Charlotte City Hall
(ca. 1925)
The Neoclassical styled Charlotte City Hall anchored an entire city block dedicated to municipal government.
600 E Trade St, Charlotte, NC 28202
By the early 1920s, the city of Charlotte had outgrown its existing city hall. Designed by Swedish-born Gottfried L. Norrman (1846-1909) and built in 1891 at the corner of North Tryon and Fifth Streets, the existing building housed all city services, including the police and fire departments. As a result, James Oscar Walker (1879-1947), who was elected Mayor in May 1921, advocated the construction of a new municipal complex. The Charlotte Observer proposed that city officials join with the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners to construct a single public building that could serve as both Charlotte’s city hall and Mecklenburg County’s courthouse. Although many Charlotteans favored the concept of a joint city-county municipal building, the county population of farmers and rural workers felt very differently, rejecting the proposition by a two-to-one margin. The city purchased an entire block on East Avenue (now East Trade Street), in what was then a fashionable residential area, for the new building.
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On January 26, 1924, Charlotte City Council authorized Mayor Walker to negotiate with Charles Christian Hook (1870-1938) to design the new city hall. A native of Wheeling, West Virginia, and graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, Hook originally moved to Charlotte in 1891 to teach mechanical drawing in the city’s public schools, but soon became Charlotte’s first fulltime professional architect. By 1892, he was designing structures for the Charlotte Consolidated Construction Company, the developers of the Dilworth community. Hook designed some 800 to 1,000 homes and buildings across the Carolinas, including Charlotte’s U.S. Post Office and Courthouse, the Carolina Theater, Myers Park Elementary School, several fire stations, and many buildings on college campuses across North Carolina (including the Chapel Hill and Greensboro campuses of the University of North Carolina, Davidson College, N.C. State University, Duke University, and Queens University). Hook also designed James B. Duke’s Myers Park mansion and the William Henry Belk House in Elizabeth.
The new municipal complex consisted of four structures. The administrative building (commonly referred to as City Hall) was placed in the middle of the block to allow for future expansion. A fire station, a police station, and public health building were constructed along the southern edge of the property. All four structures were built by the J. A. Jones Construction Company. City agencies began to occupy the new facilities in October 1925, and city council held its inaugural meeting in City Hall on November 1, 1925. However, Mayor Walker did not preside over that meeting, as he had resigned his office nearly one year earlier to devote his energies to the management of an automobile dealership he owned in Columbia, South Carolina.
The decision to transfer municipal headquarters from North Tryon Street to the residential district on East Trade Street ultimately set into motion a series of events that eroded the viability of the surrounding neighborhood. Ironically, within three years, the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners built a new county courthouse building next door, at 700 East Trade Street.