Photo: Charlotte skyline by James Willamor on Flickr.

Fortune 500 companies from Duke Energy to Bank of America make Tryon Street in Charlotte, N.C., their home. But over the course of a mile, the main north-south thoroughfare through downtown tells a tale of two streets.

South Tryon Street bustles with workers from high-rise office buildings, visitors to art museums and cultural centers, and bar and restaurant patrons.

North Tryon Street—which was booming before the Great Recession—hasn’t seen the same kind of development recently. The Bank of America Corporate Center fills the first block of North Tryon and the Hearst Tower stands on the next block. But office buildings become sparse as Tryon continues north, with vacant lots and surface parking lots doing little to attract the foot traffic on which South Tryon thrives.

Knight Foundation is working with civic leaders to change that.

Last week the foundation brought two Gehl Studio urban planning experts to Charlotte to discuss ways to revitalize the North Tryon corridor. Gehl Studio is part of Copenhagen-based Gehl Architects, known for emphasizing “the relationship between the built environment and people’s quality of life.”

The philosophy aligns closely with Knight Foundation’s strategy of creating places that attract, retain and harness young talent and encourage people to mix and share ideas, says Susan Patterson, Knight Foundation’s Charlotte program director. The idea is to develop streetscapes that are as friendly to people as they are to vehicles.

“North Tryon is almost a blank canvas, with lots of public land and incredible [civic] institutions,” she said. “This seems like a great opportunity to create a special place.”

Knight Foundation invited Jeff Risom, managing director of Gehl Studio, and project manager Julia Day to Charlotte after hosting them this spring during a similarly themed, Knight-funded visit to Miami.

Patterson coordinated with Charlotte Center City Partners and the nonprofit Foundation for the Carolinas to arrange the two-day visit. Center City Partners identified the transformation of North Tryon as a priority in its 2020 master plan.

Events for the Gehl visit included several meetings with city leaders, other urban planners and North Tryon stakeholders. The foundation also screened the film “The Human Scale,” featuring Gehl Architects founder Jan Gehl, for about 100 people.

After the screening about 25 people took a walking tour along Tryon and neighboring streets, then sat around an outdoor plaza to discuss what people love about Charlotte and how to bring those qualities to North Tryon, Patterson said.

Risom and Day’s visit coincided with the city’s NASCAR-themed Speed Street festival on several downtown blocks. A crowd Risom described as “incredibly diverse” walked the blocked-off streets enjoying music, food and entertainment.

The festival attracts roughly 400,000 people to the urban core each year – none of it in the North Tryon area.

But the bones are there to change perceptions of North Tryon, Risom says.

In addition to having museums and cultural institutions, such as the Discovery Place science museum, the main branch of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, the McColl Center for Visual Art and the North Carolina Dance Theatre, the North Tryon corridor is adjacent to Fourth Ward, a vibrant neighborhood of restored Victorian homes, he noted.

Change is already beginning. Developers broke ground in early May on a 24-story apartment building on the north end of the corridor, near the McColl Center and the Dance Theatre.

One possibility for revitalizing the corridor is to encourage cultural institutions to co-sponsor joint outdoor activities, Risom said. Possible obstacles include parking and cumbersome rules to gaining city permits for so-called pop-up events, he said.

“We feel like just planting the seed,” he said, “and giving people a prototype allows new vocabulary to take root and change perceptions.”

Julie Bird is a Charlotte-based writer.