It's a heavy lift to preserve Charlotte's history, but worth it

One of Charlotte’s historic buildings was moved to a new home last week in order to save it from the wrecking ball. WFAE’s Tommy Tomlinson, in his "On My Mind" commentary, says this is part of a welcome culture change in the city.

One of my unifying theories about Charlotte is that, up until very recently, we have always been a teardown city.

Sometimes for financial reasons, sometimes for cultural reasons, sometimes for both, if the choice was to fix something up or raze it and start over, we have opted for the bulldozer. That has led to tragic results, such as the demolition of the Brooklyn neighborhood in the ‘60s in the name of urban renewal. Other times it’s led to expensive course corrections, such as the 2007 implosion of the Charlotte Coliseum out on Tyvola Road, where the Hornets first played.

Charlotte has always had enough cash in its pockets to start anew rather than preserve. That has given us a shiny skyline and made a lot of money for developers. But in exchange, we’ve lost the character of those old buildings — the kind of character that can make a city feel vibrant instead of sterile.

But things are slowly changing here. And the other day, you could actually see it happening over on Cleveland Avenue.

The building we now call the Leeper & Wyatt Store was built on South Boulevard in 1903 by D.A. Tompkins, who also developed the Atherton cotton mill across the street. For more than 50 years, even long after the mill closed, the building served as a grocery store, originally run by the Rev. Hugh Leeper and another grocer with the wonderful name of Pleasant Lafayette Wyatt.

The grocery store closed in the late ‘50s and after that, it was a nightclub and an antique store, among other things. But then developers decided to put an apartment project on the site. And so the two-story building, like so many others in Charlotte, was destined to be reduced to a pile of bricks.

Then Jamie Brown and Jeff Tonidandel decided to save it.

The husband-and-wife team owns several restaurants around town, including two in old church buildings: Supperland in Plaza-Midwood, and the upcoming Leluia Hall in Dilworth. That Dilworth building, which you might remember as the old Bonterra restaurant, is just a block and a half from the Leeper & Wyatt building. So Brown and Tonidandel paid to have that building picked up and moved next door to Leluia Hall. One day, it’s likely to become a restaurant, too.

It was a grand gesture, one of those moments where you could actually see history change, and this time not for the worse.

Charlotte is finally starting to realize that there’s value in what little old stuff we still have. Camp North End, which sat vacant for decades, is still growing with galleries and shops. The buildings don’t even have to be great architecture; that old Wyatt & Leeper store is no beauty. But it matters in the memories of the people who worked and shopped there. And that’s a part of our city’s collective memory.

Charlotte, often by design, feels like a place without a history. For so long, we have done our best to erase what history we’ve had. So it’s meaningful to hold on to even one small thing that the Charlotte in our recent past would have undoubtedly thrown away.