Gallery Crawl @ NODA

Not what it used to be for sure! Still fun though!
Entertainment District, YES! Absolutely for sure! Art District? Hummm, in my opinion not in a few years. The first time I went (Fall 2007) I was real impressed. Since then fewer and fewer Galleries are in business and still fewer were participating this past Friday Evening! The Few Galleries left were full of people and they were looking at the Art, so that was good.

In any other «big» city, I might rate this the way the others have, but for Charlotte, the gallery crawl is one of the best places for the young eclectic to hang or for the older crowd to actually buy something. And its not just the crawl, all the bars and restaurants of NoDa are normally packed and have a different vibe. It definitely helps if you pick a night when the Deli, the Theater, or the Muse have a show. If the weather is nice and the Salvador Deli is rocking, the whole area is a concert.
As far as the actual art goes, its there, the galleries are open later than normal. I’ve seen a few great peices from time to time, and always somebody in the street selling their wares, but not really the actual focus of the event.
Ok, I might have pumped it up a little much (especially since the end of Fat City), but no way in hell this event deserves the 2.5 stars that it had before my writeup.

It’s a shame, when I was little, my parents would take me with them to go to all the galleries around NODA and watch the poetry slams and eat at Boudreaux, but now there are less galleries than there was, and it’s just not as fun as it used to be :/​The experience is nice, but not nearly as good as it used to be.

For years (at least), we’ve been hearing about the gallery crawls in NODA, so we figured it was high time to go. One Friday night, we saddled up and went.
After stopping at the Revolution (see review), we headed down North Davidson (that’s NODA for those who weren’t aware), we stopped in a couple of galleries, sampling some wine in one or two, and even observed a bit of art. We wandered about as far as we dared at night in that part of town.
Then we trudged back up to 36^th street and picked off the galleries there. Those right at the intersection were probably the most interesting, especially as they were the closest together. And there were a few folks scattered on the streets as well.
But all-​in-​all, it wasn’t all that amazing. This is what people talk about? Have I been horribly misled? Are the galleries actually on some other street, and not in this small section of town after all? If this is all there is to offer, why in the world do they have crawls so frequently?