For three years, anyone running or walking the Little Sugar Creek Greenway out of Myers Park hit the same wall near Morehead Street. Orange fencing. A detour sign pointing you onto Kings Drive. The kind of construction closure that starts to feel less like a temporary inconvenience and more like a permanent rerouting of your morning.
That closure is over. The mile of greenway between Freedom Park and Morehead Street, the stretch that runs alongside the Atrium Health campus, reopened in March 2025 after a rebuild that Atrium Health funded at a cost of roughly $18 million. It had been shut since spring 2022. If you gave up on that route somewhere in the last few years and rerouted your loop permanently onto neighborhood sidewalks, you're not alone, and you may not have noticed it's fixed.
That timing matters this year in a specific way. Festival in the Park returns to Freedom Park for its 62nd year on September 25 through 27, 2026, which means this fall is the first time in three years that Myers Park residents can actually walk the full greenway connection into the festival grounds instead of driving over and hunting for a parking spot.
What Was Actually Broken
The Little Sugar Creek Greenway is the spine that ties Myers Park to the rest of the city's trail network. It runs from Cordelia Park near uptown down through Freedom Park and continues to the South Carolina line, and it forms a piece of both the Cross Charlotte Trail and the Carolina Thread Trail. As of April 2026, Mecklenburg County counted 85.5 miles of developed greenway across the county, with the Little Sugar Creek corridor alone accounting for more than 17 of those miles.
The segment that closed in 2022 sat right at the seam between the neighborhood feel of Myers Park and the more urban stretch heading toward uptown. Locals sometimes call it the Myers Park segment. Coming out of the neighborhood, the trail alternates between sidewalk and dedicated path, crosses Princeton Avenue, and then drops into wooded ground across the creek from Freedom Park before it reaches the section that had been fenced off. For three construction seasons, that's where it stopped. Anyone continuing north had to climb up onto Kings Drive and finish the trip on a sidewalk next to traffic instead of tree cover.
That's fixed now. The rebuilt stretch runs alongside the Atrium Health campus, crosses under Morehead Street, and levels out at street grade parallel to Kings Drive, where the county has added bathrooms, a small fountain, and a gathering space along the way. It's a short piece of trail in absolute terms, about a mile, but it's the piece that turned a walk into a drive for three years.
A Festival That Finally Matches the Trail
Festival in the Park has been running in Freedom Park since 1964, and the 2026 edition marks 62 years. It's free to attend, runs Friday afternoon into Sunday evening, and the festival's own organizers are projecting more than 127,000 people over the three days, with close to 200 visual artists showing and selling work along the Artist's Walk and Lake Walk. Saturday's headline act is Greggy and the Jets, an Elton John tribute band playing the band shell, and the festival grounds wrap the lake at the center of the park, the same lake that anchors the popular running loop locals call the Booty Loop.
None of that is new information if you've lived in Myers Park for more than a festival or two. What's new is that this is the first year since the closure that the walk from the neighborhood into the festival is actually a walk again, rather than a drive followed by a search for parking near Atrium Health Myers Park on Kings Drive. If your usual festival routine has been to load the car for a half mile trip, this is the year to test whether the old route back is faster on foot.
The broader context helps explain why this one mile mattered so much. Charlotte added about nine miles of greenway across the region in 2025, and the county has roughly eight more miles planned to open in 2026, according to reporting from Axios Charlotte. Most of that mileage sits in newer suburbs where the trail is filling in gaps that never existed before. The Freedom Park stretch was different. It wasn't new trail. It was old trail, closed, and only now returned to the exact condition longtime residents remember.
Where the Walk Ends
If you're taking the reconnected route into the festival this September, or just using the fixed mile to close out a normal Saturday loop, the Providence Road corridor around the Myers Park Shopping Center is close enough to make a natural stopping point before or after.
A few spots worth knowing if you haven't been in a while:
- Reid's Fine Foods sits in the middle of the neighborhood and carries a name that's meant fine food in Charlotte since 1928, with a wine bar open Monday through Saturday evenings and a counter for breakfast and lunch during the day.
- Sir Edmond Halley's, tucked upstairs on Middleton Drive, is the kind of neighborhood pub that's been a fixture long enough that most Myers Park residents already have an opinion about it.
- Ace No. 3 on Providence Road has been serving its Myers Park location for years and recently refreshed its menu.
- Napa on Providence and Primo Prime both sit in the same immediate stretch, one leaning toward a wine list and scratch-made contemporary plates, the other built around steak.
- La Belle Helene and Customshop, both near the shopping center, round out the corridor with a French brasserie on one end and a chef-driven, farm-forward menu on the other.
None of these are new discoveries. What might be new is remembering they're a genuinely short walk from the trail now that the mile connecting the neighborhood to Freedom Park doesn't require a car to cross.
The Loop Is Whole Again
Myers Park High School still anchors the north end of the neighborhood off Selwyn Avenue, its collegiate Gothic buildings visible from several points along the greenway. The oak canopy that makes the neighborhood's streets a running destination on their own hasn't changed. What changed is the one link that ties those streets to the park, the lake loop, and the festival grounds beyond it.
Three construction seasons is long enough that a temporary closure starts to feel like the new normal. It wasn't. The mile is back, the festival returns for its 62nd year on September 25, and this is the first fall where the two things line up the way they used to.
If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of greenway is actually worth, or thinking ahead to a move within Myers Park or one of the neighborhoods it connects to, Ashley & Scott Sofsian know this corridor block by block. Schedule Your Consultation whenever you're ready to talk through it.
