The plaza of Bank of America in Charlotte was pulsing with music one unseasonably cool day in mid-August. A line of curly-haired schoolgirls danced as part of an Asian-American appreciation day that promoted a new park named for Mahatma Gandhi.

Gandhi in the Carolinas? The homage to the Indian martyr brought a smile to the sun-baked face of a wiry retiree wearing a Carolina Panthers cap, a black sports shirt, and matching slacks. Hugh L. McColl Jr., a legendary banker, reveled in how times had changed in the old textile city whose downtown used to roll up at night while favorite son Billy Graham read his Bible.

Scanning the festival, the former chairman and CEO of Bank of America declared, “It’s a sign of the times. If you came here 20 years ago, there wouldn’t have been any Indians.” McColl is part of a cadre of business and civic leaders who helped transform Charlotte into one of the nation’s largest banking centers. Among the nation’s banking hubs, only New York City is bigger.

In addition, McColl and others helped broaden and diversify the Charlotte economy over the years to include entertainment, services, healthcare, and technology. These efforts may help ensure Charlotte’s continued prominence, because the financial and banking turmoil that has transformed Wall Street has walloped Charlotte, too, particularly its home-grown Wachovia bank. Jeff Michael, director of the University of North Carolina-Charlotte’s Urban Institute, says that “we may be getting ready to see just how resilient this city really is.”

On the upside, the city’s other banking powerhouse, Bank of America, is purchasing Merrill Lynch & Co., making it the nation’s biggest bank by assets. It is likely to emerge from the tumult as one of the most important financial firms in the world.

Charlotte’s economy is steeped in energy, transportation, electronics, healthcare, and legal and financial services, and hosts nine Fortune 500 companies.

The 60-floor Bank of America building is known as the “Taj McColl,” and on that August day, the retired executive—who still runs a private equity firm from the glass tower above—was spotted by event organizers, who asked him to sponsor the Gandhi statue dedication. McColl politely begged off, and instead got them to chat up a visitor about the new Charlotte, and how it has become an increasingly diverse, affordable, and sophisticated international city in the Carolina Piedmont.

In two decades the foreign-born population in Charlotte has exploded, with over 10,000 people from the Indian subcontinent alone living in the Charlotte area, says John C. Chen, vice chairman of the Carolinas Asian-American Chamber of Commerce. “We’re working very hard to get investment from China,” Chen adds. Charlotte boasts more than 100 firms from Germany, nearly 70 from the United Kingdom, more than 50 from Japan, and a smattering of companies from other parts of Asia.

Charlotte’s economy today is steeped in energy, transportation, electronics, healthcare, and legal and financial services, and hosts nine Fortune 500 companies. It has spawned high-tech firms in fiber optics as well as high-end aircraft and automotive parts makers. Charlotte is a major transportation center, featuring a hub airport with more than 500 flights a day, dual interstate highways, and a crossroads for freight rail giants CSX and Norfolk Southern.

Charlotte’s dramatic commercial growth helped prompt NASCAR to build its $195 million Hall of Fame and office complex downtown. The motor sports Mecca complements the city’s other pro franchises: the Carolina Panthers of the NFL and the Charlotte Bobcats of the NBA.

A $5.6 billion building boom continued through the summer despite the economic doldrums slowing other cities’ commercial growth. Yes, there are some condo complexes on hold. But with 19 major development projects still marching along in the Historic South End neighborhood alone, plenty of cranes still hover over the Piedmont, feeding Charlotte boosters’ deepest edifice complexes.

The business of Charlotte is business. It’s a city on the make. Anybody could come here and make it. That’s the DNA here.

Big league bragging is as much a part of the local lifestyle as hot rods, bank mergers, and macaroni as a side dish with chicken. In Dixie Rising, his 1996 study of the South’s impact on American values, Peter Applebome admitted a special fondness for Charlotte, which “may edge out Dallas and Atlanta as home to the purest strain ever discovered of the Southern booster gene.” It has “Dallas’ hustle and go-go sense of civic unanimity without its meanness,” he wrote, and “Atlanta’s leafy geography and optimism without the worst of its big city problems and insufferable sense of triumphalism.” Applebome saved his highest praise for what he called “the world’s bluntest Chamber of Commerce slogan” from the mid-1970s: “Charlotte—A Good Place to Make Money.”

McColl, a former Marine, speaks with the frankness of a platoon leader in constant combat, even though he has long since won the banking battles with other Southern competitors. “In Richmond or Charleston or Savannah,” he says, “they’re still interested in who their parents were or grandparents were, as though that proves something.” Not so in Charlotte, where business leaders are “much more interested in meritocracy,” McColl declares. “The business of Charlotte is business. It’s a city on the make. Anybody could come here and make it. That’s the DNA here.”

Leaders in the Queen City have long exuded a fair degree of confidence, and with good reason: the pace of job growth, which averaged 3.6 percent for the past three years, is expected to continue as the value of homes and commercial properties remains relatively steady. Office employment increased at a 2.5 percent annual pace during the first quarter of this year, helping absorb about 130,000 square feet of space during that period, according to a recent report by Wachovia’s chief economist, Mark Vitner. In 2007, Vitner notes, Charlotte had 1,326 new or expanding firms that were expected to generate nearly 15,000 new jobs.

As McColl drove his silver BMW around town with its top down, he proudly chronicled the life and times of a town he helped reshape along with his longtime friend and banking competitor, Edward Crutchfield of First Union (which acquired Wachovia). Stopping at the corner of Fourth Street and South Tryon Street, McColl pointed out how his NationsBank (later Bank of America) built its glassy towers on the north end of the city center, while Crutchfield staked his claim on the south end.

In addition to their brick-and-mortar and business contributions, the banking executives traditionally backed each other’s pet civic projects, with Crutchfield raising money for education (his mother was a teacher) and McColl supporting arts and culture (his mother taught art).

Such expectations continue today, McColl says. “If you want to make it here, you are expected to play. You can’t come here and just pursue making money. You’ve got to do your job to make it a better city.”

Passing a multimodal transportation center designed by architect Harvey Gantt, Charlotte’s first African-American mayor, McColl recalled how it was built with $13 million of Bank of America’s money because “we got tired of waiting” for the city to build it. When you see that this streak of impatience with the status quo and bureaucratic hurdles is mixed with old-school civic values, you start to understand what a sign on the side of the Hilton Charlotte calls the city’s “Cosmopolitan Flavor With A Southern Twist.”

It took time and good planning to get the right mix of business, culture, and quality of life. “I guess it was Eddie Cantor who said, ‘It takes 20 years to have an overnight success, ’”McColl mused. “We really began this march in the Seventies. It took 25 years to come to fruition. To some degree, I’m more relieved than surprised that it’s happened, because we’ve been at it so long.”

Wachovia’s Vitner, an Atlanta transplant, lives within walking distance of his office at the distinctive Wachovia headquarters, known as “the jukebox” for its sloping roof. Charlotte offers the good life, he says, with “an abundance of opportunities and choices of where to work, where to live, and where to spend your free time.” For him, this includes a second home in the mountains of western Carolina, less than two hours away.

Charlotte has more than 100 firms from Germany, nearly 70 from the United Kingdom, more than 50 from Japan, and a smattering of companies from other parts of Asia.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg area made headlines this spring as one of a handful of regions around the country whose housing market was holding up against the downturn, with a year-to-year gain in the S&P/Case Shiller Home Price Index. Even though Charlotte’s home prices reportedly dipped by nearly 4 percent, “That is still a better performance than any of the other19 markets covered by the survey,” Vitner wrote in late June. Housing prices rose an average of 4.1 percent per year for the past five years; the average sale price of an existing home in April 2008 was just over $200,000.

Earlier this year, with gasoline prices soaring, Charlotte officials began to notice an increasing number of homes sold along a recently opened downtown light rail line. This has helped continue a rise in the number of professionals—young middle-aged alike—choosing to buy or rent in the heart of the city. Out of 65,000 workers in the center city, some 13,000 now live there as well. Five years ago, just 5,000 workers did.

The $462.7 million Lynx rail system was financed with a voter-approved sales tax and federal transit funds. It is one of the first light rails around the United States whose traffic levels exceed original estimates. In July, after the first nine months of operation, Lynx Blue Line had more than 16,000 daily riders, 75 percent higher than predicted.

A recent attempt to repeal the sales tax was voted down by 70 percent of voters. Bob Morgan, president of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, points out that recent arrivals from out of town help account for the support of the rail project. “If you moved here from Chicago, New York, or San Francisco, transit is not a frill—it’s a baseline expectation.”

And in the new Charlotte, the expectations have never been greater. “These things are not accidents,” McColl says of the carefully crafted quilt of transit, cultural centers, sports venues, and schools. “We wanted to build an attractive city so that people would move here.”

With annual population growth of 3 percent from 2000 to 2008, Charlotte (population 1.7 million) is the nation’s 20th largest city. “Charlotte is a big, boisterous, rapidly expanding region that has done well economically with high finance and banking, and attracted a lot of talent from the Northeast by growing economically and having good jobs to offer,” Neal Peirce, an urban affairs columnist, said in an interview. “They’ve drained a lot of talent out of upstate New York, which ends up paying for a lot of education that spurs more economic growth in Charlotte.”

McColl recalled how a transportation center was built with $13 million of Bank of America’s money because ‘we got tired of waiting’ for the city to build it.

Charlotte’s growth brings challenges, including the “resegregation” of public schools as affluent whites send their kids to pricey private or parochial schools. Charlotte “has been, and will continue to be, a vibrant and developing city,” says Michael Barnes, an attorney and Democrat on the city council. But Barnes, who is black, worries that “there is a certain segment of our population that has not experienced the prosperity many people have.”

A Republican counterpart on the city council, Andy Dulin, hails Charlotte as “a welcoming community” with “open arms” for anyone who wants to work hard. “The reason Charlotte is so great is the people are coming from other places. They’re bringing their culture, and it’s all melting together well.”

Even conservatives like Dulin embrace the tradition of private-public cooperation to keep growing and nurturing the city’s core. “The whole city is a plan in progress,” he says.

Early signs of the region’s drive and sense of independence can be traced back to May 20, 1775, when, according to local lore, a prominent landowner, Captain James Jack, rode on horseback to Philadelphia to deliver documents declaring Mecklenburg County and its new city, Charlotte, free of British rule. It took another year, according to this Charlotte-centric view of American history, for the new Congress to finally write the Declaration of Independence that Captain Jack dropped in their lap.

Charlotte was named for Queen Charlotte, the German teen bride from the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz who married George III in 1761. Today, a small bronze statue explains: “Settlers here were rebellious toward the King and his agents, but named their town and county in her honor, in hopes of gaining royal favor.”

In the late 1700s, the North Carolina Piedmont region saw an influx of immigrants who made their way down the Great Philadelphia Wagon Road from Pennsylvania and Virginia. Soon gold was discovered in the region, leading to the U.S. Mint’s decision to open a branch there in 1835. This set the stage for Charlotte to become a banking and commercial center. “There was a gold mine under the present headquarters of Bank of America,” says Al Stuart, professor emeritus of geography at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte.

The other major event that set the stage for Charlotte’s explosive growth occurred in the late 1930s when the pro-business state legislature passed what was then one of the nation’s most ambitious banking laws, allowing banks to open branches far from their home offices. In 1985, when the U.S. Supreme Court approved interstate banking, Charlotte’s bullish bankers—led by Ed Crutchfield and Hugh McColl—went on the offensive. Banks in neighboring cities, such as Wachovia in Winston-Salem, became prime takeover targets; then they went after dozens of banks in other states.

Charlotte also was helped by a North Carolina law that allowed it to continue expanding its tax base by annexing land in suburban Mecklenburg County. This avoided the fractious legal disputes in the 1970s and 1980s over school integration and busing that hindered progress in other Southern cities such as Richmond. Charlotte gained a reputation as a moderate Southern city that was a safe haven for Northern professionals and investors, says John Moeser, senior fellow at the Bonner Center for Civic Engagement at the University of Richmond. “They had strong progressive leadership that looked forward, whereas our leaders look backwards, or look sideways,” covering their political flanks, Moeser says of officials in the Richmond metropolitan area.

The city’s Chamber of Commerce slogan was once the blunt ‘Charlotte—A Good Place to Make Money.’

To drive smart growth, Charlotte’s business leaders created a city center development corporation with its own special tax for commercial and some residential development. They also did some arm-twisting to encourage lawyers, CPAs, and other service providers to locate either in the bank towers or in the city center, creating a better band of what McColl called “massed, not dispersed” development.

“You get more bang for your buck when you do that—more synergy, including retail infrastructure. It becomes a people place as opposed to having buildings a mile apart,” he says. Today, central Charlotte has plenty of fountains, plazas, and sidewalk cafes.

Charlotte has, in one sense, proved a mixed blessing for large companies with a presence in the city who bring in outside talent. “IBM initially had a big problem,” McColl says with a laugh. “They would bring in people for two or three years, and they wanted to move them, and they wouldn’t leave. We had a high-tech industry grow up out of IBM grads. The big accounting firms were the same way.”

Another group recently started descending on Charlotte. Arriving in RVs, they are what demographers call “half-backs.” Morgan explains: “When the hurricanes hit Florida, lots of Floridians decide they don’t want to go all the way back to New York or Cleveland, so they wind up in the Carolinas,” that is, halfway back home.

Another noteworthy trend is the “reverse migration” of African Americans back to the South. Black Enterprise ranks Charlotte fourth on its list of the ten best cities for African Americans, a list based on black population (30 percent in Mecklenburg County), cost of living, median home values, and crime rates.

Today, Brian Willis, a 40-year-old black entrepreneur who moved to Charlotte from St. Louis 20 years ago, is busy mining a new kind of gold rush to the city. “My uncle told me about Charlotte and I had no idea where it was,” says Willis. But after attending Johnson C. Smith, a historically black college in Charlotte, and later transferring to UNC-Charlotte, “I stayed—everything was so good.”

Willis is president of Wealth Builders, which he calls “basically a black concierge” for clients with six-figure household incomes. “We’ll find you a home, church, store, whatever,” he says. Much of his clientele hails from Washington and its Maryland suburbs, and New York City. They’re a mix of professionals and retirees seeking a safe and prosperous haven with urban amenities.

“You can still buy land here, and you can’t do that in D.C., Maryland, or St. Louis,” Willis says. “We make sure when you get to Charlotte, the landing is soft.”

Charles “Chip” Jones is a freelance writer and former newspaper reporter in Richmond, Virginia. His new book, “Red, White or Yellow? The Media and the Military at War in Iraq” (Stackpole Books), can be ordered at www.redwhiteoryellow.com.

Photo by Getty Images.