How Pride bolsters Uptown
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
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.