Charlotte’s Peacock Years: A Look At The Late-Night Scene of the 1980s and ’90s

When the sun goes down, modern-day Charlotte has a full-grown skyline, decibel-splitting nightclubs, and more party districts—South End, NoDa, LoSo, MoRA—than you can shake a booty at. But we’re here to tell you something: Charlotte nightlife is nothing new, kiddies. 

In the 1980s and ’90s, Old Charlotte had more than a nightlife. It had a late-night culture. It had 24-hour diners like the Landmark and the beloved Athens Restaurant, where drag queens and prom queens could rub elbows over midnight moussaka. It had discos where the bar stopped serving at 1 a.m., but the music kept pumping until well past 3—and you could tuck into a Krispy Kreme doughnut (or six) on the way home.

In 1987, The Charlotte Observer sent writer Kathy Haight out to prowl all night, through midnight bowling lanes—where even R.E.M. played while they were recording an album here—to private clubs where the dancing went on long after last call. Her story ended at 4:30 a.m. where everyone’s late night ended in Charlotte: At the Athens at Independence Boulevard and East Fourth Street, where a waving neon chef lured the after-hours moths to its flame. 

Until it closed in 2006, Athens Restaurant was the place to go after the bars closed. Photo by Dean Jeffery

“We get all kinds,” a waitress told her. “Preachers, policemen, homosexuals. Punk rockers come in here with all their weird hairdos. There’s one that comes in about every weekend. His hair is shaved on both sides and is all spiked down the middle and dyed pink, green, blue and all different colors. He looks like a peacock.”

WFAE commentator and author Tommy Tomlinson remembers it all well: From 1993 to 1997, he was the Observer’s music writer, and late nights after the show came with the gig.

“You were likely to see anybody,” he says. “At the Athens, especially. You could walk over from the Double Door after a show. There’d be some gospel choir that had just finished performing in one corner and a biker gang in another corner, everybody getting grits and eggs. I don’t remember ever seeing a fight. It was like neutral ground. You came in, and you knew how to behave.”

That was why the Athens gained a rep as the place where drag queens came after their shows: It was a safe harbor before Snug Harbor, which opened in 2007, a year after the Athens closed. 

One night in the mid-’90s particularly lives in Tomlinson’s memory: He had gone to see They Might Be Giants at the Pterodactyl Club. “They did a conga line at the end of the show, all the way through the club and out into (Freedom Drive). And I remember going to the Athens after that and hanging with some people who’d all been there. For (young) me, that was an amazing night.”

If one person gets credit for the start of late-night clubbing, it was Andy Kastanas. Now known for places like Soul Gastrolounge, he brought dance and club music to uptown in 1993 with Mythos, followed by Cosmos Café and Salamandra. The Observer dubbed him “the pope of College Street, the guy who gave people something to do uptown after dark.” 

“It wasn’t about late-night,” he says. “It was to have that kind of music.” His parents sent him back to their native Greece when he was 12 or 13, and he returned to America craving underground music, the kind that DJs spin until it throbs in your bones. “We were trying to do something different, that music. It was exciting music. It made you want to move.” 

So much of that Charlotte didn’t make it to the 2020s. The Athens and Double Door Inn were torn down to make way for a sprawling Central Piedmont Community College. The Landmark, once open 24 hours, is still open every day on Central Avenue, but it now closes at a sedate 9:40 p.m. 

You can’t see a hint of where the Double Door once reigned—even the address on Independence Boulevard is now Charlottetowne Avenue. The original Pterodactyl Club closed in 1999, before the century had even turned. 

If you need 24-hour eats, you can still get them at places like the Midnight Diner and the RedEye Diner, and Sir Edmond Halley’s is still the place where line cooks go after the other restaurants close. Drag queens are mainstream these days, with plenty of places to go. Even bowling alleys, from Pins Mechanical to Queen Park Social, let you hurl a ball until 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights. 

Tomlinson thinks twentysomethings still have plenty of places to watch a world of wonders get ready for bed. “If you’re out at 2, 3 in the morning in any city, you’re not surprised by anything,” he says. “Or you shouldn’t be.”