Developers say they hope to rekindle vibrancy from Charlotte’s original Brooklyn community in place of an uptown building that sits at a critical crossroads for the city’s Black business history.
Demolition is starting now on Walton Plaza — a building that, as Charlotte historian Tom Hanchett said, is “not officially a landmark, but maybe it should be.” There and at a site one block north, developer BK Partners will build Brooklyn Village — housing (affordable and market-rate), retail, office space, hotel rooms and a park.
Walton Plaza, originally named East Independence Plaza, served as a professional home of Charlotte trailblazers Julius Chambers and Harvey Gantt. It was the biggest and first real estate project led by Mel Watt, an attorney and longtime congressman who went on to lead the Federal Housing Finance Agency. And it’s hailed as one of the first buildings of its kind — an uptown office building owned and developed by Black businessmen — between Atlanta and Washington, D.C.
Its construction alone was “an act of defiance in a racially polarized time,” Watt told The Charlotte Observer.
Its demolition is sparking mixed reactions about what’s next.
East Independence Plaza
There weren’t many opportunities in the early 1970s to support a Black business enterprise like the gleaming office building that would materialize at what’s now the intersection of South McDowell Street and East Brooklyn Village Avenue, says Gantt, a former Charlotte mayor who leased space there for his architecture firm for several years. That was certainly true in Charlotte — as well as the broader Southeast.
“It was a first-class space and there was a good measure of accomplishment to see this succeeding,” Gantt told the Observer.
Only one substantial Black-developed office was built in the U.S. — in Los Angeles — between the late 1920s and early 1960, Hanchett wrote in the October 2021 edition of the North Carolina Historical Review. North Carolina Mutual, which was Black-owned, built and dedicated an office tower in Durham in the mid-1960s. It was joined by towers in Atlanta and Chicago.
The Charlotte building rose on land previously part of a Black business and institutional district in the center city — Brooklyn — as discrimination and racist policies sought to exclude Black Charlotteans.
Brooklyn’s clearing during so-called urban renewal left most of that land without major competition for new construction. The Feb. 17, 1971 edition of The Charlotte Observer reported only one tract drew multiple bids — where a Raleigh based company proposed a office towers and hotel on 14.6 acres.
On one of five tracts without competitive bids, the group led in part by Chambers, Westside Associates, won with a bid just above the minimum, and they embarked on a project named East Independence Plaza.
Just days earlier, before dawn on Feb. 4, 1971, someone firebombed Chambers’ law office on the edge of uptown. Without that, Mel Watt said, it’s not clear whether the project would have materialized as it did.
The building — a seven-story, black glass- and white brick-covered octagon — opened in early 1973, with tenants that included Chambers’ firm on the top floor, a regional office of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Gantt’s architecture firm and doctors such as Raleigh Bynum, an optometrist and general partner in the office building venture.
‘Hub for people’
Bynum, now 87, says Charlotte’s Black professionals were scattered across the city and East Independence Plaza gave them a central location to, among other things, refer customers to one another.
“It was nice for me, and I think all the other health care professionals felt the exact same way,” Bynum told the Observer.
Watt’s son, Jason, remembered the building as a “hub for people” — whether that meant seeing a doctor, lawyer or bank. Like other kids whose parents worked at the law firm, he was often tasked with delivering documents like deeds, traveling up and down elevators frequently.
“It was a community place where people kind of knew you and you felt like you were in a place where folks were connecting,” Jason Watt said.
That the building is being torn down now is a “mixed-emotion story” for Mel Watt, the attorney and former congressman. Investors made money through the venture. Its proprietors “answered a call on a building that had a history,” Gantt said. But they were largely unsuccessful in trying to attract institutional tenants and a racially diverse roster.
“They weren’t going to rent it from us, and then by definition the building becomes a Black building,” Watt said about institutional tenants such as city and county government.
Mecklenburg County bought the building in 1994 for $6 million — and Watt said he still carries resentment over that since government institutions would not rent there earlier. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools quickly occupied 2,400 of the building’s 85,000 square feet after the purchase before other government offices moved in. One year after buying the property, Mecklenburg County renamed it Stonewall Plaza.
Then, in a controversial 1996 vote, the county renamed the building for former county commissioner Bob Walton, who was convicted of assaulting an 18-year-old male in a sexual encounter.
Brooklyn Village project
The building sold for a second time last month when Mecklenburg County announced its transfer to BK Partners as part of the Brooklyn Village development. The group includes The Peebles Corporation, an African-American-owned company based in New York, and the Charlotte-based Conformity Corporation.
Donahue Peebles III, executive vice president of Peebles Corp., said he recognizes the important history on the site — particularly its past as a vibrant, predominantly African-American neighborhood. Peebles said what’s now Walton Plaza was “an important building in its time,” but that empty parking spots comprise most of the property.
“I think that our focus has always been on paying homage to the vibrancy that was historic Brooklyn ... something that could approximate what was the city’s main district for Black people,” Peebles said.
The Walton Plaza section of the property will be part of Brooklyn Village South. The 11.3-acre Brooklyn Village North property sits between the Mecklenburg County Aquatic Center and the courthouse, including Marshall Park. Together, the sites will have 1,243 residential units, including at least 114 designated affordable; office and retail space; hotel rooms; and 2.5 acres of “open space,” which includes a park.
Peebles said BK Partners will seek to build as many housing units as possible and that more units could mean more designated as affordable.
Watt said he’s not particularly sentimental about the building because “buildings come and go,” but he’s skeptical that Brooklyn Village will truly pay homage to the community it’s named for.
“This seems to me to be a total disregard of the history of Brooklyn just as the urban removal was a total disregard for the people who lived there,” Watt told the Observer.
Bynum said he would “prefer of course for our building to remain there,” but he’s interested to see how things change. Like Bynum, Gantt said he’s “kind of sorry that (Walton Plaza is) the first one to go,” but he’s encouraged to see a Black-owned company leading the development.
Peebles calls Brooklyn Village South “the first step in a long journey.”
“And a long journey is only in small steps,” he said.
This story was originally published September 05, 2023 6:00 AM.
