Charlotte

Charlotte's LGBTQ nightlife before the 1980s is only fragmentarily documented, and qnotes presents its own account as partial rather than complete. [QnotesCarolinas] The earliest traces are unverified 1950s reports: a Charlotte homosexual hotspot mentioned in a True Crime magazine of the decade, and a lesbian bar said to have stood on Wilkinson Boulevard in the same period. qnotes reports both as unconfirmed. [QnotesCarolinas] The first concrete evidence of social nightclubs for gay and lesbian Charlotteans dates to the 1960s, when two clubs opened on South Boulevard within months of each other. [QnotesCarolinas] Through the 1970s the scene turned over rapidly, with clubs opening and closing — among them Nikki's Express at Morehead Street and Kings Drive, and 20th Century Fox in Center City. [QnotesCarolinas] Arson struck several Charlotte nightclubs across the second half of the 1970s. All but one of the clubs burned were straight venues, and the fires are thought to have been set by criminal interests seeking protection money to keep police away. [QnotesCarolinas] The 1990s brought a venue type Charlotte took from Atlanta and New York: the mixed club, courting gay and straight patrons together. Pterodactyl, Mythos, Park Elevator and Tonic were among them; some lasted into the 2000s and by 2019 all had closed. [QnotesCarolinas] Gay-specific clubs still opened successfully alongside them — Stonewall, in a former Asian restaurant beside what became the Westin Hotel site, and Genesis — and both closed near the turn of the century. [QnotesCarolinas] Charlotte's Black gay population largely did not frequent the city's mainstream gay bars. [QnotesCarolinas] Club Mixx, at Wilkinson Boulevard and Morehead Street and later on S. Tryon Street near Clanton Road, served a Black clientele for several years. Its closing left a gap that nothing filled until The Nickel Bar opened in the West End in 2009. [QnotesCarolinas] The Nickel Bar closed in 2019 and its owner, Milton Howard, opened Jewels on Beatties Ford Road. [QnotesCarolinas] A growing gay population in Plaza-Midwood by the late 1990s drew venues into that neighbourhood, Central Station opening there in 1998. [QnotesCarolinas] A further tier survives only as names with no recorded history attached: TAGS, which became Manford's and then Masquerade, plus Dax, Cell Block, Closet, the Crystal Room, Cathode Azure, The Golden Cock, Road House, Spike's, Twist and Shout, Marigny and Velocity. All closed. [QnotesCarolinas] One venue has held an LGBTQ customer base across four names — Amanda Rose, then Steven's, then Liaisons, and by 2019 Bar at 316. [QnotesCarolinas] The Mint Museum of Art opened in Charlotte in 1936 as the first art museum in North Carolina, in a building that had served as the first branch of the U.S. Mint outside Philadelphia — designed by William A. Strickland and operating as a mint from 1836. Threatened by adjacent construction, the building was bought for $950 in 1933 by preservationists led by Mrs. Harold C. Dwelle, moved to Randolph Road and reconstructed between 1934 and 1936. [NCpedia (State Library of North Carolina)] The Mint Museum of Craft and Design opened in a former department store building nearby in January 1999, to house the museum's growing collections of decorative arts and regional crafts, including North Carolina pottery and turned wood. [NCpedia (State Library of North Carolina)] The crafts collection had begun in earnest in 1964, with the acquisition of John Acorn's brazed steel sculpture Growth Form and the first in a series of juried Piedmont Craft Exhibitions. [NCpedia (State Library of North Carolina)] North Charlotte began in 1903, when three textile magnates — William Holt of Alamance County and Jesse Spencer and Charles W. Johnston of Charlotte — joined forces to build the Highland Park Mill Manufacturing Company and the surrounding mill villages. [Charlotte Mecklenburg Library] Highland Park Mill #3 was designed by Charlotte textile architect Stuart W. Cramer at a cost of $600,000, covered 101,125 square feet, was the city's largest textile factory at the time of its construction, and eventually employed over 1,500 men, women and children. Cramer also designed the mill's 1906 housing development. [Charlotte Mecklenburg Library] The mill closed in 1969 and the area around North Charlotte went through turbulent economic times; new business emerged along 36th Street beginning in the 1990s, and the old buildings now house restaurants, art galleries, craft stores, music halls and coffee shops. [Charlotte Mecklenburg Library] Brooklyn, in what is now Charlotte's Second Ward, was in its heyday a thriving Black business center. It held the city's Black YMCA and library, the Brevard Street Library — opened two years after the Carnegie Library refused to admit Black patrons, and the first free library for Black patrons in North Carolina — and the A.M.E. Zion Publishing House, which published all printed materials for the A.M.E. Zion denomination in America. [J. Murrey Atkins Library, UNC Charlotte] The Mecklenburg Investment Company Building on South Brevard Street, financed by Black professionals in 1921 to provide the first office building open to Black professionals, still stands; its architect and builder W. W. Smith designed the building's signature yellow and red patterned brickwork, and its third-floor lodge hall was often used as a meeting place for Black civic groups. [J. Murrey Atkins Library, UNC Charlotte] Between 1960 and 1967 Brooklyn was razed in five stages. Not a single new residential unit was built to replace the 1,480 demolished homes; 1,007 families were displaced, mostly to the northern and western parts of the city, and two hundred and sixteen Black businesses closed, many never reopening. [J. Murrey Atkins Library, UNC Charlotte] Grace AME Zion Church at 219 South Brevard Street was built between 1900 and 1902 to designs by the local architects Hayden, Wheeler and Schwerd in association with William W. Smith, Charlotte's first black architect; Smith's masterful brickwork is revealed in a wealth of corbeled bands, pilasters, pinnacles and parapets. [SAH Archipedia (Society of Architectural Historians)] Myers Park, Charlotte's premier streetcar suburb, was laid out on 1,200 acres to a 1911 design by John Nolen, one of America's most influential early-twentieth-century planners; Earle Draper took over supervision in 1917. Nolen featured the neighbourhood in his 1927 book New Towns for Old, and the project inspired a generation of similar community plans across the South. [SAH Archipedia (Society of Architectural Historians)] A. G. Odell, Jr. moved to Charlotte in 1939 and opened his office there in 1940; his large firm, A. G. Odell, Jr., Associates, led in making Charlotte a center of corporate modernism, and its first major North Carolina work — the Charlotte Coliseum and Ovens Auditorium, completed in 1956 — was a reputation-making accomplishment nationally and internationally. [North Carolina Architects and Builders: A Biographical Dictionary (NC State University Libraries)] Among Odell's early modernist school designs was Double Oaks Elementary School of 1950, built for black students in Charlotte, which departed from traditional schoolhouse architecture in its simple forms, abundant light and flowing plan following the terrain, and won an AIA National Honor Award in 1954. [North Carolina Architects and Builders: A Biographical Dictionary (NC State University Libraries)] The firm was known as a "graduate school" for young architects and engineers; Harvey Gantt, Charles McMurray, Harry Wolf III and Charles Lyman Bates, Sr. were among those who worked there and became prominent architects in North Carolina. At Odell's death in 1988 Odell Associates was the largest architectural firm in Charlotte, with more than 150 employees. [North Carolina Architects and Builders: A Biographical Dictionary (NC State University Libraries)] The building's skin uses patterns reminiscent of quilt designs from the Underground Railroad era and woven textile patterns from West Africa. [Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture] The building that houses the McColl Center at 721 North Tryon Street was a Presbyterian church built in 1926 — a brick and stone neo-Gothic structure — active until 1950, standing empty for years and gutted by an accidental fire on 14 November 1984. Bank of America bought the property in 1995 intending to establish an artist residency and, with Charlotte's Arts & Science Council, rebuilt the interior to designs by FMK Architects; it opened on 16 September 1999 as the Tryon Center for Visual Art, was renamed McColl Center for Visual Art in 2001 and McColl Center for Art + Innovation in 2014. [Wikipedia] The centre holds nine individual artist studios, a large-scale sculpture facility and more than 5,000 square feet of exhibition space, and provides tools and materials for fiber arts, jewelry making, metal fabrication, printmaking, sculpture, painting, photography, ceramics, digital media and woodworking. Residencies run from two to eleven months and are open to visual artists and to creative people in other disciplines. [Wikipedia]

“The history of oppressed people is always fragmentary. It often goes undocumented for fear of unintentionally providing oppressors with information that could lead to unwanted trouble for those suffering under irrational scrutiny and harassment.” [QnotesCarolinas]

“The 1990s ushered in a completely different era for Charlotte's gay bars. The city saw a trend begin to develop that had already taken place in cities like Atlanta and New York: the mixed club.” [QnotesCarolinas]

“It wasn't that I was made to feel unwelcome… I just didn't usually care too much for the music. It was too…white.” [QnotesCarolinas]

“Highland Park Mill #3 was a “technological marvel,” as it was the first textile mill in North Carolina specifically designed and constructed to operate with electricity rather than steam power.” [Charlotte Mecklenburg Library]

“an African American city-within-the-city, complete with its own downtown.” [J. Murrey Atkins Library, UNC Charlotte]

“Smith played a leading role in the African American business renaissance of the early 1900s, with many of his works concentrated along South Brevard Street, Charlotte’s black main street.” [SAH Archipedia (Society of Architectural Historians)]