Preservationists help save ‘very important component’ of Black history in Charlotte
The small white building in front of a yellow house on Booker Avenue has stood vacant for years, but it tells a story of Black history in west Charlotte.
And now, a local preservation group is working to save the former grocery store, originally known as Jim Patterson’s Grocery, then later as the “Little Booker Store.”
The building has stood in the historically Black Washington Heights neighborhood for about a century. But when property owner Adam Smith was trying to sell the 0.2 acre site, he said nearly all the buyers wanted to destroy the old store.
“Every (real estate pro) I spoke with said the store’s got to come down,” Smith said. “And I wasn’t ready to continue that. I thought that would be a disservice to Charlotte, to the community, to everybody, because if you destroy something of historic value it’s gone forever.”
Smith is now under contract to sell the property to Preserve Mecklenburg, a nonprofit founded in April 2019. The group preserves historic buildings in Charlotte by buying them then selling them with preservation easements so future owners cannot destroy the historic buildings.
Preserve Mecklenburg plans to buy the property for $110,000, the same amount that Smith and his wife paid when they bought it in 2018. Although Smith had other buyers offering more money, he said it was important to preserve the history of the property.
Dan Morrill, co-founder and secretary of Preserve Mecklenburg, said the significance of the building goes beyond its exterior.
“It’s not an exquisite or fine piece of architecture,” he said. “But it documents a very important component of African-American culture in the 1920s when this store was built.”
A long history
In 1921, James M. Patterson bought a lot on Booker Avenue, named for Black leader Booker T. Washington, said Morrill. The lot was in Washington Heights, the first African-American streetcar suburb in Charlotte.
Streetcar suburbs were built so middle-income people could work downtown and commute by trolley to a home on the edge of the city, according to a 1980s essay on Washington Heights written and provided by community historian Tom Hanchett. These suburbs were fairly common in the early 1900s.
But African-American streetcar suburbs weren’t as common.
During the early 20th century almost every deed for property in the Charlotte suburbs included a clause that it could only be owned, occupied and used by “members of the Caucasian race, domestic servants in the employ of the occupants excepted,” Hanchett wrote.
His essay said these clauses were rarely found in the older center city areas that were more integrated — and that’s where the Washington Heights neighborhood was created, built especially for middle-income Black residents in Charlotte.
“It certainly may be one of the very few African-American streetcar suburbs in the United States,” Hanchett said in a recent interview.
Patterson built a neighborhood grocery store that operated until the mid-1930s, when he moved to Cleveland County, according to research done by Morrill. He said the property was vacant for a few years, then purchased by a man named Walker Logan in 1945, who operated the store until the 1960s.
The building continued as a neighborhood grocery store for the next few decades under several different owners, according to Charlotte City Directory records in the Robinson-Spangler Carolina Room of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.
In the mid-1980s, the store was fondly known by Washington Heights neighbors as the “Little Booker Store.” Washington Heights resident Dawn Neal remembers going to the store, which she said was owned by Hyder Massey at the time.
“It was a community store that he opened up about 6:30 in the morning, a little small store where everybody can go get bread, milk eggs, cigarettes, just your basic items,” she said. “Everybody in the community knew him.”
Morrill said grocery stores are important parts of African-American history, because they used to be one of the primary avenues of investment open to them. There were over 40 of these neighborhood stores in Charlotte at one time, and now, he said, they’re virtually all gone.
“There’s no other pre-World War II grocery store building in the northwest quadrant of Charlotte, which historically has been a major center of African American suburban development,” Morrill said.
Neal, whose family has lived in the Washington Heights neighborhood for four generations, thinks it’s important to preserve buildings like the old grocery store.
“We have very few places that are left,” Neal said. “So it’s important that we are able to keep some history.”
What’s next?
After Preserve Mecklenburg buys the property, it will immediately be put on the market again.
Morrill said the preservation easements will only be placed on the grocery store building, not the yellow house that’s behind it.
Preserve Mecklenburg will have certain design review powers over how the new owner might alter the old grocery building, but what they use it for is up to them, Morrill said. He said the group has suggested that the building could make a great studio apartment residence.
Mattie Marshall is president of the Washington Heights Community Association. She suggested many community members would love to see the space become a neighborhood grocery store again, or even a coffee shop that could serve as a gathering place for residents.
“It would be nice if it could (be) something that would be beneficial for the community, that someone would work with the community to find out exactly what we would like to be there,” she said.
But that would require the property to be rezoned. It’s currently zoned for residential use, not commercial.
Hanchett said zoning is part of the reason neighborhood grocery stores aren’t common anymore.
“We’ve kind of legislated them out of existence with zoning that began in Charlotte in 1947. For a big chunk of the 20th century, there was a sense that everything should be in its place and you shouldn’t mix land uses,” he said. “So it’s fascinating that you’ve got this little grocery store in the Washington Heights neighborhood on Booker Avenue.”
This story was originally published June 19, 2020 at 11:59 AM.
