Ask a longtime Myers Park resident what the Booty Loop is, and you'll get the same answer every time: the running and cycling route that circles Queens Road, Selwyn Avenue, and Queens Road West, and the one weekend each July when it shuts down for 24 Hours of Booty. That answer isn't wrong. It's just incomplete. The loop spent 2026 quietly becoming something it wasn't before, a stretch of street that people now use for more than exercise and one charity weekend, and the changes are easy to miss if you're only paying attention every July.
The route itself hasn't moved. It still runs from Queens Road to Selwyn Avenue, turns onto Queens Road West toward Hopedale Avenue, then loops back to Queens Road, a path documented at 2.85 miles. Event organizers for 24 Hours of Booty describe the same stretch as a three-mile closed course, which is close enough for a charity ride but tells you something about how loosely the loop's public identity and its actual measurements have always coexisted. Nobody around here has ever needed the number to be exact. The loop is the loop.
The One Weekend Everyone Already Knows
This year's 24 Hours of Booty ran its 25th edition Friday, July 24 through Saturday, July 25, 2026, from 7 p.m. to 7 p.m., anchored at Queens University of Charlotte and Myers Park Traditional's soccer fields, the site residents know as Bootyville. If you live anywhere near Wellesley Avenue, you felt it before you saw it. Northbound lanes on Queens Road West closed at Wellesley starting at 5:30 p.m. that Friday, with the rest of the closure taking effect by 6:45 p.m., all coordinated with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police so residents could still get in and out of their own streets.
What's easy to lose in the logistics is the scale the event has reached after 25 years. Last year's 24th running drew 1,100 registered participants from 109 teams across 23 states and three counties, and raised just under $1.7 million for cancer navigation and survivorship programs. Across its full history, the event has raised more than $33 million for beneficiaries including Atrium Health Levine Cancer Institute and Levine Children's Hospital. That's not a number that happens because a neighborhood tolerates a road closure once a year. It happens because the loop functions as genuine civic infrastructure, the kind of shared space a community organizes around rather than merely lives beside.
What Moved In While the Loop Wasn't Looking
Here's the part that changes the picture. For years, the businesses that served people who used the loop clustered a half mile east on Providence Road, the strip residents already think of as the neighborhood's dining and errand corridor. In March 2026, that pattern shifted. A Lagree fitness studio opened at 2909 Selwyn Avenue, according to Axios Charlotte's ongoing tracker of new business openings in the city. That address sits directly on the Selwyn Avenue leg of the Booty Loop itself, not adjacent to it.
The distinction matters more than it might seem. A studio on Providence Road serves people who drive to the loop, park, and walk. A studio on Selwyn Avenue serves people who are already mid-loop, the ones who finish a lap and want strength work without getting back in the car. It's a small commercial bet, but it's a bet on the loop as a daily habit rather than an occasional one, which is a different kind of neighborhood than the one that just tolerates a charity weekend every summer.
Ridgewood's Quieter Pull
One turn off the loop, at 248 Ridgewood Avenue, Wing Haven Garden & Bird Sanctuary has spent 2026 running a calendar that gives loop walkers a reason to detour without ever leaving on-foot range of home. The garden hosts more than 40 programs and events each year, and this year's slate has included Wildlife @ Wing Haven in March, a free session with education tables staffed by the Carolina Raptor Center, Mecklenburg County Park & Recreation, the Mecklenburg Audubon Society, the Myers Park Library, and TreesCharlotte. In April, the garden ran its Spring Plant Sale over three days, with free admission and short afternoon workshops covering hydrangea care, native pollinator basics, and spring-planted summer bulbs, followed the same month by a Sip & See evening and a two-day Gardeners' Garden Tour through Wing Haven's own grounds and four private gardens nearby.
None of that is new to Wing Haven, which has run programming like this for decades. What's worth noticing is how it fits against the loop's calendar. The garden is open Wednesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., which means it's available on exactly the kind of weekday morning a Myers Park resident might already be walking Queens Road West. The loop and the garden aren't competing for the same visit. They're stacking, one leading naturally into the other, in a way that wasn't really designed but has become the pattern anyway.
| What changed in 2026 | Where | What it signals |
|---|---|---|
| 24 Hours of Booty, 25th edition | Queens Road West at Wellesley, Bootyville at Myers Park Traditional and Queens University | The loop still closes for one weekend, but the scale (1,100+ participants, $1.7M raised in 2025) keeps growing |
| New Lagree studio | 2909 Selwyn Avenue | First fitness business to open directly on the loop's route rather than a block away |
| Expanded Wing Haven calendar | 248 Ridgewood Avenue | A one-turn detour off the loop now has weekly and seasonal programming to justify the stop |
The Loop That Organizes Itself Around One Weekend
None of this changes what the Booty Loop is for most of the year: a place to run, walk a dog, or push a stroller under tree cover that Myers Park has protected since John Nolen laid out the original street plan more than a century ago. What's changed is the texture around it. A gym now sits on the route instead of near it. A garden a block off the loop has enough on its calendar to be a destination rather than an afterthought. And the one weekend everyone already circles on their calendar just quietly became the neighborhood's biggest annual fundraiser in its 25-year history, closing streets that residents now plan around rather than resent.
That's the actual shape of the Booty Loop in 2026. It's still a running route named after a charity ride. It's also become the closest thing Myers Park has to a main street, one where a fitness studio and a century-old garden are both betting that people will keep showing up on foot, long after the tents come down in Bootyville.
If you're a longtime Myers Park homeowner thinking about how your own house fits into this stretch of the neighborhood, whether that's a renovation that makes better use of a lot near the loop or a project shaped around how you actually live on these streets, Carolina Precision Builders is happy to talk through it. Request a complimentary project consultation whenever you're ready.
