Lakewood Park was Charlotte’s first amusement park and one of the biggest in the South at over 100 acres. Lakewood had a roller coaster and a zoo. What’s the history of this famed park and the neighborhood surrounding it?
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, privately owned amusement parks like Lakewood Park began to pop up nationwide. These parks were usually on the city’s perimeter and were self-contained cities unto themselves. They were most often a blend of mechanical structures like roller coasters and carousels and nature with prominent lakes and gardens.
Lakewood Park was constructed three miles northwest of Uptown. It was initially built on 90 acres of land near Chadwick Hoskins mill villages. The park officially opened in 1909 under the ownership of Edward Dilworth Latta, the prominent industrialist and entrepreneur behind the Charlotte Consolidated Construction Company (The 4 Cs). Latta had a dam built across a hollow, creating an artificial lake around which the park could be constructed.
The park’s proximity to a streetcar line increased visitation because it was accessible to visitors by public transportation. White Charlotteans loved Lakewood, as the amusement park was not open to Black people unless they were working or performing in the park.
At the time, the amusement park had the largest carousel in the United States, a bowling alley, flower gardens, a Ferris wheel, fountains, rowboats, a swimming pool, and a dance hall. Lakewood Park grew to be 100 acres, including a roller coaster that opened in July of 1910, an 800-seat casino called the Air Dome that was more of an entertainment venue than a casino, and a petting zoo. The petting zoo attracted many visitors; it had various reptiles, including a skunk, wolves, water buffalo, a wildcat from the Dismal Swamp, a black bear, and monkeys from Brazil.
In 1911, Latta sold Lakewood Park’s streetcar line to James Buchanan Duke’s Interurban Piedmont and Northern Railroad. Duke extended the streetcar line and double-tracked (lines running in both directions) the line.
Latta began leasing the Park to Southern Public Utilities (later Duke Power Company) and sold it to them in 1916. Soldiers stationed at nearby Camp Greene came in their off time. Camp Greene was an Army training facility that, at its peak, housed 60,000 soldiers and was over 8,000 acres. Because of the size of Camp Greene, the number of soldiers passing through, and the level of infrastructure needed to sustain the facility, Charlotte’s population doubled in size. An increased population meant more visitors to Lakewood Park.
Duke Power continued to operate the Park until 1933. In 1936, a tornado destroyed the dam, and heavy rain washed out the lake. No repairs were ever made. The tornado destroyed the Park physically, but the Great Depression also stifled attendance at Lakewood Park, as people no longer had money to spend on entertainment.
After the Park closed in 1936, Lakewood developed as a mill village for the white workers of the Chadwick Hoskins Mill. Today, trees and telephone poles stand where Lakewood Park once stood.
From the 1930s to the late 1960s, the mill village remained white. Urban renewal destroyed the Black neighborhood of Brooklyn in Uptown Charlotte, forcing the residents of Brooklyn to move to other parts of the city, like the mill village that stands where Lakewood Park did. As Black families moved into Lakewood in the late 1960s and the area experienced white flight, new Black residents began calling it Lakeview Neighborhood because of Lakeview Elementary School.
The neighborhood was called Lakeview until 1992, when a group of white residents, Lakewood Community Development Corporation members, and Faith Memorial Baptist Church decided to change the neighborhood name back to Lakewood.
The Lakewood Neighborhood Alliance was formed to engage the community, educate them about opportunities, connect them to needed resources, and advocate for their growth and empowerment. Like many neighborhoods in Charlotte, Lakewood faces the constant threat of gentrification and forced displacement. According to the Economic Innovation Group’s (EIG) Distressed Communities Index zip code 28208, the Lakewood neighborhood has been identified as an at-risk zip code. In 2024, Lakewood scored 79.8 out of 100, with 0 being the most prosperous zip code and 100 being the most distressed.
According to the Lakewood Neighborhood Alliance, residents of Lakeview have less than a 5% chance of working their way out of poverty. Many residents there are vulnerable because they don’t have the resources to sustain the financial, physical, and emotional impacts associated with poverty. Families living there have no financial cushioning and cannot go any period without receiving pay.
The Lakewood Neighborhood Alliance is working to build meaningful relationships with community members, build trust, and provide services focused on family stability and civic awareness. One of the most significant sources of mistrust and resentment came from changing the neighborhood’s name without the input of the people who lived there.
In 2019, the current neighborhood residents voted to rename the neighborhood Lakeview, changing the name of the neighborhood alliance to Lakeview Neighborhood Alliance. That name change signified an important step for the community because the residents were asked how they wanted to be identified, and most of the community chose the name that was adopted in the late 1960s when the neighborhood became a predominantly Black neighborhood.
