The Ever-Evolving Ballantyne® Campus
Now that The Bowl is up and running, what’s next?
By Cristina Bolling
It’s a Saturday night at The Bowl at Ballantyne™, and country music lovers are streaming into a concert at The Amp Ballantyne™ — women in cowboy boots and jeans, men sporting Western hats and T-shirts. The opening act is grooving, and so are the people moving through the gate and toward their seats or lawn spots, stopping for drinks or a nosh from a food truck along the way. There will be 4,000 in the audience before the main act takes the stage.
A short walk down Bowl Street, a different kind of anticipation is building as diners make their way to a three-course meal at North Italia or a quick hamburger at Harriet’s, some finishing off with a scoop of Honeysuckle gelato. The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery’s biergarten is alive as parents relax with pints while their kids play on climbing equipment in the “family zone.” Diners look down from the brewery’s second-story terrace as strings of lights twinkle below.
If they’re lucky, the kids in the biergarten will get to run their sillies out even more at the Stream Park playground nearby, climbing on nets and careening down slides.
All the while, tall apartment towers keep watch — the 16-story Towerview and the 26-story Oro, which, thanks to its height and position on high ground, has the most spectacular view of uptown anywhere in South Charlotte.
Ballantyne, specifically this spot, was not always the destination it is on this night. But as more development has continued to south of Charlotte’s center, the area has moved from being a corporate hub with a regionally known golf course to becoming a destination that’s sought after for entertainment, dining and living spaces — all in one place.
Think of it this way: The Bowl has the restaurant draw approaching that of South End and SouthPark, a high-caliber entertainment venue like one you’d see in uptown or University City, the luxury apartment high-rises of center city, and the destination brewery of LoSo.
Just a year ago, this type of Saturday night would have been impossible at Ballantyne.
And here we are.
A design, refined
Areas like this don’t happen by accident. The design and execution of The Bowl came together by a combination of high-level forces.