The name is military. During the Cold War the U.S. Army called the complex on Statesville Avenue CAMP, for Charlotte Area Missile Plant, and the people stationed there called it camp for short. ATCO Properties, which bought the site in 2016, kept the word and added the neighborhood. Camp North End is a real estate development with a hundred murals, but the name is a nod to men packing munitions.
The site has had four lives, and the redevelopment is careful to show the other three.
It started with Henry Ford
In 1924 the Ford Motor Company opened a 240,000-square-foot assembly plant on what was then remote farmland north of Charlotte, designed by Albert Kahn, Detroit’s architect of industrial modernism. The building introduced open floor plans, skylights and end-grain wood block floors, which absorbed sound and, later, prevented sparks during munitions work, according to a WFAE history. Ford built more than 300,000 Model T and Model A cars here before the Great Depression ended the line.
The Army bought the plant during World War II and ran a quartermaster depot supplying basic training camps across the Southeast, adding five warehouses and rail spurs whose inactive tracks still cross the site. In the Cold War the complex shifted to missiles. Douglas Aircraft produced Nike missiles here, and the plant later assembled Gama Goat vehicles for the Army, according to the Museum of the New South.
In 1967 the Defense Department sold the complex, and Eckerd Drugs bought it in 1977 as a distribution center. Many residents of the North End neighborhoods worked there through the Eckerd years and after Rite Aid acquired the chain in 2007. Rite Aid left Charlotte in 2015 and the 76 acres went quiet.
The people behind it
ATCO Properties, a fourth-generation New York real estate family firm with a portfolio concentrated in and around that city, bought the site from Rite Aid in December 2016 for about $17 million, according to WFAE. It was the firm’s first signature project outside New York. Damon Hemmerdinger led it, and his argument to the city was simple: the site sat a mile and a half from Trade and Tryon in a neighborhood with virtually no restaurants or stores, a service and retail desert, and the redevelopment could fix that.
Varian Shrum, ATCO’s community manager, led tours and told the site’s history to people who insisted Charlotte had none. We just don’t have the physical reminders, she said. The firm opened the property in 2017 with music and events, deliberately programming for what Shrum called a true cross-section of the city, and brought in the architects S9 for a master plan around twelve reused buildings with gathering spaces between them.
The site has grown to nearly a hundred tenants and more than a million visitors a year. In 2025 the Atlanta firm Jamestown partnered with the existing owners to lead the next chapter, with 3.2 million square feet of entitled future development, according to its leasing materials.
The developers’ pitch to the city required a rezoning from general industrial to mixed use, and Hemmerdinger’s argument to WFAE in 2017 was about the neighborhood. A resident of this part of town, he said, had none of the services a resident somewhere else in Charlotte took for granted. The project fit the city’s own plans to improve the corridor from Uptown to UNC Charlotte, and Shorenstein, one of the oldest real estate firms in the country, joined as a joint venture partner in the five largest adaptive-reuse buildings.
What is there now
The campus is five districts of shops, studios, offices, restaurants and bars inside the old Ford plant and the Army warehouses, with the water tower and the boiler yard still standing over the Boileryard courtyard. Roughly half a million square feet has been redeveloped. Wildflowers grow along the old rail tracks. The murals, more than a hundred at last count, rotate through festivals and commissions, and the site hosts more than 500 events a year, from the Día de Muertos festival to markets and concerts.
Tenants have included a food hall’s worth of independent vendors, a bakery, coworking, indoor pickleball and a game studio, and the leasing brochures promise nearly 2,000 parking spaces, which in a city that fights over parking is its own kind of amenity.
The site’s history is told on the ground as well as in brochures. Community tours walk the Ford building’s original skylights and wood-block floors, the Army’s rail spurs and the coal-fired boilers that still stand behind the water tower, and the leasing materials carry a timeline from 1924 through the Army years, the 1967 sale, Eckerd, Rite Aid and ATCO’s 2017 opening. The Levine Museum of the New South, which stages its Día de Muertos festival here with the Latin American Coalition, has written its own account of the site’s innovations, from Ford’s conveyor lines to the missiles.
Why it matters
Camp North End is the largest and boldest adaptive reuse project Charlotte has attempted, in a city that generally demolishes instead of adapts. The buildings that made cars for Ford and missiles for the Army now make coffee, art and rent, and the developers chose to keep the history visible instead of sand it off.
The neighborhood around it, about 9,000 residents north of Uptown, is changing fast because of it, and whether that change serves the people who worked at Eckerd is the open question. The murals are the easy part. The name, at least, remembers who was here first.