Charlotte's downtown grid was redrawn in 1768 when surveyor Thomas Polk laid out four wards radiating from Trade and Tryon, the crossroads that would anchor the South's second-largest banking center two centuries later. Today that intersection sits beneath glass towers holding more than $2 trillion in assets, while three blocks north the Fourth Ward's Victorian cottages—built between 1890 and 1920—remain largely intact, their gingerbread trim and wraparound porches preserved through a 1970s conservation effort that saved 11 blocks from demolition. The uptown core compresses 250 years of American commerce into 1.5 square miles. Bank of America's corporate headquarters rises 871 feet at 100 North Tryon, its crown visible from 20 miles out; at its base, the old Independence Building—Charlotte's first skyscraper, completed in 1909—anchors a corner where cotton traders once set regional prices. The Mint Museum's original building, erected in 1837 as the Charlotte branch of the U.S. Mint, produced $5 million in gold coins before the Civil War; Charlotte sat atop the nation's first documented gold rush, a 30-year seam that predated California by two decades. Electric cart access opens lanes closed to standard vehicles. The Fourth Ward loop passes Alexander Michael's, a pub occupying an 1898 Victorian that survived urban renewal, and the Duke Mansion, a 1915 Colonial Revival estate now operating as a nonprofit inn. Two blocks south, the Overstreet Mall—a second-story pedestrian bridge completed in 1975—connects the city's convention district above street level, a skyway experiment that predated Minneapolis's more famous system. Modern uptown layers NASCAR heritage atop Reconstruction-era rail junctions. The NASCAR Hall of Fame, opened in 2010, anchors a district where Southern Railway once moved Piedmont cotton to Atlantic ports; its Glory Road exhibit banks at 18 degrees, replicating Daytona's high-speed turns. Across Brevard Street, Romare Bearden Park commemorates the Charlotte-born collagist whose Harlem Renaissance work now hangs in the Met and MoMA. The 5.4-acre green, completed in 2013, occupies former rail yards, its berms and lawns terraced above what was once the Southern's freight depot.