Charlotte

We arrived in Charlotte on a Sunday, which anyone who has been will tell you is a mistake and also a gift. Uptown — they call the center Uptown, not downtown, and I never got a straight answer as to why — was almost empty, the great banking towers standing silent over swept sidewalks. Lia and I walked the length of Tryon Street with our coffees, our footsteps echoing, and for a moment the city felt like a stage set built for someone else’s Monday. Then a church let out three blocks over, and suddenly the street filled with families in bright dresses, and the whole place exhaled.

Uptown and the Towers

Charlotte’s skyline is genuinely handsome, and I say that as a Frenchman who is professionally suspicious of glass towers. The Bank of America Corporate Center rises like a crown, and at its feet the little cluster of the Levine Museum and the Mint Museum’s uptown branch gave us somewhere to hide from the heat. We spent an hour in the Harvey B. Gantt Center, named for the city’s first Black mayor, and left quieter than we came. The best surprise was Romare Bearden Park, a green pocket where kids ran through fountains while the towers watched over them like patient uncles.

NASCAR and the Speed of the Place

Neither of us cares about motor racing, which is precisely why the NASCAR Hall of Fame undid us. Lia strapped into a pit-crew simulator and dropped a lug nut, cackling, while I stood before a banked track section steep enough to make my stomach turn just looking at it. The building tells the story of the sport as a Southern thing — moonshine runners outrunning the law on back roads, which is a far more romantic origin than I expected. We came out converts, sort of, arguing happily about whether we’d ever actually watch a race.

Plaza Midwood and the Real City

Uptown is the postcard; Plaza Midwood is where we’d live. This is the Charlotte of bungalows and tattoo parlors, of a diner called the Diamond and secondhand shops that smell of old paper. We ate barbecue with our fingers, the vinegar sharp and Carolina-proper, and Lia found a record she’d been hunting for years. In the evening we wandered NoDa, the arts district up the road, where a brewery had set out picnic tables and a band played something loose and warm. Nobody was performing being cool. They just were.

Getting There

Charlotte Douglas International Airport is one of the busiest hubs in the American South, so flights arrive from nearly everywhere, and the light rail — the LYNX Blue Line — carried us from South End straight into Uptown for the price of a coffee. If you’re driving, the city sits at the crossroads of two interstates and makes an easy stop between the mountains and the coast. Give it two days. Skip the temptation to only see the towers; the porches are the point.