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 section docs when you want the detail.

Updated: 2026-08-20

Contents

1. The four section guides
2. The rest of the site, by room
3. Things that are true everywhere
4. How big is all this?
5. The other help pages

1. The four section guides

Places, neighborhoods, the map and the rail The directory. How a place page is laid out and why the "open now" chip is usually absent; the neighborhood arrival pages and their walkable first hour; the map's fourteen layer chips; the A–Z at /places and the sortable Register beneath it; riding both rail lines and the walkshed rule that decides what counts as "on the line". It opens by reconciling the three different place counts the site quotes, and it ends with a candid list of what the guide deliberately does not hold.

The history archive 677 dated facts, 1540 to 2025, each with its own source and its own confidence. How to brush the Core Sample at /history/timeline and what its semantic zoom does; the eight argued threads and the evidence gaps each one admits to; the twelve prose chapters at /history/record; person, organization and era lookup; the five knowledge-graph views and the question each answers; and the colophon, where the bibliography is generated from the research rather than typed.

Finding things, and planning a trip The search box that reads intent rather than only matching letters, with real queries and their real result counts; what happens when nothing matches, and why every recovery suggestion was run before it was offered; the column browser at /browse and its six axes; the activity cloud; setting a home base; the trip planner, the meal slots, the split-day lanes and the share link; the offline pack; and a full account of what is stored in your browser and what is not.

Playing Seven arcade cabinets, five crosswords cut from the guide's own records, trivia by neighborhood, streaks on Charlotte's clock, and the cosmetic Mint Coins. Also the honest part: what is placeholder, what is unfinished, and exactly which keys in your browser hold your progress.

2. The rest of the site, by room

The four guides above cover most of it. These pages are worth knowing about on their own.

3. Things that are true everywhere

These hold on every page, and the section guides do not repeat them.

Absence means absence. If the guide does not have a fact, it prints nothing. Not "information unavailable", not a plausible-sounding guess. A missing hours line, a missing parking note and a missing price band are all the same statement: nobody has checked this. The Register at the foot of /places tallies those gaps out loud rather than hiding them.

A hedge is printed, never implied. "Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record" appears on the 236 facts it is true of. Where two credible sources disagree, the guide publishes the disagreement rather than picking a winner quietly.

Numbers on the site are computed, not typed. Counts on a page are derived from the records at build time, which is why they can differ from each other honestly and why they cannot go stale. When two counts on this site differ, they are counting different things — see the FAQ.

It works without JavaScript, and it says so where it doesn't. The A–Z, every place page, the whole history record, the offline page and the navigation search all work with scripting off. The map, the column browser and the activity cloud do not, and each says so plainly rather than showing you an empty box.

Charlotte's clock, always. Every time on the site is America/New_York — never your device's, never the server's.

4. How big is all this?

Measured on 2026-08-20:

5. The other help pages

• Getting started — the ten-minute tour.
• FAQ — 26 questions, including the count question.
• Troubleshooting — when something looks broken or missing.
• Glossary — the words this guide uses deliberately.
• Changelog — what has changed, and an honest note about versioning.