A North End Charlotte Neighborhood Thinks Big
(Quoted from The Charlotte Observer)
The tiny Lockwood neighborhood near the Amtrak station on North Tryon is gentrifying ... one house at a time.
There’s a 981-square-foot home listed at $42,000 and a 3,900-square-foot stunner with five bedrooms and five baths listed at $379,000.
“You just can’t find a really beautiful home with a lot of character in the $200s,” says Realtor Elizabeth Grillo of EG Real Estate Consultants. But you can in Lockwood, she said of the little-known neighborhood where the average list price is $186,200.
Theatrical lighting designer Chip Fischesser and his wife, Julie, moved to Lockwood from Charleston in 2006. They chose the neighborhood for its proximity to uptown, I-77 and I-85 and for its charm.
“My wife saw enough potential in (our) house to make an offer,” Fischesser says. Since moving in, the couple has built a new deck and a small shed, added some landscaping and put “lots of insulation into this old house.”
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The neighborhood itself is small – just a few streets between North Tryon and North Graham streets near the Amtrak station. Some homes are 1920s bungalows. Others were built in the 1930s and ’40s. Many have the original exposed brick inside. There’s one home on the market now with a Wolf range, heart pine floors and four original fireplaces. Its list price: $235,000.
William Green’s home, just shy of 900 square feet, is the perfect size for him and his housemate. The home originally had three bedrooms and one bath, but Lockwood’s unofficial mayor Christopher Dennis, who bought it and had begun renovations when Green found it, converted it to a two-bedroom house.
The home has a grander kitchen for its resident chef than the original shotgun-style one it had – and Shaker-style cabinets and granite countertops. The remodeled bathroom is a showstopper, too. “The kitchen and bathroom are the rooms people flip over,” he says. “My house is on the diminutive side, but the bathroom is really massive for a house this size.”