The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission in December voted to recommend designating a 110-year-old house known as the Steele Creek Presbyterian Manse as a landmark.
But city officials never placed the recommendation on the City Council’s agenda, meaning elected officials never got the opportunity to give the house additional protections.
Without a council vote, Charlotte Douglas International Airport began tearing down the house last week.
The dispute has led to accusations from both sides, with the city of Charlotte and the airport saying the commission ignored previous agreements that allowed the house to be razed.
And the commission’s chair, Brian Clarke, said the city snuffed out any opportunity to save the home, possibly by moving it somewhere else.
“My biggest frustration is that the HLC made its recommendation in 2023, and it was never presented to City Council for action,” Clarke said. “And the (state) statute is very clear that the HLC makes its recommendation — to this City Council. Not to city staff, not to the airport, not to the property owner. (We make the recommendation) to City Council and that never happened.”
The controversy was first reported by The Charlotte Ledger.
The Manse was a four-square, Colonial Revival home built in the early 20th Century. Ministers from Steele Creek Presbyterian Church lived there, Clarke said.
“This was the manse, the house where the minister would have lived when for example Billy Graham was a child and attending that church with his parents who are both buried at the cemetery at Steele Creek,” Clarke said.
He said the house was in good shape.
“(It had) quality materials, craftsmanship, slate roof. It was fine,” he said.
Just off Steele Creek Road, the house was also a mile south of the airport’s new fourth parallel runway that is under construction.
The airport wants to develop that area, possibly with warehouses. It bought the house and the historic church — which still stands — in 2017, part of the airport’s decades-long acquisition of surrounding land.
CLT applied for a permit to demolish the house in the fall of 2023. Soon after, the local landmarks commission voted unanimously to save it.
That vote delayed any demolition by six months. If the City Council had voted to certify it as a landmark, that could have preserved the house for up to a year longer — although a historic landmark designation doesn't prevent someone from demolishing a property forever. That delay might have given the city an opportunity to move it somewhere else, perhaps next to the old church, which is being preserved.
In an email to City Council members last week, Clarke wrote that he was “ordered to cease my efforts as HLC chair and, it was strongly implied, that if I continued to push preservation of these properties I would face removal from the Historic Landmarks Commission.”
He said that was based on conversations he had with Mecklenburg County officials. He later said that he had possibly misstated those comments. He said he wanted to focus on the “loss of the Manse and the fact that the City Council never had the chance to even weigh in.”
Saving the church, not the Manse
The city-owned airport said it did nothing wrong.
Officials noted that it had an agreement with the Federal Aviation Administration and the North Carolina Historic Preservation Office in 2018 that allows it to demolish some buildings as part of an overall noise mitigation strategy.
The agreement called for the airport to pay the state $450,000, including $150,000 because it “failed to meet its mitigation obligations for (three other) historic properties” in the area.
CLT executive Ted Kaplan said the city has worked to preserve the Steele Creek Presbyterian Church, which was built in the mid-18th century. Though services are no longer held there, the city is working to partner with a nonprofit that can use the building.
Kaplan said saving the sanctuary was the church community’s priority — not saving the Manse.
“They made the effort to designate the sanctuary as a historic property and the same step was not taken with the Manse,” he said.
When asked why city staff did not place the landmarks commission’s recommendation on the City Council agenda, Kaplan said the airport met with the city’s planning department to express its concerns.
CLT's main argument: It already had permission under the 2018 agreement.
“And obviously we made it clear that this was HLC kind of taking a step outside of our partnership,” Kaplan said.
In a statement, city spokesman Lawrence Corley said city staff didn’t place the item on the City Council’s agenda because the landmarks commission didn’t follow procedure by contacting the landowner first, which, in this case, was the city.
“Because the HLC did not follow its standard procedure, CLT was not given the opportunity to formally object to the recommendation,” he wrote.
City staff would have been able to present its objections to council members before they voted on additional protections.
City Council member LaWana Mayfield wrote in an email to Clarke this week that it was her understanding that “someone took it upon themselves on staff to pull it.”
She said, “If this is correct, it’s definitely a discussion Council needs to have as employee reviews are coming soon.”
