This fall, a garden on Ridgewood Avenue turns 100 years old. A few blocks over on Providence Road, a Lagree studio that opened in February and a women's club still under construction are both selling Myers Park something the neighborhood has had, quietly and mostly for free, since 1926: a reason to park the car and go be around other people.
That is not a coincidence worth shrugging off. It is the most interesting thing happening in Myers Park this year, and almost nobody is saying it out loud, because the two halves of the story live in different sections of the local news. One is a garden club calendar. The other is a commercial real estate press release. Put them next to each other and you get a neighborhood accidentally proving, in real time, that it already solved the problem its newest businesses are charging membership fees to fix.
A Garden Built to Keep People Out, Now Inviting Them In
Wing Haven Garden and Bird Sanctuary sits at 248 Ridgewood Avenue, built by Elizabeth and Edwin Clarkson as a private refuge for birds and the two people who tended it. Ten houses down the same street, Elizabeth Lawrence, a garden writer whose work is still cited by horticulturists nationally, kept her own living laboratory of a garden. Neither property was designed with the public in mind. They were designed to be left alone in.
A century later, both gardens are open to visitors, alongside the newer SEED Wildlife and Children's Garden next door, and together they run more than 40 public programs a year, from story times to bird counts to lecture series. This year the centennial gets a specific marker: Wing Haven's Fall Dinner is built around the 100th anniversary of the bird sanctuary and the shared history of all three gardens. The more accessible version of that milestone is the Fall Plant Sale, with Member's Day on Wednesday, October 7, and the sale open to the general public October 8 through 10, including a full Saturday session from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Wing Haven Nursery. Admission is free for the sale weekend, donations welcomed but not required.
The point is not that a garden is having a birthday. The point is what that garden was built for in the first place: a walkable, unhurried place to be a person around other people, without needing a car to get there or a reservation to stay. That is the exact pitch three new Providence Road businesses are making this year, at a price.
Providence Road's New Businesses Are Selling the Same Deal, at a Different Price
QC Lagree opened in February 2026 inside Selwyn Shoppes at 2909 Selwyn Avenue, in the middle of Myers Park. Founder Christina Langrall built the studio around the Mega Pro, a Megaformer machine, with classes running a tight 40 minutes. It joined a fitness scene that had, until recently, sent Myers Park residents to Elizabeth or South End for a Lagree class. Now it is a walk or a short drive from home.
Down at 507 Providence Road, in the building that used to be a Ben & Jerry's and then a fitness center and dietitian's office, Moxie has signed a lease for the whole space. Founder Margaret Cheatham Williams, who left a six-year run at the New York Times before landing in Charlotte, built the concept around a specific complaint: as remote work grows, so does loneliness, and women in particular are tired of hopping in and out of the car between a coworking desk, a gym, and a place to actually see friends. Moxie is meant to be all three under one roof, with a cafe, a cocktail bar, a provisions market, conference rooms, a podcast studio, and wellness offerings that include Pilates, yoga, massage, and meditation. It is still under construction, targeting an opening in early 2027.
A few doors away, Goodwill opened its first brick and mortar donation drop-off in Myers Park at 813 Providence Road, replacing a donation trailer that used to sit in the same spot. It shares a block with Salted Melon, which is a smaller and less symbolic addition, but it fits the same pattern: the corridor is filling in with places designed to give residents a reason to walk somewhere close instead of driving somewhere else.
Every one of these businesses is answering a version of the same question Wing Haven answered a hundred years ago. How do you get people out of their houses and into contact with their own neighborhood. Wing Haven's answer was a garden gate. Providence Road's answer, this year, is a membership fee.
The Neighborhood Never Actually Lacked This
None of this means Myers Park was starved for community before February 2026. The Booty Loop, the 2.85-mile route that runs Queens Road to Selwyn Avenue to Queens Road West to Hopedale Avenue and back, has been the neighborhood's informal gathering spot for runners, walkers, and cyclists for years. It is also the original home course of 24 Hours of Booty, the charity cycling event that draws hundreds of riders and thousands of spectators to the same stretch of pavement every year. Freedom Park, 98 acres with a 7-acre lake at its center, sits at the edge of the neighborhood and connects to the Little Sugar Creek Greenway, which runs all the way to Plaza Midwood. Longtime residents have been meeting for a deli sandwich at Laurel Market or a slower dinner at Napa on Providence for years, not because a press release told them to, but because those were already the places people went.
What is new is not the desire for a third place. What is new is that the desire is now being packaged, priced, and marketed back to the same residents who already had it built into their sidewalks. That is not a criticism of Moxie or QC Lagree. Plenty of people will be glad to have a Lagree class two minutes from home instead of fifteen. It is simply worth noticing, the way you'd notice a neighbor installing a fence around a yard that never needed one: Myers Park is not discovering community this year. It is watching its oldest and newest institutions solve the exact same problem, a century apart, with different tools.
If you want to see the centennial season in person before it wraps up, a few dates are worth putting on the calendar:
- Wednesday, October 7: Wing Haven's Member's Day for the Fall Plant Sale
- Saturday through Monday, October 8 to 10: the Fall Plant Sale opens to the public, with Saturday running 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Wing Haven Nursery on Ridgewood Avenue
- Ongoing this year: the Wing Haven Foundation's centennial-themed Fall Dinner, marking 100 years since the garden's founding
None of it requires a membership. That is sort of the point.
Myers Park has always made its case in details like these, the ones that don't show up on a listing sheet but shape what it actually feels like to live somewhere. If you're weighing a move into this stretch of Charlotte, or you already call it home and want a clearer read on how a specific block or price point works here, Mackenzie Amirfar can walk through it with you. Let's Connect.
