Back in the 1980s, Charlotte really wanted to revitalize its downtown. It had been the city’s retail and entertainment hub until about the mid-1960s. Then as people moved farther away from the city’s center, and as shopping centers and eventually shopping malls continued to pop up and become the main retail destinations, Charlotte’s downtown pretty much became a place where people would go to their offices and work during the weekdays and then leave in the evening and avoid on the weekends.
By the 1970s, there was virtually no retail downtown and the only restaurants were cheap lunch spots for the business people who worked there to grab some lunch. The Chamber of Commerce decided in the 1970s to start calling downtown “uptown,” as if that would help revitalize it, but calling it by a different name wasn’t going to change anything. (While it is still officially referred to as “uptown,” most of us Charlotte natives who have lived here since at least the 1970s still generally call it “downtown” when we refer to it.)
Then in the 1980s, the city came up with an idea intended to help revitalize the center city. Since shopping malls were all the rage at the time, why not put a shopping mall there? And so the city came up with City Fair; a shopping mall right in the center of town.
It was a complete flop. It opened in 1988 and closed in 1991. It didn’t have any major tenants and its stores were mainly novelty shops, but not so unique or interesting that they would attract people from afar. Not to mention, not a lot of people lived in downtown/uptown Charlotte at the time, so it’s not like potential tenants that would attract potential shoppers would be too interested in setting up shop there when there were a number of shopping centers and malls in or near more highly populated residential areas. And the majority of center city residents at the time lived in public housing (most of which is no longer there), so they didn’t have much disposable income to spend at the mall.
After City Fair closed, it briefly reopened with a portion of it being a Fat Tuesday’s. The Fat Tuesday’s probably did play a role in helping to revitalize Charlotte’s downtown, as it was one of the early nightlife spots there in the 1990s, and the nightlife spots grew exponentially there over the years.
But Fat Tuesday’s closed around 1998, and the building it was housed in— once known as City Fair— was torn down to make way for a 47-story office tower, now known as the Truist Center.
