Help

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.

Updated: 2026-08-20

Contents

About the guide itself

Why does the site show three different numbers of places?

Because they count three different things, and the site would rather show you all three than average them into one comfortable figure.

  • 346 is every place record the guide holds, in any state at all — open, seasonal, shut, demolished, unconfirmed.
  • 343 is how many have a page you can open. Three records are marked unconfirmed and are withheld until somebody stands them up, so they have no page anywhere.
  • 311 is what the drawn city map on the home page plots: the 343, minus the 32 places in the Day trips ring. Those are an hour outside Charlotte — the Speedway, the lake, the mountains — and drawing them would more than double the map's height and squash the city into the middle of the picture. The same subtraction is why that map's caption says "21 neighbourhoods" rather than 22: Day trips is the twenty-second.

So: 346 records in all; 343 you can visit a page for; 311 on the drawn map.

Then what is the "212 places open" on the home page?

A fourth number, counting a fourth thing: places whose seasonal calendar positively says open. Only 213 of the 346 records say anything definite in that field — 212 "open", 1 "closed" — and the remaining 133 say "unknown", which is counted in neither direction.

It is a fact about the year, not about this minute. It means "runs year-round", not "you can walk in now". Charlotte is a city of nearly a million people that operates in February much as it does in July, and the interesting thing about that number is how little it moves.

Separately, a record's lifecycle status — what has actually happened to the business — currently reads: 326 open, 2 seasonal, 1 temporarily closed, 6 permanently closed, 8 site-only (the building is gone), 3 unconfirmed. That is a different question again, and the reason 326 and 212 are both true at once.

The full derivation is in the places guide.

Who is behind this? Is it official?

No, and deliberately not. CLT Explorer is independent and unaffiliated — not associated with the City of Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority, charlottesgotalot.com, CATS, or any listed business. Citing an official source is a citation, not a partnership. See /about.

How do I report something wrong?

Email corrections@clt.theperfectship.com. That includes an error, an out-of-date fact, a business that wants a listing corrected, and a photo or a piece of local lore someone wants taken down. There is no web form and no submission API; nothing you send is stored by the site. Answered within five business days.

Published corrections to the news layer live permanently at /news/corrections. The history archive has no equivalent public correction log yet — see the history guide for that gap, stated plainly.

Places, hours and coverage

Why don't most places say whether they're open?

Because most of them have not told us. Only 28 of the 343 published records carry a real, structured week of hours — day by day, open and close — and the "Open now · closes 10pm" chip appears on those and nowhere else. Ninety more have hours only as a sentence, and 225 have none recorded at all.

A record that merely says "open year-round" gets no chip, because this business operates in this season is not the same claim as you can walk in right now, and the site refuses to upgrade one into the other. Where a place is provably shut, it says so.

Why is a place that closed years ago still listed?

Because it is still part of the city. Closed and demolished places are labelled, never hidden — the Excelsior Club has a page, and it tells the building's story rather than pretending you can visit.

What those pages lose: the Directions button (routing you to a building that is gone is not a route), hours, price, and the check-in control. What they gain: a "Lost Charlotte" line at the top and, where the record knows it, a link to whatever stands there now. They also never appear as a suggestion on someone else's page, and they are left out of the neighborhood arrival pages and the activity cloud — a browse surface for places you can go should not answer "where shall we eat" with a demolition.

They are still on the map, once you turn the History layer chip on.

I followed a link to a place and got nothing at all.

Three records are marked unconfirmed and have no public page. The Register at the foot of /places counts them as "withheld". They are not deleted and not published; they are waiting on somebody confirming they exist as described.

Where is the parking information?

There is almost none, and that is a decision. Thirteen records carry a hand-written parking note, and those print. There is no municipal lot inventory, no metered-zone map and no street-parking rule set in the data, so a page with no parking note prints nothing — not "parking information unavailable", and emphatically not a plausible guess about a lot that may not exist.

Is there accessibility information?

Only in fragments, and this one is a genuine gap rather than a decision. Eighteen records carry a short hand-written access note, and where one exists the place page prints it. There is no structured accessibility data — step-free entry, restroom, parking-to-door — on any of the 346 records, and the site will not infer it from a category or a building age. The Accessibility layer chip on the map therefore has nothing to select today.

If step-free access decides whether you can go, call the place. We would rather say that than draw you a symbol we cannot stand behind.

What is a "deep cut", and why can't I find it on the page?

A deep cut is a researched, sourced extra fact that did not fit a place's main description — 38 records have one. Today it surfaces as a Deep Cut badge in search results and in the plain-text version of a page, but it does not yet render on the place page itself. So a deep cut is currently something you find by searching rather than by reading. That is a rough edge, not an intention.

The map

Why aren't the neighborhood boundaries drawn?

Because an edge would be a claim, and the guide does not have one to make. On a neighborhood page the district is drawn as a soft tinted field with no edge at all, centred on where its places actually sit and captioned with its ground radius — "about 3km from its centre — it is where NoDa's places sit, not a boundary."

Two reasons. No municipal dataset carries a boundary for most of these names. And several of them are the guide's own groupings anyway: "Steele Creek & Whitewater", "Matthews & Mint Hill" and "LoSo & South Boulevard" are composites nobody but this guide draws. Inventing a line and rendering it crisply would make an editorial convenience look like a survey.

Why are there no roads on the city map?

The guide holds no road geometry, so the schematic map draws none. It draws what it actually has: every place's real coordinates, every rail station's, and the city limits.

The map won't load.

It needs WebGL and JavaScript. If either is unavailable — or if the tile host is blocked — you get a plain banner saying so and pointing at the A–Z, which holds every place as text. The basemap tiles come from OpenFreeMap; if your network blocks it, the guide still works. See troubleshooting.

Searching and planning

Why does "breweries near south end" not behave like "breweries near new bern"?

Because station names are locations to the search box, and neighborhood names are not. near 36th street, near stonewall, near east west boulevard resolve to a rail station and search its walkshed — that station plus the one either side — and you get a "Near …" chip confirming it.

near south end has no station of that name, so "south" and "end" fall through to an ordinary text search over the records. The results are good — 67 of them, Wooden Robot Brewery first — but no "Near …" chip appears, and that missing chip is the tell. If you want the walkshed behaviour, name the station.

My search found nothing. Now what?

The results page will not just say no. It runs several looser versions of your query for real — drop a word, keep a word, take the plain category, drop the station, drop the time — throws away any that also return zero, and offers you the survivors with their true counts. A promise on one of those buttons is a promise the next screen keeps.

If nothing about your query can be loosened (one unknown word, or an emoji), you get three queries that are known to work right now instead, each with its real count.

The wording is deliberate: "Nothing matches X yet" states the guide's limit, not your spelling. Those empty searches are counted in your own browser so the editors can see what the guide is missing. Nothing about you is recorded with them.

I pressed Enter in the search box on the results page and nothing happened.

If you have JavaScript disabled, that box does nothing — it re-runs the query live in your browser rather than submitting a form. Two workarounds, both of which work: use the search box in the top navigation bar or the mobile drawer, which are ordinary forms, or edit the ?q= value in the address bar. This is the one search box on the site that behaves this way, and it is a rough edge rather than a decision.

Where is my trip saved? Will it follow me to another device?

In your own browser, and no — not unless you sign in. The trip planner needs no account and nothing about a plan leaves your device. "Get my share link" encodes the entire itinerary — days, stops, times, groups, meal slots — into the URL itself, so there is no server-side save to expire and nothing to lose if we vanish. Send that link to your own phone and it opens as a working copy there.

Clearing your browser data clears your trip. There is no backup and no undo.

Does the offline copy tell me if somewhere is open?

No, on purpose. The offline pack at /offline carries name, neighbourhood, category, address, phone and a season-scoped hours line — and it prints when the copy was taken. It deliberately does not carry "Open now · closes 10pm", because that answer is true for minutes and a cached one is a confident lie you have no way to check.

The phone number dials with no data connection. The address opens as a geo: link straight into your handset's map app where the guide has real coordinates.

The history archive

Why do some facts say "unverified"?

Because they are. Of the 677 dated facts, 441 are marked verified and 236 unverified — "sourced but not confirmed against a primary record". The hedge is printed on the ones it is true of and absent from the rest, so its presence carries information rather than being furniture. Every fact carries its own source and its own checked-on date; two facts side by side in the same decade can have different sources and different confidence, and the interface shows that rather than averaging it away.

Why won't the guide say whether the Mecklenburg Declaration happened?

Because credible sources disagree, and the disagreement is the interesting part. The corpus holds the traditionalist account, the NCpedia position that no contemporary 1775 documentary copy has ever been found, the Resolves that were printed in the North Carolina Gazette on 16 June 1775, and Jefferson's 1819 letter to John Adams calling the Declaration "spurious" — as separate facts, each with its own source, none deleted in favour of the others. Fifty-one facts in the archive carry a recorded conflict like this.

I clicked a year link and landed on a whole decade.

That is what it does. A ?year=1799 link opens the Core Sample brushed to the decade around that year, at year-cluster zoom, because a single-year sliver is almost never what you wanted. Near the ends of the record the window slides rather than shrinking. To read one year, drag a handle in — or use ?brush=1799-1801, which is the canonical form.

What is the difference between an era and a thread?

An era is a stretch of time with a name — sixteen of them, from The Catawba Crossroads to Queen City Now. A thread is an argument: one claim, followed from the year it starts to the year it stops, with the evidence in order. Eight of those. The timeline tells you when; a thread tells you therefore. Each thread also ends with a section headed What we still cannot show, naming what could not be established and which archive would settle it.

Accounts, privacy and money

Do I need an account?

No, and not for almost anything. The guide, the map, the trip planner, the offline pack and the entire arcade work signed out, permanently — that is a supported mode, not a trial.

Accounts are for ages 13 and up and add exactly three things: posting photos, posting reviews, and syncing your progress between devices (which also puts you on the season leaderboard). If sign-in is not configured, /login says "Sign-in isn't available here" rather than showing you a button that fails.

Does the site know where I am? Does it track me?

No to both. There is no geolocation prompt anywhere — you tell the guide which station you are staying near, and the guide never asks your browser. And the site counts things, never people: how often a topic guide was called helpful, which searches came back empty. There is no profile of you here to have.

Everything the site remembers about you sits in your own browser and is listed by name in the finding-and-planning guide. Clearing your browser storage clears all of it.

Are Mint Coins worth anything?

No. They are cosmetic, cannot be bought, cannot be redeemed for money, goods or a discount, and there is nothing anywhere on the site to spend them on. The amounts are also explicitly placeholders pending a balancing pass, and the guide says so rather than describing a finished economy.

If you look in your browser's storage you will find the balance under an older name, clt-sand-dollars, inherited from the first city in this network. One currency, two names; renaming the key would wipe everyone's balance, so it stays.

Why are there ads on some pages and none on others?

Advertising is not open on the Charlotte edition yet — /advertise is a deliberate "not open yet" page while the question of which categories North Carolina permits is under legal review. Where ads eventually appear (the home page and the news section) they carry an unconditional "Sponsored" label and a distinct frame.

Where they never appear, at any price: safety pages, accessibility pages, heritage pages, and every game, trivia and leaderboard surface. Nobody pays to be included in the guide, and paid placement never affects what the guide says.