Central Avenue runs through Plaza Midwood, the Charlotte neighborhood that has most successfully blended historical preservation with contemporary creative culture. The neighborhood developed in the 1920s along the streetcar lines that ran east from uptown, with bungalows and Colonial Revival houses filling in the blocks around a commercial strip on Central Avenue. When the streetcars stopped running and the automobile era arrived, Plaza Midwood went through a long decline before becoming, by the 1990s, the preferred address for Charlotte's artists, musicians, and counterculture residents who wanted the character of an old neighborhood at rents they could afford.
Today Central Avenue is lined with restaurants, bars, record stores, vintage clothing shops, and small businesses of the kind that thrive in walkable neighborhoods with strong local identity. The residential streets behind the commercial strip retain much of their 1920s and 1930s character, with mature trees and front-porch culture that feels different from the newer developments elsewhere in the city. Plaza Midwood has gentrified significantly, but it has done so while retaining an independent-minded, eclectic character that distinguishes it from Charlotte's more polished neighborhoods.