Harry & Bryant funeral home, Charlotte's oldest business, to relocate
Harry & Bryant funeral home, Charlotte's oldest business, to relocate
Plus: Is it time to buy plane tickets?; Prosecutors warn Jim Bakker about selling coronavirus 'cure'; Interviewer hangs with Lebda at Quail Hollow mansion but somehow fails to ask about Pittenger
Good morning! Today is Friday, March 6, 2020. You’re reading The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C. Don’t forget to TURN YOUR CLOCK FORWARD an hour tomorrow night.
Editor’s note: This is the final Friday Ledger you will receive … unless you sign up for a paid subscription. Subscriber-only content starts next week. The price is $9 a month — or cheaper than the cost of lunch at Panera, a standard Netflix plan or parking in an uptown deck for a couple hours. You get scoops and insight about Charlotte business (broadly defined), and your subscription supports a fresh and innovative approach to delivering important, interesting and smart local news. Join today. Here are the details. The $99/year plan comes with a second email address for your household, and the $379 plan comes with six email addresses (collected after payment) and a few other extras aimed at businesses and those who want to help at a higher level. Many thanks.
Providence Road site in Myers Park eyed for new office building; funeral home hopes to stay close but ‘that may not happen’
Funeral home Harry & Bryant Co. seems likely to leave its longtime home on Providence Road in Myers Park, with a developer saying he’d like to build a small office building on the site.
It’s the latest example of redevelopment in a mile-long corridor on Providence Road between the intersection of Providence and Queens roads and the intersection with Caswell Road, near Novant Health Presbyterian Medical Center. The street is the dividing line between million-dollar houses in Eastover and million-dollar houses in Myers Park.
Founded uptown in 1883, Harry & Bryant is the oldest continuously operating business in Mecklenburg County. Property records indicate its stately white two-story building dates to 1926.
But times are a-changing, and the Bryant family, which owns the 1.1-acre parcel and the business, decided to sell the land. Local real estate investor/developer Brian Bucci tells The Ledger he has it under contract. He put in a rezoning request with the city last week to change the zoning from B-1, which is general business, to O-2, which is office.
“We think the best use for the property would be office,” he says. Zoning regulations under O-2 would cap the height of a new building at two or three stories, he says. “There’s no need for people to think a 10-story residential tower is going up, or a high-rise condo. We are looking to be consistent with the zoning requirements and do something high-level, high-end.”
He’s building something similar now a few blocks away on Providence toward uptown — a three-story office building called 150 Providence that will have 75,000 s.f. of space. It’s already fully leased, he says. Developers in Charlotte have been building offices at a breakneck pace, but the demand is still high.
Myers Park uses: “There is a demand for office space for financial institutions, wealth management, attorneys, professional services, those type of uses in the Myers Park corridor,” Bucci says.
So if the funeral home is going to be replaced with a new office building, what happens to the funeral home?
The business would like to move across the street and build a new building on the site of a current parking lot, also owned by the Bryant family, says manager Jeff Dimond. But those plans are uncertain. He says Harry & Bryant would prefer to stay in Myers Park or Eastover.
“Unfortunately, we may not be able to keep the property,” he says. “I would prefer to stay [near] where we are, but that may not happen.”
It’s always uncomfortable asking an undertaker “How’s business?” but Dimond says the company’s outlook is bright. He says some funeral homes have had trouble adjusting to the shift toward lower-cost cremations, a trend that’s especially prevalent in cities. But Harry & Bryant still gets plenty of burials.
“We are, I guess you would say, busy?” Dimond said with a nervous chuckle. In just the last couple weeks, the funeral home has held a half-dozen chapel services, which he says is a lot.
‘Out in the country’: Harry & Bryant started on West Trade Street as a division of Andrews Music Co. In 1929, it moved to a site at 406 N. Tryon St., diagonally across from St. Peter’s Episcopal Church. Owners moved the business to its present location in the late 1940s and were told “it would never work because [it] was ‘too far out in the country,” according to company literature.
Nowadays, though, there’s plenty of other development nearby. In addition to the offices under construction at 150 Providence:
A developer last month filed a rezoning to build a Fifth Third Bank branch on the site of the Queen’s Crown Automotive shop, across from the Myers Park Harris Teeter. The shop’s website says it has been around for more than 42 years. Queen’s Crown didn’t return a phone call Thursday.
The parcel containing the Boston Market sold in October.
There have been rumblings about the future of the Manor, the city’s last arthouse theater, but nothing has been announced.
Neighbors are usually OK with the redevelopment of businesses, as long as businesses don’t start moving toward the area’s single-family homes, says Steve Garrett, a board member with the Eastover Residents’ Association.
“We don’t want the businesses encroaching too far on the side streets into the neighborhoods,” he says. “The market is robust, more robust now than it ever has been in the last 25 years, so there is a lot going on.”
Today: Join us for an online discussion of South End/uptown development at 12:00 p.m.
Today (Friday) at 12:00 p.m. Eastern, we’re going to hold an online discussion — “Development in South End and Uptown” — featuring Clayton Sealey of CLT-Development. He’s constantly providing fresh information on all the activity in Charlotte’s urban core, and he’s a pro at guiding discussions about Charlotte development on his Twitter and Instagram accounts.
You can ask questions. We can have a discussion. Or you can just lurk — whatever you prefer. We’d love for you to join us. We are intending it to run for 30-45 minutes. This one will be open to people on the Ledger’s free plan and paid subscribers.
Look for an email around noon today. It will have a link to a Substack feature called “threads,” which will route you to the discussion page. If you’re busy and miss it, it’s OK — it will be archived there for you to read later.
The Ledger likes experimenting with new ways to provide you with news and insights about Charlotte. This discussion, in a written format, should be informative and productive. If people like it, we can do more in the future with additional panelists or on different topics. Thanks. — Tony Mecia
Today’s supporting sponsors are Industrial Handling Solutions…
and TechnikOne:
Coronavirus contrarian: Is it a smart time to buy plane tickets?
Nobody knows how this coronavirus mess is going to turn out.
Is it possible that by summer, we will all be self-quarantined in our houses? Maybe.
But is it also possible that the virus will have gone away like the flu virus does every year? It is.
If you believe in that second scenario, right now might be the time to check out airplane tickets — just as people are canceling flights and airlines are getting desperate. Several companies on Thursday, including Wells Fargo, banned employee air travel for now.
Look online for flights this summer, and you’ll see they are pretty cheap at the moment. American Airlines, which dominates Charlotte’s airport, just extended its waiving of change fees for tickets bought by the end of the month.
And if you have a bunch of frequent flier miles, you can fly American from Charlotte to many tourist spots this summer for only 20,000 miles round-trip, sometimes fewer:
Rapid City, S.D., gateway to Mount Rushmore and Badlands National Park, over 4th of July week? 20,000 miles.
San Francisco in mid-June? 15,000 miles.
Bangor, Maine, in early August? 10,000 miles.
The downside is that frequent flier tickets are not refundable without paying a hefty redeposit fee, and the airline does not appear to be waiving change fees on frequent flier tickets.
It’s like when the stock market crashes and people are panic-selling: Sometimes it makes sense to swoop in and buy. You might want to take a look.
Just throwing it out there.
New renderings: 6-story SouthPark office building
Developers have released new drawings of a proposed six-story office building in SouthPark. It will have 92,500 s.f. of office plus 3,500 s.f. of retail — and a five-story parking deck nearby. It’s on Coltsgate Road near the intersection of Sharon and Fairview roads. It requires a rezoning and is scheduled for a public hearing next month.
Prosecutors warn Bakker on coronavirus ‘cure’
New York prosecutors are warning the Rev. Jim Bakker to stop hawking a medication that he claims cures the coronavirus.
A guest on Bakker’s TV show had claimed on Feb. 12 that a “Silver Solution” sold on the televangelist’s website “totally eliminates it, kills it, deactivates it.” Medical experts and people with common sense say no such magic cure exists.
That was false advertising, New York’s top prosecutor’s office claimed in a cease-and-desist letter to Bakker this week.
Calling herself “extremely concerned” about the clip from the show, Lisa Landau, the chief of the attorney general’s health care bureau, sternly told Bakker that there is no known medical treatment for the coronavirus disease, which has sickened patients around the world, including in New York.
“Your show’s segment may mislead consumers as to the effectiveness of the Silver Solution product in protecting against the current outbreak. … Any representation on the Jim Bakker Show that its Silver Solution products are effective at combatting and/or treating the 2019 novel coronavirus violates New York law,” she wrote.
Landau said any future claims promoting Silver Solution as a cure would violate laws against false advertising.
Bakker’s office, though, insists the “Silver Solution” — which costs $80 for four tubes — is legit:
An assistant manager at Bakker’s store directed a reporter to a statement about the medication and coronavirus. The statement described … the guest who said on the show that Silver Solution treats other illnesses in the coronavirus family, as an “integrative naturopathic doctor and mind-body psychotherapist.” It also quoted the chief executive of the company that manufactures Silver Solution, who claimed researchers have studied his product’s effectiveness at treating viruses including HIV.
Bakker, who ran the PTL Club out of Fort Mill in the 1980s, served five years in prison for fraud after his conviction by a Charlotte jury. He was paroled in 1994.
In brief
Ingersoll-Rand layoffs: Ingersoll-Rand has started laying off employees in Davidson after the company merged its industrial-products division with another company over the weekend. It’s unclear how many will be laid off locally. (WFAE)
Chamber battle ahead? A new organization calling itself the “Charlotte Area Chamber of Commerce” has started holding events, although the region’s main chamber, known as the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, is concerned the public will be confused. “The Alliance is hopeful that it can work collaboratively with the Charlotte Area Chamber of Commerce to mitigate any such confusion,” CEO Janet LaBar said in a statement to The Ledger. “The Alliance has rights with respect to the ‘Charlotte Chamber’ name.” The Charlotte Area Chamber’s address is the same as the WeWork office on Church Street uptown.
‘Micro-retail’ in South End: Mixed-use project Centro Railyard is filling out its roster of “micro-retail” tenants, small shops that businesses find affordable in urban settings. “Centro Railyard is the first in Charlotte that embraces the idea of drastically downsized spaces designed to reduce costs and attract tenants and small businesspeople who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford anchored space in a high-priced urban area.” The development was created by architect David Furman and Ascent Real Estate Capital. (Charlotte magazine)
Pay raise: Wells Fargo says it plans to increase the lowest wage it pays to workers. Charlotte employees will make a minimum of $16 an hour by the end of the year. Other big local employers including Bank of America and Atrium Health have announced recent increases in minimum pay. (Observer)
Politicians still flogging Wells: The chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Maxine Waters, said she’d like two members of Wells Fargo’s board to resign. She’d also like to see former CEO Tim Sloan prosecuted for misleading Congress last year. Waters said she doesn’t think Wells has made enough changes. (Observer)
Apartments: Grubb Properties has land under contract at 1200 S. Mint St. and is “assessing the feasibility of a Link Apartments project” on the site. (Biz Journal, subscriber-only)
Lebda interviewer skips Pittenger question: In a 3,500-word profile and Q&A with LendingTree CEO Doug Lebda that took place at Lebda’a Quail Hollow mansion, the Biz Journal’s Erik Spanberg fails to ask the question on the minds of all of Charlotte: How is Lebda’s relationship with next-door neighbor Robert Pittenger? This is as close as Spanberg gets: “A year ago, Lebda and his family moved into their home, valued at $4.1 million, according to county tax records. Yes, it’s the one that has been the subject of bemused local media coverage because of an unresolved legal fight with former Congressman and next-door neighbor Robert Pittenger accusing the Lebdas of encroaching on Pittenger’s privacy by building too close to his home.” Then Spanberg moves on to asking Lebda about his golf game. (Biz Journal, subscriber-only)
Food and drink news
A weekly wrap-up of the week’s eating and drinking developments
Beer and basketball: The Hornets have added a feature to the team’s mobile app that allows fans to order a beer to be delivered to their seats at the Spectrum Center. The new “brew button” will allow fans “to stay in their seats and have the beer delivered to them so they don’t miss any of the awesome action going on during the game,” a Hornets spokesman said. (CharlotteFive)
Optimist Hall empanadas: A new food stall called Felix Empanadas opened this week at Optimist Hall. The menu has “savory, breakfast and dessert empanadas, such as the Pulled Chorizo, Lobster Corn n’ Chive, Shepard’s Pie, Guava n’ Cheese and Nutella Banana.” (Biz Journal)
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The Charlotte Ledger is an e-newsletter and web site publishing timely, informative, and interesting local business news and analysis Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, except holidays and as noted. We strive for fairness and accuracy and will correct all known errors. The content reflects the independent editorial judgment of The Charlotte Ledger. Any advertising, paid marketing, or sponsored content will be clearly labeled.
The Charlotte Ledger is published by Tony Mecia, an award-winning former Charlotte Observer business reporter and editor. He lives in Charlotte with his wife and three children.