Category: historic preservation

‘Charlotte doesn’t have a brand’? Here’s an idea

The famed Excelsior Club, possibly to be demolished, in keeping with local tradition. Photo courtesy Dan Morrill

Even in the chest-pumping venues of deep-booster Charlotte, an inkling of the problem sometimes creeps in. Janet LaBar, the new CEO of the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance even said it out loud in an interview with the Charlotte Observer. “I think Charlotte doesn’t have a brand,” she told reporter Deon Roberts.

The comment came up today at a regular weekly rump session over eggs, biscuits, livermush and bacon with a group of mostly long-time Charlotte residents, several of them Charlotte natives. I recalled the one-time civic discussion of a possible monument at The Square, the symbolic heart of the city at Trade and Tryon uptown. There was a time when folks were trying to figure out what could be an image that would capture the city’s essence. The late Doug Marlette, then the Observer’s editorial cartoonist, proposed an Eternal Barbecue Pit. Of course, other N.C. barbecue fans noted that Charlotte was famed, not for barbecue, but for being a place without authentic N.C. barbecue joints. Whatever.

What got put up at The Square was four didactic, symbolic statues representing Commerce, Industry, Transportation, and The Future. Visiting poet Andrei Codrescu once described them on NPR as Socialist-Realist and noted that the gold nuggets pouring on a symbolic banker’s head looked like turds.

And there’s a nice old-fashioned-looking clock in a small park on one corner. That park is modeled on the terrain of the Pacific Northwest, or maybe it was the Appalachian mountains – neither of them exactly representative of Charlotte’s terrain. It was built after the city used eminent domain to take and demolish the only antebellum store buildings uptown, which were offering not a heavily symbolic statue but actual Commerce.

Which leads me to the idea our rump session this morning devised. Because when asked, what iconic image does “Charlotte” bring to mind, people said: There isn’t one because Charlotte tears everything down.

After discussion digressed for a short time into various houses folks had owned and raised kids in only to see new owners tear them down for bigger houses, the idea emerged organically. The iconic image of Charlotte is of buildings being torn down.

Hence this modest proposal: Create a monument to Charlotte that is a building. It might be a small model of a historic building that should have been preserved. Maybe the Hotel Charlotte. Maybe the Independence Building. Maybe the Masonic Temple. I hope the Excelsior Club does not join this list.

Then every year on the city’s birthday, the model building is demolished. A new one goes in its place. It will last one year, and then, with pomp and ritual, it too is demolished. And so on. Erasing the past, year after year after year.

One N.C. city aims to protect older buildings with a height limit. (Hint: Not Charlotte)

Tall new buildings surround Romare Bearden Park in uptown Charlotte. Photo: Nancy Pierce

As discussion in Charlotte continues on how to protect the unique character of some older neighborhoods from intense development pressure, [Can Plaza Midwood save the places that matter?] one N.C. city is using a tool that’s been available all along. That city is Raleigh. [With height caps, Raleigh hopes to protect historic buildings]

It’s not a tool beloved by people who make money from building tall buildings. By limiting the heights of buildings, the city is, at heart, limiting the profitability of any development on that dirt. Note that overall, Raleigh wants to encourage tall buildings downtown, and density.  But with a cluster of 19 old, iconic buildings along its main downtown street, Raleigh wants to add a level of protection.

Most of the buildings that will get the height limits are on the National Register of Historic Places and Raleigh historic landmarks.  Under state and federal law, neither of those designations can prevent a building from demolition.

Charlotte also has height restrictions in some of its zoning categories, especially the transit-oriented and mixed-use development districts. But those height limits are so tall that they don’t, effectively, deter demolitions of older buildings, and there is an “optional” zoning that lets the city OK pretty much anything if the developer can make a good case for it.) Of course, the single-use-only districts have de facto height limits as well.  (My graduate student, Jacob Schmidt, recently analyzed the proportion of mixed-use vs .single-use zoning inside Charlotte city limits. More than 90 percent of the land area is zoned for single-uses.)

But if you own a property in uptown Charlotte zoned UMUD (uptown mixed use district) you can build as tall a building as the FAA will allow. That’s right — the only limits on height are based on whether airplanes might run into the towers. The
development-encouraging UMUD zoning was developed during the 1980s, when businesses were fleeing to the suburbs and the city wanted to encourage development uptown. At the time, it was a much-needed tool. UMUD zoning, coupled with several uptown bank leaders’ determination to keep uptown healthy, prevented uptown from dying completely for a couple of decades. So while Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston-Salem and other N.C. downtowns are finally reviving nicely, with their older buildings intact, in Charlotte the side effect was to demolish virtually all the older buildings, including designated landmarks. With some welcome exceptions, our uptown is mostly shiny and new. 

I have heard at least one planner say that at one point the idea of uptown height limits was mentioned in a planning department meeting. But it was quietly buried.

It will be interesting to see, over time, how or whether Raleigh’s use of the height-limit tool makes a difference in its downtown development. 

Charlotte’s lost old buildings may be costlier than we thought

Where a historic-district house once stood, in Dilworth

It’s sadly coincidental that this week, I went out to snap a photo of the lot where a vintage 1920s house in Dilworth has been demolished, just a few days after I read this article in the New York Times. The Times piece, “Urban Renewal, No Bulldozer: San Francisco repurposes old for the future,” describes how it’s San Francisco’s older buildings downtown that are luring the tech firms that so many cities – including Charlotte – hope to attract.

Charlotte’s Dilworth neighborhood is a turn-of-the-last-century streetcar suburb built a mile from the city’s uptown in an era when that was the edge of town. The section where the house was demolished is a local historic district. (This PlanCharlotte article describes growing discontent among some Dilworthians with the way that district has been managed over the past decade.)

In North Carolina, buildings in local historic districts can be demolished, as can local historic landmarks. The law says that if a city or county has a local historic district or landmarks ordinance, an appointed commission can delay
demolition by up to a year. That’s what the Historic District Commission did for the Dilworth house. But it’s a hot neighborhood, with numerous tear-downs of older, smaller homes being replaced by much larger, grander homes.

An aside: Don’t complain that the neighbors who don’t like the demolitions are just density-fighting NIMBYs. No increased density is being created here, just more impervious surface.

The sad irony is that because Charlotte’s civic personality has never valued older buildings, the city’s uptown has hardly any of those old buildings that in San Francisco are being upfitted. They’ve all been demolished because local development policies,shaped in large part by builders of tall office towers, never pushed for policies that would have better protected some of the older, smaller buildings: height limits, for instance, in parts of uptown, and restrictions on surface parking lots.

If you want to look for tech firms and start-ups that like the funky older buildings, you can visit uptown’s Packard Place, but in general you’ll have to widen your search far beyond uptown. Look to the old, industrial fringes of South End. Look along North Tryon Street and into Optimist Park, Belmont and Villa Heights, just north of the I-277 freeway loop, as well as up North Davidson Street. Look at the Plaza-Central business district, and beyond. Cast an eye on the city’s smaller, overlooked spots. That’s where those valued old building remain.

But with so little protection from city policy, will those spots remain? And it’s sadly ironic that Dilworth – the first of the city’s once-fading close-in neighborhoods to rebuild itself with 1970s urban pioneers – is now being devoured with demolitions.

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.

Whither crumbling Modernist plazas?

Minneapolis has its own version of Charlotte’s Marshall Park, a vintage mid-century plaza of aging concrete that few love or visit. In Minneapolis it’s Peavey Plaza. “Minneapolis Tussles Over a Faded Plaza,” is the New York Times’ article.

It’s another example of the dilemma over how much unloved, unpopular mid-century Modernism should be preserved. Ardent historic preservationists point out that 50 years ago people were tearing down Victorian houses because they were so “ugly,” only to wait a decade until people began to love them. Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s Historic Landmarks Commission has posted a study of the city’s post-World War II  buildings to recommend which were worth National Register designation. Note, Marshall Park is not on the list.

However, the Times article recounts, in 1999 the American Society of Landscape Architects recognized Peavey Plaza as one of the nation’s most significant examples of landscape architecture, along with Central Park in Manhattan and the Biltmore estate in North Carolina. (That, alone, may offer more insight into what’s wrong with landscape architecture in America today than any other single piece of evidence.)

Built in the early 1970s (Peavey Plaza dates to 1975) after urban renewal razed a historically black neighborhood, Marshall Park is frequented most often by Canada geese. It had a moment of national glory as a stand-in for Farragut North in the Showtime series “Homeland,” filmed in Charlotte.

I don’t think every park adds value, especially in a city downtown with so many blank spaces from parking lots, empty lots, corporate plazas and such.

At the same time, I don’t think beauty alone, or popular opinion alone, should determine whether a building or other place should be preserved, or torn down and replaced. Even though I find almost all  Modernist architecture bleak, depressing and anti-human, I still believe examples should be saved. If for no other reason, they may serve to remind us of the awful ideas some so-called designers can come up with.

What’s up with the federal courthouse?

The majestic federal courthouse on West Trade Street, while stilled used by the federal courts, is owned by the City of Charlotte now. Monday night the City Council unanimously OK’d a change to the city’s agreement with Queens University of Charlotte, which has an option to purchase the building.

The previous agreement was for Queens to use the building as a future law school.  Now that the for-profit Charlotte School of Law has opened, Queens requested a change in the agreement to give the school more leeway in what it could use the building for.

The Charles R. Jonas Federal building, built in 1917 and expanded in 1934, is not a local historic landmark although by most definitions of the term it should be, given its role in such historic federal cases as Judge James McMillan’s Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 1971. And the building also holds the only remaining courtroom that looks and feels like a courtroom.  Whatever happens, let us hope Queens honors its history and ambiance.

The U.S. General Services Administration plans eventually (I am not holding my breath) to build a new courthouse at 500 E. Trade Street, over in the part of uptown that has been steadily deadened with courthouses, the Federal Reserve building, the government center and the jail. Not much room over there for many uses that will help create lively sidewalks along East Trade or Fourth or Third Streets, other than Occupy Charlotte at Old City Hall (which if you take the long view is temporary) and the occasionally excellent people-watching in front of the new Mecklenburg County Courthouse way down at McDowell and Fourth streets.

Time-traveling to a lost era in city history

I spent rather too much time yesterday looking through a new website that lets you view old maps of Charlotte a century ago, pegged to the 100th anniversary Friday of artist and native son Romare Bearden’s birth. The site, www.bearden1911.org, (put together via a partnership of the Levine Museum of the New South and UNC Chapel Hill) superimposes old photos and information about Bearden on an old Sanborn map. You can see old building outlines, where the streets used to be. (Note the small lot sizes, compared with today.).

I got interested, also, in the companion site www.charlotte1911.org, another collaboration by the Levine’s historian, Tom Hanchett and UNC. It uses 1911 Sanborn maps and city directory information to show you, for instance, where people holding different jobs were listed as living. You can locate where the boarding houses were, by race, as well as attorneys, mill workers and “bag agents.” The slider bar lets you superimpose an aerial photo of today’s buildings atop the century-old maps.

Of course, using this site, I scrolled out to see my own neighborhood  –  a subdivision whose official plat name is Pharr Acres. I’d heard it was “old man Pharr’s farm.”  Yep, there on Providence Road, just south of  Briar Creek, is a dot labeled “W S Pharr.” Into the late 1970s the large, old farmhouse house still stood. Like so much else on the map, it’s gone now, with a cul-de-sac subdivision in its place.

The Bearden site also offers some opportunity to mourn, including for the segregated world into which he was born, and for the loss to this city of a talent like his, when his parents moved North in search of a better life. As Levine historian Hanchett says in his article for the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute’s website (disclosure: my workplace) “Bearden’s 1911 birthplace: A fateful time for Charlotte,” a city where downtown neighborhoods had been comparatively integrated was hardening into rigid segregation during the years before Bearden’s birth. A new city park was closed to black residents. Black passengers were ordered into the back of streetcars.

But as you look through the Bearden locations and see photos of what’s there today,  mourn this, as well:  Most of it is gone. The good, the bad, the spacious front porches, stores, churches – almost everything. Including, in some cases, even streets  What you’ll see in photos showing today’s scenes in the places where Bearden and his family lived is not newer buildings – after all, cities do evolve – but surface parking areas, empty grass-covered lots. It’s one thing when old buildings are lost but replaced by newer ones that also over time contribute something to the city’s life and, then, its history. That is not what has happened here. We’ve just lost the reminders of the past, without gaining anything. At least this online exhibit can, if only virtually, restore something of what went before.

Photo: Artist Romare Bearden, born in Charlotte 100 years ago, moved to New York. His great-grandparents are shown in the photo next to him, on the porch of their Graham Street home in Charlotte.

Old depot may yet escape bulldozer

Photo courtesy Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission

The historic passenger depot off Freedom Drive, the Thrift P&N station, may yet be saved from demolition. A complicated property deal is in the works, involving the depot’s owner, CSX railway, as well as the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission and the N.C. Department of Transportation.

As I first wrote in November (City may seek landmark demolition) the station dates to the Piedmont and Northern electric suburban rail system developed by power company and tobacco magnate James B. Duke and power company executive William States Lee (who ran the forerunner of Duke Energy). The railway opened in 1912; passenger service ended in 1951. The station, designed by prominent Charlotte architect C.C. Hook (he designed the Duke Mansion and old City Hall), is the last P&N passenger station in Mecklenburg County.

It’s a designated landmark, but in North Carolina designated landmarks can be demolished if the owner desires. The old depot was caught up in the city’s new, well-intentioned nonresidential building code, adopted last April and aimed at cleaning up dilapidated, blighted buildings. CSX hadn’t kept the old depot in good repair, and after an inspection the city ordered repairs or demolition. CSX applied for a permit to demolish. The city-county landmarks commission has power to delay demolitions for a year and did so.

Walter Abernethy, the city’s code enforcement manager, told the City Council on Monday that an agreement had been reached to save the depot. He might have been a wee bit prematurely optimistic. Dan Morrill, the consulting director for the landmarks commission, says that CSX has
has agreed to withdraw its demolition application for a year to let NCDOT and the landmarks commission try to put together this scenario:

• NCDOT acquires property nearby, across track. If it succeeds, NCDOT allows the depot to be moved onto that new site.
• CSX would then donate the station to the HLC. The HLC would move the station to the new site and restore it for an interim adaptive reuse. CSX might donate some money for the move and restoration, Morrill said.
• If and when NCDOT acquires the former P&N track for passenger use (it owns about 15 miles of the railway, some near uptown Charlotte but mostly in Gaston County where re-opening freight operations) then NCDOT would buy the station from the HLC for use as a passenger. But currently NCDOT has no plans for passenger rail along the line.

Obviously, the plan hinges on NCDOT acquiring land. But if all the pieces fall into place – still a big if – in a weird sort of irony the demolition threat may well end up having saved the old depot from what was starting to look like “demolition by neglect.”

Old depot may yet escape bulldozer

Photo courtesy Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission

The historic passenger depot off Freedom Drive, the Thrift P&N station, may yet be saved from demolition. A complicated property deal is in the works, involving the depot’s owner, CSX railway, as well as the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission and the N.C. Department of Transportation.

As I first wrote in November (City may seek landmark demolition) the station dates to the Piedmont and Northern electric suburban rail system developed by power company and tobacco magnate James B. Duke and power company executive William States Lee (who ran the forerunner of Duke Energy). The railway opened in 1912; passenger service ended in 1951. The station, designed by prominent Charlotte architect C.C. Hook (he designed the Duke Mansion and old City Hall), is the last P&N passenger station in Mecklenburg County.

It’s a designated landmark, but in North Carolina designated landmarks can be demolished if the owner desires. The old depot was caught up in the city’s new, well-intentioned nonresidential building code, adopted last April and aimed at cleaning up dilapidated, blighted buildings. CSX hadn’t kept the old depot in good repair, and after an inspection the city ordered repairs or demolition. CSX applied for a permit to demolish. The city-county landmarks commission has power to delay demolitions for a year and did so.

Walter Abernethy, the city’s code enforcement manager, told the City Council on Monday that an agreement had been reached to save the depot. He might have been a wee bit prematurely optimistic. Dan Morrill, the consulting director for the landmarks commission, says that CSX has
has agreed to withdraw its demolition application for a year to let NCDOT and the landmarks commission try to put together this scenario:

• NCDOT acquires property nearby, across track. If it succeeds, NCDOT allows the depot to be moved onto that new site.
• CSX would then donate the station to the HLC. The HLC would move the station to the new site and restore it for an interim adaptive reuse. CSX might donate some money for the move and restoration, Morrill said.
• If and when NCDOT acquires the former P&N track for passenger use (it owns about 15 miles of the railway, some near uptown Charlotte but mostly in Gaston County where re-opening freight operations) then NCDOT would buy the station from the HLC for use as a passenger. But currently NCDOT has no plans for passenger rail along the line.

Obviously, the plan hinges on NCDOT acquiring land. But if all the pieces fall into place – still a big if – in a weird sort of irony the demolition threat may well end up having saved the old depot from what was starting to look like “demolition by neglect.”

Historic church gets saved on Seigle Ave.

It looks as if the Seigle Avenue Presbyterian Church sanctuary won’t be demolished. Neighbors, church members and other interested parties found a local builder-developer who has contracted to buy the old church property. Monday night the Charlotte City Council granted a 90-day delay in the city’s demolition order.

As I wrote in my Jan. 28 op-ed, “Once-loved sanctuary faces the end,” the church may not be an architectural gem, but it and its congregation played a notable role in ongoing efforts here to create more racially integrated congregations. It was, I wrote, “a small congregation, racially integrated for more than 40 years. For decades that 1950 sanctuary was home to a group of African-American and white Christians puzzling their way through barriers of race, income, gender, class and other inequities – a journey so difficult that many other people and groups in Charlotte have not really begun it.”

The congregation split over a variety of issues, with many long-time former members of both races joining Caldwell Memorial Presbyterian Church. The remaining Seigle members moved up the street to another building five years ago and put the old property on the market. But the real estate slowdown, the three buildings’ bad condition and the lack of parking made it a difficult sale. The city’s new building code for non-residential property, when applied to the church property, resulted in a demolition order. In January the City Council granted a 30-day demolition delay, after the church’s real estate agent said he thought he had found a buyer.

Monday night, the buyer himself – Brandon Brown of Green City Development – told the City Council he would close on the property in about a week and asked for 150 days’ delay in the demolition order so he could tear down the oldest building and start repairing the sanctuary and fellowship hall. He’s also asking to buy 2 city-owned acres behind the church to use for more parking; those negotiations will be more complex and his purchase of the church isn’t contingent upon that separate land purchase.

Brown said he’d like to turn the church sanctuary into a restaurant (he didn’t use the example of Bonterra in Dilworth, but I will) and the fellowship hall into a coffee shop or office. The City Council gave him a 90-day extension of the demolition. Brown was good with that.

The city’s nonresidential building code is well-intentioned but it’s having the effect of threatening historic landmark buildings, as I wrote in November’s “City May Seek Landmark Demolition.” (The Seigle Avenue church building wasn’t a landmark.)

Observer file photo below showing the front of the sanctuary was taken in 1993.