Fourth Ward, Charlotte's best-preserved Victorian neighborhood, spreads out ahead of you. Fourth Ward occupies the northwest quadrant of uptown, and in the 1880s and 1890s it was the city's most fashionable address — the home of prosperous merchants, bankers, lawyers, and the professional class that grew with Charlotte's railroads and cotton trade. Queen Anne cottages, Italianate townhouses, and Colonial Revival mansions lined these shaded streets, many with wide front porches where families sat in the long Southern evenings.
By the mid-twentieth century, Fourth Ward had declined, its grand houses subdivided into apartments or abandoned, the neighborhood hollowed out by suburbanization and urban renewal. A preservation movement in the 1970s and 1980s saved what remained, and the neighborhood was meticulously restored. Today the original street grid survives, and dozens of Victorian homes have been returned to their painted-lady glory.
Look at the variety of architectural details — carved cornices, turned spindles, stained glass transoms — and imagine the neighborhood in 1895, when Charlotte's first electric streetcar ran just a few blocks away. This is the fabric of the city before the automobile remade everything.