·:PS For.-1 1t-S<)j (3-62} OHB ,Vo, 1024-0018 Expires 10-31-87 United :itates Department of the Interior National Park Service For NPS use only National Register of Historic Places received Inventory-Nomination Form dale entered See instructions In How to Complete National Register Forms Type all entries-complete applicable sections 1. Name historic Hyers Park Historic District ------------------------------------ and·or common 2. Location street & number see verbal boundary descr.ipt ion and maps NI~ not for publication city, town Charlqtte __ vicinity of ·~~-----------------~----------------------------- 037 Mecklenburg 119 state North Carolina code county code 3. Classification Category Ownership ~latus Present Use Ldistrlct __ public __ occupied __ agriculture __ museum __ bullplng(s) __ private __ unoccupied __ commercial -X- park __ structure _x_ both __ work In progress ~ educational _K_ private residence __ site Public Acquisition Accessible __ entertainment ~religious __ object -111-,lAin process __x_ yes: restricted __ government __ scientific __ being considered -·- yes: unrestricted __ industrial __ transportation __ no __ military __ other: 4. Owner of Property name Over 50 street & number city, town __· vicinity of state 5. Location of Legal Description courthouse, registry of deeds, etc. Mecklenburg County Register of Deeds Office 720 E. 4th Street street & number Charlotte North Carooina city, town state 6. Representation in Existing Surveys title Charlotte Neighborhood Survey has this property been determined eligible? __ yes __ll__ no 1981-1982 X date __ federal ~ state __l(_ county _ • _loca_l ~----------------------------------~=-- State Historic Preservation Office, N.C. Division of Archives & History dep.>sitory for survey records Raleigh North Carolina city, town·'----------------------------- ______________s_t_a_te __ __ 7. Description Condition Check one Check one X excellent deteriorated __x_ unaltered __x_ original site -y good _ ruins -X- altered -X- moved date See criteria exceptions and _fair _unexposed inventory Describe the present and original (if known} physical appearance THE LANDSCAPE OF MYERS PARK Today Myers Park appears to the newcomer to be a warren of winding streets cut haphazardly through a lush woodland. In fact, however, the neighborhood sprang to Iife on a nearly tree-less cotton farm. Its famed planners John Nolen and Earle Draper (for more on their historic significance see Section 8)not only took great care in their naturalistic planting and tree-moving, but also invested great thought in the design of the streets, parks, and even the sidewalks and planting strips. The Plannino Concepts Myers Park was planned at a time when attitudes toward urban living were undergoing great changes. America had succeeded so well in taming its wild continent that people no longer saw nature as something to subdue, but rather as something to protoct. Anational conservation movement blossomed, including designation of the initial National Parks under president Teddy Roosevelt, and planners now advocated bringing Nature into city life. At the same time, Americans were becoming more obsessed with privacy. Where all had once lived cheek-by-jowl in the city, zoning and other restrictions were now discussed to separate residence from cbmmerce, r·ich from poor·, block from white. New developments at the edge of town no longer aspired to be extensions of the city, with similar street patterns. Under the leadership of landscape architects beginning with Frederick law Olmsted, suburbs now were designed as separate, secluded enclaves carefully protected from urban bustle. In the Charlotte as late as the 1900s the wealthy had built their mansions proudly on the busiest downtown thoroughfares. Now they began to tuck their dwellings away on sidestreets in the suburbs. John Nolen's 1911 t1yers Park plan ( reproduced as Map A in Section 8) embodied these new tr·ends. The backbone of Myers Par·k WB5the II 0' wide grand boulevard now known in various sections as Queens Road, Queens Road East, and Queens Road West. Nolen planned the boulevard to run south from the northern edge of the neighborhood, then split into two separ·ate streets which eventually came together to form a giant loop. This "lollipop" arrangement made the neighborhood a huge cul-de-sac largely cut off from any surrounding streets, a fact symbolically reinforced by the placement of a stone gateway at the neighborhood's entrance. The trolley line was to run down the gr·assy median of the boulevard; the lollipop loop arrangement also ensured that no housB in the vast neighborhood would be more than a couple of blocks from mass transit. Off the boulevard backbone hung a skelton of narrower streets. All streets curved with the natural topography. Interspersed with the streets there were to be a number of parks, particu Jar ly along creek bed "greenways" (areas usually sold off as the becks of house lots in earlier Char lotte neighborhoods). OMB Approvll No. 1QU..C018 United ·states Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet .MYERS PbARK HISTORIC_DISTRICT S eclion num er Page ___ Many planners in the period drew street layouts for suburbs, but Nolen went far bayond the norm in providing detailed landscape edvice. His plans show width and local ions of streets, medians, sidewalks, and planting strips. He sketched planting plans for public areas, and maintained personel on site to guide the transplanting of the hundred of trees that now line all the avenues. Nolen's office provided individual landscape designs for early lot buyers. He helped the developers write deed restrictions which regulated minimum house costs (and thus size) and setbacks. He specified that -­ unlike downtown mansions with their cast iron Victorian railings, or houses in suburban Dilworth with their walled raised front yards-- Myers Park houses were to have no front fences. Nothing was to disturb the appearance of the Myers Park streets as green parkways. When Earle Draper took over supervision of the Myers Park design in 1917, he kept close to Nolen's concepts. Street arrangements shifted, curves became gentler, and he added another major entrance a! East Boulevard (see Map B in Section 8). But Queens Road West with its median remained the neighborhood's backbone, and planting plans and winding streets were calculated to achieve lush naturalistic effects. Civil engineers charged with completion of the neighborhood after 1926 increasingly departed from Nolen and Draper's philosophy. For example, curving tree-sheded Norton Road, created in the late 1920s, is indistiguishable from earlier work. Bucknell Avenue, from the 1940s, continues the tradition of tree pIanting but is arrow-straight. By the 1950s such streets as Princeton and Hastings saw little tree-planting, and the final leg of the grand boulevard, Queens Road East (not included in the district), did not even have a median. Today not all of Nolen's and Draper's work survives. Queens Road medians have been altered at fourth 5\ree!, Morehead 5\ree!, and Providence Road, a5 the neighborhood has been opened to through-traffic. The central portion of the main gateway was destroyed to build turning lanes. The plantings envisioned for the medians and for the strips between street and sidewalk are forgotten. Most of the shrubbery and planting beds planned around early houses have changed. Nonetheless, the ar·eas laid out by Nolen and Draper( see Map C in Section 8) remain much as they envisioned. Setbacks and fenceless fron!yards maintain the parkway feeling. J.S. Myers Park and the Edgehill Road greenway ar·e calm leafy dells. Surviving landscaping is now at maturity. Willow oaks a hundred feet high form cathedrals of arched limbs over the streets. This is particularly true on the vast, sweeping curve of Earle Draper's Queens Road West. Here at least seven rows of trees-- one in the median, one between each sidewalk and the street, and two in each front yard -- wer·e plen ted in the 1920s before houses were buill. Today the lendscape of Myers Park is a featured pert of city lours end is prominently shown in promo\ ion a! material about Char lotte. OMB Approvll No. 1024-0018 United States Department of the Interior National Park Service Na~mJ~..,REtSiffl.tWo~fR~~storic Places conttnuafforr 'Snee• 7 3 Section number ___ Page ___ THE ARCHITECTURE Of MYERS PARK Introduction Myers Park is a showcase of the architectural styles of the early twentieth century. I Some of Charlotte's most elaborate surviving Bungalow-influenced designs are here, along with several of the best Colonial Revivals. The suburb contains a collection of Tudor Revival designs whose quality and quantity are unusual in North Carolina. From the time the neighborhood was laid out in 1911 until the end of the 1920s Myers Par·k had no rivals as the premier streetcar suburb in Charlotte, the booming '"New South"' center of the Piedmont textile belt. Many of the most active architects of the Carolinas were based in Charlotte in that period, including C. C. Hook, Louis Asbury, J.M. McMichael, William Peeps, and t1artin Boyer, and they did some of their best work for Myers Park clients. Myers Park also boasted designs by nationally-renowned architect Charles Barton Keen of Philadelphia. Into \he 1940s, the early streets of the vast neighborhood remained a fashionable p!BCB for the city's middle and upper income residents to build new houses, and most builders stuck close to traditional styles. During the suburb·s first decade, houses were mostly of wood and were designed in a free mixture of styles, including Bungalow, Rectilinear, and Colonial Revival. In the 1920s brick became common, primarily in relatively literal interpretations of Colonial and Bungalow forms, but also in the romantic Tudor Revival. By 1930 the Bungalow style faded from popularity, followed in the late 1930s by the Tudor Revival.