HISTORIC PRESERVATION

Breweries, apartments, hip food halls, creative offices, coworking spaces: Charlotte developers keep finding new uses for the city’s old mills. As a post-war, Sunbelt boomtown, Charlotte has garnered a reputation for tearing down its old buildings and replacing them with sterile plaques to make way for the city’s glittering new skyline. But while many once-grand […]

In 2012, local historian Tom Hanchett wanted to explore his fascination with Central Avenue. He led a community walk down the busy thoroughfare, bustling with new businesses, older neighborhoods and a growing immigrant community. “I was beginning to see Central Ave as an urban place, which at that point in time sounded like a contradiction […]

SHELBY — If you’re thinking downtowns are dead, you haven’t been paying attention lately. I recently got an earful of downtown success stories from some of North Carolina’s smaller cities and towns, where residents have worked hard for decades to bring life back to once-hollow downtowns. The occasion was the annual North Carolina Main Street […]

[highlightrule]Can lower South End survive the large-scale cookie-cutter development now ravaging South End and NoDa? Charlotte can learn some lessons from another Millennial magnet city, Des Moines. Yes, Des Moines. [/highlightrule] In post-election America, consensus seems as unreachable as the lost land of Atlantis. Republican “Middle America” has triumphed over the Democratic coastal regions, and […]

Although Brian Miller grew up in Charlotte, he always felt drawn to Gastonia’s Loray Mill village, where his mother lived as a child. The 30-block neighborhood with about 500 small houses surrounded the historic Loray Mill, site of a bloody 1929 labor strike that claimed the lives of Gastonia Police Chief Orville Aderholt and union […]

One reason North Carolina had more Rosenwald Schools than any other state is the strong advocacy for their construction by Charlotte’s George E. Davis. Davis was the first black professor at Biddle Institute, now Johnson C. Smith University. He taught mathematics, science and sociology during his 35-year tenure there. He became dean of the faculty […]

[highlightrule] The City of Kannapolis bought its own downtown. It’s one of dozens of towns and cities across North Carolina hoping to make their downtowns more vibrant. [/highlightrule] In Kannapolis, plans for revitalizing downtown are ambitious, the stakes are high, and, residents say, there is a chance “to create our own destiny.” Unlike any other […]

In what local preservationists call a major victory, a century-old depot—the deteriorating relic of a lost era of Charlotte-Gastonia passenger rail—will be moved a short distance and repaired. The old Piedmont and Northern Railway depot has stood since 1912 in northwest Charlotte, on Old Mount Holly Road beside what are now CSX-owned tracks used for […]

A proposal working its way through the city zoning process could create something new for Charlotte: a special kind of zoning designed specifically for one neighborhood. The proposed Gold District would give a section of the larger South End area its own zoning standards, tailored to what businesses and property owners in the area say […]