West Asheville

What used to be known as “Worst Asheville” now attracts young people who are fixing up neglected Craftsman-style cottages and bungalows, having chosen smaller floorplans with personality and a yard in a walkable community over sprawling houses in designer-planned neighborhoods. West Asheville teems with parents pushing strollers and relaxed retirees out walking their dogs. The community’s resurrection came about after a downturn that quite literally put West Asheville on the wrong side of the tracks.

West Asheville is one of the hottest things going in Asheville right now. It’s where much of Asheville’s funkiness still rings true, serving as a gateway to the River Arts District, where one find’s quintessential hangouts like The Wedge, a small brewery that has done an excellent job of convincing people that it’s cool to hang out in a scruffy yard by the railroad tracks that run parallel to the river. The neighborhood Italian restaurant, Nona Mia, relocated from a strip mall off Patton Avenue to Haywood Road, West Asheville’s main thoroughfare, which is also gives its address to the Lucky Otter burrito joint, Urban Orchard Cider Co.’s press and tasting room, the breakfast-only Biscuit Head, and Sunny Point Café, where the tiny dining room is packed seven days a week. 

“Sunny Point used to be Lisenbee’s Place, a little beer joint type of place,” said Tommy Sellers, who grew up in West Asheville and went on to serve as an Asheville City Council member. Mr. Lisenbee, who had a watch repair shop in the other half of the building, used to go bear hunting with Seller’s father, and afterward, they’d stop by the bar for a cold one. The Mothlight, a new music room that attracts A-list touring bands, used to be Rose’s Five and Dime, Sellers said. What is now West Village Market in the Bledsoe Building was French’s Five and Dime. 

Sellers’ family owned a building near the fire station. As a boy growing up in the ‘60s, Sellers loved to sneak into the West Asheville fire station with his buddies whenever the firemen had been summoned away on a call. The boys would run upstairs and slide down the brass pole the firemen used to get quickly from their quarters to the trucks. But the firemen, who had learned to grip the pole with their forearms to keep it smudge-free, would know the boys had been there by the smattering of small fingerprints they left behind.

His family of six—he, three brothers, and their mother and father—all lived in an apartment above his father’s cabinetry shop and mother’s coin shop. Sellers didn’t know much about the rest of the world, but he knew every inch of Haywood Road. West Asheville was solidly working-class back then. Just about everything people needed existed along the road. Husbands bought gas at the Esso station, where attendants also checked the oil and cleaned the windshields. Wives walked to the A&P, Colonial, and Winn-Dixie for groceries, or they shopped at Brown’s Market—now home to Harvest Records. 

“It was just your local grocery store that actually delivered groceries by bicycle,” Sellers said. “You’d call it in, and they would get your order together and bring it to your front porch.”

Sellers could earn a quarter or two sweeping up sawdust in his father’s cabinetry shop, and he’d get another 50 cents or so by selling the sawdust to Brown’s Market, where Mr. Brown would toss it on the floor of the store’s butcher shop. 

“So I was an entrepreneur at 10 years old,” Sellers said.

For a quick bite, Sellers and his friends would head to the soda fountains at Ideal or Bennett’s drug store. 

“A hot dog and a cherry Coke probably cost you about a buck,” Sellers said.

At barber shops, shoe repair, hair salons, doctors, restaurants, garages and churches, West Asheville’s residents saw each other everywhere. That changed, though, in the 1950s when the state built a bridge over the French Broad River, bypassing Haywood Road and rerouting traffic to Patton Avenue. As businesses started migrating to Patton Avenue, West Asheville began to wither. 

“People like my mom and dad grew old, and businesses closed,” Sellers said. “Children didn’t have the same passion to keep the family businesses going. People died out, and children moved away.” 

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, crime rose and property values fell. The broad sidewalks that lined West Asheville’s once-vibrant neighborhoods were empty. People shopped at the Asheville Mall, on the east side of town. One by one, the lights at small, family-owned businesses along Haywood blinked out.

Sellers and fellow long-time reside Dale Groce refused to stand idle. They and other business people lobbied the city for help. The city came through with money for Christmas lights, which attracted people to West Asheville. Then, while Sellers was a city councilmember, Asheville opened a police substation on Haywood Road. Residents felt safe again, but decades of neglect still showed. Houses in the surrounding neighborhoods needed a lot of work, but they were exceptionally affordable. 

“People started buying these old homes that were gems and taking the aluminum and vinyl siding off and bringing back the character that was always there,” said Austin Walker, a commercial real estate agent who lives in West Asheville. The new owners wanted what the old owners had­—a sense of community, as well as convenience.

“One of the major draws was that you could be downtown in your favorite restaurant in six minutes,” Walker said. “In 10 minutes you could be mountain biking in Bent Creek or driving on the Blue Ridge Parkway and even be on your way to Waynesville. These were all key pieces of the West Asheville experience.” 

In the ‘90s, Krista Stearns and Cathy Cleary had a small bake-and-deliver business and heard from customers how nice it was to have something so good made close to home. The two set up tables at street gatherings to see if West Asheville would support a real bakery. They got an overwhelmingly positive response.

“Cathy and I kept walking down Haywood Road and saying, why isn’t anything happening here, because we saw all these young families,” Stearns said at the bakery recently over a hot bowl of soup. She and Cleary began looking at property. What they found was more than what they were looking for—a great place for a baker but an owner who wouldn’t sell it to them unless they also bought his other property next door, the Bledsoe Building. The location would make for a true community gathering spot, so the women sought backing from some entrepreneurial spirits. 

“It’s pretty amazing that, at 28 years old, we were able to find investors,” Stearns said. “We didn’t even have any restaurant management experience.” 

West End Bakery opened in 2001. Just a stone’s throw away, West Ashville residents Lu Young and Greg Turner opened Westville Pub in 2002. 

“There wasn’t a whole lot going on around here then,” said Drew Smith, Young’s son and the pub’s general manager. 

Oh, but how things change. 

“Those young leaders took a chance on West Asheville,” Groce said.

More than a decade later both West End Bakery and Westville Pub are bastions of West Asheville’s by-the-bootstraps success. 

 “West Asheville is blowing up,” said Liz Sea, celebrating the end of the semester’s exams at Sunny Point Café with two girlfriends from the University of North Carolina-Asheville. She said many of her friends have moved to the area, in part due to what her friend Audrey Howarth observed—West Asheville’s community seems “much less touristy” than downtown Asheville.

Indeed, Haywood Road still has a grocery store, a coin laundry, mechanics, and hair salons tucked in alongside churches and banks.

 “People are building neighborhoods on the west side in a new way, in a sustainable, walkable, livable kind of environment,” said Jodi Rhoden, owner of Short Street Cakes, having arrived to work with bags full of tacos from a local shop for her staff. “I myself just moved here from downtown and can walk to my son’s school, to work, to eat, to get a drink.”

“This community kind of vibrates with me,” said Michael Akers, a native of the Czech Republic who owns a bagel stand in West Asheville. “It’s my kind of people—artists, working class, kind of a shared community all mixed together.” 

At Battle Cat Coffee Bar, Kisha Blount was outside with others, enjoying the unimpeded sun on an otherwise cold day. She was drawing and writing in her journal, in which she sketches out ideas and impressions, often a prelude to the her large-format, cold-wax oil paintings. Blount moved from the small town of Murphy, N.C., to West Asheville last spring. Blount is honest about her realization that some of the community’s attractors are also becoming detractors.

“Everyone is an artist or a massage therapist or a yoga instructor or all three,” she said, laughing. “It’s almost cliché, but it’s a safe haven. That I dig.” 

People in West Asheville are protective, almost defensive, about their community, she says. “It’s like having a sibling—only you can talk about your sibling, no one else can,” she said. “Same with West Asheville—if you’re not from here and you have a complaint, keep your mouth shut.” 

West Asheville has become so well established that many residents now identify themselves as living in “east” West Asheville (east of Interstate 240, on the river side) and “west” West Asheville (west of I-240, toward Patton Avenue). Stearns at the bakery was talking to a friend of a friend in town recently who was looking for a home in the community. The woman said she thought she needed to live in east West Asheville. 

“And I’m like, ‘Wow, it’s really just one street. Does it matter what end you’re on?’” Stearns said. “I would hate to see West Asheville become too polished and gentrified. It wouldn’t feel authentic. I’m OK with not every inch of it being developed.”

However, the cheap, affordable housing Sellers remembers has been so successful in attracting new residents that now the “G” word—gentrification—is indeed being thrown around. The concept concerns Ann Silver, a longtime Asheville resident who was watching the shop at Pro Bikes recently. 

“Everywhere the prices have gone up,” she said. “Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a lot of young, liberal folks with their children pretty much everywhere I go around here.”

Following Asheville’s all-things-beer trend, Pro Bikes is building a bar in its inner sanctum. A small bar called The Brew Pump recently opened inside a gas station down the road. And the Oyster House Brewing Co. is located across the street.

In many ways, West Asheville is a distillation of Asheville, said Gordon Kear, who opened Altamont Brewing Co. in 2011. The enthusiasm the larger city has for fresh food and local businesses is a bit more intense in West Asheville, he believes.

“People starting out with nothing and trying to make something, Asheville does that, but West Asheville is a smaller community, so it’s easier to see here,” Kear said. “Being able to walk or bike wherever we need to go is one of the things that helps us be a neighborhood.”

Like Silver, Kear has noticed the influx of mothers-to-be and moms with young tots in his restaurant. Why so many and all of a sudden, he can’t say, but he’s happy because it shows how desirable the community has become. 

“It’s not a rich area, as far as people’s income is concerned. But it’s rich in people’s quality of life,” he said. “I don’t see any signs of this neighborhood stopping.”