Today, LaMelo Ball was traded from Charlotte to Minnesota. Hornets fans may be sad. People driving in Uptown may be relieved. The trade seems to be fantastic for Charlotte, and terrible for the Timberwolves (One league source told The Athletic “I don’t know what they are doing lol”). People remarked that this move will allow LaMelo to, you know, drive snowmobiles and enjoy Minneapolis’s Skyway System, which in a twist of fate, was one of the inspirations for Charlotte’s slowly dying Overstreet Mall. He will no longer be a fixture in the Gateway to Gastonia.

But! Think about the human side of all this. This celebrity was just like us. A real person. A real person who liked to drive a go-kart on the rooftop of his condo.

Apparently he liked to do this quite a bit! That’s according to literally everybody who worked in an office building nearby, many of whom would post videos of LaMelo living out his MarioKart dreams.

However! You may be wondering: What did the person living right underneath the rooftop think about all of this? Was it loud? Annoying? Has that person ever banged a broom on the ceiling of the penthouse below and yelled at LaMelo to keep it down? I suppose to find out for sure, you’d have to ask the person who owns the penthouse: Michael Jordan.

MJ? LaMelo? In the same place? What is this magical building? Why is there one singular tower in Charlotte that once hosted some of the greatest basketball and football talent that North Carolina has ever seen? Today, through the magic of public records, we unlock the mystery of The Trust, a former bank that got a second life as a bachelor pad for rich, mostly-single dudes with money to spend and a location that was both visible and secure. Well, sort of.

A century ago, 139 S. Tryon Street in Charlotte was home to a hotel that later, like so much Uptown real estate, turned into offices for a bank. Home Federal Savings and Loan was on the rise in the 1950s, and wanted a modern new headquarters. So it tore down the old hotel in the mid 1960s and built a seven-story modernist structure with distinctly Japanese overtones. At the time, most of Charlotte’s new skyscrapers were glass and steel boxes. This one stood out.

By the 1980s, Home Federal was one of the biggest banks in the state, which led to its takeover by First Charter Bank in the 1990s. The headquarters moved down the street, and First Charter put the building up for sale.

The building was given historic status by the city in 2002 (despite the objections of council members who said wasn’t old enough). Even so, it sat mostly vacant for about five years before Jim Donnelley decided to convert it into condos. Donnelley and his wife had moved to Charlotte in 2005, bought a building uptown, converted the upper floor to condos, and opened the Emerson Joseph men’s grooming lounge on the street. They thought they could repeat that formula at 139. S. Tryon, which they renamed The Trust.

It wasn’t going to be, uh, affordable housing. “We won’t have any lower-priced units,” Donnelley told the Charlotte Observer in 2006.

By 2008, right in the midst of the looming financial crisis, seven of the eight condos on the upper floors had been sold, and a Brazilian steakhouse, Chima, opened up at street level. My Charlotte friends and I used to celebrate ChimaFest one a year. We ate a lot. We got the meat sweats. It was there that I learned life’s most important lesson: Pace yourself.

So who moved into The Trust? At first, there were a lot of single dudes with money to spend. Two of the co-founders of Direct Digital, an online nutritional supplement company, bought condos early on. So did some unmarried guys with connections to the financial industry. Even in the middle of a global financial meltdown, the units sold for close to their predicted asking price of $1.5 million.

Then, the athletes showed up. The first was Boris Diaw, a Charlotte Bobcat and Frenchman who seemed to enjoy the finer things in life and, also, sometimes, basketball. He bought a condo on the third floor in 2009.

Then, in 2010, about nine months after he bought a controlling interest in the Charlotte Bobcats, Michael Jordan closed on the two units on the top floor and combined then into one 7,000-square-foot penthouse. He also got his own private elevator. That condo features prominently in a 2013 ESPN story about Jordan’s 50th birthday, written by Wright Thompson. The story begins, however, inside the arena uptown:

He did not, in fact, own the building! He did, however, own the penthouse a few block away.

In 2012, the Bobcats waived Diaw, and he sold his condo. By then, Charlotte had become enthralled by another athlete: Cam Newton. A month after Diaw left town, a company formed by Newton’s father Cecil bought a condo two floors above. In 2015, right around the beginning of the Panthers Super Bowl season, Newton bought another condo downstairs on the fourth floor. He decorated it with, among other things, a Pepsi machine adorned with his own image.

Then! In 2020, not long after LaMelo Ball showed up in town, Newton rented that fourth floor condo to him. After he left for the New England Patriots, he also rented his fifth floor condo to Jermaine Jackson, who had been Ball’s manager since high school. Remember that guy for a moment.

First, let me take a quick detour to note one other resident you may have heard of. In May 2014, the condo across the hall from Diaw’s old place was bought by Chris Daughtry. If that name rings it’s a bell, it’s probably because you watched American Idol in 2006 (Daughtry got to the final four, but was eliminated). Since then, he formed a band called—wait for it—Daughtry, and in 2014, went in on a condo in The Trust with his wife. That didn’t last long: He sold it a little more than a year later. Before that, he lived in a home he built off of Haw River Road in Oak Ridge (FULL DISCLOSURE: I live in Oak Ridge! A few miles away! My house is much smaller!). In another weird convergence of celebrity, Daughtry lived just down the road from NASCAR legend Kevin Harvick. Both sold their property more than a decade ago, but a new celebrity has emerged in another house ON THE SAME ROAD. That’s right: Twister Sister singer Dee Snider. I swear I am not making any of this up.

Back to the sports stuff. In 2024, Newton sold Ball the fourth floor condo that he’d been renting and Ball, as we said much earlier, celebrated by driving a go kart around on the roof. Things did not go as smoothly for his manager, though. In May, a judge evicted Jackson from Newton’s condo (which is still owned by his father, Cecil), saying he owed more than $150,000 for 11 months worth of rent. Jackson counted by saying the place needed repairs, had mold and mildew, and that the aquarium was leaking.

Also, you’d figure a building that housed millionaires and top-tier athletes (and has a bank vault converted to a private wine cellar) would have top-tier security. Not necessarily! Apparently it used to be extremely easy to get into the parking garage (People would yell and startle MJ, and at least one person broke in to sit inside LaMelo’s Ferrari). Two years ago, a guy who worked for an owner got his ass kicked by a random dude in the elevator. The HOA for the building told WCNC-TV that they were gonna fix the problems.

All that said, the entire building is still extremely pricey. The condo across from the one LaMelo’s manager was renting sold in 2019 for $3.9 million, making it the priciest residential sale ever in Uptown Charlotte. Another condo on the sixth floor, owned by the husband and wife behind Little Hardware, is currently up for sale. Others, like Cam Newton, have quietly held on to their property. Jordan still owns the penthouse (technically, it’s listed in the name of a company run by his longtime business manager, Curtis Polk).

There’s no word on what LaMelo will do just yet. After all, he just found out today that he’s moving! Even so, his legend lives on. Real estate listings for other units show his camouflaged Hummer parked in the garage (before he wrecked it on Trade Street). And one real estate agency bragged about it this way: “One detail most people don't know: The Trust has a private rooftop terrace exclusive to residents — the same rooftop where LaMelo Ball famously rode a go-kart.” Sure, LaMelo may no longer be a Hornet, but he’ll always be turning laps on the terrace of our hearts.