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.

Northwood, the developer behind The Bowl, hired a Boston-based, world-renowned planning and urban and design firm called Sasaki to take hundreds of acres that were previously a golf course and corporate campus and transform them into a mixed-use urban development. (Among Sasaki's more notable projects are the design of the Olympic Green in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics, the Chicago Riverwalk and Boston's Seaport District.) Northwood also collaborated with locally based LandDesign, who has been involved with the master plan project since its inception.

The municipal rezoning process is known to be challenging for builders, and Northwood's rezoning for The Bowl project happened in June 2020 over a Zoom call amid the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. "It was said that it was the largest and most complex infill rezoning in Charlotte's history," says John Barton, president of Northwood Office.

When planners realized that the pandemic had heightened the public's desire to be outdoors — a trend that seemed likely to stay — they tweaked The Bow's design, putting greater emphasis on Stream Park (which has some 80,000 plantings to give it a lush, green feel), expanding the size of The Amp from its original design, and making sure restaurants had plenty of outdoor seating and accessible windows or entrances for carryout meals.

"We definitely leaned in more to the outdoor experience," Barton says. "We've always been big on that: We had over 20 miles of hiking and biking trails as it was before all of this, but we really amplified what we were thinking about, doing a stream park, amphitheater, extended trail network and other signature green spaces, and did more of it, and we did it even better."

Ned Curran, who helped shape the Ballantyne development as president and CEO of The Bissell Companies (which created and then sold the Ballantyne Corporate Park, four hotels, a golf course and hundreds of acres of undeveloped land to Northwood Investors in 2017 for $1.2 billion), Ned Curran recalls an aha moment when thousands gathered on a section of the golf course that was opened up for viewing the solar eclipse in 2017.

"We were like, there's a greater purpose for this green space than limited-play golf," Curran says. "Northwood finally had the ambition and the capital to make a change."

The Bowl, in Curran's eyes, "is now the epicenter of what people think of as Ballantyne."

"People will come from businesses to go to something at The Amp, and they'll see the park behind the hotel and say, Wow, this is amazing. This place is cool," Curran says

Before, there were corporate office buildings abutting rolling fairways that were pretty to look at but relatively inaccessible on foot. Northwood’s developers turned that idea on its head, Curran says.

“They had a vision to transform a look-but-don’t-touch part of Ballantyne into don’t just touch it but live in it. Play in it. Experience it with constantly changing programmed areas, so there’s always something to come to,” Curran says. “So there’s a reason to come back.”

Smoky Bissell, who was the chairman of The Bissell Companies and is one of the best-known names in Charlotte development, says he “could have never, ever envisioned the possibility of Northwood doing what they’ve done. They have really addressed where we are in life, and they have reimagined the whole facility.

“They’ve done it right. They’ve been able to put their bridges over creeks that we didn’t think you could get near,” Bissell says. “It’s a beautiful job, and I’m in awe of it.”

Filling a need

There are moments of marvel, too, for some of the business leaders who’ve opened shop at The Bowl.

Jim Birch, chief operating officer for The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery, says its Ballantyne location “came out of the gate screaming” when it opened in the spring of 2024. The Bowl brewery employs two-thirds of OMB’s 300-some workers due to its restaurant-focused environment and second-floor event space, which is in high demand, Birch says. On days and nights when big events are at The Amp, OMB sees spikes in customers.

Ballantyne was prime for OMB’s second location (its original location is on Yancey Street in Lower South End) because South Charlotte lacked some of the brewery and restaurant culture that had evolved in other parts of the city, Birch says. “It’s a little bit of South End in Ballantyne.”

Just down Bowl Street from OMB are Bossy Beulah’s and Rooster’s — two restaurants owned by Jim Noble, who’s been creating eateries across Charlotte for four decades.

Noble says he’d wanted to locate a restaurant in South Charlotte since his early days in the Queen City when he lived in Providence Country Club. But he says he never could find a commercial area that was just the right fit for a Rooster’s until he was approached about building at The Bowl.

The appeal, he says, was instantaneous: In The Bowl, he’d have a built-in lunch crowd thanks to the nearby corporate offices and good evening and weekend business because of its strong neighborhood vibe.

“I just thought the whole concept was really good,” Noble says.

What’s next?

The question, of course, is what is next for The Bowl?

Barton says the answer will be revealed piece by piece in the years to come.

When the Oro apartment tower fully opens in 2025, it’ll have businesses on its ground level, including service-oriented ones with more specialty dining options expected in the mix.

They are actively designing and planning for further densification of The Bowl with residential, office and retail uses. The emphasis will be on quality, high-end construction, Barton says, in keeping with the cobblestones and granite curbs that now make up Bowl Street and the unique building designs that give each business its character.

“We wanted to make it a really high-quality experience for people, and we think people will pay a premium for that,” Barton says. “It’s something that’s been really important to us. To do it, and to do it right.”

When Barton and his team look over the crowds like the one at the country music concert this Saturday night at The Amp, they see people who have driven in from areas far from Ballantyne, who’ve likely never been there before.

And that was exactly the goal.

“We went from this public golf course that appealed to probably a very small segment of the population, and now we’re drawing from a regional and national basis,” Barton says.

The appeal, he believes, is largely held in three simple words: Fun. Easy. Safe.

“Those are all really important concepts, and having a constant flow of that energetic vibe that exists when you have all these things working together,” Barton says. “I think that’s really our goal: to be ever-evolving and utilize nature as part of the experience too. It’s one of the things we have in abundance that makes this so special.”