From Mint to Museum: Uptown's Cultural Ledger

Charlotte's oldest museum was born in a bank. The Mint Museum — founded in 1936 as North Carolina's first art museum — occupies the Randolph Road building that once housed the Charlotte branch of the United States Mint, where Carolina gold was coined in the 1830s. The art came later; the building is itself the first exhibit, a Greek Revival survivor saved from demolition and moved stone by stone to its Eastover grounds.

The museum today runs on two campuses. Mint Museum Randolph holds the historic collections — American and European art, ceramics and decorative arts built in part on the region's clay traditions. Mint Museum Uptown, opened in 2010 at the Levine Center for the Arts, carries contemporary work and craft and design in a glass tower that is part of Tryon's cultural spine. Together they give a banking city a serious claim to an arts identity.

Down the block, the neighbors cooperate. The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art — the Swiss family's gift of a mid-century European collection, housed in a Mario Botta building whose tiled terra-cotta scales catch the light — pairs with the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, whose woven-metal facade and escalator shaft quote the quilting and textile patterns of Black Southern heritage. A single ticket stub's walk connects all three.

For families, Discovery Place Science on North Tryon has been the other anchor since 1981: hands-on science, an IMAX dome, aquarium tanks, and a rainforest you can walk into. Generations of Charlotte schoolchildren have had their first laboratory there.

November is museum season in Uptown: the exhibitions rotate, school groups cycle through on weekday mornings, and the cultural campus does its quiet work of persuading a finance town that it is also something else. The Mint's own history — a city that melted gold and struck coins — is the proof that it has been something else before.