QCity Metro27%
Excelsior Club demolition triggers memories, hopes and concerns 71%
By Glenn H. Burkins22%
7/17/2026, 10:28:37 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 28 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, Negativity Bias, and Appeal to Authority, with Optimism Bias as the most egregious example at 27% saturation with 208 hits. Analysis detected 1,803 faulty-reasoning hits from 769 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 63.7% and a BS Rank of 71% (6,240 of 21,180 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 70.50% of the article peer group.
For the better part of 73 years, the white facade of the Excelsior Club stood as a singular landmark in Charlotte's West End.
But on Thursday, as workers demolished the final remains of the historic but aged building, Martin Pelzer, aka “the Cadillac Kid," stood watching from across the street.
"It's sad," he said, as the structure gave way to the crushing jaws of progress.
"I knew that it would never be what it was before. ...
I know that era has gone."
In its heyday, when Jim Crow laws demanded that Blacks and whites stay separate and unequal, the Excelsior Club provided social respite for Charlotte’s Black elites.
It hosted weddings, social events and the occasional big-name musician like Nat King Cole, James Brown or Louis Armstrong.
But those days had long faded as Pelzer, age 50, recalled trying to enter the club in the 1990s while a student at Johnson C.
Smith University.
"Every time I got within a year of the acceptance age to go in,” he said, “they moved it."
And so he did the next best thing: he parked his ‘98 Cadillac Seville — gray-on-gray with wide whitewall tires — in the parking lot and socialized with the men and women who came and went — “parking lot pimping,” he called it.
Despite the club's demise years ago and the building’s demolition this week, Pelzer said he was encouraged by the promise of a new Excelsior Club that local developer Shawn Kennedy has proposed for the site.
A hydraulic excavator chews up the final remnants of the Excelsior Club, a Charlotte landmark and social touchstone for more than 70 years, July 16, 2026.
Glenn H.
Burkins, QCity Metro
Under Kennedy’s $8.3 million plan, two plots of land on the southwest corner of Beatties Ford Road and Sanders Avenue are the future home of a revived Excelsior Club: a two-story structure that will bear faint resemblance to the old building, but with a full restaurant, community meeting spaces and a small museum to keep Excelsior Club history alive.
The city of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County backed the project with a combined $3 million in taxpayer money, and private investors, most notably Tim Sittema, managing partner with Crosland Southeast, have also chipped in.
For West End advocates who have long imagined a revived Excelsior Club, the Kennedy project arrived like a godsend after a California-based developer abandoned a similar plan in 2024.
“The demolition of the iconic Historic Excelsior Club is the dawning of the Excelsior’s next iteration, slated to be as grand as the two iterations that preceded it," J’Tanya Adams, co-founder and executive director of Historic West End Partners, an economic development organization, said in an email to QCity Metro.
"We shall collectively make it so!”
Observers watch in the early morning hours as workers prepare to complete the demolition of the Excelsior Club in Charlotte, July 16, 2026.
In October 2025, when the Charlotte City Council approved $1.5 million to support the project , council member Malcolm Graham, whose district includes the Excelsior Club, called the city’s subsidy “the right investment at the right time."
“I'm excited about the opportunity we have here tonight to, really, not invest in a club but to invest in a community rich in history, legacy and tradition," Graham said of the West End, a historically Black section now under the pressures of gentrification.
For Shundra L.
Allison, a public school teacher whose home abuts the Exclesior Club property, gentrification is a chief concern.
In recent years she has seen pricey homes — mini-mansions, she called them — rise on empty lots to tower above the modest, clapboard houses traditional to her Washington Heights neighborhood.
Just a few blocks down, one such home was recently listed at $640,000, reduced from more than $700,000.
Allison now worries that a new Excelsior Club will accelerate that gentrification.
“We've watched our taxes go up, and it kind of forces people out … people who live here, have been here forever,” she said.
Long before the Excelsior Club was demolished to make way for an $8.3 million rebirth, the historic landmark had been deemed unsafe as its walls buckled and support structures rotted.
Still, Allison, who visited the old Excelsior Club only once, in its final year, said a part of her is excited about the prospect of a new and modern Excelsior Club.
“I think it's a great thing, of course, because we need that,” she said.
“You know what I mean?
Culturally, historically, we need it.
It's been a part of Charlotte.”
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