Walk the Booty Loop far enough and you pass a fence that's been part of the scenery so long it barely registers anymore. It runs along the edge of Freedom Park near Sterling Road, wrapped around a construction site that used to be Discovery Place Nature. A banner from the topping out ceremony still hangs on part of it. Most days, nobody stops to read it.
Meanwhile, a few blocks away on Selwyn Avenue, three different sites have changed use since that fence went up. A Lagree studio moved into a strip center. An all-day café took over a pizza chain's old lease. A row of townhomes went up on a site whose original craftsman-style windows got saved and reinstalled rather than demolished. None of those changes took anywhere near as long as the museum's has.
That gap is the actual story in Myers Park this year. The neighborhood's biggest public project is stalled on a timeline nobody will commit to, while its smallest commercial spaces keep turning over on a schedule measured in months. Here's what's actually happening on both sides of that fence, and what to expect when Freedom Park hosts its 62nd Festival in the Park next month.
The topping out was the easy part
The building going up inside Freedom Park has a new name and an old job. Discovery Place ran a nature museum on that site starting in 1947, and after more than 77 years decided to rename the reimagined version Charlotte Museum of Nature rather than reopen it under the old brand. The project is a public-private partnership: the county owns the property and the building on Sterling Road, an arrangement that's been in place since Discovery Place first opened the original museum in 1947.
The construction milestones are public and easy to track:
- 2017 – the project is first approved, with an initial budget of $35 million
- May 2024 – groundbreaking, marked with a ceremonial tree planting
- December 2024 – a "topping out" celebration marks the placement of the last steel beam
- June 2026 – the museum's own project updates still describe the opening only as "anticipated" for 2026, with no month attached
Somewhere along that timeline, the price tag changed. Reporting from the Charlotte Observer, cited by WCNC, found the cost swelled from $35 million to $62.3 million since 2017, almost double the original figure, and that increase became a point of friction among county commissioners before construction wrapped.
When Discovery Place unveiled the new name, its president and CEO Catherine Wilson Horne said the goal was to build "a museum for everyone." That's a fair description of the plan: a treetop canopy walk, an owl enclosure, a frog bog, and a North American river otter habitat, built to integrate directly into Freedom Park rather than sit apart from it as a standalone building. It's an ambitious list, and it's been an ambitious build, one that's now stretched roughly a year and a half past its steel-topping milestone without a firm date to show for it.
For a neighborhood that watches this fence line every day on a run or a dog walk, that's the frustrating part. The steel is up. The exhibits are designed. The date still isn't real.
Selwyn Avenue didn't wait around
While the county project sat on its own clock, the commercial strip that Myers Park residents actually shop on kept moving at retail speed.
| Change | Location | Timing | Status this August |
|---|---|---|---|
| QC Lagree fitness studio | 2909 Selwyn Ave, Selwyn Shoppes | Opened February 2026 | Open about six months |
| People's Market | Tranquil Court, Selwyn Ave | Opened late summer 2024 | Into its second year |
| Selwyn Walk townhomes | Selwyn Ave corridor | Units listed as of April 2026 | Selling |
QC Lagree, a studio built around the high-intensity, low-impact Lagree method, took over roughly 2,500 square feet inside Selwyn Shoppes this past February. A few blocks over, restaurateur Cory Duran brought his all-day café concept People's Market into the Tranquil Court development, taking over the space Mellow Mushroom occupied for years with the same bright, indoor-outdoor layout as his original Elizabeth location. And a 34-townhome infill project has been filling in along the corridor, with builders saving and reinstalling the site's original craftsman-style stained glass windows rather than sending them to a landfill, with select units already listed for sale this spring.
None of these projects involved a county commission vote or a public-private funding structure. They involved a lease, a build-out crew, and a grand opening. That's the difference in speed you're seeing play out along the same half-mile stretch as the fenced-off museum: private retail turns over on a landlord's calendar, while a public capital project answers to a much longer chain of approvals, budgets, and construction sequencing.
The lake still gets its weekend
None of this changes what happens at Freedom Park in September. The 62nd annual Festival in the Park runs Friday through Sunday, and the schedule is set regardless of what's finished on the museum side of the property:
- Friday, September 25: 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
- Saturday, September 26: 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.
- Sunday, September 27: 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.
The festival has run every year since 1964, long before anyone was pouring concrete for a new nature museum, and this year's edition is expected to draw well over 127,000 people to the lake, the artist walk, and the main stage. It's the same lake the museum's new public gardens are meant to open onto once construction wraps. For at least one more festival weekend, that connection stays theoretical. Visitors will walk past the fence on their way to the art tents the same way neighborhood residents already do on an ordinary Tuesday.
What to actually watch for
If you live inside the Booty Loop or off Selwyn Avenue, the practical takeaway isn't complicated. The festival dates are locked in, so plan around September 25 through 27 if you want the lake without the crowds, or lean into them if you don't mind sharing a folding chair with a few thousand strangers. The retail corridor will likely keep changing at the pace it has been, so don't be surprised if another lease turns over before winter.
The museum is the one variable actually worth tracking, and the best way to do that is the county's own project page, which gets updated as milestones happen rather than on any promotional schedule. Until that page says otherwise, the fence stays up, the banner stays faded, and the fastest-moving real estate in Myers Park will keep being the storefronts, not the park.
If you're weighing what any of this means for a home along Selwyn Avenue or elsewhere in Myers Park, from a corridor that keeps reinventing itself to a park amenity that's still finding its finish line, The Dearing Team at SERHANT. North Carolina can walk you through what it's actually worth right now. Request Your Free Home Valuation & Marketing Plan and get a read on the market that accounts for what's changing on the ground, not just what's listed on paper.
