Live in Old Irving Park

Old Irving Park is a line on the City's own estimated map. The City draws it on the neighborhood layer published for its traffic-calming program, marked unverified, and its point layer warns that the shapes should not be considered accurate. Clipped to the City limits it covers 725 acres west of North Elm Street and south of Cone Boulevard, with 2,342 residents in 989 housing units in 2020. The layer says Old to separate it from New Irving Park across Cone Boulevard; residents and OpenStreetMap say Irving Park. It is not an association's territory or a plat, and this guide claims nothing about where residents think the name ends.

The club came before the houses. On 22 April 1911 the newly incorporated Greensboro Country Club bought 58.52 acres of A. M. Scales's farm, and in 1912 Scales sold the first lots on Sunset Drive with covenants: a house worth at least $5,000, set fifty feet back, on a lot at least one hundred feet wide. The golf course opened that November. The Irving Park Company, incorporated in 1914, hired John Nolen, who had planned Charlotte's Myers Park; Robert Cridland revised the plan around 1920, and the company was dissolved in 1940. Land holding 1,713 of today's residents came into the city in 1923, the rest in 1951, 1955 and 1956.

The historic district is recognition, not review. The Irving Park Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1995 for its houses of 1911 to 1941, holds 509 of the residents. A Register listing restricts nothing a private owner does with private money, and none of the City's three local historic districts, where a certificate of appropriateness is required before exterior work, reaches here. What reaches a buyer is the deed: the 1912 covenants were written into the deeds, and whether any still bind a given lot was not read. Outside the district most houses date from the 1950s or later.

The tax bill is on 2022 values, for one more year. Guilford County's 78.95 cents and the City's 79.85 make 158.80 cents per $100 for fiscal 2027, charged on the 2022 revaluation's values because Senate Bill 889 put the 2026 reappraisal off to the 2027 bills. Buying does not reset the assessment, so the seller's bill is the guide to the first one. North Carolina has no homestead exemption for an ordinary buyer; the County's relief programs are for low-income older owners, owners with disabilities and disabled veterans. Stormwater and solid waste come on the City's water bill, read only secondhand and not quoted here. Nobody publishes a sale price for this neighborhood: Zillow's typical value for the whole 27408 ZIP was $346,268 in August 2026, a ZIP figure and not this guide's.

The practical position. No resident lived on a block in a mapped flood hazard area in 2020, and the point is in zone X on a panel effective 10 June 2026. The nearest bus is Route 17 on Battleground Avenue, 0.79 km away and hourly at midday. Moses Cone Hospital is 1.65 km down North Elm Street. The census tract holding 2,007 of the residents counts 5.5% of its people in college, with wide margins.

Worth knowing before you commit

Read the deed, not the Register listing

The 1995 district restricts no owner; the 1912 covenants may still run with the lot

---

• Ask the closing attorney which recorded covenants bind the lot, from setbacks to lot width
• Check whether the house is in the National Register district: 509 of the 2,342 residents are
• Work the 2026 bill from the seller's assessment at 158.80 cents per $100, and expect the 2027 bill to move on the 2026 value
• Look the address up on the state's Flood Risk Information System; the creek corridors carry the mapped hazard
• Ask about association dues and the water bill's fees, neither of which this guide could read

How Old Irving Park got here

• 1903Preservation Greensboro's history says the developer A. M. Scales, with the Southern Real Estate Company, began acquiring land in what is now Old Irving Park as early as 1903.
• 1911The Greensboro Country Club is incorporated on 3 April and on 22 April buys 58.52 acres of the Scales farm, west of North Elm Street and north of what was then Sunset Avenue, for $11,700. Its deed carries covenants written to protect both the club and Scales's coming development.
• 1912Scales sells the first lots along the south side of Sunset Drive, on a plat by the civil engineer W. B. Trogdon, with covenants: a house worth at least $5,000, set at least fifty feet back, on a lot at least one hundred feet wide. The golf course opens in November.
• 1913The earliest houses go up on Sunset Drive around Meadowbrook Terrace, then called D'Eschaler Terrace, and survive. The name Irving Park appears in a deed by March; Preservation Greensboro dates the choice of name to January.
• 1914The Irving Park Company is incorporated on 2 June, and its first brochure, listing A. W. McAlister as president, announces that it has hired the Cambridge landscape architect John Nolen, whose plan of about 1914 to 1915 runs from North Elm Street west to Battleground Avenue.
• 1920Around 1920 the landscape architect Robert B. Cridland enlarges and revises Nolen's plan, adding the land north of Irving Place and east of Granville Road and laying out Hood Park with curving walks. Preservation Greensboro dates Cridland's plan to 1916.
• 1921The country club's first clubhouse burns on 5 November and is rebuilt the next year. The Elm Street Bridge, which the National Register nomination counts among the district's resources, dates from the same year.
• 1923The land that holds 1,713 of the guide's 2020 residents comes into the city, on the City's historical annexation layer.
• 1925Between 1925 and 1930 the golf course is redesigned to its eighteen-hole form by Donald J. Ross, by Preservation Greensboro's account.
• 1940The Irving Park Company, in receivership through the Depression, is dissolved. No house is built in the district during the Second World War, and the houses that follow from the late 1940s are smaller and in newer styles.
• 1956The last of the guide's land comes into the city: the City's layer dates 238 of the 2020 residents' blocks to 1951, 67 to 1955 and 324 to 1956.
• 1995The Irving Park Historic District, the most intact part of the neighborhood from 1911 to 1941, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places on 21 February, from a nomination by Laura A. W. Phillips of Preservation Greensboro.
• 2026New FEMA flood map panels take effect on 10 June, and Senate Bill 889, signed on 19 June, holds the County's 2026 reappraisal back from the 2026 tax bills.

What the map does not show: which of OpenStreetMap's parks are The Meadow and The Dale was not matched, and what any of them holds was not read. For fields and long walks, Country Park and Lake Brandt are a drive northwest.

Elsewhere in Greensboro, not Old Irving Park

The free option is the neighborhood itself: the planted boulevard on the first block of Sunset Drive, the curving streets and the small parks.