FAQ City

Does it seem like something's missing around Charlotte? Something small, green, or brown? Listener Hope Nicholls thinks so. She wrote in to FAQ City wondering about what seemed to be a total absence of cankerworms this spring.

On this week's FAQ City, listener Margaret Peeples has lingering questions about a 2016 report in The Charlotte Observer that found between 2000 and 2016, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department had destroyed more than 1,000 sexual assault kits.

Today on FAQ City, listener Mark Doherty is curious about Charlotte's Revolutionary War history, specifically, where is it?

Orlando has tourism, Nashville has music, seems like Charlotte has always been defined by its banks. But have you ever wondered why?

If you've been keeping up with the news in Charlotte, you've probably encountered the term "287(g)."

It refers to the 287(g) program, a voluntarily partnership between the Mecklenburg County Sheriff's Office and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has become a controversial sticking point in the upcoming May 8 primary for Mecklenburg County sheriff.

If you're not too clear on what the program is, here's a basic primer.

It wasn't too long ago — 2003 in fact — that a huge underground bunker was put up for sale just outside Charlotte. The bunker was built in the Cold War, but since emptied and covered up with weeds and rust.

It's the end of the workday in Charlotte, and a crowd of bankers and business people are heading home for the day, striding down a plain, ordinary sidewalk next to a nondescript brown building on Trade Street.

What these business people perhaps don't know is that just below their feet, about a story or two down, is a bustling underground operation and a massive, steel-encased vault containing untold billions of dollars in cash.

It was only around 70 years ago that Charlotte had a booming trolley system, with dozens of orange-colored streetcars running up and down the middle of Queens Road, The Plaza, and other surrounding streets and neighborhoods. That is, until the late 1930s came around, and the city dismantled the system, envisioning a future where cars and buses would become the city's primary modes of transportation.

Listener Jeff Moen moved to Charlotte about three years ago, and has never really figured out this one quirk of his new hometown. While nearly every city in the nation calls its central business district "downtown," in Charlotte, it's "uptown."