Bungalows and front porches line the tree-lined streets of Wesley Heights as you walk, one of Charlotte's earliest streetcar suburbs and a neighborhood that has held onto its early twentieth-century character better than almost any other close-in Charlotte neighborhood. The streetcar lines that radiated from uptown in the 1890s and 1900s made it possible for the middle class to live at a distance from the crowded city center, and Wesley Heights developed as one of those outlying residential communities — bungalows, foursquares, and Colonial Revival houses set on tree-lined streets with front porches and modest yards. When the streetcar lines were torn up in the 1930s and 1940s and replaced by buses and eventually by automobiles, neighborhoods like Wesley Heights faced the same cycle of decline that hit close-in suburbs across America.
Decades of disinvestment were followed by a preservation movement in the 1990s and 2000s that saved many of the original houses and attracted buyers who wanted urban neighborhoods rather than subdivisions. Today Wesley Heights is a desirable and architecturally intact reminder of how Charlotte lived before the automobile made everything low-density and car-dependent.