PHOTO | TROY HULL

Charlotte City Council voted Monday to return South Tryon Street between 3rd and 4th streets to vehicular traffic five months after a Black Lives Matter mural was painted there. The vote was 10-1, with Braxton Winston the lone dissenter.

South Tryon Street between 3^rd and 4^th streets reopened to vehicle traffic this morning.

The block in Uptown became a pedestrian-only space three days after the Black Lives Matter mural was painted there on June 9. Charlotte City Council voted 10-1 in last night’s meeting to reopen the street to vehicles. Council member at-large Braxton Winston voted no. The alternative would have been to keep the plaza closed to vehicles through the end of the year. City staff suggested concluding what was coined the Tryon Street Pilot Plaza on Nov. 2.

“Even our artists know that if you put a mural on the ground, it’s not sustainable,” said assistant city manager Taiwo Jaiyeoba, who helped make the mural possible in June. “It’s going to eventually fade, and so how can we memorialize it? Maybe we print it [and] hang it on a prominent wall, in a prominent place Uptown.”

The city has maintained the mural as part of its street cleaning efforts but is beginning to fade.

“Tryon was going to be repaved at some point in the future,” Jaiyeoba said. “It just happens to be that future will be next year. What we don’t want to do is to go and pave over it, because that would be more of a harmful step to take as a city.”

While the mural will fade, its significance cannot. Black Lives Matter was painted on one of the busiest streets in Charlotte in response to the death of George Floyd, a Black man who was killed in May by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Charlotte artists were commissioned by the city to create the mural, with each letter telling a different story. Jaiyeoba also suggested potentially creating programing around the mural and its significance annually on June 9. Another potential would be providing local artists with residency opportunities to, as Jaiyeoba said, “elevate the role of artists in our city.”

District 2 council member Malcolm Graham demanded the city do more than paint words on the street.

He referenced his late sister Cynthia Graham Hurd, who was one of the nine people killed in the mass shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015.

“For someone who really gets the notion of Black Lives Matter whether it is the death of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or Cynthia Graham, it is more than just paint on a street,” Graham said. “I can only speak for one of the three I mentioned, but she would say, ‘it’s the actions that we take, not the words that we paint.’”

The city also used the time the street was closed to study what pedestrian-only areas in Uptown could look like, which is a consideration for the 2040 Charlotte Center City Vision Plan. 

Future events at the mural site will require an event permit now that the street is open. While city officials said they will maintain the mural better than while the street was closed, they will allow it to fade over time. A committee will also be formed to write a report exploring the potential for public space on Tryon Street. Also, once the 2040 plan has been adopted, they will explore public space and ways to support artists as well as explore opportunities for art as activism Uptown in areas such as Polk Park and Levine Avenue of the Arts.

The city also intends to establish a new permitting process for programming of plazas by the city or non-profit organizations looking to utilize city-owned public space.

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