Gateway and Century Buildings
(ca. 1925 & 1926)
The Gateway and Century Buildings are the last early twentieth-century small-scale commercial buildings along uptown Charlotte’s West Trade Street corridor.
402 W Trade St, Charlotte, NC 28202
Built as part of Charlotte’s growing central business district, the Gateway and Century Buildings on West Trade Street are the last small-scale retail business buildings along that uptown corridor from the first half of the twentieth century. Prior to the 1920s, the city’s central business district only stretched two or three blocks from the intersection of Trade and Tryon Streets, but during that decade the district grew in all directions. As part of that expansion, local commercial real estate developer John Hastings Cutter (1878-1958) decided in 1924 to build a two-story retail store and office building in the fourth block of West Trade Street, almost directly across the street from the former branch of the U.S. Mint, an area that had previously remained largely residential.
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The Georgia-born Cutter first came to Charlotte in 1905 to start a cotton brokerage firm. From 1927 until 1947, he operated the Cutter Manufacturing Company textile mill in Rock Hill, South Carolina, but was also active in commercial real estate development in Charlotte. Two of his most notable projects were the Carolina Theater on North Tryon Street and the Hotel Charlotte (demolished in 1988).
For the Gateway and Century Buildings, Cutter retained the services of the highly regarded Charlotte-based architect Charles Christian Hook (1870-1938). A 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. He soon became Charlotte’s first fulltime professional architect, designing houses for Edward Dilworth Latta (1851-1925) in Dilworth, the city’s first streetcar suburb. Hook designed some 800 to 1,000 homes and buildings across the Carolinas, including Charlotte’s U.S. Post Office and Courthouse, Charlotte City Hall, the Carolina Theater, Myers Park Elementary School, and several buildings on college campuses across North Carolina (including the Chapel Hill and Greensboro campuses of the University of North Carolina, Davidson College, and N.C. State, Duke, and Queens Universities). Hook also designed James B. Duke’s Myers Park mansion and the William Henry Belk House in Elizabeth.
Shortly after the 1925 completion of the Gateway Building, with its handsomely detailed limestone façade, Cutter decided that sufficient demand remained to warrant building a second adjacent building alongside the first. The Century Building offered more retail space and a bus terminal. For that second building, Hook adopted a different look, incorporating an unusual green terracotta face tile in the façade. By 1926, both buildings were complete and mostly occupied. The Gateway Building had several long-term tenants, including Smith’s Book Store, an A & P grocery store, the American Red Cross, and Holloway’s Music House. The Century Building had a somewhat different history. Aside from anchor tenant Union Bus Terminal (Charlotte’s only bus station until 1940), the Century storefront was often vacant in the 1920s, but later included a barber shop and King’s Business College from the 1930s to the 1960s. By the late 1970s, those longtime tenants had moved or gone out of business, leaving the adjoining buildings vacant as part of a general decline of the West Trade Street area that later rebound following new development in the early 1990s.