The many lives of Plaza Midwood

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Editor’s note: Charlotte is a city of nearly 200 neighborhoods. Each boasts its own unique history, and today, we continue our occasional series called “Love Thy Neighborhood” that explains how they shaped what the Queen City is today.

by John Short

Plaza Midwood was never meant to look like Charlotte’s other streetcar suburbs like Dilworth and Elizabeth. Instead, it began as an accidental collage of separate subdivisions, competing architectural styles and cultural movements.

The neighborhood’s identity emerged layer by layer. Farm pastures and strawberry fields yielded to a country club, a grand streetcar boulevard and rows of quiet bungalows. Later, modest storefronts along Central Avenue grew into future retail behemoths and, over the decades, residents stitched distinct districts into a unified community. 

Never adhering to a tidy master plan, Plaza Midwood has spent a century absorbing new eras of investment without completely erasing the ones that came before, turning constant reinvention into a defining rhythm.

In the late 1800s, the area now known as Plaza Midwood was a bucolic mishmash of farms, woodlands and wagon roads. Lawyers Road (eventually changed to Central Avenue) would form the southern boundary, and Poorhouse Road ran perpendicular from uptown to the Mecklenburg County poorhouse, now a part of Spencer Memorial United Methodist Church. A narrow farm access road connected the two roads through a strawberry field, a dirt path that was a far cry from the grand Plaza it would become.

In 1910, a small group of Charlotte's elite businessmen sought to establish the Mecklenburg Country Club (which later became the Charlotte Country Club) amid this eastern farmland expanse, selecting a tract of land along Briar Creek on the north side of Central Avenue. 

But because this site was a prohibitive 2 miles beyond the existing reach of the closest streetcar line at Hawthorne Lane, the stakeholders of the club had to solve a transportation pickle that still impacts the neighborhood to this day. 

The club's founders reached out to the eponymous Edward Dilworth Latta, owner of the existing streetcar system, about extending trolley service to the property. Latta's characteristically pragmatic response was that there was nothing but farmland in the broad stretch from Hawthorne Lane to Briar Creek, and he refused to invest in the extension of the line to support the club founders' vision.

On the same timeline, textile industrialist and real estate developer Paul Chatham had separately acquired tracts of land adjacent to the club site for the development of what he would call Club Acres, a high-end subdivision just to the west of the club's eventual golf course. Given his financial interest in the development of the area, Chatham chose to establish his own streetcar independent of Latta’s transportation monopoly, partnering with Southern Public Utilities, a predecessor to Duke Power, to extend a streetcar system down Central Avenue and up The Plaza, terminating near the club. 

However, to complete this journey from downtown, commuters would have to take the main streetcar line to the stop at Hawthorne and Central, then transfer to the new system's battery-powered rail car. This disjointed and less-desirable commute would slow the development of the area, and many homebuyers of means opted for the more convenient direct streetcar lines to Dilworth, Elizabeth and Myers Park.

With the transportation issue technically settled, the area along the streetcar would eventually develop, as Chatham Estates was soon joined by nearby developments: Midwood, Plaza Heights, Belvedere and others, each catering to a different tier of the socioeconomic ladder. This patchwork of architectural styles, commercial zones and disparate class structures would come to define the eventual neighborhood. Wealthy civic and industrial leaders, like cotton broker Ralph VanLandingham, who sought grand homes on the east side of town, were attracted to The Plaza, a part of Chatham Estates, while later subdivisions like Midwood appealed to a more working and professional class homebuyer.

The area would eventually boom in the early 20th century, also attracting middle- and working-class residents to the quirky, if slightly less convenient, new developments of the area. 

Without a single dominant commercial center or social class, the area of Plaza Midwood would become a fertile ground for retail experimentation. Entrepreneurs found modest storefronts and affordable rents, while residents supported businesses that might have struggled elsewhere. 

The two-story structure at 1500 Central Ave. was one of the first commercial buildings to appear along this stretch. Opened as Lewis Long's Grocery in 1916, the building enjoyed a run from 2009 to 2022 as the iconic Soul Gastrolounge, and speculation about its next tenant remains a citywide hobby today.

Two decades later, the retail innovation continued when W.T. Harris set up shop a block up the road in 1936 and opened Harris Supermarket along Central Avenue. That store would grow and eventually combine with Teeters Food Mart to form Harris Teeter, which sits on the same site today.

As if incubating just one national chain wasn’t enough, Alvin Levine opened a shoe shop called Pic 'N Pay in 1957, and his brother Leon opened the first Family Dollar store two years later at 1510 Central Ave. Pic ‘N Pay would expand nationwide, and Family Dollar would eventually define the category of discount retail. 

The innovation wasn’t strictly about retail. Mecklenburg Country Club investor Fred Laxton would experiment with radio transmission in a backyard chicken coop in Club Acres, which would ultimately grow into the first commercial radio station in North Carolina, WBT, in 1922.

Like many American urban neighborhoods, Plaza Midwood entered a period of profound transition after World War II. Driven by new suburban development elsewhere and widespread automobile ownership in the 1950s and ’60s, the Central Avenue corridor yielded momentum to suburban malls in SouthPark and Eastland that attracted Charlotte's residents. Businesses closed, and home values declined across Plaza Midwood.

What city leaders increasingly viewed as obsolescence attracted young residents who could not afford Charlotte's newer neighborhoods. These residents transformed the area into a hub of bars, record stores, vintage clothing boutiques and music venues, which established Plaza Midwood as a creative counterweight to Charlotte's banking and business culture. Businesses like The Penguin Drive-in, which opened in 1954, and Reflection Sound Studio, which opened in 1969, encapsulated the artsy, eccentric spirit of the neighborhood that residents deemed worth protecting. 

By the 1970s, neighborhood residents increasingly understood that preserving this unique community required thinking beyond the original subdivision boundaries of Chatham Estates, Club Acres, Midwood and Plaza Heights. Coinciding with the threat of a highway expansion, the time was right for the collection of developments to begin thinking of itself as a single neighborhood, and the Plaza Midwood Neighborhood Association was born.

The efforts of this group resulted in Plaza Midwood earning recognition on the National Register of Historic Places and securing local historic district protections in 1992. Beyond preserving buildings, these designations preserved the visual continuity and distinctive character that had begun attracting new residents.  

As investment and growth increased during the post-2008 financial crisis boom, so did rents for residents and businesses. Icons like the Dairy Queen walk-up window have vanished, pushed out by a rent structure that favors the new and national. The same neighborhood that had once attracted newcomers because of its affordability became increasingly expensive. 

But long before adaptive reuse became a planning buzzword, Plaza Midwood showed Charlotte that historic storefronts, modest bungalows and eclectic commercial corridors could attract investment without being erased. In a city often defined by reinvention, the neighborhood offered a model of growth through preservation.  

More than any architectural style or commercial district, the ability to absorb change without entirely surrendering its identity is what turned an accidental collection of subdivisions into one of Charlotte's most iconic neighborhoods.

John Short is a freelance writer and co-host of The Charlotte Podcast who loves digging up Charlotte’s past and pondering its future. Say hey when you see him on the streetcar.

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Today's supporting sponsor is Trinity Episcopal School. Register for Trinity Episcopal School's Kindergarten Open House on Tuesday, Sept. 29, at 9:30 a.m., to learn about Trinity's academic program and its community of curious learners and leaders.