History

The story of Myers Park cannot be told in just a few sentences.  Much has been written about Myers Park. To learn more about this National Historic District, the MPHA encourages you to explore the information included here:

Myers Park is one of the Premier neighborhoods in North America.  In 1905 John Nolen, at thirty six, a recent Harvard graduate with a Masters in Landscape Architecture came to Charlotte to interview George Stephens about designing Myers Park.   Nolen’s professor and mentor at Harvard was Fredric Law Olmstead Jr.   Olmstead’s father had designed Central Park in New York, and in his later years the Biltmore Estate for George Vanderbilt.  John Nolen went on to be one of the most outstanding landscape architects of the early 1900’s.  His work is found all over the eastern part of the United States, but Charlotte is as far south as he practiced.

The original plan for the George Stephens Company, the developers, was to form a streetcar community where all residences could walk to the street car lines and visitors who came would be able to make a loop through the neighborhood and depart where the main street would join itself.  If you look at today’s map of Myers Park, you will see that loop and realize its different than the grid-type plan of so many cities.  This early plan did not anticipate the development of the automobile to the extent it is used today, and there have been many changes in the neighborhood as Charlotte grows and traffic becomes more of a problem.

In 1986 The Myers Park Foundation published a comprehensive book which captured the history of Myers Park.  The book, Legacy: The Myers Park Story, is available from the Myers Park Foundation.