Driving up Interstate 77 from the south, downtown Charlotte jumps out at you suddenly. Much of that is a function of North Carolina’s inland topography — not yet Appalachia mountains, not the flat coastal plains either, but somewhere in between. The skyscrapers visible suddenly from the highway, only a few miles from the city center. Five of those high-rises are more than 50 stories tall (and 15 are more 30 stories tall) — not as many as in New York or Chicago, but moving in that direction. In 1990, the population was 396,000.