Third annual RADfest lands November 14 and 15, and for the first time the River Arts District Artists Foundation is running a free shuttle from downtown straight into the district, with a live band riding along for the trip. RADA board member Carol Spagnuola has been the one explaining the logic behind it: get more people across the tracks and over the bridge, especially as the district heads into the slower winter months when foot traffic usually thins out.
That's the good news arriving this fall. The complicating news arrived earlier this year, at 304 Lyman Street, where the former Asheville Waste Paper Company building was supposed to become Salvage Station's comeback home. A fire hit that building, and it did what fires do to timelines: it didn't cancel the project, but it added a layer of uncertainty that wasn't there before. Plans are still moving forward, according to people close to the rebuild, but nobody in the reporting so far has attached a new opening date to it.
Put those two facts next to each other and you get the actual shape of the River Arts District two years after Helene. It isn't one recovery story. It's two stories running on different tracks, with some businesses reopening or expanding and new ones opening, while the one project everyone wanted back most, a live music venue with real history in this neighborhood, keeps hitting friction nobody planned for.
What's actually open right now
Start with the Foundy area, because that's where the district's comeback has been most visible. The Marquee reopened there after the flood, restoring a piece of the district that used to house hundreds of artists, makers, vintage dealers, and creative vendors inside a 50,000-square-foot former industrial building. Before Helene, it was one of the district's biggest single draws for anyone who wanted to browse a lot of ground in one visit. Now it's functioning again, and it's doing what it used to do.
A few blocks over, Local Cloth turned its own flood damage into permanent art. Founder Judi Jetson has described walking back into the studio after the storm to find water lines more than 10 feet up the walls. Rather than paint over that mark, Local Cloth is coordinating a WaterLine Project that traces the exact height of Helene's floodwaters using individual pieces of fiber art, built by the same community that showed up to help the studio rebuild in the first place. The studio itself reopened last August.
Cultivate Climbing followed a similar arc. Its original bouldering gym on Foundy Street was destroyed in the flooding, and the replacement gym is back open in the same corridor. But Cultivate isn't just replacing what it lost. It's building bigger. Highland Station, a 20,000-square-foot top rope facility going up next to Highland Brewing, will include 45-foot walls and the country's second Quantum Board, a training system that lets multiple climbers work different problems on the same wall at once. That's not a recovery project. That's an expansion, funded on the bet that demand in this corridor is growing, not just returning to where it was.
Wellness followed the same pattern. RAD Yoga opened on Artful Way under longtime instructor Kristin Mitchell, and Blue Ghost Yoga, named for the region's elusive synchronous fireflies, added infrared-heated Vinyasa and kettlebell-infused strength classes to the district's options. Neither of these existed in the district before the storm. Both chose to open here after it.
Dining tells the same story from a different angle. Piccolina, an 800-square-foot Italian spot tucked between a pottery studio and a mixed-media gallery on Depot Street, is part of what Explore Asheville has been calling a shift toward "linger longer" dining in the district: places built for visitors to sit down between studio stops instead of just grabbing something quick on the way through. Elana and Nathan Pearlman opened it after a trip to Italy, and it's become one of the spots people mention when they talk about spending a full afternoon in the district instead of a single gallery walk.
None of this is theoretical. It's a mix of businesses that took flood losses and returned, and new businesses that opened in the district.
The one that hasn't landed yet
Salvage Station is the exception, and it's worth being specific about why. The venue built its identity as a family-owned live music institution, the kind of place that anchors a neighborhood's reputation as somewhere things happen after dark, not just during gallery hours. Its planned return was set for a site along the French Broad River Greenway, close enough to the water and the murals that it would have picked up right where the old location left off.
Then the fire hit 304 Lyman Street. The building wasn't destroyed by the storm two years ago. It was damaged this year, mid-rebuild, which is a different kind of setback than the flood was. Flood damage came with a known cause and a known playbook: dry it out, rebuild, reopen. A fire in a building already mid-renovation raises harder questions about what gets salvaged, what gets rebuilt from scratch, and how much time either option adds to a timeline that residents had already been watching for two years.
The people running point on the rebuild have said plans are continuing. That's the extent of what's confirmed right now. No reopening date has surfaced in current reporting, and treating one as likely would be guessing rather than reporting. What's true is narrower and more useful: the district's smaller businesses have mostly reopened or expanded, and its single biggest anchor project has not, and the reason isn't lack of will. It's a fire that landed on top of a flood.
Who owns the anchor buildings now
Riverview Station, one of the district's original anchor studio buildings, changed hands this year to GBX Group, which is moving forward with what's been described as a preservation-focused redevelopment, an approach that keeps the building's historic industrial character intact rather than replacing it with something generic. That's a different bet than the one RADA itself is making a few blocks away.
RADA president Jeffrey Burroughs has been laying out plans for a Creative Campus spanning more than 33,000 square feet across two buildings, with the foundation's stated focus split across five areas that include affordable studio space, creative manufacturing space, and workforce development for artists. Where GBX Group is buying an existing anchor and preserving it, RADA is trying to build a new one from a nonprofit's playbook, betting that affordability for working artists matters more than polish.
Those two approaches sitting a few blocks apart is the real structural story of the district right now. It's not one developer's vision winning out. It's two different models for what an anchor building should do, running in parallel, with neither one finished yet.
Getting there just got easier, and that's not an accident
The free LaZoom shuttle for RADfest is a small detail, but it's part of a bigger pattern. Separately, the Western North Carolina Passenger Rail Corridor project, still in its planning phase with study work continuing through 2027, has floated potential station locations that include sites in or near the River Arts District. That's years out and nothing is decided. But it means the district is fielding two separate connectivity pushes in the same year: a shuttle solving this month's problem of getting festival crowds across the river, and a rail study aimed at solving a much longer-term version of the same question.
That's worth noticing precisely because it's happening in the same stretch of time as the Lyman Street fire. The district isn't waiting on any single project to define its momentum. People are investing in getting more visitors to this corridor even while one of its most anticipated buildings sits in limbo.
What's on the calendar this fall
| Event | Date | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Spooky Saturday Art Festival | Oct. 10, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. | RAD Second Saturday, Foundy Street |
| October's Ghost, opening reception | Oct. 17, 5–7 p.m. (runs through Nov. 1) | Mark Bettis Gallery, 123 Roberts St. |
| RAD Second Saturday Stroll & Arts Market | Nov. 14, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. | Foundy Street |
| RADfest | Nov. 14–15 | Throughout the district |
Spooky Saturday and the November Second Saturday Stroll happen on the district's regular monthly rhythm, the same open-studio format that's run for years. RADfest is the outlier this fall, both because it's the third annual run and because it's the one with the new shuttle attached.
What this actually adds up to
Two years after Helene, the River Arts District isn't behind schedule and it isn't finished. It's a place where the district's small and mid-size businesses include those that reopened or expanded as well as new businesses such as the yoga studios, while the one large anchor project everyone's been asking about keeps running into new complications on top of old ones. If you're already walking these blocks on a Second Saturday, that unevenness is the thing worth understanding, not the recovery narrative that treats the whole district as one story with one ending.
If you're curious what any of this means for property near the district, or you just want someone who tracks these blocks as closely as the artists who work in them, Home in WNC is a good person to ask.
