Second Ward High School Gymnasium
(ca. 1948)
The Second Ward High School Gymnasium is the only surviving building from that school and one of the last structures of the Brooklyn neighborhood.
710 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Charlotte NC 28202
The Second Ward High School Gymnasium is the only surviving building from the once fourteen-acre campus of the Second Ward High School, Charlotte’s first public high school for Black Students. As the hub for many sports and non-sports events, the gym played a prominent role in the Brooklyn neighborhood, Charlotte’s largest Black community. Brooklyn was once about 230 acres in size, containing nearly 1,500 buildings, including more than 1,000 homes, some 200 businesses, thirteen churches, and two schools. Today, Second Ward High School Gymnasium is one of only four Brooklyn buildings that survived the city’s aggressive Urban Renewal campaign of the 1960s and 1970s.
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Opened as Colored High School in 1923, long before integration, the institution was soon renamed Second Ward High School. Grades 7 through 12 were taught at the school. Its notable graduates include Frederick Douglas Alexander (Charlotte’s first Black city council member since Reconstruction), Duke University law professor James Coleman, and Tuskegee Airman Lt. Fred Lorenzo Brewer Jr. But the gym was not originally part of the school. The gym was not added until 25 years later, and only after frequent reminders to the School Board from members of the Negro Parent Teacher Association Council and the local NAACP chapter that the need for equal educational opportunities included the need for equitable facilities. Finally, in January 1949, the Second Ward High School Gym opened as the home of the Tigers.
The modern International styled gym was designed by A. G. Odell, Jr. (1913-1988), one of North Carolina’s most prominent twentieth century architects. The Concord, North Carolina, native studied civil engineering and architecture at Duke and Cornell Universities and at Paris’ L’Ecole des Beaux Arts. Opened in 1939, his one-man Charlotte office eventually grew into one of the state’s most influential architectural firms. His Modernist styled work included the Charlottetown Mall (the city’s first enclosed shopping center), Wachovia Tower (Charlotte’s first Modernist skyscraper), and Ovens Auditorium and the original Charlotte Coliseum (the world’s largest unsupported free-span dome as of its 1955 opening).
The gym only served as the home of the Tigers for twenty years. In 1969, the Charlotte School Board closed the high school, promising that a new integrated high school would be built. The school was demolished shortly thereafter as part of Brooklyn’s overall demise. No new integrated high school followed. In 1973, refusing to forget their beloved school or Tiger legacy, the graduates of Second Ward formed the Second Ward High School National Alumni Foundation that now has chapters as far away as Washington and New York. In addition to an annual reunion (held every year but two since 1980), the foundation’s members are active in community service – from tutoring students to helping people in assisted living – and operate the volunteer-staffed Second Ward Alumni House Museum.
In 2015, the Mecklenburg County Parks and Recreation Department acquired the building from the School Board and spearheaded the multimillion-dollar renovation that resulted in the current facility.