City House
(ca. 1909)
The City House is Charlotte’s oldest extant suburban duplex residence.
500 E Kingston Ave, Charlotte, NC 28203
The City House is one of Charlotte’s oldest suburban residences originally designed as a duplex. It is also the city’s oldest recognizable suburban example of that architectural form. The lot on which the former duplex sits was part of the initial phase of Dilworth, launched in 1890 as Charlotte’s first streetcar suburb by Edward Dilworth Latta (1851-1925) and his Charlotte Consolidated Construction Company (known as the 4-Cs). The first owner of the lot, Colonel John E. Brown, and several subsequent owners left the lot undeveloped for a number of years, possibly awaiting the eventual 1907 annexation of Dilworth by the City of Charlotte. C. B. Bryant purchased the lot the following year and built what is now known as the City House in 1909.
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Although duplex homes would later become more common in Dilworth, the late Victorian styled City House is the only extant duplex built prior to 1911. From the time of its construction until the early 1960s, the City House served as an investment property, owned by absentee landlords and rented to working-class residents. An examination of the Charlotte City Directories from those decades shows a steady flow of teachers, salesmen, dressmakers, widows, bookkeepers, factory workers, bank cashiers, and other working-class tenants, most of whom stayed in the house for only a year or two.
By the mid-1960s and 1970s, many Dilworth residents began to abandon the center city for the suburbs, allowing blight and decay to creep into the neighborhoods. The City House sat vacant from 1963 to 1967, at which point it was divided into seven small apartments. Three new exterior entrances were punched through, one near the center on the south-east side, and two on the north-west side fronting Lyndhurst Avenue. Many of its tenants were unemployed, and the City House gained a reputation as a “flophouse” associated with prostitution and other clandestine activities.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, a revitalization movement was taking hold in Dilworth. Two newcomers to the area, Bryan E. Robinson and Cecil J. McCullers, purchased the greatly weathered City House in 1985, restoring the home to its original beauty and renovating the interior as a single-family residence. Their efforts resulted in a citation by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission in the spring of 1989 for best residential restoration in a historic district.