While I was doing research on last week’s newsletter about the surprisingly old building that housed Charlotte’s classiest strip joint (until recently), I found the picture above. Well! Would you look at that! A pool inside a bubble! Apparently they’re not just for outdoor dining and NBA playoffs during a pandemic!
This picture is from the state archives’ postcard collection, and it shows the Manger Motor Inn on Tryon Street in Uptown Charlotte. Bill Halsey, whose mother operated the motel’s gift shop, explains what’s going on here:
The bubble was a translucent plastic with nylon cord reinforcement. The bubble was blown up and held up by a large and noisy heater blowing hot air. There were two doors. One was an emergency exit and one was the main enter/exit door. When both doors were opened at the same time the bubble would start to collapse.
Ah yes, the finest in modern technology, easily foiled by kids who can hold two doors open at once.
The motel itself opened on March 2, 1960, and an ad in the Charlotte Observer noted, pridefully, that the place had year-round air conditioning and a heating system that could warm up a building twice its size. “Guests can dial their own local calls,” one article proudly announced. No operators needed! In fact, each room also had two phones, one near the bed and another near the shower which, the motel noted, was safe to answer while you bathed, because phones run on very low electrical current. Finally, everyday folks could realize the pinnacle of luxury: answering the phone while dripping wet and naked without fear of electrocution.
Enough about the phones. The place had 160 rooms and cost $2 million to build, which is like $20 million in today’s dollars. It also had the only bubble-enclosed pool east of the Mississippi—a “Schjeldome” built by the G.T. Schjeldahl Co. of Northfield, Minnesota. (The company’s namesake also launched the world’s first communications satellite that same year, which, uh, was probably a bigger deal). I could go on, but this motel was such a big deal that the March 2, 1960 edition of the Observer dedicated nine pages to its grand opening. Journalistically, that feels like overkill. But from a revenue standpoint, it was a coup—seemingly every contractor and vendor connected to the place bought an ad congratulating the Manger for, you know, finally being open. Things went off the rails quickly though. The next day, Charlotte got a hit by a huge snowstorm. The first guests couldn’t get out, and new guests couldn’t get in. Still, the Manger was profitable and quickly became the nicest place to meet and stay in uptown.
It also was the site of a low-key piece of significant history. In May 1963, after speaking at the commencement ceremonies for Charlotte’s then-segregated Black high schools, Martin Luther King, Jr. stayed the night at the Manger. That stay was orchestrated by mayor Stan Brookshire and his race-relations committee, and it marked the first time that a Black guest had stayed in what had been whites-only hotels in Charlotte. By checking in at the Manger, MLK had quietly integrated the city’s hotels.
The Manger Motor Inn eventually started to fade as an upscale hotel, and its parent company sold it in 1974. Over the next two decades, it went through five owners and changed its name to the Executive Inn. Toward the end, it had started shedding guests and closed for good in 1986. After that, it became a retirement center called Renaissance Place. In 1993, when living in Uptown Charlotte was still a novel concept, the place started leasing out apartments to non-retired people. It was there until 2006, when First Colony Capital bought the two acres it sat on for $10 million and tore it down. They said they’d listen to “uptown stakeholders” and others before deciding what to do with the property.
They took a while to decide! Eventually, part of the site became the Skyhouse Apartments, when went up in 2015. But the front of the property along North Tryon (between 9th and 10th streets) is one of the shockingly rare vacant lots in Uptown Charlotte. It still sits empty.
So what happened to the bubble? Apparently it was a whole lot of trouble and kept turning to rubble. The first inflatable plastic dome only lasted a couple of days because a valve was left open, and the out-rushing air “tore it to shreds.” A replacement was brought in, but a wind storm ripped it apart during the following winter. A third, heavier and thicker bubble was installed, and that bubble went up at least through 1965.
The pool and its plastic dome eventually went away, but this was far from the only bubble. Other “Schjeldomes” went up over other pools across the country, and were used as storage facilities and even the covering for the Schjeldahl plastics factory itself (One article noted that it was the first time a company had made its own factory out of its own product). One dome served as the cover of a “bubble office building,” which saved energy by using natural sunlight instead of electric lights, although a fabric sail was set up inside up to provide employees some shade. The company, renamed Sheldahl, is still up and running with more than 800 employees. Their workplace today is a little more traditional. According to one blog: “Their offices have roofs.”