🏘️Brooklyn: 238 Acres

1. ↳ 400 East Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, two blocks up from Brooklyn Village Station. Most of this walk stays on or near MLK — the street Brooklyn knew as Second Street.

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   NASCAR Hall of Fame

   Start where the Blue Line lets you off. The station behind you was renamed Brooklyn Village Station in 2022, and Stonewall Street became Brooklyn Village Avenue with it — the neighborhood's name returned to the land six decades after the city began taking the neighborhood. Brooklyn was 238 acres of Second Ward: schools, churches, civic organizations, Black-owned businesses, and, by most accounts, over a thousand families. The Hall of Fame stands on part of the land cleared by urban renewal, alongside the Government Center and the county courthouse — government and civic buildings where a residential and commercial Black neighborhood stood. This walk crosses what's left.

   Full details, hours & sources for NASCAR Hall of Fame →

2. ↳ 219 South Brevard Street — northeast from the Hall of Fame, up Brevard.

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   Grace A.M.E. Zion Church

   As former resident James Ross II recalled in interviews for UNC Charlotte's Brooklyn Oral History Project — first-person recollection, not an official inventory — Brooklyn held two movie theaters, a library, two newspapers, about twenty restaurants, two funeral homes, a YMCA and a YWCA, and roughly twenty-three churches. This is the church building that survived: Grace A.M.E. Zion, whose congregation grew out of Clinton Chapel, Charlotte's first Black church, in the 1880s. The Gothic Revival sanctuary dedicated on July 13, 1902 was designed and built by Grace member William W. Smith, Charlotte's first Black architect. When the bulldozers came, the parishioners were displaced, most to west Charlotte. The building is the only religious structure left standing from the entire neighborhood.

   Full details, hours & sources for Grace A.M.E. Zion Church →

3. ↳ 710 East Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard — south down Brevard, then east on MLK. The alumni marker is at the boulevard edge.

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   Second Ward High School Gymnasium

   Second Ward High opened in 1923 at Alexander and First streets, the first public high school for Black students in Charlotte — before it, a Black student who wanted a high school education had to leave the city or enroll in the high-school-level program at Johnson C. Smith University. It served Brooklyn until 1969, when the school board closed it, one of five historically Black center-city schools shut that summer rather than fully integrated — this even though voters had approved roughly $2 million for its renovation in 1967. The renovation never came; the main building was demolished in 1970. The gymnasium survived, and it is not a ruin: it's Second Ward Gym now, a Mecklenburg County rec center that still fills with games and camps. An alumni-erected marker on the boulevard remembers the school.

   Full details, hours & sources for Second Ward High School Gymnasium →

4. ↳ 800 East Third Street — a short block east and across Third from the gym.

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   Marshall Park

   On January 19, 1960, the City Council approved the 'slum razing' project targeting Brooklyn — the vote the city later formally apologized for. On December 20, 1961, Mayor Stan Brookshire ceremonially began the demolition with a sledgehammer swung at a house some sources place at 310 South Davidson Street. By the early 1970s roughly a thousand structures across the 238 acres were gone and only four buildings from the original neighborhood survived. The displacement counts do not reconcile — more than 900 families by one UNC Charlotte thesis, over 1,000 by other accounts — and that disagreement is itself part of the record: nobody kept the neighborhood's books the way they kept the demolition schedule. Marshall Park's five and a half acres of open ground are part of what the clearing left. The 2018 Brooklyn Village master plan folds the park into a redevelopment; in 2025 its first phase was revised to lead with 250 affordable housing units under a 99-year covenant. Read the marker. Then look at what surrounds you.

   Full details, hours & sources for Marshall Park →

5. ↳ 551 South Tryon Street — back west along MLK and the Brooklyn Village Avenue blocks, two blocks from the station you started at. If the walk ends at a table, Mert's Heart and Soul at 214 North College Street is the soul-food room a few blocks up through Uptown.

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   Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture

   End at the institution carrying the story. The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture opened in 2009 in the former Second Ward/Brooklyn area of uptown. The UNC Charlotte Brooklyn Oral History Project — community-sourced, first-person history — counts over 1,000 families and roughly 200 businesses lost between 1960 and 1977, with no new homes or storefronts built to replace what was razed. On August 10, 2020, Mayor Vi Lyles delivered the city's formal apology for its role in urban renewal and Brooklyn's destruction. The Gantt's galleries, and the station name you arrived by, are what public memory of Brooklyn currently looks like: an institution and a sign, standing in for a neighborhood. The walk ends two blocks from where it began — which is the honest shape of the story.

   Full details, hours & sources for Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture →

   Quiz yourself: In 2022, CATS renamed the Blue Line station where this walk begins. What was its old name?

   1. Stonewall Station
   2. Second Ward Station
   3. Marshall Station
   4. Trade Street Station

   Answer: Stonewall Station

   Effective June 30, 2022, Stonewall Station became Brooklyn Village Station and Stonewall Street became Brooklyn Village Avenue — the demolished neighborhood's name returned to the land, sixty-some years after the city's demolition began.

The whole route on one line — the beads sit where the ground puts them, not where a layout would like them.