The Booty Loop Picked Up Two New Regulars This Year

Someone finishing a lap in February would have jogged straight past a construction fence at 2909 Selwyn Avenue. By March, that fence was gone and a Lagree studio had opened in its place. By May, the cheese shop Charlotte regulars used to detour to at The Market at 7th Street had relocated three miles southwest, landing at the loop's own front door on the corner of Selwyn and Colony.

Neither business opened because Myers Park needed more foot traffic. The traffic was already there, circling the same three-mile stretch of Queens Road West, Hopedale Avenue, and Selwyn Avenue that Charlotte has called the Booty Loop for decades. What's different in 2026 is how many businesses are finally building around it instead of just tolerating it.

The Loop, For Anyone Catching Up

The route starts wherever you want it to, but most people pick up northbound on Queens Road West, take a right on Hopedale Avenue, rejoin Queens Road, and bear right to loop back through the neighborhood's oak canopy and Tudor-lined curves. It's just under three miles, flat enough that the elevation gain barely registers, and it's been the default answer to "where do you run in Charlotte" for so long that visitors get pointed here before they've unpacked their bags. Cyclists coined the nickname generations ago as a nod to the loop's regulars, and it stuck hard enough that a 25-year-old charity ride now carries the name officially.

None of that is new information if you live here. What's worth tracking is what's been filling in around the edges of it this year.

Two Businesses Landed Right at the Loop's Elbow

The Selwyn Avenue stretch of the loop picked up two notable additions in 2026, both timed within a few months of each other and both sitting almost on top of the route itself.

QC Lagree took a 2,556-square-foot space in Selwyn Shoppes for its first Charlotte location, led by Arthur Pulley and built around Sebastien Lagree's 40-minute strength and mobility method. MPV Properties' Robbie Adams represented the studio in the lease, with Jay Mitchener of Thrift CRES representing the landlord, Eastern Federal Corporation. It's the kind of studio that makes sense next to a running loop: cross-training for people who already log miles on Queens Road every week.

Orrman's took longer to land. The shop spent 13 years at The Market at 7th Street before owners Jose Espinosa and Rachel Klebaur announced the move in August 2025, aiming for a late-March opening that slipped a few weeks to a May 4 grand opening. The new Selwyn Avenue space is bigger than the old stall, big enough to carry more than 150 cheeses instead of the roughly 100 they could fit before, and it's the first Orrman's location to pour wine on-site instead of just selling it retail. Espinosa and Klebaur picked the corner deliberately. Klebaur told a local food outlet they wanted a neighborhood spot, not too big, not too small, one location instead of splitting attention across two.

The Corner Wasn't Empty Before

The instinct is to treat 2026 like the year Selwyn Avenue suddenly got interesting. It didn't. This stretch has been building a specific kind of commercial mix for years, and the new arrivals fit a pattern rather than starting one.

Reid's Fine Foods has been the neighborhood's go-to gourmet grocer for so long that Charlotte transplants compare it to the specialty market they left behind. Mellow Mushroom and Little Spoon Eatery cover the pizza and brunch end of things. Selwyn Avenue Pub anchors the sports-and-patio slot, well known enough that Michael Jordan and Dale Earnhardt Jr. have both been spotted there. And in August 2024, an Asheville butcher called The Chop Shop Butchery opened at 2820 Selwyn Avenue, bringing in cuts from small producers like Apple Brandy Beef and Hickory Nut Gap Farm to a corridor that already had a built-in audience of people thinking about protein after a workout.

Line that up against QC Lagree and Orrman's and the logic gets clearer. This isn't a random retail mix. It's food and fitness businesses that specifically serve people who just finished exercising or are about to, clustered on the same half-mile of road that most of them cross on foot several times a week. A cheese shop with a patio and a fitness studio with a golf-specific training add-on aren't competing for the same walk-in as a nail salon would. They're competing for the same runner, at different points in that runner's day.

One Weekend a Year, the Loop Closes to Cars

If you've lived in Myers Park through a July, you already know what happens at the end of the month. This year marked the 25th running of 24 Hours of Booty, the overnight cycling and walking event that shuts the entire loop down to car traffic and hands it over to riders for a full day.

The 2026 event ran from 7 p.m. Friday, July 24 to 7 p.m. Saturday, July 25, on the same three-mile course the loop always uses. Queens University of Charlotte, at 1900 Selwyn Avenue, served as event headquarters, known to regulars as Bootyville, where riders camp between laps and refuel on catered meals and a midnight pizza party. Drivers in the neighborhood were pointed toward Providence Road or Park Road as alternates while the course was closed, a routine most residents have down by now even if it still catches new neighbors off guard the first July they experience it.

The money side of the event has grown alongside its age. Last year's ride, in 2025, raised just shy of $1.7 million for cancer survivorship and patient navigation programs, and the event's all-time total has now crossed $33 million, benefiting organizations including Atrium Health Levine Cancer Institute. It's easy to think of the Booty Loop as purely a jogging route, but one weekend a year it becomes the single largest fundraising mechanism the neighborhood hosts, run entirely on the same pavement everyone laps on a normal Tuesday.

If You're Stretching the Route

For anyone looking to turn the loop into a longer outing, two options sit close enough to fold in without much extra planning. Freedom Park, which sits between Myers Park and Dilworth, adds nearly two miles of trail if you route through it before or after your lap, and its lake and tree cover make the extension feel like a different park entirely rather than an afterthought.

A few blocks off the Selwyn stretch, Wing Haven Garden & Bird Sanctuary hosted its annual Gardeners' Garden Tour over the last weekend of April 2026, opening not just its own grounds but the adjacent Elizabeth Lawrence House & Garden and the SEED Wildlife & Children's Garden for a rare walk-through of private area gardens most people only see from the sidewalk. It's a once-a-year window, not a standing stop, but it's worth building a spring Saturday around if the timing lines up.

What This Adds Up To

None of this means Myers Park has changed. The homes are still the same brick and Tudor stock that's been here for a century, and the loop is still the same three miles it's always been. What's changed is that the businesses lining that loop have started reading it less like a residential street and more like a corridor with a built-in customer base that shows up on foot, several times a week, without needing to be marketed to.

That's a small shift, but it's the kind that tends to compound. A cheese shop that bets on foot traffic instead of drive-up parking, a fitness studio that leases based on who's already running past the storefront, a butcher that opens next to a route full of people thinking about their next meal. None of it requires the neighborhood to grow. It just requires someone to notice that the loop was already doing the work.

If you're weighing what a home near this stretch of Myers Park is actually worth to your daily life, not just its list price, that's the kind of local detail worth talking through with someone who tracks it closely. Real Estate Layne works this neighborhood block by block. Let's Connect.