11/18/2024
Absolutely love that we live so close to here. I too have memories of my childhood birthday cake coming from the bakery here.
The classically timeless Park Road Shopping Center opened on November 15th, 1956 at the intersection of Park and Woodlawn roads. As the city’s first suburban shopping center, Park Road Shopping Center opened during a period of increased residential construction and suburban development around the outskirts of Charlotte. Built on former farmland, Park Road Shopping Center became the largest open-air shopping center between Washington DC and Atlanta. On the center’s opening day, 22 stores had simultaneous ribbon-cutting ceremonies and guests had the chance to win $30,000 in prizes, including three 1957 Ford cars. The Charlotte News advertised it as an ‘ultra-modern Colonial Supermarket designed to serve you better and save you more.’
The center has served generations of Charlotteans who have visited since its opening 68 years ago. Steele Creek resident Bill Mitchell has been coming to the center for 17 years, telling Charlotte Magazine in 2013, “[Park Road] reminds me of my childhood. If you come here, you’re not looking for a big, fancy mall. You’ll see a lot of older people, remembering how it used to be. It hasn’t changed. That’s what’s great.”
For many, nostalgia is the greatest drawing factor of the shopping center, which is why patrons worried that Charlotte’s rapidly progressing development over the past few decades would lead to a loss of the character that made Park Road Shopping Center so great in their youth. For 44 years, Porter Byrum owned the center, but in 2011 Byrum donated it to three NC universities (Queens, Wingate, and Wake Forest), who sold it for $82 million to Edens & Avant, a property management company based in South Carolina.
Edens & Avant focused on making infrastructure changes to increase accessibility to the shopping center, but they acknowledged how great nostalgia is for business in the area. With intentions to retain these essential nostalgic elements, in 2019, the company removed Park Road’s original 50s-style, art deco for the sake of preserving this vintage Charlotte icon. After five months of restoration efforts, the sign remains above the southeast entrance to the center as it has since its opening in 1956.
WBT/WBTV MS0324, Manuscript Collections, J. Murrey Atkins Library Special Collections and University Archives, UNC Charlotte.
