East Charlotte
Plaza Midwood and Elizabeth inside Route 4, Cotswold's ranch houses just outside it, and the Central Avenue corridor beyond. The most linguistically diverse blocks in the Carolinas.
Photograph: Plaza Midwood, Charlotte, NC 28205, USA · James Willamor · CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
5 neighborhoods east of uptown, and the widest internal range of any side here. Plaza Midwood and Elizabeth are early streetcar suburbs of bungalows and front porches, Plaza Midwood a mile and a half from uptown and Elizabeth the shortest walk to uptown of any front-porch neighborhood in the city; both have gentrified hard since 2010. Cotswold is 1950s ranch houses on quarter-acre lots just outside Route 4, being torn down and replaced one at a time. The Central Avenue corridor beyond it (the blocks around Eastland) is where roughly a third of Charlotte's foreign-born population lives, and where the city's best food is.
East Charlotte is the part of the city where the two Charlottes are most visibly adjacent. On one side of Eastway Drive a 1,400-square-foot bungalow trades for three-quarters of a million dollars; on the other, strip malls hold Vietnamese, Salvadoran, Ethiopian and Cambodian businesses and the housing is among the cheapest inside I-485. Two things to weigh. Transit: the Gold Line streetcar reaches Elizabeth and Plaza Midwood but goes nowhere else useful, and the long-planned Silver Line east–west light rail has no funded date. And schools: assignment east of Route 4 varies more block by block than anywhere else in the county, so check the actual address rather than the neighborhood.
5 communities, guide by guide
Cotswold
Postwar ranch houses on big lots inside Route 4, being replaced one at a time. The clearest example of a Charlotte teardown market.
- 1950s–60s
- When most of the neighborhood was built. Brick ranch houses on quarter-acre lots
- Route 4
- The inner ring road that defines the eastern edge: everything here is an inside-the-ring address
Eastland
The Central Avenue corridor: the most linguistically diverse blocks in the Carolinas, and the dead mall site the city spent twenty years arguing over.
- 1975
- Eastland Mall opens; it closes in 2010 and is demolished in 2013
- 78 acres
- The Eastland Yards redevelopment on the site: housing, retail, a park and a sports venue
Eastover
The most expensive square mile in the Carolinas by median sale, a 1920s Myers Park spillover of twenty-five hundred people behind the Mint Museum.
- 1927
- The year the E. C. Griffith Company laid out Eastover on two dairy farms, as Charlotte's first automobile suburb
- 2,580
- Residents of Quality of Life profile area 364, which covers Eastover, at the 2020 census
Elizabeth
The second-oldest streetcar suburb, wrapped around a hospital campus, and the shortest walk to uptown of anywhere with front porches.
- 1890s
- Developed as Charlotte's second streetcar suburb, after Dilworth
- 1905
- Independence Park opens. The first public park in Charlotte
Plaza Midwood
Bungalows, dive bars and the fastest-changing blocks in the city, at the point where east Charlotte's immigrant business corridor begins.
- 1910
- Laid out as Chatham Estates, with a trolley line down Central Avenue to sell the lots
- 1992
- Part of the neighborhood designated a local historic district. The Plaza, Thomas Avenue, and stretches of Pecan and Clement
Photographs: Little Sugar Creek Greenway by Leo Caplanides, Public Information Officer for Mecklenburg County Government, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · The Blue Line by DearEdward from New York, NY, USA, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons · Biltmore Drive in Pharrsdale by Nyttend, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons · Tryon Street by Mark Clifton, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.
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