With help from a federal grant, the City of Charlotte will for the first time in 30 years survey its historic buildings and neighborhoods to identify potential historic districts and landmarks. (Photo: Nancy Pierce)
Gastonia and Rock Hill: two former textile towns, each with a large and empty old mill in the middle of town. How are they working to use Gastonia’s Loray Mill and Rock Hill’s old Bleachery site for economic development? (Photo: Mae Israel)
Two of the region's main streets have won this year’s Great Places in North Carolina competition. Union Street in Concord and Main Street in Davidson were recognized among the state’s top downtowns in a competition from the N.C. chapter of the American Planning Association.(Photo: Nancy Pierce)
The historic Duke Mansion was nearly lost once to fire and later to plans to convert it to condominiums. Its historic landscape is just as vulnerable. But some outstanding efforts are preserving its tree-studded setting. (Image: Bing Maps)
The house at Cedarwood Lane once sat on the eastern outskirts of the city, a wooded, secluded haven in the 1960s where artists would gather on Sunday afternoons. Today, it’s a potential historic landmark in a city that has never opened its heart to Mid-Century Modern architecture.
Ghosts and cities often occur together, and not only in fiction. Kevin Lynch writes about how we "read" cities. Many descriptions of our surroundings are accompanied by the ghosts of what used to be there. Changes can leave scars on our mental map.
When I moved to Charlotte more than 30 years ago, Matthews was the suburb. Years of attracting people looking for a small town and a private getaway have built a fabric of large lawns and scattered houses, and more lawns and more houses. Where does a it go from here?
In any other time, the request might not have been so hard. But a nonprofit developer’s plea for $2.3 million in city money from federal grants to restore a historic NoDa textile mill came after a lingering economic downturn, and after the city had already put $6.7 million into the property. Why is it so hard to restore an important piece of city history? Well, it’s complicated ...
Downtown Salisbury has been named one of “10 Great Neighborhoods” for 2012 by a national planning organization. The town remained vibrant through the decline of the textile industry by maintaining its historic character and promoting agri-tourism and an authentic North Carolina experience through culture, arts and food rooted in its picturesque setting.
Charlotte city officials are pushing two groups with competing visions for the future of the Carolina Theatre to work together to help save the history-rich venue that’s been vacant, on a prominent uptown corner, for more than 30 years.