With customers shunning the Epicentre, the development’s owners are working on a plan to bring new life back to the once-hot site after two deadly shootings in the last four months, according to one of the Epicentre’s biggest tenants.

In an interview with The Ledger, the chief financial officer of Studio Movie Grill said the company has seen business drop off in the last 12-18 months and that Epicentre tenants want the development’s owner to find a way to bring families back.

“They’re supposed to come back to us in a few weeks and give us an overall plan,” said Ted Croft, the company’s CFO. “They’re out talking to all the tenants. We’re like, ‘Hey, we want to hear what you guys have in store. Help us out.’ …  We are all saying the same thing: How can you help us attract the families back, because they were coming.”

He said Studio Movie Grill is spending “a lot of money on security,” as is the Epicentre’s owner, CIM Group. (Croft was in town last month for the opening of the company’s second Charlotte location, in Prosperity Village near Highland Creek. More on his thoughts on Charlotte and the movie-theater business in a future newsletter.)

Representatives from CIM Group couldn’t be reached for this article. It’s unclear what a turnaround plan might look like, or whether it’s even possible to market your way out of a perception that the area is dangerous:

• In November, an off-duty police officer shot and killed a man who was leaving the Epicentre in the early morning after the man had exchanged gunfire with another patron.
• In September, a 74-year-old CEO of a drug-disposal company was hit by a stray bullet and killed when somebody pulled a gun as part of a fight in an Epicentre alleyway in the middle of a weekday afternoon.
• A subsequent analysis of crime data by the Observer found police have “responded to more violent crimes at the Epicentre in recent years than at any other commercial or residential location in Charlotte.”

Although the Epicentre and its tenants were once happy to reap the breathless publicity about openings of hot new bars and clubs, the future of the Epicentre has become a sensitive topic, and many of those same tenants are now clamming up about its problems. Several didn’t return calls. The site, on College Street between Fourth and Trade streets uptown across the light rail line from the bus station, is home to more than 40 restaurants, clubs and other retail tenants.

Flashback: When the Epicentre opened in 2008, it was the hot place to be. Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Panthers linebacker Jon Beason were among the local celebs attending the packed debut of Whisky River: “Junior stayed hidden in his VIP booth with friends (including a gaggle of table-dancing girls) and closed the place down,” the Observer reported at the time.

There were lines to get into clubs. The restaurants were packed. It made sense: an entertainment hotspot in the middle of a thriving downtown.

Now, though, a stroll through the Epicentre can feel more like walking through a ghost town. Many of the clubs and restaurants are still open but empty. The city’s prime nightlife spots have migrated elsewhere, like to South End.

CIM Group, based in Los Angeles, is Epicentre’s third owner. Some say the site has suffered from changes in ownership over the years. The site’s original developer, Afshin Ghazi, ceded control of his interests in it in 2012 after a foreclosure and a bankruptcy filing. CIM Group bought the property from interim owners in 2014 for $131M.

No ‘riffraff’ at first: One source in management of an Epicentre restaurant, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue, said in its early days, under the original ownership, Epicentre security “wouldn’t let riffraff in,” even though some patrons complained about those tactics being too aggressive. But after ownership changed hands, new out-of-state owners were less vigilant, the source told The Ledger.

In an interview, Ghazi said subsequent owners didn’t understand the complexities of running the Epicentre.

Care needed: “The type of project that the Epicentre was needed a tremendous amount of TLC from an ongoing, everyday perspective,” he said. “I don’t think the new owners or the interim owners that came in had any idea how complex and deliberate you had to be. … They thought it just ran itself, and it didn’t.”

He mentioned the need for programming and security but declined to elaborate.

Asked if he thought the Epicentre has been mismanaged since others took control, he paused and said: “In part.”

He said it’s “disheartening” to see what is happening to the Epicentre but that he knows how to turn it around. Asked how, Ghazi said: “That’s for me to know and everybody else to guess. I’m not in the advice-giving business.”

Then he joked: “If they want to give it back to me, I’ll be happy to fix it.”

This article appeared in the Jan. 6, 2020, edition of The Charlotte Ledger. Read the rest of the newsletter here.

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