How Pride bolsters Uptown
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If you're heading into Uptown Charlotte today, be prepared for big crowds, street closures, dancing, rainbow flags and lots of glitter.
- The Charlotte Pride, the city's largest street festival and largest annual parade, gets underway at 1pm. It'll be held rain or shine.
Context: Pride roared back in Uptown in 2022, following a two-year hiatus during the pandemic.
The big picture: Leisure travel and spending in Charlotte like the kind Pride sees, city boosters say, helps bolster Uptown's recovery at a time when business travel hasn't made the same post-pandemic strides.
By the numbers: Organizers expect about 260,000 weekend attendees, matching last year's figure. About a quarter of those attendees will be out-of-towners who traveled more than 50 miles to attend, Charlotte Pride communications manager Liz Schob told Axios.
- Pride's total economic impact is $15.8 million annually, according to organizers.
- Direct visitor spending is $9.5 million.
- The event generates $580,000 in local tax revenue.
- Pride is responsible for 16,500 hotel room nights.
What they're saying: "Typically it's a very strong demand weekend for us based on (the) hotel's parade route location," Tom Dolan, the JW Marriott's director of sales and marketing, tells Axios.
The intrigue: Plenty of newcomers to Charlotte probably wonder why Pride is held in August here and not June — the month marking the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York when other major cities host their Pride events.
- The TLDR? It boils down to city scheduling, as WFAE reported a few years ago. Organizers told the station they actually like that Charlotte's Pride doesn't conflict with other Pride events, so that people can attend more than one.
