If you have lived in Myers Park for any stretch of time, you already know the shape of a summer evening here. The oaks along Queens Road throw enough shade to make a 7 p.m. walk feel like 5 p.m., someone is running the loop in a Myers Park High School shirt, and the parking situation at Reid's is a light game of chicken. What is different this year is what happens when you step off the loop and onto Selwyn Avenue for dinner. The strip has turned over quietly, and the summer of 2026 is the first one where the new lineup has fully settled in.
The thesis worth holding as you read: Selwyn Avenue has become Myers Park's second front porch. The 2.85-mile Booty Loop that follows Queens Road to Selwyn Avenue, turns right down Queens Road West to Hopedale Avenue and then back onto Queens Road still gives the neighborhood its silhouette. But the block a step off it, where residents actually spend the golden hour, has shifted from mainstays to a new generation of operators sitting alongside them.
The block that changed while you were at Freedom Park
Three arrivals have reset the center of gravity on Selwyn between roughly Colville and Woodlawn.
Rada, tucked away on Selwyn Avenue, takes its name from the Spanish word for a protected alcove, a harbor where sailors drop anchor, rest, and restore before heading back out to sea. Owner Eloy Roy wanted the restaurant to be a haven where people share a meal and leave renewed. The kitchen is run by Executive Chef Callan Buckles, who grew up in Seattle with parents who both worked as servers and started washing dishes at 14. The signature list reads more coastal European than Southern: clams with vin jaune, meatballs with harissa, gildas, and striploin au poivre, at 2820 Selwyn Avenue, Suite 180. This is not a room built for turnover. Book it when you want the evening to slow down.
A few doors up at 2909 Selwyn, a gym studio with high-intensity, low-impact strength workouts in Myers Park has opened as part of Charlotte's growing Lagree footprint. If you already walk the loop in the morning, the studio's arrival is worth noting only because it changes the sidewalk traffic at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. in a way regulars will feel before they see it.
Then there is The People's Market on a prominent corner along Selwyn Avenue in the Tranquil Court development, in the space Mellow Mushroom occupied for several years, with an open floor plan and covered patio featuring the same bright yellow accents as the Elizabeth location. The menu leans on weekly features from Chef Deacon Ovall alongside scratch-made breakfast, artisan sandwiches and wraps, pizza, salads, smash burgers, bar bites and vegan options. For residents who have been quietly missing the casualness of the old Mellow Mushroom booth, this is the closest replacement Selwyn has produced, and the coffee bar makes it a real morning option instead of only a lunch one.
What the loop actually does this month
The Booty Loop is not a running route this weekend. It is closed to normal foot traffic in a way that reshapes the neighborhood.
The 25th annual 24 Hours of Booty happens July 24–25, 2026, and it is worth planning your Friday evening around, whether you are riding or not.
A few practical things residents rediscover every July:
- The course runs on a police-secured loop through Myers Park, and unlike traditional races or endurance events, participants can set their own mileage goals and ride as much as they like during the 24-hour period. Cars route around it.
- Participants staying the full 24 hours park in the Queens University of Charlotte parking deck, and spectators are encouraged to park outside of the loop. If you are heading to dinner on Selwyn Friday night, walk.
- The event has raised more than $31 million to date for its beneficiaries, and the 24th year alone raised over $1.7 million with 1,100 registered participants and 109 teams across 23 states. That scale is why the neighborhood feels different for 24 hours.
- Giordana Cycling is designing the 2026 jersey, released to riders who raise $1,000, which is why you will see specific kit for the first time this year on every third rider.
The event was founded in 2001 by Spencer Lueders, who got the idea to ride a bike for 24 hours around Charlotte's famed Booty Loop in the Myers Park neighborhood to raise money to help cancer patients. Twenty-five years in, it functions less as a fundraiser and more as the informal summer marker for the neighborhood.
An evening, in order
If you are hosting people who have not been to Myers Park in a year, here is a sequence that uses the new lineup without abandoning the old one:
- 6:00 p.m. Park at Freedom Park and walk the greenway spur into the neighborhood. The Little Sugar Creek Greenway runs along the western edge of the neighborhood, adjacent to Freedom Park, and it puts you within twelve minutes of Selwyn on foot.
- 6:45 p.m. A drink at Selwyn Avenue Pub. It has been at 2801 Selwyn since 1990, welcoming guests to its gathering spot for over 30 years. Sit outside.
- 7:30 p.m. Walk one block to Rada for dinner. Ask for the clams and the striploin. If Rada is booked, The People's Market patio is the low-key alternative.
- 9:15 p.m. Loop back through Queens Road West. This is the stretch known for its canopy of more than 100-year-old oak trees, perfect complements to the mansions and magnificent gardens on the main drag, and it is still the best free thing you can do after dinner in this ZIP code.
The point is not the itinerary. It is that the itinerary is now possible without leaving one block of Selwyn, and it was not this compact in 2023.
The corners that haven't moved
Selwyn's summer works because the new arrivals slot in next to a set of anchors that have not budged. Reid's Fine Foods, Shain Gallery, Selwyn Pub, Myers Park Country Club, the Myers Park Library, KK Bloom Boutique, Clean Catch Fish Market, Wing Haven and Queens University are all inside a half-mile of the same intersection. The library sits at the famously baffling intersection of Queens and Queens and Providence and Providence, in front of the Myers Park Library, which locals treat as a punchline and out-of-town guests treat as a personal insult.
Park Road Shopping Center is the pressure-release valve when Selwyn is full. Within a seven-minute drive you have Amelie's French Bakery, Velvet Taco, Rocksalt, Blackhawk Hardware, Park Road Books, Harris Teeter, Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream, Midwood Smokehouse and the AMC Park Terrace Movies. On a Booty weekend Friday, that is where the neighborhood displaces itself when it wants dinner without the ride traffic.
The greener side of the same evening
Not every summer night is a dinner night. Freedom Park is the reason most Myers Park families never quite feel the need to leave for the mountains in July. Spanning nearly 100 acres at the edge of Myers Park, Freedom Park features scenic walking trails, playgrounds, sports fields, and a picturesque lake, serving as a beloved gathering space for families and outdoor enthusiasts. The 7 p.m. window, once the direct sun clears the tree line, is when the fields fill without feeling crowded.
If you are looking for something more structured, the neighborhood association has been publishing a rolling summer calendar with a summer-long reading program at local Charlotte Mecklenburg Library branches running June 1 through August 15, 2026 for children and teens, offering prizes and incentives. Small, but the kind of thing that makes a Tuesday feel less like a Tuesday.
For music, the wider Charlotte summer calendar is generous this year. Queen City Nerve's roundup notes The Hitmen Party Band at Pearl Street Park on July 16 and Boz Biz Band at Park Road Park on August 20, both close enough to bike to from most Myers Park addresses.
The take
Neighborhoods age in one of two ways. They calcify around what worked in 1995, or they add a layer without knocking down the last one. Selwyn Avenue this summer is doing the second thing. Rada, the People's Market and the new Lagree studio have arrived on a strip where Selwyn Pub is still pouring transfusions and Reid's is still the parking headache it has always been. The Booty Loop still draws the region's cyclists to your street for one weekend a year, and Freedom Park still empties into the greenway at dusk. What is new is that the block between the loop and the park has become the reason more residents are eating within walking distance of home three nights a week.
If you are thinking about how any of this shapes what your Myers Park home is worth, or what you would look for in the next one, The Laws Collective knows this stretch of Selwyn block by block. Start the conversation whenever the walk home from dinner turns into a longer thought.
