HISTORIC PRESERVATION

If there’s one constant in Charlotte, it’s change. And while the pace of new building and construction might make you think Charlotte doesn’t have much history (at least, not much left), there’s plenty to explore in the city’s past. The rebranding and upcoming changes to the Epicentre got me thinking about the ephemeral nature of […]

Charlotte has a reputation as a shiny new city, one that tears down grand old buildings to replace them with bland new apartments and historic marker plaques. But that’s not the whole truth, and the guests on this episode of “Future Charlotte” are devoted to preserving and promoting more of Charlotte’s history. Historian Dan Morill, […]

Charlotte is a city that’s often criticized for tearing down its history. But some of the most significant demolitions of the past few decades haven’t been historic structures, but rather buildings that didn’t make it to middle age — or even puberty. In a fast-growing city, plenty of change is to be expected. The built […]

Editor’s note: This story originally appeared on Mary Newsom’s blog The Naked City. The first three paragraphs are from Newsom. I stood in line two hours today to order chicken from Price’s Chicken Coop, the iconic fried chicken takeout joint on Camden Road in South End that had just announced it will close in two […]

If we’re being completely honest, those of us who sat down this year to write traditional end-of-year reflections struggled to find something positive to say. I certainly did. Whether an organizational newsletter or a family’s holiday greeting card, it seemed the best one could say about 2020 is that it’s finally over. However, as I […]

When Paul Sires and his partner Ruth Ava Lyons started looking at the neighborhood that would become the NoDa arts district in north Charlotte back in 1983, it looked like opportunity. The main drag had a ribbon of historic buildings with “structural reality,” and the kind of masonry where the inside is revealed from the […]

Who used to live in your house? When was your neighborhood built? Was your subdivision legally segregated? How’d your street get its name? Start wondering about where you live, and these kinds of questions are bound to crop up. And in a fast-changing, shiny “New South” city like Charlotte, it can seem like there isn’t […]

Sitting in a gas station turned into a café and coffee shop along Rozzelles Ferry Road in Charlotte’s Historic West End, J’Tanya Adams, a longtime community activist, spotted a commercial real estate broker who has been working with developers interested in building new homes in the area. The conversation was brief, but packed with news. […]

From her porch in booming Fort Mill, S.C., Barbara Mackey can point out three houses where neighbors who love her live. One takes her to church every Sunday morning. Another trims her hedges and mows her grass. A third chauffeurs her around town whenever she needs to run errands. “Here, everybody knows everybody,” says Mackey, […]

Charlotte is a city with a reputation for tearing down its old buildings to replace them with the next big thing, and perhaps nowhere is that go-go approach to development more apparent than at the site of the Main Library. The corner of Sixth and North Tryon streets has been home to three main library […]