Guides
54 pages, each built from the research library. Nothing here is written from memory or rewritten from another guide.
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Free things to do in Charlotte
Charlotte is unusually good at this, mostly because the city and county own so much of what is worth seeing. This page is what we…
/free/Charlotte Douglas: everything except the flight
Getting through CLT is mostly about knowing four or five things nobody tells you. This page is those things, taken from the…
/visiting/clt-airport/Where to check what's on
We don't run an events calendar, on purpose. Event listings go out of date faster than anything else on a website, and a guide…
/about/where-to-check-what-is-on/Just moved to Charlotte: the first few weeks
The admin, in the order it usually bites.
/living-here/first-weeks/Accessible Charlotte
Everything on this page is what an organisation publishes about its own accessibility, quoted or closely paraphrased, dated, and…
/practical/accessibility/Outdoors
Where to park for a greenway walk
Mecklenburg County's greenways are easy to reach on foot if you happen to live beside one, and surprisingly awkward if you do…
/outdoors/greenway-parking/Playgrounds, spraygrounds and water play
Mecklenburg County records a playground at 148 parks. Ten have a sprayground. This page lists all of them, from the county's own…
/families/playgrounds-and-water-play/Dog parks in and around Charlotte
Mecklenburg County flags fifteen parks as having a dog park. Nine have a Charlotte address; six are in the surrounding towns.…
/pets/Day trips from Charlotte
Charlotte sits within reach of granite domes, the highest peak east of the Mississippi, a gold mine, a 600-foot rock face and the…
/day-trips/Charlotte on a rainy day
Charlotte gets proper rain, and it tends to arrive on the afternoon you had planned to be outside. Here is what is indoors, from…
/things-to-do/rainy-day/Eat & drink
Halal food in Charlotte: butchers, markets and how to check
Start with the thing most guides won't tell you: no halal certification body publishes a certified list covering Charlotte.
/eat-and-drink/halal/Alcohol-free Charlotte: where to go when you're not drinking
A city that markets itself on breweries can be a hard place to spend an evening if you don't drink — whether that's for faith…
/eat-and-drink/alcohol-free/Charlotte's social districts
A social district is a defined area where you may walk around outdoors with an open drink. It is not a general right, it is not…
/eat-and-drink/social-districts/History & culture
How Charlotte's neighbourhoods were made
Most of what gets written about Charlotte's neighbourhoods is estate-agent copy. This page is built from a different kind of…
/neighbourhoods/how-they-were-made/Public art in Charlotte
Mecklenburg County's public art register lists 242 installations, and nearly all of them are publicly owned: 132 works belong to…
/culture/public-art/Brooklyn: the neighbourhood Charlotte demolished
If you stand in Charlotte's Second Ward today — among the government buildings, the car parks and Marshall Park — you are…
/history/brooklyn/Charlotte's historic cemeteries
Uptown Charlotte's largest public green space is a cemetery — and the way it was laid out tells you more about the city than most…
/history/cemeteries/Gold
Charlotte is a banking city. People tend to date that back to the 1980s, or to the mergers of the 1990s, and to treat it as a…
/history/gold/Charlotte's lost places
Getting a building onto the National Register of Historic Places is a long, careful, evidence-heavy process. It confers an…
/history/lost-places/Practical
Parking in Charlotte
Most parking advice for Charlotte is a list of prices, and most of it is wrong by the time you read it. This page is about the…
/getting-around/parking/Where to pray in Charlotte
Most city guides will tell you where the cathedral is. Almost none will tell you where you can actually pray if you are passing…
/places-of-worship/where-to-pray/Funerals, burial and end of life in Charlotte
If someone has just died and you are looking for what to do next, the practical section is first. The rest can wait.
/practical/funerals/Sunday in Charlotte
This is not a list of what's on. Things that are on change; this page is about the things that don't.
/practical/sunday/Everything else
A layover at Charlotte Douglas
Most people who pass through Charlotte never see Charlotte. CLT is a connecting hub, and an enormous number of its passengers are…
/practical/clt-layover/Acabas de llegar a Charlotte: las primeras semanas
Los trámites, en el orden en que suelen aparecer.
/es/recien-llegado/An architecture walk through Uptown, built from the register
Twenty-four properties on the National Register of Historic Places sit inside a roughly twenty-five-block area of Uptown…
/history/architecture/uptown-walk/Bechtler Museum of Modern Art
Most museum collections are assembled. This one was lived with.
/things-to-do/bechtler-museum/Carolina Raptor Center, Huntersville
It started with one bird. In 1975 someone brought an injured broad-winged hawk to Dr Richard Brown, an ornithologist at UNC…
/outdoors/carolina-raptor-center/Charlotte Mailbox
Private mailboxes with a street-style address rather than a PO Box number, from a staffed counter — held behind the counter or in a box you can open at any hour.
/services/mail/charlotte-mailbox/Charlotte Museum of History and the 1774 Alexander Rock House
The oldest building in Charlotte is not in Uptown. It is a stone house on an eight-acre campus in east Charlotte, finished in…
/things-to-do/charlotte-museum-of-history/Charlotte Tech Repair
Board-level repair done on the premises rather than shipped to a depot, plus consoles, drones and devices most shops turn away.
/services/device-repair/charlotte-tech-repair/Charlotte en español: dónde encontrar servicios en tu idioma
Esta página trata de las organizaciones de Charlotte que trabajan entre idiomas: quiénes son, qué dicen que hacen y cómo…
/es/servicios-en-espanol/Charlotte in other languages
This page is about the organisations in Charlotte that work across languages — who they are, what they say they do, and how to…
/community/languages/Charlotte's greenways: what they are and where they go
Mecklenburg County's greenways are not, strictly speaking, footpaths. The county classes them as linear parks and as…
/outdoors/greenways/Charlotte-Print
A print counter in University City. Plan sets and blueprints, signage, business stationery and binding — quoted and proofed before anything goes on the press.
/services/printing/charlotte-print/
Dilworth
Dilworth was laid out for Edward Dilworth Latta, and it kept his middle name. The National Register of Historic Places lists it…
/neighbourhoods/dilworth/Getting around Charlotte
Charlotte is a driving city with a usable spine of rail and a greenway network that does more work than visitors expect. Whether…
/getting-around/Historic Rosedale
The neighbours called it Frew's Folly. Archibald Frew, Charlotte's postmaster and tax collector, finished his Federal-style house…
/things-to-do/historic-rosedale/How we choose what to recommend
Some businesses on this site are here because we have a direct interest in them. We say so, every time, on the page itself.…
/about/how-we-choose/
Levine Center for the Arts (Uptown cultural cluster)
Two blocks of South Tryon Street hold four cultural institutions, which makes this the most efficient cultural afternoon in…
/things-to-do/levine-center-for-the-arts/Libraries in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County
Charlotte Mecklenburg Library runs 23 locations across the county. A library card is the single most useful free thing a newcomer…
/living-here/libraries/Local landmark or National Register? What the labels actually mean
If you have looked into an old Charlotte building you will have met both phrases, often on the same property, and they are not…
/history/how-designation-works/
NoDa (North Charlotte)
NoDa is short for North Davidson, the street it grew up along. The name is recent; the place is not. On the National Register of…
/neighbourhoods/noda-north-charlotte/Places of worship in Charlotte
What this is, and what it is not. This is a researched selection of Charlotte's faith communities, not a directory of every…
/places-of-worship/Qué hacer gratis en Charlotte
Charlotte se presta a esto más de lo que parece, sobre todo porque la ciudad y el condado son dueños de buena parte de lo que…
/es/gratis/Running a small business in Charlotte
Company formation and registered agent requirements are handled by the North Carolina Secretary of State, not by the city or…
/for-business-owners/
The Historic West End
West of Uptown, around the campus of Johnson C. Smith University, is a network of neighbourhoods that has been the centre of…
/neighbourhoods/historic-west-end/
The Trail of History walk, Little Sugar Creek Greenway
1.3 miles one way · paved · Midtown Charlotte
/walks/trail-of-history/Thirteen Charlotte neighbourhoods, and where their histories are written down
Charlotte is often described as a city that knocked down its own past. That is true in places — and one of those places…
/neighbourhoods/historic-series/
University City
Charlotte's north-eastern quarter is organised around a university, a boulevard and a rail line, and that is more interesting…
/neighbourhoods/university-city/We opened 1,360 Charlotte business websites. 29 of them weren't the business any more.
Building this guide meant opening the website of every business we wanted to list, rather than trusting the link we found it…
/about/link-rot/West Charlotte greenways: Irwin Creek, Stewart Creek and Wesley Heights
Charlotte's greenway attention goes almost entirely to Little Sugar Creek. The west-side network gets very little of it, which is…
/walks/west-charlotte-greenways/Who designed Charlotte: the planned suburbs
Drive through Dilworth, Myers Park or Elizabeth and the streets curve where a developer working to a grid would have run them…
/history/planned-suburbs/