Charlotte's lost places

It does not confer protection.

Nine properties in our records of Mecklenburg County's National Register listings are marked by the register itself as demolished, destroyed or delisted. Several came down within a few years of being listed. One came down in 2022.

Here they are.

A note on the count. Nine is the number of listed properties recorded as lost in our dataset. It is not the number of things Charlotte has lost — not remotely. Everything demolished before it was ever listed, everything never eligible for listing, every house and shop and church that went without paperwork, is invisible in a register. The real losses are much larger, and the largest of them are further down this page.

Demolished after listing

Independence Building — 100–102 W. Trade Street

Listed: 18 September 1978 · Demolished: September 1981

Three years on the register. Beaux Arts and Renaissance, from 1909, by Frank P. Milburn and William L. Stoddart — two of the most consequential architects ever to work in Charlotte.

Hotel Charlotte — 327 W. Trade Street

Listed: 2 July 1979 · Demolished: 6 November 1988

Built 1924. William L. Stoddart again, with J. A. Jones — the Charlotte construction firm that built a great deal of the twentieth-century city. Significant, the register says, for both commerce and architecture.

Stoddart designed both of the buildings above. Both are gone.

Merchants and Farmers National Bank Building — 123 E. Trade Street

Listed: 1 March 1984 · Demolished: date not recorded

Italianate, with significant years of 1871 and 1872 — which made it among the oldest commercial buildings ever listed in Charlotte. The architect is unknown; the register does not record when it came down.

Charlotte Supply Company Building — 500 S. Mint Street

Listed: 1 March 1984 · Demolished: June 1991

Built 1924–25 by Lockwood, Greene & Co. with Blythe & Isenhour — an industrial building from the era when this part of the city was still working.

Thomas Trotter Building — 108 S. Tryon Street

Listed: 23 May 1985 · Demolished: May 1987

Two years. Listed in the spring of 1985, gone by the spring of 1987.

The register's own record cites a Charlotte Observer report from 2 May 1987 under the headline "City's Oldest Buildings To Come Tumbling Down".

We cite that article because the register does. We have not read it — it sits behind a paywall, and this project does not go around paywalls. We are telling you what the register says its source was, not what the article says.

Barringer Hotel — 426 N. Tryon Street

Listed: 29 August 2011 · Demolished: 2022

The most recent loss in our records, and the one that most clearly makes the point. An Art Deco hotel by Bobbie Dial and Albert Thomas with the Jno. C. Heslep Company, listed on the National Register in 2011 — and demolished eleven years later.

Listing on the National Register is an honour, not a protection. Walk past the gap.

Destroyed — cause not recorded

Two rural properties on the county's south-western edge, both listed on the same day in 1991, both recorded by the register simply as destroyed.

John Washington McKinney House — 7332 Providence Road West

Listed: 21 February 1991 · Colonial Revival, 1916.

Green Morris Farm — western side of NC 3628, about a mile south of Providence Road West

Listed: 21 February 1991 · Greek Revival and Italianate, 1870. Significant for both architecture and agriculture — a working farm complex, in an area that is no longer farmland.

The register gives no date and no cause for either. We are not going to guess at one.

Delisted — a different kind of loss

Dinkins House — Pineville

Listed: 4 December 1973 · Delisted: reason given as relocation and modification

This one is not a demolition. The building was moved and altered, and the National Register removed it — because what the listing described no longer existed in the form, or the place, that was listed.

The house is somewhere. The listing is not. It is a reminder that a register entry is a description of a specific building in a specific place, and that moving it can end the listing as surely as knocking it down.

And then the much larger losses

Everything above is a building. Charlotte's real losses were neighbourhoods, and no register recorded them because nobody listed them first.

Brooklyn, the city's principal Black neighbourhood and business district in what is now the Second Ward, was razed in five stages between 1960 and 1967. 1,480 homes demolished. 1,007 families displaced. Not a single new residential unit was built to replace them.

Greenville and Irwinville, two of the ring of villages that grew around Charlotte township in the 1890s, were demolished in the same era.

No plaque, no listing, no register note. Just an absence.

→ Brooklyn, and what urban renewal did to Charlotte → Thirteen Charlotte neighbourhoods — including Greenville → Elmwood, Pinewood and the Potter's Field — where a great deal of the Charlotte that is gone is still, physically, present

What we're not showing you

We have not put photographs on this page.

There are images associated with some of these properties, but the licensing is unverified — and in at least one case the obvious-looking image is of the tower that replaced the lost building, not the building itself. Using it would be a small lie that most readers would never catch.

Where we can clear a photograph of the actual building, under a licence that permits it, we will add it and credit it properly. Until then, the gap stays a gap.

See also: How historic designation works in Charlotte · Reading Charlotte's architecture

Sources: National Register of Historic Places records for Mecklenburg County as published by the National Park Service, with demolition and delisting notes carried from the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office (S-0111); Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission survey material (S-0730); UNC Charlotte Atkins Library, Historic Charlotte Neighborhoods (S-0746). Brooklyn figures per our Brooklyn research (C-0401). Counts are of properties in this research library's dataset, compiled 2026-09-14, and are not a complete record of what Charlotte has demolished.