Levine Museum to Buy South End Church Site for $7.5 Million, Plan New Permanent Home

The brick sanctuary at 1800 South Boulevard still fills with worshippers on Sunday mornings, even as its future is being redrawn.

Levine Museum of the New South, Charlotte’s history museum focused on the post–Civil War South, has reached an agreement to buy the Grace Covenant Church property in South End for about $7.5 million and turn it into the museum’s next permanent home.

The deal, expected to close in the coming days, would give the museum a 0.57-acre campus at the corner of South Boulevard and East Boulevard, along the Lynx Blue Line and in the middle of one of Charlotte’s fastest-growing neighborhoods. It marks a major step for an institution that sold its longtime uptown building in 2022, spent three years in a smaller temporary gallery and has gone without a dedicated exhibition space since last spring.

Museum leaders say the move is about more than finding a roof.

“It will be more than a museum — it will be a gathering space where history sparks conversation and where diverse perspectives come together to explore what the New South has been and what it is becoming,” museum president and CEO Richard Cooper said in a statement announcing the agreement.

A new base after years of transition

The planned campus represents a significant shift in scale and setting for the museum, which built its reputation interpreting the South’s complex history of race, growth and inequality from a 40,000-square-foot facility in uptown Charlotte.

Founded in 1991 and renamed a decade later to honor benefactors Leon and Sandra Levine, the museum became known for its permanent exhibition Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers and for community-centered shows on topics including school desegregation, the razing of Black neighborhoods under urban renewal and the legacy of lynching in the region. Over three decades, it has drawn more than 1.7 million visitors to its galleries and programs.

Its home for much of that time was a purpose-built museum at 200 E. 7th St., near the Lynx light-rail line and what is now the First Ward neighborhood. In 2022, the museum completed a $10.75 million sale of that building to VeLa Development Partners and Post Road Group, which are replacing it with a 32-story luxury apartment tower.

At the time, board leaders framed the sale as a response to rising operating costs and changing audience expectations, saying the institution needed to shed a large, aging facility and invest in digital tools and neighborhood-based programming.

The museum moved into a 6,000-square-foot, rent-free interim space at Three Wells Fargo Center on South Tryon Street later that year, operating pop-up exhibits and civic dialogues from the ground floor of the uptown office tower. That gallery closed May 4, 2025, when the agreement with Wells Fargo expired, leaving the museum without its own exhibition hall for the first time in decades.

Since then, Levine has functioned as a network of traveling exhibitions, neighborhood installations and online projects, including the KnowCLT app, which guides users through the history of the demolished Brooklyn neighborhood in Second Ward, and the Our New South podcast.

The South End site and early design plans

The South End deal would effectively end that “museum without walls” period by giving the institution a permanent base again — this time in a smaller footprint and in an area where cultural anchors have lagged behind offices, apartments and restaurants.

The Grace Covenant campus includes two buildings totaling about 10,000 square feet, less than a quarter of the size of the old uptown museum. Early concept images released by Levine show plans to preserve the church’s main sanctuary and attach a contemporary addition around it, creating exhibition galleries, classrooms, flexible event space, a lobby atrium and outdoor gathering areas. Museum officials say they are exploring a café and gift shop as part of the project.

Pickard Chilton, a New Haven, Connecticut-based design firm that has worked on cultural and institutional buildings across the country, has been hired as design architect.

“The Levine Museum of the New South project represents a rare opportunity to create an extraordinary place of lasting civic and cultural significance,” Kristin Hawkins, an associate principal at the firm, said in a prepared statement. “We are honored to partner with the Levine Museum to design a place that reflects the museum’s enduring commitment to history, storytelling and inclusive public engagement.”

No construction timeline or opening date has been announced. Cooper has said the museum will spend the next year refining plans and seeking input from community members, educators and partners on how the new space should function.

The church, a non-denominational evangelical congregation founded in 1990, continues to list services at the South Boulevard address on its website. Its leaders have not yet released public details about where the congregation will move or why they decided to sell.

A familiar reuse—and a symbolic location

The transformation of a church into a museum aligns with a broader pattern in Charlotte and other cities, where congregations have sold sanctuaries to be repurposed as restaurants, event venues or other public spaces. Locally, projects such as Supperland, a restaurant in a former Plaza Midwood church, and Leluia Hall, an events space in Dilworth, have followed that model.

In this case, the new use is a civic institution that has often taken on difficult subjects in Charlotte’s past.

Levine’s exhibitions have documented the destruction of Black neighborhoods such as Brooklyn under mid-20th-century urban renewal, explored tensions around policing and criminal justice, and examined immigration and LGBTQ history in the region. Board chair Glen Wright said the South End campus is intended to extend that work.

“This next chapter deepens that commitment by helping communities see themselves in the story of the South and inspiring participation toward a more inclusive future,” Wright said.

The decision to locate that work in South End carries its own symbolism.

The neighborhood, which grew up around a 19th-century railroad line and textile mills, declined in the mid-20th century as industry left and suburban growth accelerated. Its fortunes reversed after the Lynx Blue Line opened in 2007, triggering waves of redevelopment. In recent years, South End has added thousands of apartments, drawn major office tenants and become a regional destination for bars, breweries and restaurants.

While arts organizations, galleries and performance spaces operate throughout Charlotte’s center city, South End has lacked a large, permanent museum or theater. Levine leaders and supporters describe the project as an opportunity to anchor the district with a cultural institution that can serve residents, workers, students and visitors.

“Levine Museum of the New South has played a vital role in helping Charlotte understand itself and its place in the broader story of the region,” said Sara Fedyna, senior program officer at The Leon Levine Foundation, a longtime funder of the museum. “The new home in South End allows the museum to deepen its impact and continue serving as a space for learning, dialogue and connection for generations to come.”

Access, funding, and what comes next

The South Boulevard site’s proximity to the light rail could make it easier for visitors from other parts of the city to reach without a car. At the same time, there is no on-site parking planned, which means school buses and families from farther-flung neighborhoods will rely on nearby garages and street spaces in an already busy corridor.

Financial details beyond the purchase price have not yet been disclosed. The museum is expected to draw on proceeds from the 7th Street sale and philanthropic support to renovate and expand the church campus. It is not yet clear whether city or county cultural funds, historic preservation incentives or other public tools will play a role.

For now, the announcement signals that after years of transition — from selling its flagship, to borrowing space, to operating as a largely virtual and traveling presence — Levine Museum is again betting on bricks and mortar, this time on a smaller, more flexible campus.

“Our new home in South End will deepen our impact as a place where people gather, connect and belong,” Cooper said. “At Levine Museum, history, dialogue and culture come together to encourage active participation in shaping a New South story that is still being written and offers a more just and equitable future for all who call this region home.”

As that story unfolds, the brick building at 1800 South Boulevard will move from Sunday sermons to daily exhibits — from a sanctuary for one congregation to a public forum where Charlotteans are invited to negotiate what the “New South” means next.