Local Landmarks We'd Like To See

Arthur Samuel Grier House
(c. 1922)

This large eclectic style home was both Craftsman and Colonial Revival elements was a testament to Grier’s success as a businessman. He was a civic leader and helped develop one of Charlotte’s first suburban African American Neighborhoods. The Grier house, a part of the African American Heritage Driving Tour recently published by Historic Charlotte, is on the watch list due to its current condition and because of recent development in the area resulting in teardowns.

Tuskaseegee Ford

The property known as the Tuckaseegee Ford, located on the western border of Mecklenburg County at the Catawba River, is a site that possesses local historic significance as the first documented crossing place along the Catawba River in Mecklenburg County and as an integral part of the Tuckaseegee Trail, the major thoroughfare for travelers (both Native American and European settlers alike) moving to and from Charlotte as far west as the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. While the eastern regions of North Carolina had been inhabited by European settlers for over a century, the area that would become Charlotte had been inhabited only by Catawba Indians by the time Thomas Spratt and Thomas Polk, the area’s first European inhabitants, decided to settle and build cabins there in the early 1750s.

The Charlotte region was a logical location for inland settlement, since two of the Carolina’s most frequently traveled Indian trails, the Tuckaseegee Trail and the great Trading Path, intersected at what is now the center of the city of Charlotte. Although most historians site the coming of the railroad in the 1850s as the key event that would transform Charlotte from a small town into the major transportation, distribution, and manufacturing center of the Carolinas, Charlotte’s location at the intersection of the Tuckaseegee Trail and the great Trading Path gave the town, from the very beginning of the area’s settlement, a key advantage over dozens of other small Piedmont towns around it. Without the Tuckaseegee Ford and the Tuckaseegee Trail, which brought settlers, travelers, and traders directly into Charlotte from the western part of the state and beyond, Charlotte could not have grown and developed as successfully as it did in the late eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century.

Tuskaseegee Ford is located at what is now the U.S. National Whitewater Center.

The Solomon &
Shirley Levine House
(c. 1957)

For the first time in the thirty year history of the Mecklenburg County Revolving Fund, a property presented for Local Landmark status was denied. This is that property, a striking example of midtwentieth century Modernism, by local architect Jack Orr Boyte.

The Solomon and Shirley Levine House was completed in The Cloisters neighborhood off Providence Road in 1957. The Cloisters is one of Charlotte’s best preserved examples of upscale suburban landscape planning executed in the mid-twentieth century. From the outset the Cloisters was configured to be a secluded glen visited only by automobiles. The Cloisters took its inspiration from the philosophy of designers such as Frank Lloyd Wright, John Nolen, Earle Sumner Draper, and the Olmsted Brothers, who taught that suburban street patterns should respect the contours of the land. The Solomon and Shirley Levine House illustrates how architects who were principally known for revivalist buildings were able to accommodate themselves to changing, more diverse tastes in the housing market.

The architectural firm of record that designed the Solomon and Shirley Levine House was Louis H. Asbury & Son, a father and son combination that had a significant impact upon the built environment of Charlotte and its environs during the first three quarters of the twentieth century. Architect Jack Orr Boyte was schooled in Modernist design at Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture. His initial design for the Solomon and Shirley Levine House proposed constructing the house around an existing tree, however, the Levines vetoed the idea. Nevertheless, the Solomon and Shirley Levine House is one of the finest Modernist residences in Charlotte.

The Barringer Hotel / Hall House

Currently on the State Historic Preservation Office Study List, the 1940, William R. Barringer Hotel is the only hotel of its style and type remaining in Center City Charlotte. Although the building served as elderly housing until 2008 and is now a temporary Homeless Shelter, it retains its essential integrity on the outside. In keeping with the architectural preferences of pre-World War Two America, the Barringer Hotel harkens to the past and exhibits qualities derivative of classical antiquity — having a decorated base and capital and having an unadorned shaft in between. Hotels have long been essential to Charlotte’s role as a regional commercial, banking and industrial center.