Scott Sells Charlotte

Real Estate Market Stats

 

 

The Cherry neighborhood is among the oldest surviving black residential areas of Charlotte, North Carolina. ¹ According to local tradition, it was built as a servants’ community for the adjoining streetcar suburb of Myers Park, which began to develop in 1912. ² Cherry is much older than that, however. It was platted in 1891 by wealthy landowners John and Mary Myers. ³ Though Cherry has changed as the city has grown up around it and its administration has passed through successive generations of the Myers family, its early history appears to be unusual among Charlotte’s black neighborhoods. During John and Mary Myers’ lifetime, Cherry provided black unskilled and semi-skilled laborers with rental housing, opportunities for homeownership, and a number of urban amenities including a city park, school, churches, and tree-lined streets.

The land on which Cherry was developed was part of a thousand acre cotton farm that John Springs Myers had assembled since the 1870s along Providence Road outside the bustling cotton town of Charlotte. ⁴ Myers’ country cottage was on Providence Road at a high point near where Ardsley Road crosses Hermitage Road today. ⁵ A farm lane wound its way out from town through the family’s cotton fields to the back of the house. The lane started from East Trade Street near McDowell Street, crossed Sugar Creek, then threaded its way through a secluded hollow and up the hill past a row of old, whitewashed slave cabins left by the land’s pre-Civil War owner. ⁶

In 1891 Myers filed a plat map at the county Register of Deeds Office to lay out house lots in the hollow near the farm road. ⁷ The map indicated two streets off the curving lane, which was to eventually become Main Street in Cherry. Angling off it to the east was a more-or-less straight street which is now Luther Street (originally Davidson Street). Most of the new house lots were along this street, which in its earliest years ran all the way up to Providence Road, coming out near Dartmouth Place. From the intersection of Main and Luther streets, a short straight street ran north to what is now Fourth Street. This last street was Cherry Avenue or Cherry Street and may have been in existence as early as 1886. ⁸

The name of both the street and the neighborhood was evidently inspired by the cherry trees that grew on the hillsides of the hollow. Eighty-seven year old Laura Foster Kirkpatrick remembers that they were “not wild cherries. Real cherries. They made the best pies.” ⁹ Not everyone referred to the area as Cherry (or Cherryton or Cherrytown). The city directory listed the settlement as Myers Quarter well into the 1910s, despite the fact that deed records indicate that the Myers themselves never called it by that name. ¹⁰

When they were laid out in 1891, the early streets of Cherry were beyond Charlotte’s city limits, though probably no more than a twenty-minute walk to the center of town. The nearest section of the city was the predominantly black Second Ward, also known as Brooklyn, half a mile away across Sugar Creek. The white streetcar suburb of Elizabeth, to the north of Cherry, was also platted in the 1890s but did not see much house building until after streetcar tracks were laid up Elizabeth Avenue in 1903. ¹¹ It was fully twenty years before work would begin on the transformation of the remainder of the Myers’ cotton farm into the Myers Park neighborhood. For most of its first two decades, Cherry was a village distinct from Charlotte, following the earlier pattern of such black settlements as Biddleville and Greenville elsewhere around Charlotte’s border.

The Myers family had a reputation in Charlotte by the 1890s of being concerned with the welfare of area blacks. John Myers’ father, W.R. Myers, had donated the land for the nucleus of what is now Johnson C. Smith University and had been one of the most prominent white Charlotteans to be involved in the Republican Party, an organization known for its emphasis on black participation. ¹² Both W.R. and John Myers were vestrymen of long standing at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. ¹³ That organization took the lead in Charlotte after the Civil War in ministering to blacks, including construction of St. Michael and All Angels Church, St. Michael’s Training School, and Good Samaritan Hospital, which is believed to be the first privately-funded hospital exclusively for blacks in North Carolina. ¹⁴

Only two direct clues have come to light concerning John Myers’ motives in establishing Cherry. One was planner Earle Sumner Draper’s recollection in a 1971 interview that Cherry was a “so-called model Negro housing development” when Draper arrived in Charlotte in 1915. ¹⁵ The second indication of Myers’ motives, and the only contemporary reference to Cherry yet discovered, is to be found in a laudatory biographical newspaper article published in the mid 1920s near the end of his life. After discussing Myers’ creation of Myers Park, the writer noted that there was:

 

a rather expansive area near the creek premises which Mr. Myers had already undertook to develop for the negro race, giving them such modern conveniences as would make for their contentment and comfort, laying out streets, helping them build schools and churches and assisting also, by a financial arrangement, in the building of homes for themselves.

Later in the article the author expanded on the point:

 

Mr. Myers is held in special regard and reverence by hundreds of negroes for his aids to them. The settlement known as Cherrytown, just east of Town Creek [an early name for Sugar Creek], and numbering thousands of negro inhabitants, is the product of his thought and helpfulness. He laid aside a spacious area of his estate for the sole purpose of giving the negroes of Charlotte a residential section with such improvements as would make them better citizens, and sold them lots on easy terms so that they would be encouraged into owning their own homes. As a result of this assistance, hundreds of families out there own their own premises and are thrifty, industrious, well-behaved and constructive forces in their race. ¹⁶

The claim of “hundreds” of Cherry homeowners may be exaggerated, but the Myers family did indeed offer a goodly number of house lots for sale to blacks, as well as providing rental housing. One of the earliest listings of Cherry residents may be found in the “colored department” of the 1898 Charlotte city directory. It shows some thirty heads of household in Cherry, a number which corresponds to that indicated in the 1900 federal census. ¹⁷ By 1900, deed records indicate that six Cherry lots had been sold to five different black buyers, putting home ownership somewhere around twenty percent. ¹⁸ For 1905, a different sort of measurement is possible, because the United States Geological Survey map drawn that year allows a rough count of actual houses in place. ¹⁹ The map shows some fifty structures, compared with thirteen property transfers through early 1905, putting the percentage of owner-occupied dwellings as high as twenty-six percent.

The pace of lot sales picked up in the mid 1900s and continued at a high level into the mid 1920s, when John and Mary Myers turned over control of Cherry to their children. ²⁰ The family sold some thirty-five lots between 1900 and 1909, and over 125 in the decade 1910-1919. ²¹ Most lots cost forty or fifty dollars, but could go as high as $100. This was no small sum, but it was well below the $300 to $600 being charged in the early 1910s in the middle-class black streetcar suburb of Washington Heights across town. ²² By the beginning of 1925, grantor records show that some 198 lots in Cherry had been sold to individual blacks. ²³ By comparison, a count of residents listed on Cherry streets in the city directory that year produces a total of 305 heads of household, all black, meaning that as many as sixty-five percent of the residents could have been homeowners. ²⁴

Information on Cherry residents is sketchy, but from city directory, census, and chain-of-title records, it is possible to create a picture of the early inhabitants of the Myers’ development. In its first two decades, almost all Cherry citizens were unskilled or semi-skilled urban laborers. There were virtually no household servants, despite the area’s present-day reputation as having been developed as a servants’ quarter. There were also virtually no representatives of the black middle class — ministers, teachers, store owners, doctors, lawyers — that was much in evidence in other Charlotte black neighborhoods in the period, including Brooklyn, First Ward, and Biddleville. This absence is particularly noticeable among Cherry homeowners. The Myers appear to have created in Cherry a place where urban laborers could own their own modest dwellings, rather than being forced to rent in the crowded back alleys of center city neighborhoods. ²⁵

Among the thirty Cherry heads of household gleaned from the 1898 city directory, one listed his occupation as drayman, and four were “farmers,” but the remainder said they were laborers. The 1900 census provides a similar picture. At least a dozen of the blacks in the Cherry area had distinctly urban occupations, particularly cotton oil mill worker, drayman, and laundress. There were a like number of “day laborers,” an occupation distinct from “farm laborer” in the census records. ²⁶

Information on lot buyers in Cherry indicates that most were laborers. either working for one particular concern, or hiring themselves out on a day-by-day basis. ²⁷ Such was James Crawford (who purchased 624 Cherry Street in 1911), listed variously as a general laborer, a porter with J.I. Blakely, and finally a laborer at the Southern Cotton Oil in the years before he bought his property. So too were Matt Ross (1615 Luther Street, 1899), listed as a general laborer and a laborer for the Southern Railway; Edward Holmes (1805 and 1809 Luther Street, 1904), consistently listed as a general laborer; and John P. Alexander, Jr. (1926 Luther Street, 1909), also a laborer.

A handful of others worked as their own bosses in semi-skilled occupations. The small number of single women listed as heads of households worked as laundresses, including Mary McHenry (1505 and 1509 Luther Street, 1893, demolished), Annie Griffin (1816 Luther Street, 1905), and Lizzie Harris (1922 Luther Street, 1909). Richard Torrence (1701 Luther Street, 1900), and Andrew Byers (1812 Luther Street, 1904) listed their occupation as drayman, meaning they had a cart and a horse, mule, or ox and made deliveries around town.

After Myers Park opened in the 1910s, maid and gardener would become commonplace occupations in Cherry, but in the neighborhood’s first two decades, only one household servant has been identified among lot buyers. He was Jones Ross, who purchased a piece of property on Luther Street with his wife Janie in 1901. Ross worked as butler to the family of Hamilton C. Jones, who had a large house on East Trade Street near Caldwell Street and was a relative by marriage of John Springs Myers. Though Ross made his purchase in 1901, he evidently did not build until 1907, for the city directory lists him as living elsewhere.

Among the preponderance of unskilled and semi-skilled homeowners in Cherry were a small number of heads of household who held skilled positions. Andrew Wallace worked as a laborer before he and his wife Dorrina bought their lot at 1704 Luther Street in 1909, but afterwards was listed as a blacksmith. John Lewis ran a shoe-making and cleaning shop in the heart of the black Brooklyn neighborhood for some twenty years before he and his wife Carrie purchased property at 628 Cherry Street in 1918. Perhaps the most highly skilled craftsman was Robert S. Jackson. City directories indicate that he was accomplished at cabinetmaking, furniture construction and upholstery, and that he passed his skills to black youths as an instructor at St. Michaels Training School. He lived in Cherry for many years, evidently as a renter, before buying property on Baxter Street near the corner of Cherry Street in 1906.²⁸

The earliest dwellings in Cherry today are found along Luther, Cherry, and Baxter Streets and date from the first decade of the twentieth century. The earliest single-family housetype is one found often on tenant farms and in mill villages throughout the Carolinas in the late nineteenth century. The main part of the house is a one-story, gable-roofed block that is two rooms wide and one room deep. ²⁹ To the rear are one or more wings that add extra space to the basic two-room plan. Numbers 1515 Luther Street, 1816 Luther Street, and 1820 Luther Street, evidently erected between 1900 and 1910, all follow this plan, as do numbers 1800 and 1804 Baxter Street. These dwellings were all owner-occupied by 1910, though similarities between 1816 and 1820 Luther indicate that they may have been built at the same time for rental and later sold to tenants. ³⁰ Each house has a broad front porch.

Harder to date, but likely of the same era, are a series of identical rental duplexes scattered throughout the neighborhood, all of which remained in the Myers family until recent years. Each duplex is square in plan and is topped by a high hip roof with shallow eaves. Each apartment within has two rooms. The floor plan is laid out so that the four fireplaces — one for each room — are back-to-back at the center of the structure and feed into a single central chimney. The arrangement appears to be extremely efficient in giving heat, providing sound insulation between units, and minimizing construction expense. According to black architectural historian Richard K. Dozier of Tuskegee, Alabama, this housetype is uncommon in early-twentieth century black neighborhoods in the South. ³¹ Recent demolition has claimed several examples along Luther Street, but two survive in good condition at 404-406 Cherry Street and 412-414 Cherry Street.

Along with the simple gable-roofed single-family cottages and hip-roofed duplexes, a few other houses appear to date from before World War I. These include 708 Waco Street, the last remaining shotgun type house in the neighborhood. This distinctive housetype with its long, narrow arrangement of rooms was common in Southern black neighborhoods into the 1910s, and scholars have recently traced its roots to African architecture. ³² In a more Victorian mode are 1700 and 1701 Baxter Street. Both use high hip roofs with a profusion of smaller gables to achieve the sort of complex roofscape beloved by Victorian builders. Also with Victorian touches is 1915 Baxter Street, a substantial edition of the gable-roofed cottage found elsewhere in the neighborhood but here enlivened by an ornate porch with turned balusters and scroll-sawn “gingerbread” trim around the attic vent in the front gable.

After World War I, the pace of building apparently picked up in Cherry. Numerous dwellings survive today that show influence of the Bungalow style popular in middle- and upper-income white neighborhoods of the 1920s. Cherry cottages of this era have low gable or hip roofs with rafters left exposed in the eaves. Often gable ends are extended and supported by brackets. Siding is either weatherboard or horizontal tongue-and-groove “novelty” siding. ³³ Duplexes with these characteristics include: 1616, 1618, 1704, 1900, 1904, and 1906 Luther Street; and 1902-1904, 1906-1908, and 1910-1912 Baxter Street. Among the single-family examples are: 1400, 1433, 1509, and 1912 Luther Street; 1819, 1823, and 1829 Main Street; 417, 501, and 624 Cherry Street; and 1801, 1805, 1819, 1900, 1901, and 1907 Baxter Street. All continued the tradition of front porches seen elsewhere in the neighborhood.

Also in the 1920s, the Myers family began experimenting with other building materials in addition to wooden weatherboard siding. Among the earliest structures to use brick is the pair of dwellings at 1717 and 1735 Baxter Street. Each has a jerkin-head gable roof with brackets and wooden novelty siding in the gables. The brick walls are laid in a variation on the common bonding pattern with one course of alternating headers and stretchers followed by seven stretcher courses. The durability, natural insulating qualities, and freedom from repainting made brick a natural material for rental structures.

A contemporaneous grouping of four brick structures on Cherry Street has notably unorthodox brickwork. Rawlinson Myers owned an interest in a brickworks in Monroe, North Carolina and these houses are said to have been built as experiments in the material. ³⁴ Numbers 500, 502, 504, and 506 feature oversize bricks with unusual, rough, reddish-orange finish similar to terra cotta. They are laid in Flemish bond, alternating stretchers and headers in each course, an unusual practice in Charlotte in the period. Three of the structures are single-family bungalows while the fourth is a two-story quadraplex. Adjacent to the brick bungalows are a pair of concrete block bungalows that share the same plan and window arrangement as the brick dwellings. It is likely that these structures at 508 and 510 are part of the same Myers family experiment with new building materials; all of the houses in the 500 block of Cherry Street have been renter-occupied since their construction.

By working-class standards of the day, the Cherry houses of the 1900s were desirable living quarters, on the level of what might be found in an average white mill village. ³⁵ Each unit had enough land for its own kitchen-garden, something seldom found in the crowded alleys of Second Ward. The design of the hip-roofed and later Bungalow-style duplexes likely made them easier to heat than the standard urban shotgun with its strung-out room arrangement. But by contemporary white middle-class standards, the Cherry houses were less than ideal. All had outdoor privies. Few had more than two to four small rooms, and lots were smaller than found in better white middle-class suburbs. Few had enclosed foundations, but rather perched atop brick stilts, and all were heated by fireplace rather than furnace.

Along with providing rental housing and lots for sale to blacks, John and Mary Myers ensured that Cherry would have such amenities as churches, a school, and even tree-lined streets and a neighborhood park. Before more than a dozen residents had arrived, the Myers were able to sell two lots for church sites. The family’s third property transfer of any kind in their new development was to the Pleasant Hill Baptist Church Association on November 2, 1892. The site was on Luther Street near its outlet onto Providence Road. Blacks had worshipped under a brush arbor on the spot since at least the 1870s. ³⁶ Since the 1890s, Pleasant Hill Church has moved twice and now occupies a large modernistic 1959 structure by architects Wilbur, Kendrick, and Workman at Baldwin and Baxter streets in the heart of the neighborhood. ³⁷

In 1896 a second denomination purchased a Cherry site. The Lutheran Church’s Missionary Board of the Evangelical Lutheran Synodical Conference of North America for Mission Among Heathens and Negroes paid fifty dollars for a large lot near the center of the fledgling neighborhood. The street the property overlooked, originally Davidson Street, became Luther Street (or Lutheran Street in some city directories). It is something of a mystery how the Lutherans became involved in Cherry, considering the Myers’ Episcopalian background and the exceedingly small Lutheran presence in Charlotte as a whole. The Missionary Board soon erected a New England picture-book chapel of white weatherboard, complete with a Gothic-influenced steeple. It remains a neighborhood landmark today, known as the Mount Zion Church of God Holiness after the Lutherans’ departure in 1946.

 

 

The former Lutheran Church

The third major Cherry church site dates from near the end of John and Mary Myers’ direct involvement in the community and was a donation by the family. In 1919 the couple deeded a large parcel on Cherry Street near the corner of Baxter Street to the trustees of the Myers Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church with the condition that:

 

It is to be used for a new church which shall be completed within ten years from this date otherwise this lot shall revert to the legal heirs of John S. and Mary Myers … and if said lot shall ever cease to be used for church purposes it shall revert. ³⁸

The congregation was one that had grown out of the new community, organized in 1901 and worshipping in a wooden chapel for several years. ³⁹ In 1919 its trustees included Kelly O. Alexander and Stephen Alexander, two Cherry landowners, as well as Major White, Albert Shropshire, Daek Peron, Rawson Hall, and D.D. Watkins. The final trustee was George Wiley Clinton, a First Ward resident who was one of the city’s most prestigious black citizens. Charlotte was known in the period as a national center for the African Methodist Episcopal Zion religion, second only to its New York City headquarters. Clinton, former director of the prolific A.M.E. Zion publishing facility in Charlotte, was a long-time bishop of the denomination. His participation in the Myers Chapel building project was one of his last acts before his death in 1921. ⁴⁰

Today Myers Chapel is a commanding presence in the Cherry neighborhood. Its facade features a gabled central block flanked by two towers, one flat-topped, the other surmounted by a crenelated parapet. The structure’s stucco finish and chunky buttresses give it a Spanish-flavored solidity and massiveness that contrasts strongly with the surrounding sea of small cottages. The congregation evidently had no trouble meeting the Myers’ ten-year deadline; the cornerstone reads:

MYERS CHAPEL A.M.E. ZION CHURCH
Organized 1901
Erected 1902-3
Remodeled 1910-11
By Rev. B.B. Moore
Rebuilt 1920-25

At about the same time, the Myers family provided land for a school near the center of the neighborhood. According to a 1950 story in the Charlotte Observer:

 

Like his father, John Myers was interested in improving the education facilities and methods of the state, particularly those in Charlotte. He deeded to the city a valuable tract of land in the Cherrytown district for a graded school, later giving another tract nearby for a park and playground. ⁴¹

In 1925 the school lot became the site of the Morgan School, named after a member of the Myers family. ⁴² The red brick, two-story building was one of half a dozen schools erected throughout the city in 1925 and 1926. ⁴³ According to school superintendent Harry P. Harding:

 

Morgan School in Cherrytown on a lot 180′ x 120′ … the building cost $36,309.00. There were ten class rooms, Principal’s office and Nurse’s office …. Dr. Strayer and Dr. Englehardt of Columbia University … were consulting Architects in the planning of these buildings. ⁴⁴

Throughout its history, Morgan was one of the city’s smallest elementary schools. ⁴⁵ It finally closed in 1968, and the building is now used for a city program to aid pregnant teenagers. ⁴⁶

 

Morgan School

Across Torrence Street from the school building is Morgan Park, occupying an entire grassy block. It is not known when the Myers created the park, but at the time that the City Parks and Recreation Commission was initiated in 1927, Morgan was one of five parcels of parkland it administered. ⁴⁷ The Cherry facility was the first city park in a black neighborhood and seems to have been the first intended primarily to serve a working-class area. The park is near the center of Cherry and strongly recalls a small-town New England green, with the school on one side, the Pleasant Hill Church on another, and a 1920s community store near one corner. A section of adjoining Main Street was closed to traffic in 1977 to provide additional play area for small children. ⁴⁸ Today Morgan Park continues to be a heavily-used neighborhood gathering spot, a unique feature in Charlotte.

Along with providing a park, the Myers also had trees planted along Cherry’s streets. Floretta Gunn, a teacher at Morgan School beginning in the 1920s, remembers the trees as one of the area’s most striking attributes even then. ⁴⁹ Today’s Cherry’s tree-cover ranks among the finest in Charlotte, and a comparison of size with those in Myers Park or Elizabeth indicates that the Cherry specimens were planted early, probably when streets were platted.

In 1925 John Springs Myers passed away. ⁵⁰ By that time Cherry’s street system had grown to nearly its full extent. Fox and Cecil (originally Bronson) streets had been the first added to the original Luther, Main and Cherry streets, finished in time to appear on the 1905 United States Geological Survey Map. In 1906 the Myers had sold the first lot on Baxter Street, a major new avenue parallel to Luther Street on the south side of Main Street. ⁵¹ In 1909 local engineers had laid out the angled grid of straight streets south of Baxter Street. ⁵² Today these are known as Avant Street (originally Woodward), Welker Street, Waco Street (originally Wallace), and the last blocks of Baldwin Avenue (originally Morgan), Torrence Street (originally Converse), and Cherry Street. Many of the Cherry street names commemorated Myers and Springs family members and relatives, including Baxter, Woodward, Eli, Davidson, and Morgan. ⁵³

In 1912 Luther, Baxter, and Main streets, which originally had run up the hill to Providence Road, had been cut short by the new boulevard of Queens Road, part of the Myers Park development for whites. The few houses occupied by blacks in the Myers Park section were moved down the hill into the central part of Cherry, primarily along Avant Street. ⁵⁴ There were to be no more changes in the neighborhood’s boundaries until the 1950s.

So by the time of Myers’ death, Cherry’s western boundary was Cecil Street, with the bed of Sugar Creek a further barrier between it and adjacent Dilworth and Brooklyn. The streets of the 1909 plat formed the southern extent of the neighborhood, separated by a branch of Sugar Creek from the large houses of Myers Park. The steep hill to Queens Road clearly marked Cherry’s eastern edge. On the north side, the least clearly defined boundary, the back property lines along Luther and Cherry streets served to separate the black neighborhood from the bungalows of the adjacent white Torrence subdivision.

Shortly before John Springs Myers’ death, he and his wife had deeded the balance of their holdings in Cherry to their children. ⁵⁵ Rawlinson Myers assumed title to some lands in 1918. A bachelor, there is some evidence that he had overseen early development of Cherry for his parents. Earle Draper remembers, “Mr. Myers’ son … managed it and I think laid it out. He collected rents and maintained it.”⁵⁶ Family members recall that by the 1920s a Mr. T.C. Wilson handled the actual rent collection, but that Rawlinson was quite active in arranging lot sales and also setting up construction financing for buyers through Mutual Building and Loan, of which he was an officer. ⁵⁷ By 1922 John and Mary Myers had given each of their children a portion of Cherry’s rental housing and undeveloped land. ⁵⁸The beneficiaries were Mary Myers Dwelle and her husband Harold, Richard Myers and his wife Marguerite, and Rawlinson.

The children made no more additions to Cherry’s street pattern or urban amenities, but they did continue to administer Cherry as their father had. This may have been due to the watchful presence of mother Mary Morgan Rawlinson Myers, who lived until 1939. ⁵⁹ Between 1925 and the end of the 1930s, grantor records show that some thirty additional Cherry lots were transferred to individuals. ⁶⁰This was a somewhat smaller number than in previous periods, but significant in the face of the national economic depression.

In the late 1920s, each part of the family developed and managed its own holdings individually. ⁶¹During the course of the 1930s and 1940s, grandsons John Dwelle and Brevard Myers took control of rentals and new development. ⁶² The men slowly added indoor bathrooms to the existing houses and gave them enclosed foundations, supplementing the brick piers that supported many of the rental dwellings.

They also constructed a number of new rental units in the oldest section of the neighborhood, filling up vacant land and occasionally replacing early wooden structures. Brevard Myers remembers that one of his first post-World War II buildings in Cherry was the duplex that stands at 505-507 Waco Street. It contains no wood inside the units; walls are of concrete block, windows are steel framed, and the floors are of poured concrete “so that we could just hose it out after a family left,” according to Myers. ⁶³

Most of the new rental units were brick. Their long, low forms recall the suburban Ranch style houses that were becoming popular throughout the nation in the 1950s. Today much of Main Street, which had only a handful of frame dwellings before the Second World War, is lined with these structures. Scattered other examples are found throughout Cherry. Also from this period are the two-story brick quadraplex apartments on Baldwin Street that face Morgan Park. They were built for John Dwelle by contractor C.T. Brown, a prolific Charlotte apartment builder.

The 1950s saw an expansion of Cherry’s boundaries as well, though this was not the work of the Myers family. For decades Cherry’s small houses had backed up to the middle-class bungalows of the white Torrence subdivision to the north. The Torrence property had once been part of a farm owned by S.J. Torrence in the late nineteenth century, which straddled the eventual path of Elizabeth Avenue. After trolleys began running up Elizabeth Avenue in 1903, the Torrence lands had been gradually subdivided into house lots. ⁶⁴ Streets created included much of Torrence Street, Baldwin Avenue, Lillington Avenue, and Ranlo Avenue. The four square blocks between Luther Street and present-day Third Street were evidently laid out around 1910, and by the 1920s they were lined with comfortable, one- and one-and-a-half-story wood-frame bungalows.

The line between the white Torrence subdivision and black Cherry remained inviolate until the late 1950s when, in the words of Brevard Myers, “the color line broke all over town.” ⁶⁵ Soon blacks occupied most of the properties up to Third Street. Adjoining Amherst Place, developed in the early teens as a bungalow block of Myers Park, also became predominantly black. Today both Amherst and the Torrence property are considered part of the Cherry neighborhood. ⁶⁶

Even as Myers and Dwelle built new rental units in Cherry, they recognized that Cherry’s place in the urban structure of Charlotte was changing. By now the city’s growth meant that Cherry was no longer isolated on the edge of the city, but was among its central neighborhoods. Cherry’s land was becoming too well located for its “highest and best use” to continue to be low-income housing.

This fact was accentuated by post-war developments. In the late 1940s the city’s first expressway, Independence Boulevard, cut through Cherry’s northern edge. ⁶⁷ Soon a second new thoroughfare was built to connect affluent Myers Park directly to the highway. Kings Drive followed the path of Sugar Creek along Cherry’s western boundary. In 1958, Charlottetown Mall was completed at the Kings-Independence intersection. ⁶⁸ The showy shopping complex was one of the first enclosed shopping centers in the South, and it was literally a stone’s throw from the humble frame houses of Cherry.

Even before construction began on the mall, John Dwelle and Brevard Myers, who were real estate developers by profession, began increasing their holdings in Cherry. By the 1950s many early residents were reaching old age, and sometimes their heirs had left Charlotte as part of the vast out-migration of Southern blacks to the industrial cities of the North. Nevertheless, Brevard Myers remembers it often took numerous visits and “a lot of porch rocking” before he could convince some owners to sell. ⁶⁹ By the 1970s, “resident property owners constituted only about 17% of the nearly 1800 persons living in Cherry.” ⁷⁰

Cherry was also one of the few black neighborhoods near Charlotte’s center to escape federally-funded Urban Renewal in the 1960s. During the decade, thousands of houses and hundreds of businesses were bulldozed in the Brooklyn, Greenville, First Ward, and Third Ward sections. ⁷¹ According to Vernon Sawyer, who directed the city’s Urban Renewal program, Cherry was spared because Planning Commission studies showed it to be one of Charlotte’s least substandard neighborhoods for blacks. ⁷²It may not have hurt, as well, that Brevard Myers served a term on City Council in the period and strongly opposed the city’s wholesale clearance policies in general, arguing that property owners in Brooklyn and elsewhere should be pushed to improve their own holdings. ⁷³

What Dwelle and Myers planned to do in Cherry, as market conditions permitted, was to clear the oldest portion of the neighborhood, including Luther Street and Cherry Street, and redevelop the land for stores and offices along the highways, with upper-income apartments near Myers Park. ⁷⁴ Said Myers:

 

In the lower end of Cherry, from about Baxter Street to Queens Road, most of the people there own that property and should be respected as homeowners…. But the property around Independence Boulevard in the upper end of Cherry should be allowed to go commercial because the houses there are too old to rehabilitate. ⁷⁵

Though redevelopment of this major Kings-Independence intersection seemed to make good sense as a real estate development, it did not sit well with Cherry residents. Despite the fact that Cherry had few homeowners, an active residents’ organization known as the Cherry Community Development Association grew up in the late 1960s under the leadership of Phyllis Lynch, Torrence Powell, and others. ⁷⁶ Because of its activities, city fathers felt pressure to direct some of the federal urban redevelopment dollars flowing into the city to Cherry. The city’s Neighborhood Improvement Program proposed installation of sidewalks, curbs, gutters, and storm drains for Cherry in the mid-1970s. ⁷⁷Like most older black neighborhoods in the city, Cherry had no such facilities.

Officials were surprised at the Cherry residents’ reaction. Instead of welcoming the belated improvements, neighborhood residents stood up in meeting after meeting to say that the great need of their area was improvement of housing that was substandard by modern measurements. and an end to the absentee landlordship that had been growing since the 1950s. After a battle that stretched over several years, the residents won much of their proposal. A 1980 Charlotte Observer article summarized the effort:

 

Three years ago residents in the neighborhood of 370 homes … decided it made no sense to get new sidewalks while their homes were falling down. So they formed a corporation and persuaded the city to spend $1 million to buy out the major Cherry landowners, Brevard Myers and John Dwelle. The new corporation, the Cherry Community Organization periodically buys some of that property from the city and hires contractors to rehabilitate the houses with city-sponsored low-interest loans. CCO maintains, and collects rent from, the remaining city-owned property …. It has been heralded by the federal government as one of the most innovative community projects in the country. ⁷⁸

The effort began slowly, with the first Cherry Community Organization director being replaced after an initial year in which only nine of twenty-six promised units were renovated. ⁷⁹ The new director, Charlotte native James Ross, has been largely successful in getting the organization to meet its goals. Numerous houses have been renovated, and many of the most deteriorated have been bulldozed. Construction is underway on a thirty-two unit low-rise public housing project at Cherry and Luther streets, and five smaller projects are scattered throughout the neighborhood, the first major new construction in Cherry since Brevard Myers and John Dwelle stopped building rental units about 1960.⁸⁰

The recent developments in Cherry have not been without effects to the area’s historic character. Myers and Dwelle’s projects in the 1950s produced a scattering of new structures throughout the neighborhood and replaced the last of the owner-occupied houses of the 1890s. Since 1980 more than seventy additional dwellings have been destroyed by the City of Charlotte. Myers and Dwelle continue to control large tracts of land along Kings Drive and Independence Boulevard, and nibble away at the neighborhood’s housing stock as they succeed in petitions for commercial zoning.

Yet, in the heart of the neighborhood, hints remain of Cherry’s early flavor. Architecture encompasses a diversity of construction periods ranging from the 1900s to the 1950s, but the structures possess a unity of appearance. They are predominantly duplexes and single-family cottages. The compact structures all have gable or hip roofs, and almost all are one-story. Every house has a front porch.

Homeownership is much lower than the figure achieved in the 1950s, but Cherry’s residents continue to be low-income blacks, just they were in John and Mary Myers’ time. The amenities that the Myers helped to provide, including the land for the Morgan School building, Myers Chapel church, and especially Morgan Park at the center of the neighborhood are still important features of the area. Most striking to the visitor are the street trees which the Myers planted in the neighborhood’s earliest years. Today they are near full maturity, sheltering Cherry in a soaring summer canopy of green.

 

 

Information gathered from http://www.cmhpf.org/kids/neighborhoods/cherry.html