THE BUZZ
CO M M U N I T Y
THE MAYOR OF NORTH END Darryl Gaston, a pastor and community advocate who died in February, devoted himself to Druid Hills BY TAMIYA ANDERSON
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CHARLOTTEMAGAZINE.COM // JUNE 2021
to buy land cheap, rebuild, and resell—in the process hiking land values and forcing longtime residents out. That year, Gaston and leaders in seven other historically Black neighborhoods—including Graham Heights, The Park at Oaklawn, Greenville, and Genesis Park—founded an organization rare in a city high on its own growth: the North End Community Coalition, a partnership with a mission to “preserve, protect, and persevere.” The area’s surge toward gentrification really picked up two years later, when the real estate development company ATCO bought a 76-acre former industrial site off Graham and began to plan the Camp North End mixed-use complex. When Gaston died unexpectedly on Feb. 20, he left behind a legacy of community leadership that helped balance the developers’ expansion plans against the needs and desires of North End residents whose roots, like Gaston’s, went back generations. “Though he had a good relationship with my predecessor, who I was running
Darryl Gaston spent all of his 59 years in the Druid Hills neighborhood and helped found the North End Community Coalition. (Above) Gaston at the Birds, Nature, and Community Festival at Druid Hills Park in 2019; (left) Gaston at a recent coalition workshop.
against, he was still very welcoming and warm to me,” says City Council member Larken Egleston, whose District 1 includes the North End, and who considered Gaston a friend. Two days after his death, Mayor Vi Lyles signed a city proclamation in Gaston’s honor, and Egleston read it aloud from the dais. “You could not have an interaction with Darryl and not leave in a better mood.” Darryl and Melissa met when both were planning a community event and married in 2014; their advocacy led North End residents to affectionately refer to them as “Team Gaston.” (As of this writing, Continued on page 20
COURTESY KIM BRAND; KENN SHRADER
DARRYL GASTON SMILED at the crowd as he made his way from a blue canopy tent to the center of a crowd of volunteers. It was a sunny Saturday in May 2019 at Druid Hills Neighborhood Park, and the occasion was the Birds, Nature, and Community Festival—the first-ever festival in the historically Black neighborhood off North Graham Street northeast of uptown, organized by Gaston and the Mecklenburg Audubon Society. Gaston, a pastor and community advocate, paused now and then to marvel at the beauty of the park and the people. When visitors thanked and complimented him for his work, he had a standard response, says his widow, Melissa: “To God be the glory.” Druid Hills is one of a cluster of predominantly Black neighborhoods north of uptown along the Graham and Statesville Avenue corridors, and Gaston lived there, in a house on Edison Street that his grandparents had bought, for all of his 59 years. He eventually came to lead the neighborhood association—a position that by 2014 gave him a clear understanding that Charlotte’s real estate market was primed to explode. Neighborhoods like Druid Hills were ripe for developers who wanted
