Using this guide
Help
This guide has opinions about how it works — which door to use when you only know a street, why a place page usually has no opening hours on it, what a streak does at midnight. Rather than leave you to infer them, they are written down. These pages are the manual, and they are as honest about what the guide doesn't hold as about what it does.
Getting started
CLT Explorer is an independent visitors guide to Charlotte, North Carolina. It needs no account, no app install and no sign-up, and it does not ask for your location. This page is the ten-minute tour: what the four hubs hold, the five or six pages that answ…
Inside: Contents · If you only read one paragraph · The four hubs · Five things to do first · Two settings worth making · What the site does not ask of you · Where to go next.
The user guide
This is the index. CLT Explorer is four things wearing one coat — a directory of places, a sourced history archive, a live layer over the city, and a small arcade — and each has its own guide below. Read this page to work out which one you want; read the se…
Inside: Contents · The four section guides · The rest of the site, by room · Things that are true everywhere · How big is all this? · The other help pages.
Finding things, and planning a trip
This guide covers the four ways the guide lets you get from "I want to do something" to "here it is": the search box, which reads what you typed rather than only matching it; browse, which walks the whole dataset as cascading columns along six different axe…
Inside: Contents · · Searching — the box that reads intent · · When nothing matches · · Browsing by path — the columns · · The activity cloud — "What do you feel like doing?" · · Setting a home base · · Planning a trip · · The offline pack · and 2 more.
Places, neighborhoods, the map and the rail
CLT Explorer holds 346 place records for Charlotte, filed into 22 neighborhoods, plotted on one map, and threaded onto the city's two rail lines. This guide is organized by what you are trying to do — find a place, read what the guide knows about it, arrive…
Inside: Contents · How many places? Three honest numbers · Finding a place · Reading a place page · Browsing a neighborhood — the arrival page · The map and its layers · The A–Z registry at /places and The Register · Getting around by rail · and 2 more.
The history archive
CLT Explorer holds 677 dated facts about Charlotte, North Carolina, running from 1540 to 2025 across 204 distinct years and 16 named eras. Every one of those facts is a record, not a sentence: it carries the source it came from, the date a person checked it…
Inside: Contents · What makes this archive unusual · Reading the record — the Core Sample · Following an argued thread · The Prose Record — twelve chapters, 1540 → 2025 · Looking up a person, an organization, or an era · The knowledge-graph views · The colophon: sources, the bibliography plate, and corrections · and 1 more.
Playing: the arcade, the crossword, trivia, streaks and coins
CLT Explorer has a small arcade of seven cabinets, a set of five crosswords, a trivia hunt, a day-chained streak, a cosmetic currency called Mint Coins, and a leaderboard with two halves. None of it needs an account, none of it can be bought, and none of it…
Inside: Contents · The short version · The arcade — all seven cabinets · The crossword · Trivia and the district packs · Streaks, and how they actually work · Mint Coins and the reward economy · The leaderboard and "your standing" · and 3 more.
Frequently asked questions
Twenty-six questions that come up, answered plainly. Several of them are questions about things that look like bugs and are not — and two are about things that look like bugs and are.
Inside: Contents · About the guide itself · Places, hours and coverage · The map · Searching and planning · The history archive · Accounts, privacy and money.
Troubleshooting
Most of what looks broken on this site is either a deliberate silence or a known rough edge, and this page separates the two. Each entry says what you are seeing, why, and what to do instead. Where something is genuinely a defect, it says that too.
Inside: Contents · The map · Search · Live data — trains, weather, the river · Places and pages · Your trip, and things that should have been saved · Accounts and sign-in · Games and progress · and 2 more.
Glossary
Words this guide uses on purpose, and what each one commits us to. Several of them look like ordinary words and are not — "open", "verified" and "unconfirmed" all mean something narrower here than they do in conversation, and knowing which is which is most…
Inside: Contents · Places and coverage · Time, hours and the word "open" · Geography · The rail · Sources and confidence · The history archive · Finding and planning · and 1 more.
Changelog
What has changed on CLT Explorer, in the order it changed, written for people who use the site rather than people who build it.
Inside: Contents · Unreleased · -08-20 · -08-19 · -08-18 · -08-17 · -08-15 · -08-13 · and 1 more.
Not what you were after?
Answers holds the questions visitors ask about Charlotte itself — parking, weather, what to do in the rain. The Colophon explains how the guide checks its facts and lists every source behind them. Something here wrong or out of date? We publish our corrections.