Rotary Speaker 8 21 David Erdman

Well, it is a privilege to be here. I remember when Mike Allman spoke almost 20 years ago here, he said that this is Charlotte's leading forum, and I truly believe that. And I will always treasure my nameplate from today's meeting. On the back it says Carol Folt. I also remember Tim Newman One day when he had to preside for some reason over the club, and he said it was a stand-in. And so I'm a speaker stand-in. What I'm going to do is show you pictures of old Charlotte. And but before I do that, I want to by the way if we happen to dim the lights a little bit so the slides would be better suit me just fine. I was in Oklahoma City a month ago. And they had opened a 100-year time capsule in the year 2013. And in the time capsule was a commemoration of the Rotary Club of Oklahoma City in 1913. That's embroidered names into a quilt. So I just thought that was so interesting I had to show it to you. Now we're going to find out how this works. Oh, I'm glad. Also, I'm always collecting information about old Charlotte. So about 1937, the Charlotte News received this congratulation from our Charlotte Rotary Club. And I want to thank you for the privilege of speaking here today. Before I say anything else, I want to thank President Mike Hawley, Mac McCarley, Sandy Osborne, Ron Kimball, David Tobin, Jessica Dupree, Benton Bragg, Kim Bratton, and Tom Bartholomew, because every one of them had to spring into action to make anything happen at our meeting today. So what I'm going to do today is talk about 50 lost architectural treasures of Old Charlotte. And in honor of our president, Mike Hawley, I'm going to start. My first slide is the Hawley Mansion. The Hawley Mansion was built in 1906 and stood on Elizabeth Avenue. It later was known as Mrs. Moorhead's Boarding House. Mike and I have not discussed whether it's Ken or not. I'm not sure. If they're not in jail, they're Ken. All right. I'm going to show pictures of 50 buildings. And one of them is still standing, albeit not where it was originally located. This is our mint when it was located on West Trade Street in Charlotte. And most of you know that it was taken apart block by block and moved around 1931 in order to avoid being simply demolished. And then it was reconstructed as part of WPA in around 1936 and '37. All right. Every picture I'm going to show you is an actual photograph. And I use this slide to illustrate why I use photographs. These are all colorized postcards. Colorized postcards are easier on the eyes without a doubt because they are color. But nobody knows what these buildings, the color of these buildings really was, at least when they were making the postcards. And so I've chosen to focus on actual photographs. That's— with one exception down to the left, those other 5 buildings are all the same building, the Independence Building. So, start with Central Hotel right at the square, one of the oldest buildings in Charlotte. By the way, no one alive today was alive when the Central Hotel was standing. But I wanted you to see— what you'll learn in seeing these pictures is that Charlotte was a real city 100 years ago. Now it was a small city. We only had, well, 100 years ago we were up to 25,000 people roughly. But Charlotte is 250 years old this year. This very year we're celebrating that 250th anniversary. And so I'm going to show you buildings from our history. The D.H. Hill Military School. This became Charlotte's first Public School, located over on Moorhead Street, actually facing South Boulevard at Moorhead. The Buford Hotel and Bank. There are people in this room who remember that building because it wasn't torn down until around 1960. And the bank became, it was Union National Bank and became First Union National Bank. And of course they built their other buildings here in our city. in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, maybe even '80s. But the bank was on the first floor and the hotel was upstairs. Second Presbyterian Church. There's bound to be somebody in this room who actually went to Second Presbyterian Church. This is the church— there, there's some hands being held up. This is the church that along with another church merged and was relocated to East— to Dilworth to become Covenant Presbyterian Church. This building was on North Tryon Street. Tryon Street. You know, as we look at these pictures, I hope you'll take into account, into account what monumental structures some of these buildings were. This is a remarkable building, in my opinion. Well, City Hall, 19— no, 1888. It also doubled as the fire station, which is why you can see where the horses would come out of the, of the horse gate there. But that was our City Hall. But it didn't have to be for long because in 1898 the city built this monumental City Hall. And I've always thought that that City Hall bespoke ambition because it was built before the turn of the century. Charlotte had a population of about 18,000 people and yet it built such a monumental City Hall reminiscent in my eyes of the one in Philadelphia where William Penn's statue is on top. And the federal enclave. The building on the right is actually the Mint in its old location. And the building on the left is the post office and federal courthouse. It only stood until 1915. So you see the age of this picture. But that also beautiful building was torn down to build half of our current federal courthouse. And the Mint was moved to move the other half, to build the other half. of our current federal courthouse. So it's always been a federal enclave, meaning federal property within the city of Charlotte. The Manufacturers Club. Anybody here remember the Manufacturers Club? You would have been a child if you remember. Ralston Pound remembers it. The Manufacturers Club on West Trade Street was sort of the city club of its day, only the manufacturers, of whom there were so many in this town of Cotton mills. The manufacturers would hang out there. Presbyterian College for Women had a beautiful building on North Church Street. That's why, excuse me, North College Street. That's why it's named North College Street. That is now Queens University of Charlotte. They moved out of that building about 100 years ago to the campus that's in Myers Park. Became Queens College. But it was originally Presbyterian College for Women. And this building lasted until, I think, the 1950s. But again, what a monumental structure right uptown. The Dilworth Park Pavilion and Theater. I wish I knew more about this place. I don't know what they did in the pavilion. You know, probably roller skating, probably dances, probably entertainment. We would imagine a theater had Theatrical productions. But it was built out at the Latta Park area in Dilworth to attract people to move to Dilworth. So that was the Dilworth Park Pavilion and Theater. And the whole idea, we all know that Dilworth was Charlotte's first suburb. We were a tightly packed city until the trolley was routed out South Boulevard And then East Boulevard opening up the whole neighborhood of Dilworth. The Mecklenburg County Courthouse, 1896. I look at that building and again I see ambition. This is that small town building a monumental courthouse. And I believe that its vague resemblance to the United States Capitol was a signal that the South, this city anyway in the South, was back in the Union, had rejoined the United States. Now it was 31 years after the war was over, but there were lots of people around who didn't think the war was over. And this, this was quite a statement. Elizabeth College. I think most of you know that Elizabeth College is a— was a campus on Elizabeth Avenue where Presbyterian Hospital, Presbyterian Novant Hospital as they now call it, is located. And that college went out of business around 1909, but it had some buildings and they became ultimately Presbyterian Hospital. The D.A. Tompkins Building on South Church Street. Tompkins owned the newspaper and he was, I like to say, and I hope Hugh McCall would regard this as a compliment, but I would call him the Hugh McCall of his day. He is a person who who did more to build this city with its, with a building like this, with the newspaper, with commerce, but mostly by supporting the textile manufacturing industry. And the textile manufacturing industry became a large part of what built Charlotte into a big city. The Catawba Power Company. Who knows whether this building would have been preserved if it hadn't burned. It burned in 1923. But this is where James B. Duke had his offices. Because you know he moved to Charlotte about 1916 with his world-class fortune which he had gotten from selling 4/5 of the American Tobacco Company because he had to sell it because the Theodore Roosevelt trust busters made him disses himself, dispose of 4/5 of the assets. But he got cash, cash, cash, cash. And so he came and bought more than 100,000 acres of land around the, around the Catawba River, excuse me, and created the lakes and started generating electric power. His office was there on South Tryon Street. I would like to see a color picture of that, but of course none exist. I imagine That, that's kind of a reddish roof and gray stone otherwise. The Carnegie Library. There are people in this room who went to the Carnegie Library. Mmhmm. The library was paid for by Andrew Carnegie. History taught us that he paid for libraries all across America. He contributed $25,000, which was a sufficient fund to build that wonderful library in Charlotte. That is still where we have our current Library. They used the same site, tore that building down, built the 1955 library, tore that building down, built the roughly 1988 library, which they're talking about tearing down to build another library. The Charlotte Sanatorium. This would be a place to go for some sort of healthcare. I'm not crystal clear. It's not, it was not a tuberculosis sanatorium. I understand that. But they were always way out in the country. 'Cause tuberculosis was very contagious. This is right at 7th and North Church Street, sort of in the Spirit Square area. The Piedmont Fire Insurance Building on South Tryon Street. This was one of the first real office buildings in Charlotte. Before we had office buildings, we had offices. And offices were little buildings, house-sized buildings, wooden buildings. This is a place where somebody could rent an office in a prestigious address on South Tryon Street in an early date. The Latta Mansion. Edward Dilworth Latta Mansion. What a remarkable house that was on East Boulevard. It was torn down to build the educational building of the, of the Greek Church Yes. On East Boulevard. But that big, big house was the anchor of the neighborhood he named after his family name, Dilworth. The Selwyn Hotel. Now there's got to be loads of hands for Selwyn Hotel. People who had their Sunday lunches there. The Selwyn Hotel went up in 1905, 1906 and went down Early 1970s, '71, '72, and it was the showplace of its time. I like to think that the bay windows were a tip of the hat, so to speak, to the San Francisco earthquake because San Francisco was known for its bay windows and this was designed a little time after that. Just something different. The train station. There's certainly lots of people who rode the train out of there, although this building went down in 1962, so many of you did not. But this building, again, a monument and a very important monument to our city because we, the city of Charlotte, were on the main line of the Southern Railway. That's like being on the main trunk of the oil pipeline. It's very, very important. So trains came through Charlotte, 100 a day. And they, many of them would stop at this train station. Passengers for sure, freight probably. This would have been like our airport in the day. Now obviously our airport was coming along by 1962. But the train station, if you go back another generation, was, it held the importance that our airport holds today. And this was a fine— train station. The Independence Building. We do have a color picture of that building. I took that picture. When I heard that they were going to tear it down, I went and grabbed a camera and grabbed a picture. So we know that it was kind of a gold brick there. The Independence Building, if you'll look at it, you'll see that they added 2 stories on the top of it. In fact, I'm not sure they didn't add 3. But you can see where the building design changes at the top. And that was the vogue in those days to make sure your building was still the tallest one in town. So you'd add floors. It was done to other buildings as well. The YMCA was not until 0960, it was 1960. So that's a typo. But I know there are a lot of men in here who went to the YMCA on South Tryon Street. It was a very major Institution in our city for the first— maybe it still is, but especially in the first half of the last century, the YMCA, if you were anybody male, you wanted to be in the YMCA. The first law building. We had a later law building on Trade Street and I'll show you that one. But this was on South Tryon Street and it was next door to that 1896 courthouse that looked like the United States Capitol. The building was torn down, well, I don't know when this one was torn down. Probably in the— it's kind of unclear because Sturkey's Furniture Store later occupied this building and then Sturkey's later occupied another building further south. So it's a little unclear to me when this building went down. But I can tell you that they added 2 stories to it and it was a 5-story building at a later stage. The American Trust Company. This is important Charlotte history. There were 2 banks immediately next door to each other, undoubtedly hyper competitors. One was American Trust Company and I'll show you the other in a minute. But first, the Belk Store. That Belk Store was originally only a half wide. The left half was built first in the 1920s and then they made it a double wide By adding the right-hand side in the later 1920s. By the way, a lesson there. By 1929, almost everything stopped. Almost everything. Because of course, the Great Depression, there was no money. But Charlotte built a lot up to 1929 and then started building again after World War II. So there was a long hiatus there. But the Belk Store was double-wided before of the Depression. This is the other bank, Commercial National Bank. There are certainly bankers in this room who know why American Trust and Commercial National are important because they combined with another bank from Greensboro, as I recall, and became North Carolina National Bank, NCNB. And what NCNB did was tear down both of them and build the building where McCormick and Schmick is now. Because that was the first NC&B building here in Charlotte. They used the same land, they just tore down the buildings and had the combined NC&B that became Nations Bank that became our Bank of America. The Clayton Hotel at West 5th and North Church. Currently a parking lot, I believe, but There may be, maybe there's probably a building there, my mistake. But anyway, the Clayton Hotel. I like this building because it's, it's one of the few places in Charlotte where the land is not flat. And so you can see how the architect adapted to have 2 separate entrances. I'm interested to see how it worked inside. Unless there's somebody here who can tell me, we'll never know. The Coca-Cola Bottling Company of Charlotte. They were there early. Now, I will tell you that in many of these pictures that were taken 100 years ago, they would put the sign on the picture and it may well be that that sign was not actually on the building. They would superimpose them. I've seen enough of those to believe that this may have been superimposed. But there's no doubt that that's the Coca-Cola Bottling Company. Those are trucks with Coca-Cola bottles out front. The Mecklenburg Hotel. It burned about 1978. It was a very important hotel diagonally across the street from the train station. So if you came to Charlotte on the train, you might well spend the night at the Mecklenburg Hotel. And they had a very good restaurant that some of you will remember from your childhood. The YWCA, 1914 to 1969 at that location. That's on East Trade Street. They later put another YWCA building on that location and then moved out to Park Road, as you know. The Alexander Graham Junior High School. Got some hands? Anybody? Yeah, we've got some hands. Alexander Graham Junior High School. Now, there are 2 Alexander Graham Junior High Schools. We still have one. The one we have is on Runnymede Road. But the original— On Park Road. Alexander Graham Junior High School was on East Morehead Street, and that was the building. And what's historically significant about it, it was the first junior high school in the entire state of North Carolina. There was no— it was a whole new concept to have a junior high school. And so that was the first. Of course, it was copied all over the state. And therefore, when they moved Locations that kept the historic name. The Dowd Flats. What a remarkable apartment building. Moorhead and South Boulevard. I'd like to know more about what that looked like inside. It's got towers, kind of a Mediterranean look to it, as you can see. The columns got all sorts of architectural attributes. The Professional Building. Anybody who grew up in Charlotte 60, 70 years ago went to the doctor at the Professional Building. That was the doctor's building of its time. That was on North Tryon Street, 7th and North Tryon. The Wade Loft. I expire and gasp when I see that building because I photographed that building. This is not my photograph of it. And 6 months later it burned. The Wade Loft was like the Merchandise Mart of Chicago for the city of Charlotte. The Merchandising District. This is down on First Street behind in the, in what is now the Arts Complex. But Charlotte was a big breakdown city. And by breakdown that would mean trainloads of cargo would be broken down into truckloads for distribution in the Carolinas. So that was a big breakdown center and the train lines ran right behind there. The ear— eye, ear, nose, and throat hospital was next door to the professional building. It was where you would have eye, ear, nose, and throat surgery. Very wonderful, sort of advanced in the 1920s that Charlotte had such a facility. Second Ward School. Second Ward School was built 3 years after the Alexander Graham Junior High School that I showed you. To me, the designs are somewhat similar, probably similar enough that the architecture of this building was influenced by the, the school that was only about 3 blocks away on Moorhead Street. Second Ward School, of course, African American students only. And the buildings and the campus lasted until 1969. The Hotel Charlotte. Those of us who've been in Charlotte long enough remember the day that that building was imploded on national TV. It had been closed since the early 1970s. Something I'm looking for, and all the pictures that I collect are basically for the history of our city. going to give all that I have to the museums, the libraries, universities when I've got all that I can get. But, but, but what I don't have is pictures of inside that ballroom. And something tells me there are prom pictures or wedding pictures or anniversary events that people have got pictures from inside that, those Palladian windows, that ballroom. The Walton Hotel. That's where the cotton brokers all stayed on the cotton side of town, which is over near where the light rail now runs through uptown. Now this one's easy. The Lamplighter Restaurant. See, this one's so much more recent that many of you went to your first date or your Valentine's date or your New Year's Eve dinner at the wonderful Lamplighter Restaurant on East Morehead Street. The Wilder Building. Thank goodness I got, got this picture. I'll be thanking the person who gave it to me in a little while. The second law building. By the way, I'm going to use— I'm going to see if this really works. Yes. My law office was on the 3rd floor right there for a short time in my law practice. It was great to be in that wonderful historic building even then. The Southern Railway offices. If you're going to have the main line of the Southern Railway running through Charlotte, you've got to have some offices. And you've got to have a tank to put water into the locomotives. You see the tank. The Observer News Building. This building was torn down and the later Observer News Building was built on the same site. And of course, it's now gone and the 25-story building is going up. And the Power Building. The Power Building, monumental in scale and in style. This was known, even though it was Duke Power Company, it was known as the Power Building. And the Power Building, I don't quite understand why that needed to be torn down. You could build any sort of high-rise within that facade and preserve both. Film Row. Talk about breakdown. Charlotte was the film distribution center for a large region— North Carolina, South Carolina, into Tennessee, into southern Virginia. So, in the days when movies came in big old cases of film, they'd carry them out of Charlotte and truck them all over the region. So, we were a film distribution center and all the major film companies were represented in Charlotte. To distribute their films. That was on South Church Street. Going the wrong way. The bus station. Other cities have seen fit to preserve the facades of these streamlined style, streamlined style bus stations and build high-rises behind them. There's a beautiful example in Washington, D.C. of just that. Crockett Park. Always have to show this because I met my wife here. We— some of you remember they— Charlotte used to have a bachelor's club and a spinster's club. Sounds quaint, sounds peculiar, but it was popular in Charlotte. And yes, I met my wife at a spinster's club mixer, and that's what it's all about. That's what it was for. And finally, the Jesus Saves building. Jesus did not save this building. So, if you want to see the other 50 buildings, you can buy my book. Ralston Pound gave me that nice picture of the building I said I'd comment on, and Ralston's a great source of history for me. Bill Barnhart is really the one who got me started on all this. He gave me his scrapbooks a few years ago and said, use these if you'd like, and I've used them a lot. But I also want to thank Katherine Browning, Bob Freeman, Luther Moore, Chase Saunders, Martin Waters, David Zimmerman, and Frank Martin, whose name I inadvertently omitted, for various help in historic matters. And there may be others of you as well. So I want to say the end, thank you, and on time. Thank you.