McCausland Building / Thacker Restaurant
(ca. 1899)
The McCausland Building/Thacker’s Restaurant provides a rare glimpse into uptown Charlotte’s late-1800s commercial real estate landscape.
221 S Tryon St, Charlotte, NC 28202
The three-story McCausland Building/Thacker’s Restaurant is a uniquely rare example of a small-scale, late-nineteenth-century commercial building in Charlotte’s center city. Erected in 1899 for stove merchants and tinsmiths James Noble and Andrew Earle McCausland (1864-1939 and 1867-1934, respectively), and later remodeled in 1936 as Thacker’s Restaurant, the building typifies the scale of two eras of the city’s commercial construction. As Charlotte grew into a textile and distribution center, two-and three-story commercial structures with narrow facades were squeezed together in uptown. High-rise buildings were the exception. By the 1920s, however, skyscrapers began to transform the skyline, especially along the South Tryon Street financial corridor. Tall office towers with space-consuming parking lots steadily replaced the low-rise storefronts. Today, only a handful of these small century-old buildings remain.
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The original owners of the South Tryon Street building were the McCausland brothers, whose McCausland and Company business manufactured and sold stoves, mantels, grates, and other “kitchen furnishings.” Dr. E. R. Russell occupied a physician’s office upstairs. The rear of the building contained a two-story tin shop. The building originally sported a flamboyant brick-and-stone façade with a shaped and corbelled parapet, a broad archway framing a second-story balcony, rusticated stone pilasters, and large recessed windows. Some of the exterior ornamentation, notably the decorative parapet, may have been pressed metalwork manufactured by the McCauslands to promote their tinsmith business.
The brothers operated their company until 1936, when the principals of Thacker’s Restaurant, a popular Charlotte eatery, purchased the building. Remodeled for use as a restaurant, the building’s new exterior created the cleaner, classical design that remains largely intact today, with the exception of the large vertical neon sign that for many years announced, “Thacker’s, A Good Place to Eat.” Over the years, the 200 block of South Tryon Street contained a variety of retail and industrial land uses, including the Piedmont Clothing Company (a pants factory), a steam laundry, a manufacturer of cotton looms, and furniture and plumbing supply warehouses. As commercial real estate near the city square continued to climb in value, the block’s storefronts remained narrow – typically twenty to thirty feet wide – and often reserved for retail uses. Several space-consuming warehouses and factories were relegated to the less pricey rear alleys, reflecting a downtown trend. By the 1920s, however, a canyon of office towers gradually replaced the small storefronts of South Tryon’s 200 block, with the notable exception of the McCausland Building and the adjacent 217 South Tryon Street building. Since the 1963 closure of Thacker’s Restaurant, several businesses have occupied the building, including Home Federal Savings and Loan, Interstate Securities, a law firm, a men’s grooming business, and upscale condominiums.