In Charlotte’s historic Elizabeth neighborhood, there’s a home that stands out. It’s not the largest or the oldest house on East 8th Street. It’s not even the block’s only historic landmark. But it is the only home painted with bright pink, blue and yellow flowers.
Known by neighbors (and Google Maps) as The Mural House, the property is experiencing a new chapter in its more than 100-year history. That’s thanks to the vision of Mexican artist Rosalía Torres-Weiner — and a family that wanted to bring joy to their neighborhood.
Constructed by an artist
Before 1812 East 8th Street became The Mural House, it had a different identity. It was the Ziem House, designated a historic landmark in 1987.
“Legend has it — or the historical commission has it — that it was built by a man named Harry Arthur Ziem,” said current homeowner Nicole Gardner.
“He had survived the Great Fire of Chicago and wanted to build a house that wouldn’t burn. So, he got this Sears kit, a masonry house. It’s not fireproof exactly, but it’s pretty close.”
She says his name is literally etched into the foundation of the home, preserved in the crawl space, down the stairs.
“Somewhere around here there is his signature,” she said, moving a storage shelf away from the wall, “and, aha! There it is. It says Ziem.”
To the right is a date, July 4, and a year, 1911. Charlotte had about 34,000 residents then.
Ziem, a commercial artist and the son of German immigrants, would have fit in among Elizabeth’s wealthy and white residents, says historian Tom Hanchett.
“This was a neighborhood of doers, and Harry Ziem seems to have been well situated among his neighbors,” Hanchett said.
“Elizabeth was a new neighborhood. It was at the end of the streetcar line. The Alexander family had laid out that piece of it — Clement Avenue, 7th Avenue, 8th Avenue — around Independence Park, which today has just recently been renovated.”
The comment Gardner made about Ziem surviving the Great Chicago Fire is an important part of the home’s history. Ziem, at age 6, is thought to have survived the devastating 1871 fire in Chicago, where he was born.
“When I look at that concrete block house, I say he built it fireproof,” Hanchett said. “Concrete block was a brand new material around the turn of the last century. You could actually make them on site. Sears Roebuck, out of Chicago, offered concrete block machines.”
A new chapter, inspired by Mexico
The Charlotte Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission says the house is Charlotte’s best-preserved example of “early cast concrete block residential architecture.”
But for a long time, Hanchett remembers it as a “quiet landmark,” painted in an unassuming beige color. Now, the home has evolved.
“I think the mural is a fascinating twist, perhaps an appropriate twist for the home of an artist,” Hanchett said. “I don't know, but I kind of think that Harry Ziem the artist would have enjoyed it.”
Today the home is an open-air art exhibit adorned with cheerful and brightly colored flowers. The vibrancy is typical of mural artist Rosalía Torres-Weiner’s work and symbolic of her heritage.
“That's who I am, Rosalia from Mexico. That’s my colors from Mexico, my flowers and my trademark, my hummingbird,” she said.
The Gardner family contacted Torres in 2020, early in the COVID-19 pandemic. They wanted to create something positive in those dark days. So Torres-Weiner brought them a palette of her happiest colors.
“These are the colors of my Mexico,” she said. “The hot pink, the bright yellow and the just beautiful blues, oranges and bright greens, that's what you see when you visit Mexico. We paint homes like that. We paint streets like that.
“That’s why I started painting murals in Charlotte because I wanted to give a sense of belonging to my Latino community.”
Torres-Weiner designed more than 100 mockups and painted a practice mural on her back shed. Then, she spent every day for a week, at times atop a mechanical lift, painting the facade and the porch and the railing until the job was done.
“When I was in the middle of painting the mural, this landscaping group of Latino men took a selfie,” she said. “I saw them, and I said, ‘Hey, amigos, Mexican art, Mexican art.’ … They go, ‘Señora, it’s beautiful. Before we used to just come, cut the grass and go … now we come here, we cut the grass, we enjoy the art, and we go to the next house.’”
'The most joyous, happy neighborhood'
Gardner says she worried at first about how the neighbors might react to the burst of color. Then, one neighbor left a children’s book — "The Big Orange Splot" by Daniel Manus Pinkwater — on her porch. In the story, a bird drops a bucket of orange paint on a house in an otherwise neat, uniform neighborhood.
“Everybody's horrified and they all come to them one by one, and they're like, dude, you’ve got to paint your house nice and neat like it was,” she said.
“And then he explains to them why he's done what he's done. And each and every person goes back and paints their house crazy colors. And then it's the most joyous, happy neighborhood.”
Now when Gardner sits on the front porch, sometimes she hears comments from passersby.
“The best are the kids. I love the kids,” she said. “There's this little girl who walked by not too long ago. She's like, ‘Mommy, it's the flower house. It's my favorite house in the whole wide world.’ And I just smile ear to ear because that's exactly what we wanted. We wanted people to walk by and go, ‘Oh my gosh’ and just feel happy.”
Torres-Weiner titled the mural Nicole’s Garden. More of her art, including her portraits of Dreamers, young immigrants with temporary protection from deportation, is on display at the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington.
