Category: Belmont neighborhood

Charlotte council to vote on three preservation projects

The Cohen-Fumero house, designed by Charlotte architect Murray Whisnant

The Charlotte City Council at tonight’s meeting is expected to vote on designating three buildings as historic landmarks. The first is the Cohen-Fumero House. Read more about it at the PlanCharlotte article, “Can Charlotte learn to love Modernist homes?” 

For Charlotte, it’s an unusual selection:

  • First, it’s in East Charlotte, not a part of the city that’s been graced with many landmark buildings.
  • Second, it’s a mid-century Modernist home, an architectural style that while attractive to a younger, hipper population around the country, doesn’t get the love from the more traditionalist sectors in Charlotte, a city with a comparatively large bloc of traditionalist sectors.

But in its favor is this: Landmarking historic properties is easier in parts of the city that are not seeing intense development pressure. That’s why so many historic properties in uptown were wiped away; the dirt under them was too valuable for new development.

Some personal disclosure here: I’m friends with the original owners, artists Herbert Cohen and Jose Fumero, who in the 1950s and 1960s hosted much of the Charlotte “Creative Class” in their living room for Sunday dinners. They’ve been together for something like 50 years, which in itself is worthy of note. And I’m friends with the architect who designed the house for them, Murray Whisnant. Whisnant, a Charlotte native who also designed the Rowe Arts Building at UNC Charlotte, has been a creative force in the city for decades. 

The other two properties are mills: The Defiance Sock Mill in the Third Ward neighborhood, and the Louise Mill, built in 1897 in the Belmont neighborhood.  Charlotte is (finally!) seeing an impressive collection of renovated and adaptively reused mills dating to its textile-industry past. Among the notable projects:
Atherton Mill in South End, Highland Mill in NoDa, the Charlotte Cotton Mill uptown, and Alpha Mill in uptown/Optimist Park. (I’m not sure where one neighborhood ends and the other begins.)

To see the reports on the historic properties on tonight’s City Council agenda:
Click here for the Cohen Fumero House.
Click here for the Defiance Sock Mills.
Click here for the Louise Cotton Mill.

What do they (the creatives) really want?

What is that big armadillo-like edifice, and will it really attract the creative class to Kansas City, Mo.? Philip Langdon of the New Urban Network poses that question in his article, “Injecting spontaneity into urban development.”

He writes: “I peered at The Atlantic’s photo of what Kansas City is building to lure the creatives, and thought for a moment I was viewing a gigantic armadillo. Oops, my mistake. The picture isn’t of an armadillo inflated to enormous size (though it certain looks like one). It’s the Kauffman Center, a $326 million performing arts facility [designed by architect Moshe Safdie] — purportedly a means for enticing talented young people to Missouri’s second-largest metropolis.

“Excuse me, but aren’t gigantic performing arts centers the sort of thing that cities were erecting thirty years ago? My understanding of the Richard Florida take on urban development is that bright young workers are less interested in vast cultural and entertainment institutions than in having access to stimulating everyday locales — places they can walk to from their workplaces or their homes.”

I hope that message from Langdon and others can get more traction in Charlotte, where building big cultural institutions draws plenty of support and attention, (and don’t get me wrong; I love the new Mint and Bechtler museums and Gantt Center uptown) but preserving “everyday locales” has gotten short shrift. The remaining walkable, everyday locales (Plaza-Central district, NoDa, Elizabeth, a few parts of Dilworth and by some measures the Q2P2 corner) have survived mostly out of neglect by large corporations and officialdom combined with strong neighborhood support.

The city even, for a time, had a plan to raze almost all the retail spots in the gentrifying Belmont neighborhood and build a suburban-style strip shopping center to replace the stores. Thank heavens that plan got scrapped in 2007 after then-Mayor Pat McCrory vetoed a 10-1 council vote. The next week the council voted 10-1 to study the proposal. (It had arisen without going through the council’s committee system.) It’s those small, human-scale retail spots that, when fixed up and cleaned up, become the spaces that neighborhood residents walk to – what Langdon termed “stimulating everyday locales.” This city needs more of them.

And finally, a short word of thanks that our new arts campus uptown doesn’t look like the Michelin Man mated with an armadillo. I don’t know that anyone has completely fathomed what it takes to attract young artistic and creative residents. Maybe, in fact, they are looking for large Dasypus novemcinctus. But somehow I doubt it.