice and coal wagons on her payroll.

(Maine Memory) — schooner loading ice cakes harvested from the Kennebec River, Maine — 1906

The crew of one schooner, rebelling at the embarrassment of unloading cargo under the orders of a woman, maliciously dumped varnish over her ice. The quiet lady in black was not intimidated, and simply deducted the cost of 20 tons of ice from the captain’s payment, and left him to discipline his crew. She earned the grudging esteem of her male business associates, against an almost inconceivable zealous opposition to allowing a woman to participate in business. In a world of mule-drawn horse cars, she embraced modernization. With retailing mastered she built up a railroad wholesale ice distribution business across Virginia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina.

(Chronicling America) — Richmond Dispatch — Tuesday, May 8, 1894

When an experimental message service was introduced, called the telephone, she had one installed despite her experienced bookkeeper warning her not to waste her money on such gimmickry. She was the first woman in Richmond to have a telephone in her own name, and the only woman listed in the city’s first phone directory. She sent her sons Henry and James to open icehouse branches in Petersburg, Virginia in 1881 and later in Winston-Salem NC. In her fifties, she decided to diversify, and used her trading contacts to build a coal and wood yard, to fill in the winter slump in ice sales. She turned a liability into an asset when in newspaper advertising she encouraged prospective customers to buy from “the only lady engaged in the Ice, Coal, and Wood business in the United States.”

(Chronicling America) — The Jewish South — May 28, 1897 — showing the “ice fatory” (sic)

In the 1880's she was a pioneer in direct mail advertising when she developed mailers with discount coupons and offered extended payment plans as a sales promotion to increase her market share. She innovated by developing and building an ice pond in the suburbs of Richmond (at King’s Hill) to try to produce low cost local ice. When a mechanical refrigeration ice plant opened in 1892 that would supply Richmond with ice cheaper than the natural ice from Maine, she recognized the end of the era of schooners and handling northern ice. Rather than quit, however, she contracted for the plant’s entire output. (Find A Grave)

(VDHR) — original Hygeia Ice Company building — 1128 Hermitage Road

She has taken entire control of the output of one of the largest ice plants in the city (the Hygeia Ice Company's), feeling convinced that the superiority of its product cannot but recommend it to all desiring pure and healthful ice, for this Hygeia ice is made from pure distilled spring water. The Hygeia's plant is situated on the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad, and shipments can be made from it to all parts of Virginia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, without rehandling, and at short notice.

(ProQuest® Sanborn Maps Geo Edition™) — Sanborn Insurance Maps of Richmond (1886) — Plate 20

Mrs. King has associated with her in business her two sons, John M. and James N., who personally look after all the details of the business. Her success in the past is to be attributed to the promptness and care taken in all transactions with both city and country patrons.

(ProQuest® Sanborn Maps Geo Edition™) — Sanborn Insurance Maps of Richmond (1895) — Plate 28 — showing expanded ice house facility

Mrs. King is the only lady in the United States who carries on so extensive a business in ice, coal and wood . Another notable feature of her business is, that Mrs. King's house is the only one of its kind in Richmond that has not changed in name and management since 1875. [RVCJ93]

(ProQuest® Sanborn Maps Geo Edition™) — Sanborn Insurance Maps of Richmond (1952) — Plate 201 — showing a much-reduced state replete with junk yard

In 1895, at age 65, Mrs. King called it quits. She sold the ice business to her competitors (likely Richmond Ice Company, just a couple of blocks away), and turned the coal and wood business over to her sons. (Find A Grave) The building at 1811 East Cary became gradually more reduced until it no longer bore any resemblance to the original structure.

June 2018 — looking towards 1811 East Cary Street

Today, all traces of the former ice house and its related industries are gone, vanished with the advent of the Flood Wall and the development of the former factory buildings along Cary Street into residential space. Considering the substantial drop in elevation from Cary Street to Dock Street, the original building must have been immense, a circumstance not reflected by the available 2D maps.

Despite this, Mrs. King’s legacy still lives on, her former domicile, the Pace-King House, prominently visible at 205 North Nineteenth Street, just a few blocks away from her place of business.

(Sunday Guardian) — Frank Capra

If there are any aspiring filmmakers out there in the audience, you could do a lot worse than this story. Just imagine the dramatic confrontations at the docks, the neverending fights for respect, the eventual grudging admiration, all neatly wrapped in a Gilded Age feminist narrative. You might discover that Mrs. King trained with a Chinese master of Kung Fu, who aided her in her quest to stuff the ice business down the throats of her male counterparts, and where might that lead you? If you’re interested, Rocket Werks is more than happy to sign on as a technical advisor, although he can’t swear to the Kung Fu stuff.

(Mrs. Jane King Ice, Coal, and Wood Co. is part of the Atlas RVA Project)

Sources

[CDRVA] Chataigne’s Directory of Richmond, Va. J. H. Chataigne. 1881.

[RVCJ93] Richmond, Virginia: The City on the James: The Book of Its Chamber of Commerce and Principal Business Interests. G. W. Engelhardt. 1893

[junkfoodvideous-blog]

Winston Salem NC Crime Scene Cleanup Company | Biohazard Cleanup

New Post has been published on https://crimescenecleanup.company/winstonsalem-northcarolina-crime-scene-cleanup-html/

Winston Salem NC Crime Scene Cleanup Company | Biohazard Cleanup

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Crime Scene Cleanup Company in Winston Salem

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[hviral]

Confederate monuments: Where are they now?

According to the latest SPLC tally, there are roughly 780 Confederate monuments standing across the U.S. That’s a staggering number of tributes to the losing side of a treasonous insurrection; a war that ended not with a treaty, but with the South’s full surrender. More importantly, those statues honor people who fought for a nation founded to preserve black enslavement — a fact enshrined in its Constitution, its member states’ declarations of reasons for secession, its vice president’s most famous speech. It’s no wonder that white supremacists of every stripe — from the neo-Nazis who occupied Charlottesville to the man who currently occupies the executive office — are so fiercely defensive of them.

As Trump and the violent racists in his base contribute to an atmosphere of fear and hatred, one in which white racial terror violence is on the rise, the need to take down Confederate monuments has gained even greater urgency. Since the 2015 white supremacist murder of nine black parishioners in Charleston — a horrific meeting of America’s gun and race problems — 114 monuments have been removed in cities from Brooklyn to Durham to Dallas. Yes, that’s a mere fragment of the total number of Confederate monuments. But communities across the country are currently embroiled in fights to remove white supremacist symbols from their public spaces, and few of those battles make it to the national press.

Below is an overview of the status of just a few Confederate monuments around the country.

Confederate-Named Army Bases: There are 10 Army bases in the South named for Confederate soldiers. Fort Gordon is named for General John Brown Gordon, the reputed head of the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan in Georgia; Virginia’s Fort Lee honors Robert E. Lee, the man who led the treasonous fight to maintain black enslavement. In late July, the League of United Latin American Citizens proposed that Texas’s Fort Hood — currently named for John Bell Hood, who ditched the U.S. Army to take up arms for the insurrectionist Confederacy — be renamed for Special Forces Master Sgt. Roy Benavidez, a Texas native who received the Medal of Honor and five Purple Hearts for his service during the Vietnam War. Military news outlet Stars and Stripes notes that LULAC’s proposal “will go to the secretary of the Army then to the appropriate committees in Congress.” In related news, an amendment to the House version of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act would prohibit the Pentagon from naming any assets after Confederates going forward.

District of Columbia: The statue of Confederate General Albert Pike in D.C. stands on National Park Service grounds. On July 30, Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton introduced legislation to remove the statue from the plot of federal land it currently occupies. Instead, Norton is advocating for the rendering of Pike to be moved to a museum, or some other place it can be properly contextualized. She notes that the Freemasons, who funded the statue’s placement back in 1901, have co-signed her call for removal. A press release on Norton’s website declares that Pike “was a Confederate general who served dishonorably and was forced to resign in disgrace. It was found that soldiers under his command mutilated the bodies of Union soldiers, and Pike was ultimately imprisoned after his fellow officers reported that he misappropriated funds. Adding to the dishonor of taking up arms against the United States, Pike dishonored even his Confederate military service. He certainly has no claim to be memorialized in the nation’s capital. Even those who do not want Confederate statues removed will have to justify awarding Pike any honor, considering his history.”

Georgia: In 2010 the Georgia General Assembly passed a law that prohibits the removal of Confederate monuments. (Nearly identical “Heritage Laws” exist in Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.) In April 2019, Governor Brian Kemp signed a bill that made relocation of Confederate statues, even to museums, illegal, and increased penalties for those caught protesting Confederate markers using defacement. Legislators in Atlanta — the blue dot in this Confederate-obsessed red sea — recently announced that they plan to put up plaques that add historical context about slavery next to four of the city’s Confederate markers. “This monument should no longer stand as a memorial to white brotherhood,” one sign notes; “rather, it should be seen as an artifact representing a shared history in which millions of Americans were denied civil and human rights.”

Tennessee: In 2017, the lawmakers in Memphis undertook a brilliant political strategy to circumnavigate the state’s repressive “Heritage Law” that prevents the removal of Confederate monuments. The law prohibits removal of Confederate statuary on public grounds, so city legislators sold two downtown parks to a private nonprofit for just $1,000 each. This allowed for the successful removal of statues honoring Confederate President Jefferson Davis and General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The Sons of Confederate Veterans (a neo-Confederate group) are currently trying to convince a court to force the return of the statues. In the meantime, the statues are sitting in storage while a new site for them is chosen.

Louisiana:

New Orleans: Formed in 2014, Take ’Em Down NOLA was the primary organizing entity behind the movement to take down New Orleans’ Confederate statues. In June 2015, following the massacre of nine black church parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, Mayor Mitch Landrieu publicly called for the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee; the next month he officially tasked the City Council to begin the legal processes necessary to remove the statues. In December of that year, the Council voted 6-1 to remove four statues that glorified the Confederacy. They remained up until May 2017, their takedown forestalled by lawsuits filed by “preservationist” groups, as well as the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Those suits failed in federal court. The Confederate statues came down over 25 days in April and May 2017. Among the conditions of removal was a clause that the statues could never again be displayed outdoors on public grounds in New Orleans. The statues are currently in a city storage facility.

Shreveport: The Shreveport, Louisiana, chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) appealed a federal judge’s 2017 decision to dismiss their lawsuit to keep up a Confederate monument in front of a local courthouse. In April 2019, the UDC lost their case.

North Carolina:

Chapel Hill: North Carolina’s Heritage Law was passed in July 2015, roughly a month after the Charleston church massacre, a hasty and transparent effort to protect the state’s racist Confederate statuary from the groundswell of calls for removal. The law made efforts to remove the UNC-Chapel Hill Confederate statue known as “Silent Sam” — which student and local anti-racist activists had been legally trying to take down for over five decades — yet more difficult. Inaction by UNC administration added to student outrage. In August 2018, community frustrations boiled over and the statue was toppled by a crowd of protesters. Since then, the school’s chancellor has stepped down and its Board of Governors has repeatedly punted on plans for the statue’s new permanent placement.

Winston-Salem: North Carolina’s 2015 Heritage Law prevents the removal of statues from public land, but has no say over markers on private property. After Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines made public his intent to remove a local Confederate marker, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (the group who erected a local Confederate statue), which had previously claimed ownership of marker, denied ownership in court papers to establish it as a public object protected by the law. The UDC sued the city, which moved forward with plans for removal on March 12, placing it in storage until it could be erected in the Salem Cemetery. A UDC lawsuit to have the marker put back failed in court. “It is a symbol of oppression and the subjugation of the African-American people and so it’s hurtful to many in our community,” Mayor Joines told news outlets. The city has announced plans that it will move the statue to a Confederate cemetery.

Texas:

Dallas: After 81 years, an equestrian statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was removed from a Dallas park in September 2017 — one month after the white nationalist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. The statue sold in an online auction for $1.4 million to a buyer using the screen name “LawDude,” who was later identified as Texas law firm owner Ron Holmes.

Back in February 2019, the Dallas City Council voted 11-4 to take down the city’s Confederate War Memorial, a 60-foot-tall monument featuring statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Albert Johnston. In the months that followed, the city’s Landmark Commission and Plan Commission would both concur with the Council’s vote, and a win seemed just over the horizon for Dallas anti-racist activists, who’ve worked tirelessly for years to bring the monument down. Unfortunately, two lawsuits in two different courts have stalled progress on removal. In recently filed court papers, the city argues against the contention that the statue must remain standing for its “protection.” The city’s brief notes that it is “not threatening to sell or destroy the Confederate Monument” but “only to have the monument safely removed and archivally stored.” In other words, it’ll be as safe in storage as it is in the park, where it’s currently covered by a tarp.

San Antonio: In 2017, the UDC chapter in San Antonio, Texas, filed a federal lawsuit against local officials after the City Council, following the racist violence in Charlottesville, voted to remove a Confederate monument from public property. It’s been nearly two years since the Confederate monument was removed from Travis Park, taken down in the dead of night after a 10-1 City Council vote. The suit is still being litigated; the statue is now in storage.

Florida:

Gainesville: The Alachua County Commission voted 4-1 to take down a Confederate monument known locally as “Old Joe” in 2017. After both a local history museum and the county’s Veterans Memorial Park refused to take it, the UDC — which erected the statue in 1904 — stepped in to “save” the marker by taking it back and paying for its removal. It was removed by a construction crew on August 14, 2017, roughly 48 hours after the Unite the Right rally. According to the Gainesville Sun, the statue was relocated to the Oak Ridge Cemetery, a private graveyard near Rochelle, Florida.

Lake County: The National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building is a grand chamber filled with statues of noteworthy Americans, two submitted by each state. For the first time since the statue collection began in 1870, a U.S. state will be represented by a black American. Mary McLeod Bethune — educator, civil rights pioneer, antilynching advocate, adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and founder of Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach — will now be the figure depicting Florida. She will replace an outgoing statute of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith. In a highly controversial move, commissioners in Lake County, Florida, voted to take possession of the Confederate statue, despite intense outcry from residents. Per one local outlet, “Nine of the 14 municipalities in Lake County approved formal resolutions opposing the relocation of the statue.” According to the paper, “the Lake County Historical Society Museum intends to house the museum in a facility above the historic county jail.”

California: It’s a testament to the insidiousness of the Confederacy — if not the insurrectionist uprising, certainly the ideology — that California was once the home to many Confederate markers. Honorifics to Confederates included the Dixie School District just outside San Francisco (renamed Miller Creek Elementary School District just this past July) and the two sequoias in Sequoia National Park named for Robert E. Lee (both still standing, names unchanged). In 2004 — again, 2004 — the Sons of Confederate Veterans erected a nine-foot-tall monument honoring Confederates in Santa Ana Cemetery. The marker praised “the sacred memory of the pioneers who built Orange County after their valiant efforts to defend the Cause of Southern Independence.” In July, protesters showed their disdain for the granite marker using defacement, spray painting one side red and scrawling the word “racists” down its face. Less than a month later, on August 1, the monument was removed by the city and placed in storage. Orange County Cemetery District General Manager Tim Deutsch reportedly stated the protesters’ paint job had made the monument “an unsightly public nuisance.”

Missouri:

Kansas City: Days after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, protesters defaced the “Loyal Women of the Old South” Confederate monument. A local chapter of the UDC “gifted” the statue to Kansas City in 1934; following the defacement, the group accepted an anonymous donor’s offer to remove the statue to prevent further harm. Then-Parks Director Mark McHenry told press that the monument was placed “in storage in an undisclosed location, not on park property.”

St. Louis: After Mayor Lyda Krewson publicly declared in 2017 the city’s intent to remove a Confederate memorial put up by the UDC in 1912, a local chapter of the group signed over ownership to the Missouri Civil War museum. The museum then successfully sued the city for custody of the structure. The director of the museum has noted that the removed structure had been “painted by protestors and the city’s resulting use of paint stripper damaged the work. It will be undergoing restoration.” The museum is ultimately looking for the right property to place it in, such as “a Civil War battlefield, a Civil War cemetery, or a museum property.”

Montana: Disgusted by the murderous violence in Charlottesville, members of the American Indian Caucus of the Montana Legislature drafted an open letter to appeal to state legislators to remove a Confederate memorial. “The fountain was commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization that openly supported the white supremacist views and mission of the early Ku Klux Klan,” the letter noted. “This is the only Confederate monument in the northwestern United States.” The memorial — a fountain that sat for 101 years in the city’s Hill Park — was removed in on August 18, 2017. A group called the Equity Fountain Project put out a call for new designs to replace the old monument and raised the funds needed to build and maintain the marker. Citizens of Helena chose, via vote, the final fountain design, titled the “Sphere of Interconnectedness.” Equity Fountain Project head Ron Waterman expressed hopes the fountain will showcase the “values of equity and equality, diversity, respect, generosity and compassion, tolerance, service, peace and justice.” Once the new monument is placed, Montana will become the first city to remove and replace a Confederate marker.

Tennessee: The city of Franklin, Tennessee, has an ongoing lawsuit against the UDC to determine who owns the land in one local public park containing a Confederate monument erected by the UDC in the late 19th century. The UDC threatened legal action when Franklin city leaders announced plans to add markers recognizing African-American historical figures to the park. Despite those threats, the city is going forward with construction of the markers.

Maryland: For months, Baltimore’s political leaders debated the fate of its Confederate statuary. After the white supremacist violence at the Unite the Right rally, the city acted swiftly to remove those monuments, taking down four markers on the night of August 15 and the wee hours of the morning that followed. Those statues were placed in storage. A recent New York Times investigation notes that city officials are “asking for a detailed plan from anyone interested in acquiring” the monuments.

Virginia:

Charlottesville: The equestrian statues of Confederate Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson — rallying points for the neo-Nazis of the Unite the Right rally — still stand in two Charlottesville parks. The Charlottesville City Council voted to relocate the Lee statue in 2017 (a move the white supremacists cited to justify their violence), but the removal has been stalled by a lawsuit filed by 13 plaintiffs, including the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The judge in the case, who at intervals has made clear his Lost Cause-influenced view of Southern history, has often sided with the plaintiffs at critical points throughout the case. It is very likely that whatever the final decision in the case, the lawsuit will end up in the Virginia Supreme Court.

Hampton: In 1956 — two years after the Supreme Court decision that legally desegregated Southern schools — the UDC funded an archway at Fort Monroe Army base in Hampton, Virginia, that decreed the area “Jefferson Davis Memorial Park.” As Virginia officials have more recently noted, the peninsula on which Fort Monroe is located was originally known as Point Comfort, where the first Africans enslaved in this country arrived in 1619. (Fort Monroe was decommissioned as a military base in 2011.) On August 6, “Jefferson Davis” was removed from the archway. The letters were donated to the Fort Monroe Casemate Museum.

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How Charlotte Became the South’s Startup Capital

When BB&T and SunTrust announced earlier this year that they would join forces in the biggest banking merger since the global financial crisis—rebranding themselves as the curiously named Truist—there was really only one logical choice for the combined financial services giant’s new headquarters.

It wasn’t just that Charlotte, N.C., found itself conveniently located between BB&T’s Winston-Salem headquarters to the north and SunTrust’s Atlanta stronghold to the south. Nor was it entirely about Charlotte’s status as the nation’s #2 banking center, one that’s already home to Bank of America’s global headquarters and Wells Fargo’s largest East Coast outpost (a legacy of Wells’ 2008 acquisition of Wachovia, in the midst of the crisis).

If you ask those who live, work, and start businesses in Charlotte, what drew Truist to the fifth-fastest growing city in the U.S. last year, according to the Census Bureau, are the same factors that led Honeywell to relocate its own headquarters there last year and Lowe’s (which is based in nearby Mooresville) to select it last month as the site of a new “global technology center” employing 2,000 tech professionals.

For all the discourse about how the nation’s wealth is concentrated in our great coastal metropolises, the Queen City is in the midst of an economic renaissance that’s both attracting major corporations and sprouting dozens of new startups across a variety of industries.

At a time when millennial professionals from New York to San Francisco find their lives characterized by climbing rents, $9 beers, and toiling public transit systems, Charlotte is luring people from across the country with the promise of a better quality of life and a lower cost of living—satirical Onion headlines be damned.

“A lot of millennials are looking for quality of life: ‘Where do I want to live?’,” says Tariq Bokhari, a former Wells Fargo executive and entrepreneur who now serves as a Charlotte city councilman. Bokhari is also executive director of the Carolina Fintech Hub, which promotes new fintech startups in the Charlotte region.

“You look at Charlotte and you see the [warm] seasons and the affordability of the areas,” he notes. “It’s a three-hour drive to the beach and three hours to the mountains. There are 27 different breweries and a burning-hot job market… [Millennials] absolutely want to be here.”

This dynamic has benefitted companies both large and small, and has helped startups that have emerged from the city’s entrepreneurial community grow into major, $1 billion businesses. Charlotte now has no fewer than three “unicorns” valued at that magic number, with analytics software firm Tresata joining the ranks of digital marketing firm Red Ventures and payment software company AvidXchange last year.

“When you’re dealing with zero-unemployment, especially in computer engineering and software development, it is a national recruiting game,” says AvidXchange co-founder and CEO Michael Praeger, who started the company in Charlotte in 2000, only a few years after moving to North Carolina from Boston.

When AvidXchange is looking to lure tech workers from places like Silicon Valley or Boston, Praeger adds, “The majority of the time they’ve never actually been to Charlotte and don’t know what to expect. And when we bring them here—wow. Certainly the cost of living and the year-round weather is a big draw.”

Start me up

The Bank of America Corporate Center, which houses the financial institution’s global headquarters, in Charlotte, N.C. Photo: Chris Keane—Bloomberg via Getty Images

Charlotte, once considered a dyed-in-the-wool banking town, has given birth to an exploding startup scene in recent years—led by a fintech sector that has thrived on the support of local financial services heavyweights and accelerator programs, and extending to young, duly hyped software firms like Passport, Stratifyd, and MapAnything (which was acquired by Salesforce in April).

Organizations like the Carolina Fintech Hub and Queen City Fintech, both of which have backing from the likes of Bank of America and Wells Fargo, have helped develop the city’s entrepreneurial community. Queen City Fintech founder Dan Roselli, a former Bank of America executive and Red Ventures founding partner, runs the accelerator out of Packard Place, a coworking space where it incubates startups not only from Charlotte but from around the world—providing them with a mentorship network of 300 established entrepreneurs and access to fintech events and conferences where they can present to, and connect with, venture investors.

Roselli started the organization in the midst of the Great Recession in 2011, when the city was undergoing “an identity crisis” following Wachovia’s downfall and the near-collapse of the financial system. Since then, Queen City Fintech has helped its alumni raise nearly $2 billion from 45 different venture capital firms.

“One of the things Charlotte realized at the time was that entrepreneurship is a good thing to embrace,” he says. “When Wachovia went under, it was an ‘Oh no’ moment. We realized we needed to pivot toward fintech and innovation.”

Packard Place’s first tenant was a fintech startup called DealCloud, which develops deal management software for investment banking and private equity firms. Some seven years later, in August 2018, DealCloud was acquired by business software provider Intapp for an undisclosed price.

“I think what happened is that during the downturn a lot of people lost their jobs—but all of a sudden, you had a lot of smart people from financial services backgrounds who were able to go out and start businesses, either in financial services or as providers to financial services companies,” according to DealCloud co-founder Rob Cummings, who is now part of Queen City Fintech’s mentor network.

Roselli described fintech as “the tip of the spear that [Charlotte] used to build our entrepreneurial ecosystem,” which makes sense given that the region employs 82,000 finance and insurance professionals. Like Roselli, many of those professionals have gone on to pursue their own ventures—a critical component driving the city’s startup environment.

“I joke that there are more ex-Bank of America and ex-Wachovia people in Charlotte than there are current Bank of America and Wells Fargo people,” he notes. “That’s a good thing.”

The big banks have also come around to entrepreneurial-driven innovation as something to welcome, rather than be wary of as a potentially disruptive force. “They realized that disruption is going to happen, and keeping it close to you is a big advantage,” Roselli says, citing Bank of America and Wells Fargo among Queen City Fintech’s major sponsors.

In fact, many within the Charlotte startup scene consider this embrace of fintech as imperative to the city’s economic future, given how an impending wave of automation—widely seen as the future of the banking sector—could put thousands of financial services professionals out of work in years to come.

“One of the reasons I’ve been doing this is because for many years now, folks have predicted that within the next decade or so, one-third of all traditional banking jobs are going to be disrupted by fintech,” Bokhari notes. “For a city like Charlotte, that’s Detroit-level ramifications for us. We have a chance ahead of time to create what becomes the alternative for those jobs, like branch workers and call center workers, that are going to be gone.”

Boomtown

Wells Fargo’s trading floor in the Duke Energy Center in Charlotte, N.C. Photo: Davis Turner—Bloomberg via Getty Images

The fintech sector is not alone in driving Charlotte’s startup boom. Ask people active in the city’s entrepreneurial scene, and most will tell you that the majority of the new companies emerging from the local economy aren’t even financial services-oriented.

There’s an energy startup sector that’s growing via support from the likes of Charlotte-based Fortune 500 company Duke Energy, a major backer of the energy-focused Joules Accelerator program. IBM, meanwhile, is looking to boost the city’s healthcare industry, having recently teamed up with Queen City Fintech to launch a new accelerator targeting early-stage healthtech (as well as fintech) companies.

“Fintech is what we’re known for—it was our easiest entry point—but over half of the startups I deal with are not related to fintech at all,” according to Innovate Charlotte executive director Keith Luedeman, whose nonprofit promotes and supports entrepreneurs in the region.

Luedeman is another former entrepreneur-turned-advocate for the city’s startup scene, having pivoted after selling his own fintech startup, GoodMortgage.com, to the PIMCO-owned First Guaranty Mortgage in 2016. He, too, is part of Queen City Fintech’s mentor network; in turn, both Dan Roselli and the Carolina Fintech Hub’s Tariq Bokhari sit on Innovate Charlotte’s board.

The sum effect of all of this collaboration and advocacy has been an environment that—contrary to the cutthroat, dog-eat-dog world of entrepreneurship in other, larger markets—sees business leaders in Charlotte working together, to an almost unusual extent, toward a shared goal of success.

“I find the entrepreneurial community here extremely collaborative; I feel like we’re all in this together,” says Meggie Williams, the founder and CEO of dog-walking startup Skipper—a somewhat unique example of a consumer-facing enterprise that has made waves in the city’s startup scene. “There are advantages to being in a city with fewer degrees of separation between the people who are starting out and the people who already made it.”

Williams moved to Charlotte from New York City in 2014. Having left her job at IBM’s New York office in search of a more fulfilling lifestyle, the University of North Carolina graduate and her husband, Sebastian, found it two-and-a-half hours from where she went to college.

The couple founded Skipper in 2016, and so far have been able to find the funding they need to grow their business; the company raised $900,000 in a seed round last year, and is on the verge of closing a new $2.5 million funding round this summer, according to Williams. It’s also benefited from the city’s collaborative business ecosystem, counting the likes of DealCloud’s Cummings among its board members.

That’s not to say things are perfect for Charlotte entrepreneurs in search of capital. While expressing her belief that “there’s a ton of capital and opportunity” for startups in the city, Williams notes that “a lot of the funding here is risk-averse” compared to other markets—a sentiment that some attribute to the more cautious, banking-related capital that constitutes much of the city’s wealth.

In turn, most Charlotte startups have had to look to investors from outside the city for the money they need to expand their operations. Queen City Fintech’s Roselli, who also runs early-stage venture capital firm Carolinas Fintech Ventures, notes a gap in venture funding based in Charlotte—pointing to how few of the 45 venture firms that have invested in Queen City Fintech’s accelerator startups are actually located in the city. “There is no general venture fund in Charlotte; we have angel funds and growth funds, but we’re still missing that venture-tier in between,” Roselli says.

Still, he described Charlotte’s funding environment as being on “a journey, and we’re certainly on the right path.”

“Ten years ago, venture firms were investing only in New York and San Francisco, and they wanted you to move [your company] to New York and San Francisco,” Roselli adds. “That’s no longer true; they’re recognizing that there are great companies and entrepreneurs [elsewhere], and there’s value to be had.”

It’s a trend that’s undoubtedly caught on within the world of venture capital and private equity at large. As Mithril Capital’s Ajay Royan told Fortune earlier this year, “You can’t do a garage startup in Silicon Valley, because the garage is [worth] $4 million”—a factor that led Royan to move his venture capital firm’s offices from San Francisco to Austin, Tex., last year.

“More than three-quarters of our TMT [technology, media, and telecommunications] investments sit outside of the Bay Area,” according to Warburg Pincus managing director Mark Colodny, who runs the private equity giant’s TMT business.

Colodny notes that North Carolina has long been a point of interest for the Warburg Pincus, which has previously invested in Cary, N.C.-based software companies MercuryGate International and Dude Solutions (both of which are located in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area known as the Research Triangle). Having exited those investments, the private equity firm still is “actively looking at Charlotte and Raleigh-based companies now.”

“The state for a long time has been moving jobs away from traditional industries, like agriculture and textiles, into tech—which, coupled with a strong university system, has created a very interesting community of talented software and fintech entrepreneurs,” Colodny says.

Tar Heel troubles

Rendering of the Camp North End office and retail redevelopment in Charlotte, N.C. Photo: Camp North End

For all that Charlotte has going for it, it wasn’t enough to draw Amazon, which didn’t even include the city in its final 20 markets under consideration for its hotly-debated “HQ2” sweepstakes. Bokhari was among the city stakeholders “leading the charge” to draw Amazon, and recalls building a consortium of business leaders for a pitch centered more around private-sector collaboration than public-sector incentives.

“I went around and said, ‘Hey, let’s get involved in this and send a message that all the banks are willing to open our doors and partner [with Amazon],” according to Bokhari. “It’s not about the government incentive package; here’s what the private sector will do for you.”

But it wasn’t to be, and Bokhari says he was “absolutely flabbergasted” when Charlotte didn’t make the shortlist. “The tiny blurb of feedback we got was, ‘Well, you guys don’t have the existing number of tech jobs that we’re looking for.’ What I pushed back with—and nobody [at Amazon] answered me—was, ‘What’s your strategy? You’re going to go in and poach people from other companies?’” In the end, Bokhari says he “lost faith that the [HQ2] process was even real.”

Meanwhile, the city’s business community continues to deal with the fallout from the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act—the 2016 state law known as HB2, which sparked a national outcry for forcing transgender people to use the gendered public restrooms that correspond with their sex at birth. The measure drew myriad boycotts; PayPal abandoned a planned expansion in Charlotte, and the NBA relocated its 2017 All-Star Game from the city, to name only two.

Despite a subsequent partial repeal that removed the bill’s provisions around bathroom use, the law lingers as a reminder of the socio-political schism between North Carolina’s booming urban centers and more conservative rural areas, which in many cases have not felt the benefits of the state’s millennial-driven economic and cultural trends.

“People say that North Carolina is a purple state, and that’s not accurate; it’s bright blue cities surrounded by bright red rural areas,” says Roselli, who describes himself as “very progressive” in his social views. “HB2 was one of the greatest disasters in the last 50 years of North Carolina’s political history. There’s no question that it was a devastatingly bad bill.”

Roselli adds that as a result of the legislation, GV—Google’s venture capital investment arm—“wouldn’t come to [Queen City Fintech’s] Fintech Generations conference” in Charlotte, with the tech behemoth continuing to limit its dealings in North Carolina. While a GV spokesperson declined to comment for this story, Google also bypassed the state earlier this year for its planned $13 billion expansion of data centers and offices in 14 states (including neighboring South Carolina) across the U.S.

Yet that doesn’t change the fact that investors from around the country are considering Charlotte to an unprecedented extent. Few businesspeople need to be as attuned to the socio-economic dynamics of a given place as real estate developers, and those who build the spaces where people live and work are increasingly viewing the Queen City as an opportunity.

“We saw a city with a low cost of living, a very high quality of life, a progressive attitude toward urban infrastructure and planning, and a place where young people are moving for jobs,” says Damon Hemmerdinger, co-president of ATCO Properties & Management. “We saw trends in the economy, and the chance to create a product that we think is meeting a need.”

Though the Manhattan-based real estate firm has traditionally been focused on the New York City office market, ATCO saw Charlotte as primed for the sort of trendy, creative office space that startups have flocked to in markets like Brooklyn and Atlanta. That motivated it to acquire a 76-acre industrial site, located only a mile from Charlotte’s central business district, where Ford Motor Company once built Model T cars and the U.S. Army later built missiles.

Today, ATCO and partner Shorenstein Properties are at work redeveloping the sprawling property into a mixed-use, office and retail campus known as Camp North End. The site will eventually house roughly than 1.5 million square feet of commercial space, and could eventually include up to 1,500 apartments and a hotel.

Hemmerdinger describes the project as a “large-scale, adaptive reuse project that, in other places, is where companies from the tech and fintech world want to put their offices in.” Thus far, that appears to ring true; in addition to coworking spaces, design firms and galleries, Camp North End already counts among its tenants TM Studio, Ally Financial’s “innovation studio” where product engineers and developers design and prototype “new consumer banking concepts,” according to Ally.

Projects like Camp North End are necessary if the Charlotte’s infrastructure is going to keep up with prolific rate of growth it’s now witnessing. But it’s definitely growing—a city fueled by a perfect storm of economic and generational tailwinds that are now bearing fruit.

“Charlotte is, to me, an adolescent city,” as Innovate Charlotte’s Keith Luedeman put it. “Some days we’re very proud and boisterous, and some days we’re insecure and we don’t think we’re deserving of any of the recognition we get. We’ve got to show that this is a great place to found and grow your business.”

More must-read stories from Fortune:

—Fortune’s 2019 40 Under 40

—How automation is cutting into workers’ share of economic output

—How the maker of the world’s bestselling drug keeps prices sky-high

—Want to buy a Spanish village? This real estate agent has 400 to sell

—One of Warren Buffet’s favorite metrics is flashing red. Corporate profits are due for a hit

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How Charlotte Became the South’s Startup Capital

When BB&T and SunTrust announced earlier this year that they would join forces in the biggest banking merger since the global financial crisis—rebranding themselves as the curiously named Truist—there was really only one logical choice for the combined financial services giant’s new headquarters.

It wasn’t just that Charlotte, N.C., found itself conveniently located between BB&T’s Winston-Salem headquarters to the north and SunTrust’s Atlanta stronghold to the south. Nor was it entirely about Charlotte’s status as the nation’s #2 banking center, one that’s already home to Bank of America’s global headquarters and Wells Fargo’s largest East Coast outpost (a legacy of Wells’ 2008 acquisition of Wachovia, in the midst of the crisis).

If you ask those who live, work, and start businesses in Charlotte, what drew Truist to the fifth-fastest growing city in the U.S. last year, according to the Census Bureau, are the same factors that led Honeywell to relocate its own headquarters there last year and Lowe’s (which is based in nearby Mooresville) to select it last month as the site of a new “global technology center” employing 2,000 tech professionals.

For all the discourse about how the nation’s wealth is concentrated in our great coastal metropolises, the Queen City is in the midst of an economic renaissance that’s both attracting major corporations and sprouting dozens of new startups across a variety of industries.

At a time when millennial professionals from New York to San Francisco find their lives characterized by climbing rents, $9 beers, and toiling public transit systems, Charlotte is luring people from across the country with the promise of a better quality of life and a lower cost of living—satirical Onion headlines be damned.

“A lot of millennials are looking for quality of life: ‘Where do I want to live?’,” says Tariq Bokhari, a former Wells Fargo executive and entrepreneur who now serves as a Charlotte city councilman. Bokhari is also executive director of the Carolina Fintech Hub, which promotes new fintech startups in the Charlotte region.

“You look at Charlotte and you see the [warm] seasons and the affordability of the areas,” he notes. “It’s a three-hour drive to the beach and three hours to the mountains. There are 27 different breweries and a burning-hot job market… [Millennials] absolutely want to be here.”

This dynamic has benefitted companies both large and small, and has helped startups that have emerged from the city’s entrepreneurial community grow into major, $1 billion businesses. Charlotte now has no fewer than three “unicorns” valued at that magic number, with analytics software firm Tresata joining the ranks of digital marketing firm Red Ventures and payment software company AvidXchange last year.

“When you’re dealing with zero-unemployment, especially in computer engineering and software development, it is a national recruiting game,” says AvidXchange co-founder and CEO Michael Praeger, who started the company in Charlotte in 2000, only a few years after moving to North Carolina from Boston.

When AvidXchange is looking to lure tech workers from places like Silicon Valley or Boston, Praeger adds, “The majority of the time they’ve never actually been to Charlotte and don’t know what to expect. And when we bring them here—wow. Certainly the cost of living and the year-round weather is a big draw.”

Start me up

The Bank of America Corporate Center, which houses the financial institution’s global headquarters, in Charlotte, N.C. Photo: Chris Keane—Bloomberg via Getty Images

Charlotte, once considered a dyed-in-the-wool banking town, has given birth to an exploding startup scene in recent years—led by a fintech sector that has thrived on the support of local financial services heavyweights and accelerator programs, and extending to young, duly hyped software firms like Passport, Stratifyd, and MapAnything (which was acquired by Salesforce in April).

Organizations like the Carolina Fintech Hub and Queen City Fintech, both of which have backing from the likes of Bank of America and Wells Fargo, have helped develop the city’s entrepreneurial community. Queen City Fintech founder Dan Roselli, a former Bank of America executive and Red Ventures founding partner, runs the accelerator out of Packard Place, a coworking space where it incubates startups not only from Charlotte but from around the world—providing them with a mentorship network of 300 established entrepreneurs and access to fintech events and conferences where they can present to, and connect with, venture investors.

Roselli started the organization in the midst of the Great Recession in 2011, when the city was undergoing “an identity crisis” following Wachovia’s downfall and the near-collapse of the financial system. Since then, Queen City Fintech has helped its alumni raise nearly $2 billion from 45 different venture capital firms.

“One of the things Charlotte realized at the time was that entrepreneurship is a good thing to embrace,” he says. “When Wachovia went under, it was an ‘Oh no’ moment. We realized we needed to pivot toward fintech and innovation.”

Packard Place’s first tenant was a fintech startup called DealCloud, which develops deal management software for investment banking and private equity firms. Some seven years later, in August 2018, DealCloud was acquired by business software provider Intapp for an undisclosed price.

“I think what happened is that during the downturn a lot of people lost their jobs—but all of a sudden, you had a lot of smart people from financial services backgrounds who were able to go out and start businesses, either in financial services or as providers to financial services companies,” according to DealCloud co-founder Rob Cummings, who is now part of Queen City Fintech’s mentor network.

Roselli described fintech as “the tip of the spear that [Charlotte] used to build our entrepreneurial ecosystem,” which makes sense given that the region employs 82,000 finance and insurance professionals. Like Roselli, many of those professionals have gone on to pursue their own ventures—a critical component driving the city’s startup environment.

“I joke that there are more ex-Bank of America and ex-Wachovia people in Charlotte than there are current Bank of America and Wells Fargo people,” he notes. “That’s a good thing.”

The big banks have also come around to entrepreneurial-driven innovation as something to welcome, rather than be wary of as a potentially disruptive force. “They realized that disruption is going to happen, and keeping it close to you is a big advantage,” Roselli says, citing Bank of America and Wells Fargo among Queen City Fintech’s major sponsors.

In fact, many within the Charlotte startup scene consider this embrace of fintech as imperative to the city’s economic future, given how an impending wave of automation—widely seen as the future of the banking sector—could put thousands of financial services professionals out of work in years to come.

“One of the reasons I’ve been doing this is because for many years now, folks have predicted that within the next decade or so, one-third of all traditional banking jobs are going to be disrupted by fintech,” Bokhari notes. “For a city like Charlotte, that’s Detroit-level ramifications for us. We have a chance ahead of time to create what becomes the alternative for those jobs, like branch workers and call center workers, that are going to be gone.”

Boomtown

Wells Fargo’s trading floor in the Duke Energy Center in Charlotte, N.C. Photo: Davis Turner—Bloomberg via Getty Images

The fintech sector is not alone in driving Charlotte’s startup boom. Ask people active in the city’s entrepreneurial scene, and most will tell you that the majority of the new companies emerging from the local economy aren’t even financial services-oriented.

There’s an energy startup sector that’s growing via support from the likes of Charlotte-based Fortune 500 company Duke Energy, a major backer of the energy-focused Joules Accelerator program. IBM, meanwhile, is looking to boost the city’s healthcare industry, having recently teamed up with Queen City Fintech to launch a new accelerator targeting early-stage healthtech (as well as fintech) companies.

“Fintech is what we’re known for—it was our easiest entry point—but over half of the startups I deal with are not related to fintech at all,” according to Innovate Charlotte executive director Keith Luedeman, whose nonprofit promotes and supports entrepreneurs in the region.

Luedeman is another former entrepreneur-turned-advocate for the city’s startup scene, having pivoted after selling his own fintech startup, GoodMortgage.com, to the PIMCO-owned First Guaranty Mortgage in 2016. He, too, is part of Queen City Fintech’s mentor network; in turn, both Dan Roselli and the Carolina Fintech Hub’s Tariq Bokhari sit on Innovate Charlotte’s board.

The sum effect of all of this collaboration and advocacy has been an environment that—contrary to the cutthroat, dog-eat-dog world of entrepreneurship in other, larger markets—sees business leaders in Charlotte working together, to an almost unusual extent, toward a shared goal of success.

“I find the entrepreneurial community here extremely collaborative; I feel like we’re all in this together,” says Meggie Williams, the founder and CEO of dog-walking startup Skipper—a somewhat unique example of a consumer-facing enterprise that has made waves in the city’s startup scene. “There are advantages to being in a city with fewer degrees of separation between the people who are starting out and the people who already made it.”

Williams moved to Charlotte from New York City in 2014. Having left her job at IBM’s New York office in search of a more fulfilling lifestyle, the University of North Carolina graduate and her husband, Sebastian, found it two-and-a-half hours from where she went to college.

The couple founded Skipper in 2016, and so far have been able to find the funding they need to grow their business; the company raised $900,000 in a seed round last year, and is on the verge of closing a new $2.5 million funding round this summer, according to Williams. It’s also benefited from the city’s collaborative business ecosystem, counting the likes of DealCloud’s Cummings among its board members.

That’s not to say things are perfect for Charlotte entrepreneurs in search of capital. While expressing her belief that “there’s a ton of capital and opportunity” for startups in the city, Williams notes that “a lot of the funding here is risk-averse” compared to other markets—a sentiment that some attribute to the more cautious, banking-related capital that constitutes much of the city’s wealth.

In turn, most Charlotte startups have had to look to investors from outside the city for the money they need to expand their operations. Queen City Fintech’s Roselli, who also runs early-stage venture capital firm Carolinas Fintech Ventures, notes a gap in venture funding based in Charlotte—pointing to how few of the 45 venture firms that have invested in Queen City Fintech’s accelerator startups are actually located in the city. “There is no general venture fund in Charlotte; we have angel funds and growth funds, but we’re still missing that venture-tier in between,” Roselli says.

Still, he described Charlotte’s funding environment as being on “a journey, and we’re certainly on the right path.”

“Ten years ago, venture firms were investing only in New York and San Francisco, and they wanted you to move [your company] to New York and San Francisco,” Roselli adds. “That’s no longer true; they’re recognizing that there are great companies and entrepreneurs [elsewhere], and there’s value to be had.”

It’s a trend that’s undoubtedly caught on within the world of venture capital and private equity at large. As Mithril Capital’s Ajay Royan told Fortune earlier this year, “You can’t do a garage startup in Silicon Valley, because the garage is [worth] $4 million”—a factor that led Royan to move his venture capital firm’s offices from San Francisco to Austin, Tex., last year.

“More than three-quarters of our TMT [technology, media, and telecommunications] investments sit outside of the Bay Area,” according to Warburg Pincus managing director Mark Colodny, who runs the private equity giant’s TMT business.

Colodny notes that North Carolina has long been a point of interest for the Warburg Pincus, which has previously invested in Cary, N.C.-based software companies MercuryGate International and Dude Solutions (both of which are located in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area known as the Research Triangle). Having exited those investments, the private equity firm still is “actively looking at Charlotte and Raleigh-based companies now.”

“The state for a long time has been moving jobs away from traditional industries, like agriculture and textiles, into tech—which, coupled with a strong university system, has created a very interesting community of talented software and fintech entrepreneurs,” Colodny says.

Tar Heel troubles

Rendering of the Camp North End office and retail redevelopment in Charlotte, N.C. Photo: Camp North End

For all that Charlotte has going for it, it wasn’t enough to draw Amazon, which didn’t even include the city in its final 20 markets under consideration for its hotly-debated “HQ2” sweepstakes. Bokhari was among the city stakeholders “leading the charge” to draw Amazon, and recalls building a consortium of business leaders for a pitch centered more around private-sector collaboration than public-sector incentives.

“I went around and said, ‘Hey, let’s get involved in this and send a message that all the banks are willing to open our doors and partner [with Amazon],” according to Bokhari. “It’s not about the government incentive package; here’s what the private sector will do for you.”

But it wasn’t to be, and Bokhari says he was “absolutely flabbergasted” when Charlotte didn’t make the shortlist. “The tiny blurb of feedback we got was, ‘Well, you guys don’t have the existing number of tech jobs that we’re looking for.’ What I pushed back with—and nobody [at Amazon] answered me—was, ‘What’s your strategy? You’re going to go in and poach people from other companies?’” In the end, Bokhari says he “lost faith that the [HQ2] process was even real.”

Meanwhile, the city’s business community continues to deal with the fallout from the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act—the 2016 state law known as HB2, which sparked a national outcry for forcing transgender people to use the gendered public restrooms that correspond with their sex at birth. The measure drew myriad boycotts; PayPal abandoned a planned expansion in Charlotte, and the NBA relocated its 2017 All-Star Game from the city, to name only two.

Despite a subsequent partial repeal that removed the bill’s provisions around bathroom use, the law lingers as a reminder of the socio-political schism between North Carolina’s booming urban centers and more conservative rural areas, which in many cases have not felt the benefits of the state’s millennial-driven economic and cultural trends.

“People say that North Carolina is a purple state, and that’s not accurate; it’s bright blue cities surrounded by bright red rural areas,” says Roselli, who describes himself as “very progressive” in his social views. “HB2 was one of the greatest disasters in the last 50 years of North Carolina’s political history. There’s no question that it was a devastatingly bad bill.”

Roselli adds that as a result of the legislation, GV—Google’s venture capital investment arm—“wouldn’t come to [Queen City Fintech’s] Fintech Generations conference” in Charlotte, with the tech behemoth continuing to limit its dealings in North Carolina. While a GV spokesperson declined to comment for this story, Google also bypassed the state earlier this year for its planned $13 billion expansion of data centers and offices in 14 states (including neighboring South Carolina) across the U.S.

Yet that doesn’t change the fact that investors from around the country are considering Charlotte to an unprecedented extent. Few businesspeople need to be as attuned to the socio-economic dynamics of a given place as real estate developers, and those who build the spaces where people live and work are increasingly viewing the Queen City as an opportunity.

“We saw a city with a low cost of living, a very high quality of life, a progressive attitude toward urban infrastructure and planning, and a place where young people are moving for jobs,” says Damon Hemmerdinger, co-president of ATCO Properties & Management. “We saw trends in the economy, and the chance to create a product that we think is meeting a need.”

Though the Manhattan-based real estate firm has traditionally been focused on the New York City office market, ATCO saw Charlotte as primed for the sort of trendy, creative office space that startups have flocked to in markets like Brooklyn and Atlanta. That motivated it to acquire a 76-acre industrial site, located only a mile from Charlotte’s central business district, where Ford Motor Company once built Model T cars and the U.S. Army later built missiles.

Today, ATCO and partner Shorenstein Properties are at work redeveloping the sprawling property into a mixed-use, office and retail campus known as Camp North End. The site will eventually house roughly than 1.5 million square feet of commercial space, and could eventually include up to 1,500 apartments and a hotel.

Hemmerdinger describes the project as a “large-scale, adaptive reuse project that, in other places, is where companies from the tech and fintech world want to put their offices in.” Thus far, that appears to ring true; in addition to coworking spaces, design firms and galleries, Camp North End already counts among its tenants TM Studio, Ally Financial’s “innovation studio” where product engineers and developers design and prototype “new consumer banking concepts,” according to Ally.

Projects like Camp North End are necessary if the Charlotte’s infrastructure is going to keep up with prolific rate of growth it’s now witnessing. But it’s definitely growing—a city fueled by a perfect storm of economic and generational tailwinds that are now bearing fruit.

“Charlotte is, to me, an adolescent city,” as Innovate Charlotte’s Keith Luedeman put it. “Some days we’re very proud and boisterous, and some days we’re insecure and we don’t think we’re deserving of any of the recognition we get. We’ve got to show that this is a great place to found and grow your business.”

More must-read stories from Fortune:

—Fortune’s 2019 40 Under 40

—How automation is cutting into workers’ share of economic output

—How the maker of the world’s bestselling drug keeps prices sky-high

—Want to buy a Spanish village? This real estate agent has 400 to sell

—One of Warren Buffet’s favorite metrics is flashing red. Corporate profits are due for a hit

Subscribe to Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter for the latest business news and analysis.

Credit: Source link

The post How Charlotte Became the South’s Startup Capital appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/how-charlotte-became-the-souths-startup-capital/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-charlotte-became-the-souths-startup-capital from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.tumblr.com/post/186511259707

[weeklyreviewer]

How Charlotte Became the South’s Startup Capital

When BB&T and SunTrust announced earlier this year that they would join forces in the biggest banking merger since the global financial crisis—rebranding themselves as the curiously named Truist—there was really only one logical choice for the combined financial services giant’s new headquarters.

It wasn’t just that Charlotte, N.C., found itself conveniently located between BB&T’s Winston-Salem headquarters to the north and SunTrust’s Atlanta stronghold to the south. Nor was it entirely about Charlotte’s status as the nation’s #2 banking center, one that’s already home to Bank of America’s global headquarters and Wells Fargo’s largest East Coast outpost (a legacy of Wells’ 2008 acquisition of Wachovia, in the midst of the crisis).

If you ask those who live, work, and start businesses in Charlotte, what drew Truist to the fifth-fastest growing city in the U.S. last year, according to the Census Bureau, are the same factors that led Honeywell to relocate its own headquarters there last year and Lowe’s (which is based in nearby Mooresville) to select it last month as the site of a new “global technology center” employing 2,000 tech professionals.

For all the discourse about how the nation’s wealth is concentrated in our great coastal metropolises, the Queen City is in the midst of an economic renaissance that’s both attracting major corporations and sprouting dozens of new startups across a variety of industries.

At a time when millennial professionals from New York to San Francisco find their lives characterized by climbing rents, $9 beers, and toiling public transit systems, Charlotte is luring people from across the country with the promise of a better quality of life and a lower cost of living—satirical Onion headlines be damned.

“A lot of millennials are looking for quality of life: ‘Where do I want to live?’,” says Tariq Bokhari, a former Wells Fargo executive and entrepreneur who now serves as a Charlotte city councilman. Bokhari is also executive director of the Carolina Fintech Hub, which promotes new fintech startups in the Charlotte region.

“You look at Charlotte and you see the [warm] seasons and the affordability of the areas,” he notes. “It’s a three-hour drive to the beach and three hours to the mountains. There are 27 different breweries and a burning-hot job market… [Millennials] absolutely want to be here.”

This dynamic has benefitted companies both large and small, and has helped startups that have emerged from the city’s entrepreneurial community grow into major, $1 billion businesses. Charlotte now has no fewer than three “unicorns” valued at that magic number, with analytics software firm Tresata joining the ranks of digital marketing firm Red Ventures and payment software company AvidXchange last year.

“When you’re dealing with zero-unemployment, especially in computer engineering and software development, it is a national recruiting game,” says AvidXchange co-founder and CEO Michael Praeger, who started the company in Charlotte in 2000, only a few years after moving to North Carolina from Boston.

When AvidXchange is looking to lure tech workers from places like Silicon Valley or Boston, Praeger adds, “The majority of the time they’ve never actually been to Charlotte and don’t know what to expect. And when we bring them here—wow. Certainly the cost of living and the year-round weather is a big draw.”

Start me up

The Bank of America Corporate Center, which houses the financial institution’s global headquarters, in Charlotte, N.C. Photo: Chris Keane—Bloomberg via Getty Images

Charlotte, once considered a dyed-in-the-wool banking town, has given birth to an exploding startup scene in recent years—led by a fintech sector that has thrived on the support of local financial services heavyweights and accelerator programs, and extending to young, duly hyped software firms like Passport, Stratifyd, and MapAnything (which was acquired by Salesforce in April).

Organizations like the Carolina Fintech Hub and Queen City Fintech, both of which have backing from the likes of Bank of America and Wells Fargo, have helped develop the city’s entrepreneurial community. Queen City Fintech founder Dan Roselli, a former Bank of America executive and Red Ventures founding partner, runs the accelerator out of Packard Place, a coworking space where it incubates startups not only from Charlotte but from around the world—providing them with a mentorship network of 300 established entrepreneurs and access to fintech events and conferences where they can present to, and connect with, venture investors.

Roselli started the organization in the midst of the Great Recession in 2011, when the city was undergoing “an identity crisis” following Wachovia’s downfall and the near-collapse of the financial system. Since then, Queen City Fintech has helped its alumni raise nearly $2 billion from 45 different venture capital firms.

“One of the things Charlotte realized at the time was that entrepreneurship is a good thing to embrace,” he says. “When Wachovia went under, it was an ‘Oh no’ moment. We realized we needed to pivot toward fintech and innovation.”

Packard Place’s first tenant was a fintech startup called DealCloud, which develops deal management software for investment banking and private equity firms. Some seven years later, in August 2018, DealCloud was acquired by business software provider Intapp for an undisclosed price.

“I think what happened is that during the downturn a lot of people lost their jobs—but all of a sudden, you had a lot of smart people from financial services backgrounds who were able to go out and start businesses, either in financial services or as providers to financial services companies,” according to DealCloud co-founder Rob Cummings, who is now part of Queen City Fintech’s mentor network.

Roselli described fintech as “the tip of the spear that [Charlotte] used to build our entrepreneurial ecosystem,” which makes sense given that the region employs 82,000 finance and insurance professionals. Like Roselli, many of those professionals have gone on to pursue their own ventures—a critical component driving the city’s startup environment.

“I joke that there are more ex-Bank of America and ex-Wachovia people in Charlotte than there are current Bank of America and Wells Fargo people,” he notes. “That’s a good thing.”

The big banks have also come around to entrepreneurial-driven innovation as something to welcome, rather than be wary of as a potentially disruptive force. “They realized that disruption is going to happen, and keeping it close to you is a big advantage,” Roselli says, citing Bank of America and Wells Fargo among Queen City Fintech’s major sponsors.

In fact, many within the Charlotte startup scene consider this embrace of fintech as imperative to the city’s economic future, given how an impending wave of automation—widely seen as the future of the banking sector—could put thousands of financial services professionals out of work in years to come.

“One of the reasons I’ve been doing this is because for many years now, folks have predicted that within the next decade or so, one-third of all traditional banking jobs are going to be disrupted by fintech,” Bokhari notes. “For a city like Charlotte, that’s Detroit-level ramifications for us. We have a chance ahead of time to create what becomes the alternative for those jobs, like branch workers and call center workers, that are going to be gone.”

Boomtown

Wells Fargo’s trading floor in the Duke Energy Center in Charlotte, N.C. Photo: Davis Turner—Bloomberg via Getty Images

The fintech sector is not alone in driving Charlotte’s startup boom. Ask people active in the city’s entrepreneurial scene, and most will tell you that the majority of the new companies emerging from the local economy aren’t even financial services-oriented.

There’s an energy startup sector that’s growing via support from the likes of Charlotte-based Fortune 500 company Duke Energy, a major backer of the energy-focused Joules Accelerator program. IBM, meanwhile, is looking to boost the city’s healthcare industry, having recently teamed up with Queen City Fintech to launch a new accelerator targeting early-stage healthtech (as well as fintech) companies.

“Fintech is what we’re known for—it was our easiest entry point—but over half of the startups I deal with are not related to fintech at all,” according to Innovate Charlotte executive director Keith Luedeman, whose nonprofit promotes and supports entrepreneurs in the region.

Luedeman is another former entrepreneur-turned-advocate for the city’s startup scene, having pivoted after selling his own fintech startup, GoodMortgage.com, to the PIMCO-owned First Guaranty Mortgage in 2016. He, too, is part of Queen City Fintech’s mentor network; in turn, both Dan Roselli and the Carolina Fintech Hub’s Tariq Bokhari sit on Innovate Charlotte’s board.

The sum effect of all of this collaboration and advocacy has been an environment that—contrary to the cutthroat, dog-eat-dog world of entrepreneurship in other, larger markets—sees business leaders in Charlotte working together, to an almost unusual extent, toward a shared goal of success.

“I find the entrepreneurial community here extremely collaborative; I feel like we’re all in this together,” says Meggie Williams, the founder and CEO of dog-walking startup Skipper—a somewhat unique example of a consumer-facing enterprise that has made waves in the city’s startup scene. “There are advantages to being in a city with fewer degrees of separation between the people who are starting out and the people who already made it.”

Williams moved to Charlotte from New York City in 2014. Having left her job at IBM’s New York office in search of a more fulfilling lifestyle, the University of North Carolina graduate and her husband, Sebastian, found it two-and-a-half hours from where she went to college.

The couple founded Skipper in 2016, and so far have been able to find the funding they need to grow their business; the company raised $900,000 in a seed round last year, and is on the verge of closing a new $2.5 million funding round this summer, according to Williams. It’s also benefited from the city’s collaborative business ecosystem, counting the likes of DealCloud’s Cummings among its board members.

That’s not to say things are perfect for Charlotte entrepreneurs in search of capital. While expressing her belief that “there’s a ton of capital and opportunity” for startups in the city, Williams notes that “a lot of the funding here is risk-averse” compared to other markets—a sentiment that some attribute to the more cautious, banking-related capital that constitutes much of the city’s wealth.

In turn, most Charlotte startups have had to look to investors from outside the city for the money they need to expand their operations. Queen City Fintech’s Roselli, who also runs early-stage venture capital firm Carolinas Fintech Ventures, notes a gap in venture funding based in Charlotte—pointing to how few of the 45 venture firms that have invested in Queen City Fintech’s accelerator startups are actually located in the city. “There is no general venture fund in Charlotte; we have angel funds and growth funds, but we’re still missing that venture-tier in between,” Roselli says.

Still, he described Charlotte’s funding environment as being on “a journey, and we’re certainly on the right path.”

“Ten years ago, venture firms were investing only in New York and San Francisco, and they wanted you to move [your company] to New York and San Francisco,” Roselli adds. “That’s no longer true; they’re recognizing that there are great companies and entrepreneurs [elsewhere], and there’s value to be had.”

It’s a trend that’s undoubtedly caught on within the world of venture capital and private equity at large. As Mithril Capital’s Ajay Royan told Fortune earlier this year, “You can’t do a garage startup in Silicon Valley, because the garage is [worth] $4 million”—a factor that led Royan to move his venture capital firm’s offices from San Francisco to Austin, Tex., last year.

“More than three-quarters of our TMT [technology, media, and telecommunications] investments sit outside of the Bay Area,” according to Warburg Pincus managing director Mark Colodny, who runs the private equity giant’s TMT business.

Colodny notes that North Carolina has long been a point of interest for the Warburg Pincus, which has previously invested in Cary, N.C.-based software companies MercuryGate International and Dude Solutions (both of which are located in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area known as the Research Triangle). Having exited those investments, the private equity firm still is “actively looking at Charlotte and Raleigh-based companies now.”

“The state for a long time has been moving jobs away from traditional industries, like agriculture and textiles, into tech—which, coupled with a strong university system, has created a very interesting community of talented software and fintech entrepreneurs,” Colodny says.

Tar Heel troubles

Rendering of the Camp North End office and retail redevelopment in Charlotte, N.C. Photo: Camp North End

For all that Charlotte has going for it, it wasn’t enough to draw Amazon, which didn’t even include the city in its final 20 markets under consideration for its hotly-debated “HQ2” sweepstakes. Bokhari was among the city stakeholders “leading the charge” to draw Amazon, and recalls building a consortium of business leaders for a pitch centered more around private-sector collaboration than public-sector incentives.

“I went around and said, ‘Hey, let’s get involved in this and send a message that all the banks are willing to open our doors and partner [with Amazon],” according to Bokhari. “It’s not about the government incentive package; here’s what the private sector will do for you.”

But it wasn’t to be, and Bokhari says he was “absolutely flabbergasted” when Charlotte didn’t make the shortlist. “The tiny blurb of feedback we got was, ‘Well, you guys don’t have the existing number of tech jobs that we’re looking for.’ What I pushed back with—and nobody [at Amazon] answered me—was, ‘What’s your strategy? You’re going to go in and poach people from other companies?’” In the end, Bokhari says he “lost faith that the [HQ2] process was even real.”

Meanwhile, the city’s business community continues to deal with the fallout from the Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act—the 2016 state law known as HB2, which sparked a national outcry for forcing transgender people to use the gendered public restrooms that correspond with their sex at birth. The measure drew myriad boycotts; PayPal abandoned a planned expansion in Charlotte, and the NBA relocated its 2017 All-Star Game from the city, to name only two.

Despite a subsequent partial repeal that removed the bill’s provisions around bathroom use, the law lingers as a reminder of the socio-political schism between North Carolina’s booming urban centers and more conservative rural areas, which in many cases have not felt the benefits of the state’s millennial-driven economic and cultural trends.

“People say that North Carolina is a purple state, and that’s not accurate; it’s bright blue cities surrounded by bright red rural areas,” says Roselli, who describes himself as “very progressive” in his social views. “HB2 was one of the greatest disasters in the last 50 years of North Carolina’s political history. There’s no question that it was a devastatingly bad bill.”

Roselli adds that as a result of the legislation, GV—Google’s venture capital investment arm—“wouldn’t come to [Queen City Fintech’s] Fintech Generations conference” in Charlotte, with the tech behemoth continuing to limit its dealings in North Carolina. While a GV spokesperson declined to comment for this story, Google also bypassed the state earlier this year for its planned $13 billion expansion of data centers and offices in 14 states (including neighboring South Carolina) across the U.S.

Yet that doesn’t change the fact that investors from around the country are considering Charlotte to an unprecedented extent. Few businesspeople need to be as attuned to the socio-economic dynamics of a given place as real estate developers, and those who build the spaces where people live and work are increasingly viewing the Queen City as an opportunity.

“We saw a city with a low cost of living, a very high quality of life, a progressive attitude toward urban infrastructure and planning, and a place where young people are moving for jobs,” says Damon Hemmerdinger, co-president of ATCO Properties & Management. “We saw trends in the economy, and the chance to create a product that we think is meeting a need.”

Though the Manhattan-based real estate firm has traditionally been focused on the New York City office market, ATCO saw Charlotte as primed for the sort of trendy, creative office space that startups have flocked to in markets like Brooklyn and Atlanta. That motivated it to acquire a 76-acre industrial site, located only a mile from Charlotte’s central business district, where Ford Motor Company once built Model T cars and the U.S. Army later built missiles.

Today, ATCO and partner Shorenstein Properties are at work redeveloping the sprawling property into a mixed-use, office and retail campus known as Camp North End. The site will eventually house roughly than 1.5 million square feet of commercial space, and could eventually include up to 1,500 apartments and a hotel.

Hemmerdinger describes the project as a “large-scale, adaptive reuse project that, in other places, is where companies from the tech and fintech world want to put their offices in.” Thus far, that appears to ring true; in addition to coworking spaces, design firms and galleries, Camp North End already counts among its tenants TM Studio, Ally Financial’s “innovation studio” where product engineers and developers design and prototype “new consumer banking concepts,” according to Ally.

Projects like Camp North End are necessary if the Charlotte’s infrastructure is going to keep up with prolific rate of growth it’s now witnessing. But it’s definitely growing—a city fueled by a perfect storm of economic and generational tailwinds that are now bearing fruit.

“Charlotte is, to me, an adolescent city,” as Innovate Charlotte’s Keith Luedeman put it. “Some days we’re very proud and boisterous, and some days we’re insecure and we don’t think we’re deserving of any of the recognition we get. We’ve got to show that this is a great place to found and grow your business.”

More must-read stories from Fortune:

—Fortune’s 2019 40 Under 40

—How automation is cutting into workers’ share of economic output

—How the maker of the world’s bestselling drug keeps prices sky-high

—Want to buy a Spanish village? This real estate agent has 400 to sell

—One of Warren Buffet’s favorite metrics is flashing red. Corporate profits are due for a hit

Subscribe to Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter for the latest business news and analysis.

Credit: Source link

The post How Charlotte Became the South’s Startup Capital appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.

from WeeklyReviewer https://weeklyreviewer.com/how-charlotte-became-the-souths-startup-capital/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-charlotte-became-the-souths-startup-capital

[ultralifehackerguru-blog]

New Post has been published on http://www.lifehacker.guru/chicago-three-artists-challenging-african-american-stereotypes/

Chicago: Three artists challenging African-American stereotypes

Three photographers are exhibiting work that confronts the way African-Americans are often perceived in art, the workplace, and through their physical appearance.

The work, by artists Alanna Airitam, Endia Beal and Medina Dugger can be seen in an exhibition called How do you see me? at the Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago.

Here is a selection of highlights.

The Golden Age, by Alanna Airitam

Alanna Airitam addresses the absence of black people in the history of Western art, with rare appearances showing dark-skinned people “represented in paintings and films as domestic workers, slaves or barbarians”.

In her series The Golden Age, the artist invited African-Americans to pose in the style of classic Dutch portraiture, to celebrate black identity and highlight the racial divide seen in art history.

Image copyrightALANNA AIRITAM / CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY

Image captionSaint Lenox, 2017

Airitam said: “When I see the beauty and power in the eyes of the people in the portraits, it immediately counters all the negative stereotypes and narratives we receive on a daily basis.

“It is (and always will be) especially important for me to combat the barrage of dehumanising messages black people face through media with messages that clearly state that we are beautiful, powerful, valuable, worthy human beings and we’re here to stay.”

Image copyrightALANNA AIRITAM / CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY

Image captionSaint Sugar Hill, 2017

Image copyrightALANNA AIRITAM / CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY

Image captionDapper Dan, 2017

Airitam pays homage to the Harlem Renaissance, a period of American history in the early 20th Century that saw a boom in African-American social and cultural expression, centred around Harlem in Upper Manhattan, New York.

The image above is named after Dapper Dan, the Harlem-based clothes designer who defined hip hop fashion in the 1980s and 90s.

Many of her images are named after places in Harlem.

Image copyrightALANNA AIRITAM / CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY

Image captionSaint Minton, 2017

Airitam says that the absence of black people in Western art made an impression on her as a child going into museums and galleries.

“I never saw anyone who looked like me. We were not on the walls (unless shown in a way in which we were serving white people). We did not work there (unless we were cleaning or acting as security; again, serving).

“I remember being young and feeling confused, sad, and embarrassed about that.”

The portrait below, named Queen Mary, is of a model named Mary. Her family is from Saint Croix, an island in the Caribbean Sea.

Mary shared a story with Airitam about three women who led a successful rebellion against Dutch colonialism in Saint Croix in 1878. One of the women was called Mary Thomas.

Airitam decided to name the portrait Queen Mary in honour of the story. The model is symbolically showing that the key to abundance is self-love, beauty, majesty.

Image copyrightALANNA AIRITAM / CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY

Image captionQueen Mary, 2017

Am I What You’re Looking For? by Endia Beal

In her series, Endia Beal positions her models against a fake backdrop of a traditional office setting, wearing an outfit that the model would choose to wear in the workplace.

Image copyrightENDIA BEAL / CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY

Image captionSabrina and Katrina, 2015

Beal, a professor at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina, has spent the last four years using photographic narratives and video testimonies to examine the personal stories of minority women working within the corporate space.

The artist’s previous personal experience of working in mostly white corporate workplaces includes people talking behind her back and making comments about her hair, which did not conform to their view of beauty.

Image copyrightENDIA BEAL / CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY

Image captionTianna, 2016

She says of the creative industry: “As a black, female photographer, I witnessed the under-representation of contemporary minority stories within fine art circles and photojournalism.”

Many of the subjects in her series are students at the university where she works. She also travelled around North Carolina and photographed women in their childhood homes.

“These environments foster comfort allowing the women to be open about their concerns. I asked each woman to wear what she would love to wear to an interview and imagine she is waiting for the interview.”

Image copyrightENDIA BEAL / CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY

Image captionChristian, 2016

The women shared their personal difficulties in gaining employment after graduation: “Employers would tell them that their natural hair was unprofessional or their name was too difficult to pronounce and would suggest they alter themselves for the job.

“Rarely are these stories shared to colleagues or management in fear of rejection or lack of opportunities.”

Image copyrightENDIA BEAL / CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY

Image captionMelanie, 2016

Chroma: An Ode to JD ‘Okhai Ojeikere, by Medina Dugger

In her portrait series, Medina Dugger pays homage to Nigerian photographer JD ‘Okhai Ojeikere, who spent 40 years creating black and white photographic studies of African women’s hairstyles.

Image copyrightMEDINA DUGGER / CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY

Image captionPurple Kinky Calabar, 2017

Ojeikere’s work helped establish modern celebration of black hair culture, documenting African hair-braiding methods that date back thousands of years.

Nigerian hair culture is often an extensive process, which begins in childhood, with methods and variations being influenced by social and cultural patterns, historical events and globalisation.

Traditionally, Nigerian hairstyles can be purely decorative or convey deeper meaning and symbolism around social status, age and family traditions.

Image copyrightMEDINA DUGGER / CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY

Image captionBlue Coiling Penny Penny, 2017

Dugger said: “As a white American living in Nigeria, creating work on Nigerian hair culture, I understood from the beginning that I first needed to learn about the history of the practice and knew that I wanted the process to be collaborative in nature.”

In her portraits, Dugger experiments with historical and imagined hairstyles inspired by Ojeikere but also by Nigerian hairstylist Ijeoma Christopher, along with hairstyles she has seen in Lagos.

Image copyrightMEDINA DUGGER / CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY

Image captionBlue Beri Beri, 2017

The women in the photos helped decide on the vibrant colours to suit their personal preferences.

Image copyrightMEDINA DUGGER / CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY

Image captionOrange Koroba with Pony, 2017

Image copyrightMEDINA DUGGER / CATHERINE EDELMAN GALLERY

Image captionYellow Tip Twist, 2017 (C)

[duqstudents4fairtrade]

Top 25 Fittest Mayors in America 2018

Article orginally published on samirbecic.com

The Health Fitness Revolution institute led by Samir Becic continues to be an annual resource in ranking US Politicians (mayors, senators, congresspeople, governors) on fitness and health, and has been for the past 6 years. Across the nation, numerous national media are using our lists and reporting the information. Every year, we update our lists because we feel that it’s important our politicians continue to be good leaders by demonstrating healthy lifestyles themselves in addition to promoting it within their communities.

“By mayors urging their cities to become healthier and fitter, they will save hundreds of billions of dollars, corporations will be more productive, and our children will be healthier throughout their lives so that they can become the leaders of the future. I believe that Mayors can be great ambassadors for a healthier and fitter nation. The mayors on this list are not only fit themselves but promote health and fitness to their cities and constituents- which is a major ranking criteria.” says Samir Becic.

Samir Becic, author of the book ReSYNC Your Life,  intends to use this list to motivate other mayors to be more active and fit in order to be the best ambassadors for their cities. The wealth and prosperity of a nation is dependent on the health and physicality of its people. “Every politician in the United States who is physically fit and promotes a healthy lifestyle in order to improve the future of our children has my vote, regardless of party” adds Becic.

This list of the Top 25 Fittest Mayors in America is a preliminary list from which we choose the Top 10 Fittest U.S. Mayors 2018. They are listed in alphabetical order:

Allen Joines Age: 70 City: Winston-Salem

Cut the ribbon@Union Cross Credit Union this a.m! 3-5 grades volunteer, & the exp teaches financial responsibility. pic.twitter.com/hLc8eXDS

— Mayor Allen Joines (@Allen_Joines) November 14, 2012

Mayor Joines Tried to bring childhood obesity to the attention of local healthcare. Did 10 workouts with people of all ages for 10 days

https://myfox8.com/2013/08/13/winston-salem-mayor-hits-the-gym-to-help-fight-obesity/

Mayor Joines launched his Childhood Obesity Prevention Initiative to help educate children seven to ten years of age, and their parents, about the importance of good nutrition and exercise. He has formed an initiative to work on reducing poverty in Winston-Salem and is making that one of his top priorities. 

Mayor Joines was voted one of the “Most Influential” people in the Triad for 2006 thru 2015. In 2013, the Winston-Salem Journal named him one of the fifty individuals who helped shape Winston-Salem in its first one hundred years. 

Bill de Blasio Age: 57 City: New York City

  View this post on Instagram

  Today I got to coach a little soccer – one of my family’s favorite games – that will now be more available to kids all over this city. Announcing NYC’s Soccer Initiative: 50 new soccer fields for more than 10,000 kids in all 5 boroughs. We’re using our best moves to kick inequality off the pitch. In a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership with @USSoccerFoundation, @NYCFC, @nycmayorsfund, @adidas, @adidasNYC, and @adidasfootball. #NYCSI

A post shared by Mayor Bill de Blasio (@nycmayor) on Jul 12, 2016 at 12:53pm PDT

Mayor de Blasio defends workout habits before detailing $385M gym plan for students

Builds new gymnasiums in schools and demands that all students get physical education in school

Has said “I think anyone, especially a decision-maker, needs physical activity to keep themselves focused and balanced,” de Blasio said of his own routine. “I think it’s really important for anyone doing serious work. I would encourage anyone in any field, if they’re not getting physical activity, I think it’s undermining their ability to do all they have to do.”

Blasio does a 15 min yoga session and 90 min workout with his wife at the YMCA early mornings.

Catherine Pugh Age: 68 City: Baltimore

  View this post on Instagram

  Had a great meeting with @magicjohnson this morning. We’re going to make Baltimore a #MagicCity

A post shared by Mayor Catherine Pugh (@mayorpugh50) on Jul 26, 2018 at 9:36am PDT

In the mornings she can be seen stretching to go on her daily run and walk workout

Mayor Pugh helped created the Baltimore marathon

http://www.espn.com/espnw/voices/article/17946459/meet-catherine-pugh-senator-marathoner

The idea of the marathon was decided by her, because of running in Baltimore is about being an inclusive city, becoming more diverse and realizing that the area has such great things happening.

“We want people to be healthy. Whether it’s running, walking, skipping, hopping or jumping, you just have to move your body. We are trying to create more bike trails in the city for people to be able to ride safely.” quote from Interview she did with ESPN could be useful as a motivation quote

She is an avid runner and has run 48 races in one year

Dan Pope Age: 55 City: Lubbock

The @SalArmyLubbock held their kick off for the Red Kettle Campaign. You can find the red kettles starting today until December 23rd. pic.twitter.com/TxuO5A9Q1c

— Dan Pope (@MayorDanPope) November 17, 2017

Mayor Pope has a fitness council and promotes healthy eating and active lifestyles and cooperates with the health science center and the healthy Lubbock effort   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shfp918qbjA

http://www.njherald.com/20180813/new-retro-fitness-gives-clients-more-than-a-place-to-work-out

Created the Mayor’s Marathon which is a mayor that uses the money from the registrations and donates them to charities across lubbock

Is an avid runner

Eric Garcetti Age: 47 City: Los Angeles

  View this post on Instagram

  Pursuing strong U.S.-Canada relations in Griffith Park this morning. #captioncontest

A post shared by Eric Garcetti (@ericgarcetti) on Feb 10, 2018 at 11:21am PST

Mayor Garcetti takes morning hikes in the park with his family and when he has guest come in town to tour the city.

Video of him hiking with canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau

Supports the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area which helps maintain the wild life and the trails for hiking. 

Beyond his time at City Hall, Mayor Garcetti has served his country as an intelligence officer in the United States Navy Reserve and taught at the University of Southern California and Occidental College.

The Mayor received his B.A. and M.A. from Columbia University, and studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, and later at the London School of Economics. He is also a jazz pianist and photographer.

He and his wife, First Lady Amy Elaine Wakeland, are the proud parents of a daughter, Maya, and have been foster parents for more than a decade.

Francis Suarez Age: 40 City: Miami

  View this post on Instagram

  ‪Heading home with our baby girl! We are truly grateful for all the love and support we have received. Can’t wait to continue creating a lifetime full of family memories with Gloriana Pilar. #daddysgirl

‬

A post shared by Mayor Francis Suarez (@francisxsuarez) on Apr 15, 2018 at 1:22pm PDT

Mayor Suarez does a daily run to stay fit and attends community events.

Has been known to play pick up basketball in the public parks in Miami with kids

In May 2018, he hosted and participated in a bike ride down Commodore trails that people could get tickets for

Hillary Schieve Age:47 City: Reno

  View this post on Instagram

  Some said it couldn’t be done!! ICYMI: CHECK THIS OUT BICYCLE ENTHUSIASTS: Reno lands @Interbike largest bike show in North America & largest trade show ever to be held in Reno. So proud of our Reno team that worked so hard to make happen! #WeDidIt @renotahoe @RenoAirport @RenoTahoeBiz

A post shared by Mayor Hillary Schieve (@mayorschieve) on Aug 5, 2017 at 3:22pm PDT

Mayor Schieve had a previous athletic career as a figure skater but was stricken with kidney failure which prevented her to pursue her olympic dream.

Her sister had to donate a kidney to save her life so she supports organ donations  

https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/news/a47318/hillary-schieve-mayor-reno/

Jacob Frey Age: 37 City: Minneapolis

  View this post on Instagram

  Gotta love #torchlight parade during #aquatennial in #minneapolis To say I was sweaty was an understatement

A post shared by Jacob Frey (@jacobfrey1) on Jul 18, 2018 at 8:33pm PDT

Mayor Frey runs daily and was a part of his high school track team.

He is a former professional runner and marathoner, between the years of 2007-2008 he has run in the Pan Am games, Olympic trials, and the new york city marathon.

Jacob grew up in northern Virginia and went to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA on a track scholarship. Source: http://www.minneapolismn.gov/mayor/about-jacob

Jay Tibshraeny Age: 64

City: Chandler

Can I join? pic.twitter.com/tunZ1IxrgR

— jay tibshraeny (@jaytibshraeny) June 17, 2018

Mayor Tibshraeny as a native of Chandler, a lifelong public servant of Arizona’s East Valley, and an avid runner and bicyclist.

Mayor Tibshraeny knows amenities like health and wellness programming, parks and open spaces, and recreational trails make Chandler an excellent place to live”

https://www.nrpa.org/parks-recreation-magazine/2015/april/chandler-arizonas-jay-tibshraeny/)

Jeff Longwell Age: 55 City: Wichita

I play a little basketball myself. Let me know if any of you need pointers. #MarchMadness #ILoveWichita pic.twitter.com/9pKEo8GLtO

— Mayor Jeff Longwell (@jefflongwellict) March 12, 2018

Mayor Longwell created the walk and talk program and encourages the city to walk to work as a daily routine.

Supports the Wichita City Thunder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgPIzEcWc0M

WALK with the MAYOR, Longwell talks about some of the improvements on the Arkansas River. Wichitans will soon be able to rent bikes, canoes and paddleboards right by the river.

Jenny Durkan Age: 60 City: Seattle

  View this post on Instagram

  I love walking the neighborhoods of Seattle, getting to know the great people that call them home. I have gotten the great opportunity to walk over 24 neighborhoods so far while on the campaign. I

Seattle.

A post shared by Jenny Durkan (@jennydurkan) on Sep 26, 2017 at 2:19pm PDT

Mayor Jenny has the Jump Club in place at the teen center in Seattle and also participate in single rope and double dutch jump rope.

Is the first women to lead the city in nearly a century

Coached girls basketball in a Yupik fishing village in Alaska

John Suthers Age: 66 City: Colorado Springs

Lifelong Bronco fan John with friend Jack Wiepking before heading to the big game. Go Broncos! #UnitedInOrange pic.twitter.com/WjF9x3vxd7

— John Suthers (@JohnSuthers) January 11, 2015

Mayor Suthers bikes with him community daily as a way to stay fit.

Did a four-mile bike ride with the community for bike month- https://www.trailsandopenspaces.org/2017/05/31/join-mayor-john-suthers-on-a-bike-ride/

Has participated in bike to work day- https://www.denverpost.com/2015/06/24/2-wheeled-commuters-flood-denver-on-bike-to-work-day/

Jonathan Rothschild Age: 63 City: Tucson

Great planting #trees at Elvira Elementary with Trees for Tucson and Kinder Morgan. https://t.co/obJyrxmenD #Tucson pic.twitter.com/CBxPt9xmpY

— Jonathan Rothschild (@JRothschildAZ) August 22, 2016

Mayor promotes healthy neighborhoods and supports healthy habits, by logging millions of miles of daily physical activity. He launched in November 2013, K-6 Fitness Day which promotes physical activity for elementary school students in all local school districts.

https://twitter.com/JRothschildAZ/status/767865663423602688

Walk 100 Miles with the Mayor, the walk was part of my Tucson Moves a Million Miles initiative, created after my first challenge.

Tucson Moves a Million Miles, I’ve challenged Tucsonans of all ages to increase their physical activity. This is a TEAM initiative, so Together we are striving to Eat well, Achieve and Move.

Joseph Hogsett Age: 61 City: Indianapolis

  View this post on Instagram

  As federal prosecutor, I got to take on and defeat rule-breakers. Now it’s your turn, Andrew. Go Colts! — Joe #Colts #SundayNightFootball #NFL #indianapolis

A post shared by Joe Hogsett for Mayor (@hogsettforindy) on Oct 18, 2015 at 5:29pm PDT

Mayor Hogsett focus is on preventing crime, protecting taxpayers, and creating opportunities for working families.

He is also dedicated to investing Indianapolis’ resources back into our neighborhoods. He also bikes around the city and competes in biking marathons.

Mayor Hogsett focus is on preventing crime, protecting taxpayers, and creating opportunities for working families.

He is also dedicated to investing Indianapolis’ resources back into our neighborhoods.

Kirk Caldwell Age: 65 City: Honolulu

  View this post on Instagram

  City services begin to come back online Saturday as Lane weakens. Read more: https://bit.ly/2BTpVWy

A post shared by Kirk Caldwell: (@mayorkirkhnl) on Aug 24, 2018 at 9:57pm PDT

He’s big into surfing, hiking, biking, and paddleboarding.

He is among many mayors who launch a 10-minute walk to a park campaign in his city

Access to high-quality parks around the city

Lenny Curry Age: 48 City: Jacksonville

  View this post on Instagram

  My dad. My son. Big red. A beautiful Jacksonville day. #JaxOnTheRise

A post shared by Lenny Curry (@lennycurry) on Jul 9, 2018 at 12:56pm PDT

Mayor curry focuses on the public safety and Created the “Marathon” as a push for the community to lose 1 pound.

He runs daily to keep himself in shape.

Created the Kids Hope Alliance program which helps kids with after school activity, mental health, fitness and nutrition. http://kidshopealliance.org/

Mayor Lenny Curry is the 44th mayor of the City of Jacksonville, Florida. A native Floridian, husband, father, and business owner, he was sworn in on July 1, 2015.  

Muriel Bowser Age: 46 City: Washington D.C

  View this post on Instagram

  ‪Another award for the city!

Thanks @BikeLeague for naming #DC as a “Gold” Bicycle Friendly Community. #GoldStatus #BikeDC

‬ . . .

@najiallah

A post shared by Mayor Muriel Bowser (@mayor_bowser) on Mar 5, 2018 at 11:29am PST

Washington D.C. was one  of America’s Fittest City  last year, for 3 years in a row and now mayor bowers is working to get the city back to its #1 spot.

Workouts, walks and runs, nutrition seminars and health expos daily. #FitDC program

Mayor Bowser expanded opportunity across all 8 Wards of DC by strengthening job training programs, and by attracting and retaining jobs in the District.

Rahm Emanuel Age: 58 City: Chicago

  View this post on Instagram

  Thank you to all the volunteers and paramedics of the #ChicagoTriathlon who made today’s event possible for participants in some hot weather. And while our dear friend and triathlete Elizabeth Brackett was not with us, we all know she was there in spirit. #ChiTri

A post shared by Mayor Rahm Emanuel (@chicagosmayor) on Aug 26, 2018 at 1:06pm PDT

Video about his workout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usjjXcGcs3M

Works out 7 days a week

Swims, bikes and has a weight routine

Three mornings a week, Rahm wakes up early, runs to the gym, and swims a mile in a 50-meter indoor pool. Then he does chest exercises and runs two miles back to his Ravenswood Manor home

Takes a multivitamin every day

Takes private yoga classes

Mayor Emanuel is working on childhood obesity too- he is working in partnership with agencies, foundations, corporations, and other key stakeholders, to give all children in Chicago the childhood they deserve by having access to parks and playgrounds.

Made HFR’s list of Fittest American Politicians 2017

Ron Nirenberg Age: 61 City: San Antonio

  View this post on Instagram

  #MentalHealthBreak at @the_originalgym_texas

A post shared by Mayor Ron Nirenberg (@ron_nirenberg) on Mar 15, 2017 at 1:42pm PDT

Strength training helps keep him sharp both mentally and physically, said mayor  Ron Nirenberg.

He been lifting weights since he was about 14. In fact, he was a competitive bodybuilder and powerlifter.

Eats clean as much as possible

Tries to workout 3 times a week

Sam Liccardo Age: 48 City: San Jose

  View this post on Instagram

  A beautiful, sunny (and very cold!) Sunday morning spent running the 408K with thousands of neighbors to support the important work of the Pat Tillman Foundation #Great408

A post shared by Sam Liccardo (@samliccardo) on Mar 4, 2018 at 8:59am PST

Mayor Sam Liccardo has worked hard to build a safer and stronger San José.

He led the effort to finally resolve years of pension disputes and begin to restore the police department. Working out with the police department whenever he has time.

make San José a climate leader by adopting one of the first Paris Agreement-aligned sustainability plans in the country, with bold climate goals that will transform San José into a more inclusive, and equitable city.

Sharon Weston Broome Age: 61 City: Baton Rouge

  View this post on Instagram

  #PedalingforPeace earlier with @lamontcole, and many from the Council, community and law enforcement. Creating a city of peace, prosperity and progress for all. #LoveBTR

A post shared by Sharon Weston Broome (@mayorbroome) on Jun 22, 2018 at 7:55pm PDT

Mayor Broome Talks about her move with the mayor program where she invites people to bike with her.

In the article talks about losing 25 pounds. http://www.wafb.com/story/38809133/mayor-broome-speaks-candidly-about-weight-loss-and-her-personal-health-journey

Stresses that everyone should find their own fitness plans that work for them

Steven Fulop Age: 41 City: Jersey City

  View this post on Instagram

  Great turnout for the #jerseycity Ward Tour today. Thank you @bikejcgram and the countless volunteers that work with us on better/safer policies for bikes in JC

A post shared by Steven Fulop (@stevenfulopjc) on Jun 3, 2018 at 11:06am PDT

Mayor Fulop is a triathlete and has participated in ironman.

Competed in the Aquadraat Sports United States Ironman Triathlon Championships, an event that will run through both New York and New Jersey.

Details about the race Fulop competed in: http://www.hudsonreporter.com/view/full_story/19744348/article-SCOREBOARD-Fulop-taking-on-another-challenge–Being-an-Ironman-Jersey-City-Councilman-among-locals-heading-to-U-S–Ironman-Triathlon-Championship?mobile_view=false

Sylvester Turner Age: 63 City: Houston

  View this post on Instagram

  Practice makes perfect. Taking some putts on Houston Golf Association’s #FirstTee green. Make sure to visit the @houopen this weekend. The weather is perfect.

A post shared by Sylvester Turner (@sylvesterturner) on Mar 31, 2018 at 1:08pm PDT

Mayor Turner believes in his determination to make Houston one of the healthiest cities in US. “By becoming a healthier and fitter city’’.

Bikes 100 miles weekly

Joined the #PushUpsEverywhere campaign in an effort to raise obesity awareness in his city. Mr. Turner easily did his 10 push-ups, then challenging the Mayor of New York City, Bill De Blasio, and the Mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti to do 10 #PushUpsEverywhere to promote health in their cities as well. Mayor Turner also said if they completed theirs, he would do 20 more!

Houston’s bike share system, Houston BCycle, will grow to 128 stations over the next two years as part of the program’s expansion funded by a $3.7 million federal grant.

“Houston BCycle’s expansion project is allowing more Houstonians an affordable way to improve their personal health as well as the health of our environment,” said Mayor Sylvester Turner. “Cycling allows people to explore neighborhoods in a unique and engaging way. Increasing the number of Houston BCycle stations provides a much-needed alternative to traveling in single-occupancy automotive vehicles and complements our public transit system.”

In 2017, Houston BCycle users offset 913,332 pounds of carbon emissions and burned over 38 million calories.

Previously named HFR’s U.S. Mayor of the Year 2017

Named among HFR’s Top 25 Fittest Mayors

Ted Wheeler Age: 55 City: Portland

  View this post on Instagram

  Before the race. #arizona #ironmanarizona #triathlon #imaz

A post shared by Ted Wheeler (@tedwheelerpdx) on Nov 19, 2016 at 5:33pm PST

Mayor Wheeler bikes around the city of portland daily when he is not busy with work and exercise daily to stay fit.

https://twitter.com/tedwheeler/status/991356478429646848

Ted is a longtime community volunteer leader and has devoted energy to diverse organizations including Neighborhood House, Portland Mountain Rescue, and the Oregon Sports Authority. 

He is an Eagle Scout. He lives in Southwest Portland with his wife and daughter. Source: https://www.portlandoregon.gov/wheeler/72222

Tim Keller Age: 40 City: Albuquerque

  View this post on Instagram

  Almost every week our family is here getting our milk, eggs, a popsicle or two, at the grower’s market with all the other folks who are out getting to know their neighbors and enjoying their community. And this week the Downtown Growers Market is kicking off Phase 1 of their transition to plastic free. The vendors, the market goers, and the team that helps the Downtown Grower’s Market get up and running every weekend are taking ownership of making our city more sustainable. Markets like these across the city bring our city together and build community. #Growers #FarmersMarket #OneAlbuquerque

A post shared by Mayor Tim Keller (@mayorkeller) on Jul 7, 2018 at 10:53am PDT

Mayor Keller hopes to create a healthier city

https://jasoncollinphotography.com/blog/mayor-keller-gladiators- He played in an exhibition game for gladiator football

In his personal time, Keller, a former quarterback in high school, still enjoys the game and played for Albuquerque’s professional Arena Football team in their season opener.

He is an Eagle Scout

[Read More ...] http://www.healthfitnessrevolution.com/top-25-fittest-mayors-in-america-2018/

[touristguidebuzz]

Airlines Pack More Seats Onto Each Plane and Manufacturers Try to Make Them Comfortable

Southwest is one of many airlines introducing slimline seats. They allow carriers to pack more passengers in the same space but some travelers find them uncomfortable. Southwest Airlines

Skift Take: Airlines and seat manufacturers do try to make seats comfortable enough. But let's be clear: Travelers want tight seating. By their actions, most passengers have shown they want cheap prices over anything else. Airlines can only offer bargain fares if they pack planes with seats.

— Brian Sumers

Every so often, officials at Rockwell Collins Inc. pitch a one-day job offer to residents near its Winston-Salem, N.C. design center: Earn $100 for sitting in an airplane seat for eight hours.

Show up for the gig, and there’s nary a drinks cart or flight attendant in sight. The rows of seats are arrayed in a testing area at the company’s design and engineering complex. Even without engine hum or overhead bins, “it’s kind of like they’re on the plane,” says Alex Pozzi, vice president of research and development at the company’s campus here.

Over the years, seat researchers at B/E Aerospace, which Rockwell acquired in April for $8 billion, have gleaned a few insights about life in the air. Most people are just fine for two hours. As the third hour approaches, stiffness increases and comfort declines. At four hours, however, a sort of derièrre detente is achieved, and the levels of discomfort recede. After all, when you’re stuck inside a sealed, speeding tube at 35,000 feet, resistance is truly futile.

There are many reasons to despise flying, from delays, to fees, to overzealous TSA staff. But shrinking seats and the pain, claustrophobia, and rage they can trigger are arguably the biggest reason why travelers loathe airlines. The modern seat, with its power to pack more customers onto any given plane, is at the very heart of the industry’s 21st century economics. Slimmer seats and less legroom between rows—known as pitch—has enabled “cabin densification” across domestic and international fleets. More seats, quite simply, means more money and lower operating costs.

There are limits, however, even beyond physical constraints. Regulators mandate a certain ratio of attendants to seats, and carriers want to keep labor costs down. Still, the trend has clearly been moving toward scrunching you. While 34 to 35 inches of pitch was once common for economy class, the new normal is 30 to 31 inches, with several major carriers deploying 28 inches on short and medium flights. Soon, however, that squeeze-play may come to an end.

The seat factory in Winston-Salem is at the center of testing the physical limits of human tolerance. One part of its live studies involves giving only some participants Wi-Fi access, an exercise that typically reveals a direct relationship between distraction and seat-staying power. “You can easily see the difference in ratings for the exact same seat if you have entertainment,” says Pozzi.

Yes, a good sci-fi flick can ease the harshest heinie-holder, and it’s no coincidence that most seatbacks on long-haul flights have a screen. But this is small compensation for the sacrifices required of air travelers who, having run the gantlet of parking, ticketing, security, and terminal, visibly slump when they find that their assigned seat has gotten even smaller.

Let there be no doubt about the shrinking quarters in economy—space is tight. Reallocation of aircraft real estate has allowed airlines to install new, medium-tier cabins between first class and economy. The front of the plane where the big money sits remains largely unchanged when it comes to space. The shrinkage, unsurprisingly, has been in back.

In recent years, the “slimline” seat has become the de facto standard by which airlines outfit economy cabins. This design is inches thinner than predecessors and markedly lighter, allowing carriers an additional cost-saver by reducing weight and thus fuel burn. Today, an economy seat that tips the scales above 9 kilograms (20 pounds) is, by an airline’s measure, too heavy to fly.

Carriers are “segmenting the economy cabin into two or three buckets,” said John Heimlich, chief economist at Airlines for America, the industry’s U.S. trade group. These efforts help “to minimize the market-share loss to ultra low-cost carriers [ULCC] or to other modes of transport.”

When Boeing Co. introduced the twin-aisle 777 in the mid-1990s, a nine-seat breadth was standard. Now, the aircraft—flown by carriers worldwide—often seats 10 across in economy, making life even more miserable for passengers. Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner has become notorious for its economy-class pinch with nine across-seating—and on some 787s, these seats are only 17 inches wide. (Airbus’s new A350 is also typically configured with nine seats across, but its cabin is about four feet wider, so it could fit 10.)

This cabin squeeze and seat-shrinking has helped increase earnings in an industry that’s gotten used to fiscal stability. But it occasionally results in some bad public relations. Two United passengers got into a kerfuffle in the summer of 2014 when a man stuck a “knee defender” device on the seat in front of him to prevent reclining, causing the seat’s occupant to grow irate. The crew diverted the Denver-bound flight to Chicago to eject both combatants.

In early May, news leaked that the world’s largest airline, American Airlines Group Inc., planned to add three rows of seats separated by only 29 inches of pitch on its new fleet of Boeing 737 Max, which arrives later this year. That arrangement would allow for an additional row of extra-legroom seats, which American calls main cabin extra, between first class and steerage. The move would have broken the current 30-inch pitch limit among the six-biggest U.S. airlines, putting it closer to no-frills carriers such as Spirit Airlines Inc., which offers a mere 28 inches.

Less than six weeks later, American reversed course—not because of passenger outrage, but because of flight attendants. American Chief Executive Officer Doug Parker said on July 28 that employees pushed back at having to be the front-line defender of a new level of cabin-class stratification. Parker said employees were telling him, “‘You’re going to put us in a position where we need to explain to these customers that indeed this is necessary so that we can have one more row of main cabin extra?’”

Parker explained the underlying calculation: “While we could convince ourselves that that might be able to produce somewhat higher revenues on the aircraft, what it was doing to our perception with our team wasn’t worth it.”

No airline has yet edged below 28-inches of legroom, although at least one major seat manufacturer, Zodiac Aerospace, has shown a prototype designed with just 27 inches. Italy-based Aviointeriors SpA gained attention in 2010 with a “standing” perch-style concept called SkyRider. That “seat” hasn’t passed regulatory muster, nor won any orders, although periodically a ULCC will speak favorably about such seating possibilities. Last month, South American carrier VivaColombia was the latest to raise the prospect of standing flights.

This rush to squeeze ever-more money out of passenger posture may soon slow. Carriers such as Delta Air Lines Inc. are looking to exploit this issue by retaining some creature comforts its competitors have ditched. It’s kept nine-across seating on its 777s, “one of the only in the world” to do so, says Joe Kiely, Delta’s managing director of product and customer experience. Delta has also led an industry trend to fly larger aircraft on more routes, reducing the role of regional jets. JetBlue Airways Corp. took pitch into consideration for its Airbus A320 fleet, which will see legroom shrink by more than an inch, to 32 inches, starting this fall. Despite the contraction, JetBlue wanted still to be able to advertise “the most legroom in coach.”

Meanwhile in Europe, low-fare king Ryanair Holdings Plc will pitch its 197 seats on the new 737 Max at 31 inches—one more than American, which plans for 30-inches of legroom in a slightly smaller version of the new 737 it begins flying in November. The battle over comfort, or more accurately less discomfort, is on.

Smaller seats and legroom have come in for scrutiny by a powerful federal appeals court. A three-judge panel recently ruled that regulators must consider setting minimum space standards, agreeing with aspects of a consumer group lawsuit that warned safety is being compromised. In emergencies, the Federal Aviation Administration requires fully loaded planes be emptied in 90 seconds or less.

“This is the Case of the Incredible Shrinking Airline Seat,” U.S. Circuit Judge Patricia Ann Millett wrote in the July 28 ruling. Her court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, handles most cases involving federal regulators and rules, a fact that may give airlines pause as they decide whether to shrink seating further.

Flyers Rights, a nonprofit advocacy group, contends that seat space has shrunk at the same time passengers have gotten larger. Those developments could lead to a catastrophic outcome during evacuation, the group warns. It also points to a less dramatic peril exacerbated by tight quarters and longer flights: deep-vein thrombosis, or blood clots in the leg, which can kill.

“Our concern is that it will take a Titanic-type disaster to make a change if we don’t get regulation,” says Paul Hudson, the group’s president. The court decision may “give impetus to getting seats back to where they’re going to be both safe and potentially not unhealthy.”

Bills pending in both houses of Congress would mandate rules on minimum airline seat space. In the past, such efforts have failed; the U.S. Department of Transportation has likewise been reluctant to address the topic. Airlines frequently say that such regulatory moves targeting key revenue centers—baggage fees, seat space, ticket-change fees—could lead to higher fares. Hudson, who previously worked as an aviation attorney, dismissed the industry response as a knee-jerk reaction.

“I’ve never heard that argument not raised,” he says

Airlines offer a few other rejoinders to the chorus of complaints. One is airfare: Faced with a choice between discomfort and higher fares, an overwhelming majority of travelers choose the former. Another is pricing-power. While industry consolidation did allow carriers to cut costs and command higher prices on some routes, average U.S. airfares have been one of the few consistent goods to hold firm against inflation over the past 20 years. Slimming the seats and tightening the space, the airlines argue, is a rational response.

The industry also points out that new seats, while thinner, are far superior to older models. Carriers’ zeal for lighter, durable, ergonomic seating has yielded engineering advances. Body shape and size, along with better materials and design, have become integral to airline seat manufacturing, and all four of the industry’s major players—Recaro GmbH, Thompson Aero Seating,  Zodiac Aerospace, and Rockwell Collins—are fiercely competitive in such areas as materials and ergonomics.

The L-shaped seat of yore has morphed into something more akin to a pivoting cradle-chair, seat designers say. And the once-flat seat pan, the chair’s frame and source of much anguish, is now generally curved. The passenger’s lower back is also finding fresh support in the newer designs.

American noted repeatedly that its seat selection for the 737 Max is a newer Rockwell Collins design, called Meridian, that’s more comfortable than prior economy-class seats. That’s the same seat Southwest Airlines Co. chose for its 200 new Max aircraft and its current 737-800s. United Continental Holdings Inc. is also purchasing the Meridian seat for its Max 9.

During a tour of its Winston-Salem design complex in May, Rockwell Collins officials invited reporters to sit in a variety of newer seats, including the Meridian and Aspire, a model aimed at two-aisle aircraft on long-haul routes. Tom Plant, vice president and general manager of aircraft seating at the company’s Interior Systems unit, asked the “passengers” to guess how much legroom each seat had. The pitch was 29 inches, but all the guesses were too high, mostly 30 to 32 inches.

Designers had managed to create a clever illusion of space. And that illusion means money.

©2017 Bloomberg L.P.

This article was written by Justin Bachman from Bloomberg and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.

[ericheras]

"When I'm in New York I look at the Empire State Building and feel as though it belongs to me ... or is it vice versa?" —Fay Wray •—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—• Like, Share & Follow the extraordinary talents we Love❣️to find in our feeds...some exceptional favs 🍭tagged here!
•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—•—• When he drew up its plans in 1929, architect William Lamb of the firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon is said to have modeled the Empire State Building after Winston-Salem, North Carolina’s Reynolds Building—which he had previously designed—and Carew Tower in Cincinnati. • The two earlier Art Deco buildings are now often cited as the Empire State’s architectural ancestors. • On the Reynolds Building’s 50th anniversary in 1979, the Empire State Building’s general manager even sent a card that read, “Happy Anniversary, Dad.” • In 2006, Malkin Holdings, the company handling day-to-day operations at the time, began a $550 million modernization endeavor to restore the marble lobby and reproduce the damaged mural on the ceiling, gut vacant floors, upgrade the building’s technology and overhaul the mechanical systems. • The new amenities are the latest stage of the project, which also includes updating the 68 passenger elevators. • Dozens of small tenants prior have been replaced with a few big names with stylish, modern offices in new space, airy and open with exposed beams, hanging Edison bulbs and two outdoor terraces at the 21st floor. (at New York, New York)

[havelovewilltravelproject]

9 Things to Have Love for in South Carolina

I’ve been driving east for so long, it’s a bit strange to be heading north!  Now, that I’m in the final stretch of the road trip, though, it’s the direction I need to head.  North Carolina will be the last state that I really spend some time in with plans to visit four cities (Raleigh, Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Asheville) and meet with 5 hosts!  It will be a whirlwind.

But, before I jump into North Carolina, I wanted to share nine things to have love for in South Carolina. These are things I saw or experienced that won’t quite fit in with the stories of spending time with my hosts.

If you’re new to Have Love, Will Travel, you can check out similar posts about Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.  Enjoy!

Top Row (L to R):

1.    Charleston Architecture and Landscaping – If you’re going to pay a visit to Charleston, SC, make sure to set aside some time to just walk around and enjoy the town.  Whether it’s the monumental architecture of downtown, the antebellum houses along the batteries, or the more modest homes in other neighborhoods, there is so much care and detail in both the architecture and the gardening. Also, many of the buildings have interesting history posted on plaques, while other blocks have pedestrian breezeways that let you take a gander at the gardens.

2.    Congaree National Park – The Ranger I chatted with at the Visitors Center told me that despite being just 30 minutes from downtown Columbia, Congaree is the third least visited National Park in the U.S.  While the visitor numbers have been rising as people discover this beautiful park, its flat hikes ranging in distance from 2-12 miles, and the amazing landscape of 26,000 acres of hardwood forest, it’s a wonderful place to get away from it all.  It’s also an amazing place to see “champion trees” (aka some of the tallest of various tree species).  If you want to check out another photo and learn a bit more about how Congaree came to be a national park in 2003, check out these posts I created on Instagram: post 1; post 2.

3.    South Carolina State House – Like many state capitols, the South Carolina State House is quite an ostentatious building, with an even more epic history. Columbia became the capital of South Carolina in 1786 (Charleston was actually the state’s first capital) and first occupied a small wooden structure just west of the current building.  In 1855, construction began on the current state house, designed by John R. Niernsee. The exterior walls were complete in 1863 when work was suspended during the Civil War.  In February 1865, Union troops burned the old State House and shelled the unfinished one and raised the U.S. Flag over it.  Today, where the shells hit the building are marked with stars that have been incorporated into the design.  By the 1880s work resumed, and when Niernsee died, there were a series of people who came on to oversee the construction, which wasn’t finished until the early 1900s.   Learn a bit about a beautiful stained glass window in the State House and South Carolina’s state mottos here.

Middle Row (L to R):

4.    “Shoeless” Joe Jackson Museum – I’m a third generation White Sox fan, so when I learned that one of the team’s greatest player, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson had a museum dedicated to him in Greenville, I knew I had to pay a visit.  I was fortunate that it worked out I would be in town on a Saturday, because the volunteer-staffed museum is only open that day.  For me, Jackson was the star of the White Sox teams that would win the 1917 World Series, and be embroiled in the 1919 World Series gambling scandal that would lead to the first commissioner of baseball throwing Jackson and seven of his teammates out of baseball, despite having been found not guilty.  The house Jackson lived in with his wife Kate, and eventually died in is now the museum. The memorabilia is enjoyable, but the real highlight for me was the stories that the volunteers shared about Joe the person and community member, and also the story of how the museum came to be.  In the collage at the top of this post is a personal favorite piece of memorabilia in the museum.  Many people leave items at Jackson’s gravesite.  This ball reads:

Mr. Jackson, please watch over me as I play your game to the best of my ability. I’m going to play for all the years you couldn’t.  I know you were innocent. Somehow I know you are the greatest ever. (Signed) Matt McRee #9

See one more photo from the museum here.

5.    Biscuits – I know that biscuits are a traditional treat all across the south, but I had some particularly great ones while in South Carolina.  In particular, I recommend the spicy chicken biscuit at Mercantile and Mash in Charleston and the biscuit that comes with any entrée at Tupelo Honey Café in Greenville (highly recommend the shashuska for breakfast/brunch).

6.    Good Hope Picnic – I’ve professed my appreciation for a good historic marker before, and today I’ll do it again (btw did you know that there’s a whole historical marker database – it’s amazing)!  En route to Congaree National Park from Charleston, I came upon a set of colorfully painted, wood stands and a marker that caught my eye right beside a rural highway. I learned that the Good Hope Picnic, founded in 1915, is the celebration of the end of planting season. It's the oldest African-American event in Lone Star, SC, and is still held every year on the second Friday in August. In addition to selling produce, it features music and games.  Check out another photo I snapped on site.

Bottom Row (L to R):

7.    The Cigar Factory in Charleston -- Charleston, SC's Cigar Factory was built in 1881 as a textile mill, and didn't become a cigar factory until the early 1900s. By the end of WWII, it employed ~1500 workers, 900 of who were black women. In October 1945, 80% of the factory's workforce walked off the job protesting discrimination and low wages. They sang the hymn "I'll Overcome Someday," which eventually evolved into the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome." They returned to work in March 1946 when they won better wages and promises of better treatment. The Cigar Factory closed in 1971, and was used as offices and warehousing space. In 2014 a group of investors bought and renovated it into a mixed-use development with restaurants, apartments, offices, and businesses.  Check out another photo from the site.

8.    Reconnecting with high school classmates!  I’m amazed how Have Love, Will Travel has reconnected me to people I haven’t seen or talked to in years. Two of my hosts on this trip came through former high school classmates, and as a bonus I’ve had the chance to catch up with them as well. The introduction to my Greenville host came through the very lovely and talented photojournalist Heidi Heilbrunn who was also in Ms. Weiner’s advisory from 1994-1998.  It was a real treat to catch up with her in Columbia over coffee, and get a peak into one of the places where she’s worked – the South Carolina State House.  I couldn’t spare you our reunion selfie!

9.    Greenville’s Main Street at Dusk – I’ll share more about Greenville’s Main Street in my story with my host, but after we wrapped up our time together, I rewalked the street at dusk on Saturday night enjoying the hub bub all about, and snapping photos of little things that caught my eye. Honestly, it’s one of my favorite ways to get a feel for a place.  Here are a couple of things that I saw, and there’s one more here.

I know I’ve just grazed the surface of the Palmetto State. What do you have love for in South Carolina?