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An active pictorial panorama of Charlotte, North Carolina at mid-decade, capturing the city’s corporate ambitions, suburban expansion, and historical self-mythology at a turning point in its modern rise. Drawn by Canadian illustrator Tom Dodds and published by Archar Inc., this 1975 view presents a dynamic, comic-inflected image of the city centered on the emerging skyline of Uptown.

Two of the tallest structures dominate the scene: the bronze-glass NCNB Plaza, completed in 1974 and then the tallest building in North Carolina, and the prominent Wachovia Building on West Trade Street, finished in 1962 and still identified with the Winston-Salem-based bank that would eventually relocate its headquarters to Charlotte. These towers rise above a patchwork of civic buildings, retail storefronts, and whimsical cartoon vignettes. The Civic Center, opened in 1955 as a hub for conventions and concerts, and the Charlotte Coliseum, also inaugurated in 1955 and famed for once being the largest free-spanning dome in the world, both appear. First Union’s headquarters at 201 South Tryon, completed in 1961, signals the city’s growing stature in the national banking sector.

Brand-name stores such as Sears, Sheraton, and Woodruff’s dot the commercial core. They stand alongside marching bands, jazz musicians, yellow cabs, and mascot figures promoting WBT radio, Cadillac dealerships, and chain restaurants. The layout sacrifices geographic precision in favor of narrative energy, encouraging the viewer to explore rather than navigate.

Historical flourishes anchor the contemporary scene in a longer civic tradition. Near the bottom margin, a scroll reproduces the text of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, dated May 20, 1775. Captain Jack is shown galloping east with the document toward Philadelphia, a nod to Charlotte’s Revolutionary legacy. Along the lower border, British redcoats scatter beneath an angry swarm of hornets, echoing the 1774 complaint of a British officer that the area was a "veritable nest of hornets," a phrase that became one of the city’s enduring nicknames.

In the southern section of the map, suburban neighborhoods take shape. Sardis Woods, Candletwyck, and the Village of Raintree appear with backyard pools, tidy lawns, and golf greens, reflecting Charlotte’s rapid expansion beyond the core. A tractor plows a red clay field nearby, suggesting that farmland still edged the new subdivisions.

Part promotional collage, part civic cartoon, and part historical tribute, Dodds’s map exemplifies a flourishing tradition of later-20th-century American pictorial cartography. The bright palette and comics-inspired style invite leisurely inspection, while the dense visual record preserves the city’s physical and cultural landscape just as its transformation into a national banking capital was underway.

Though originally produced as wall art and distributed widely, surviving examples are now uncommon, many having been discarded as Charlotte’s skyline and street grid evolved in the decades that followed.