Type "Citizen Vinyl" into a search bar today and you'll still get instructions for a 45-minute factory tour, a cafe menu, and a location on O. Henry Avenue in downtown Asheville. None of that is true anymore. The record-pressing plant that spent nearly six years turning the old Citizen-Times newspaper building into a bar-slash-museum-slash-manufacturing floor packed up its presses in May 2026 and moved the whole operation to 179 Merrimon Avenue in Weaverville. The tours stopped. The cafe stayed behind. What's left is a working factory that presses records and nothing else.
If you live here, that's worth sitting with for a second, because it tells you something about how growth actually looks in this town right now. It doesn't look like a ribbon cutting. It looks like a delivery truck backing into a building most people drive past without noticing.
A Business That Grew By Getting Quieter
Citizen Vinyl opened in October 2020 as North Carolina's first vinyl record pressing facility, built into the Art Moderne shell of the old Citizen-Times building. For most of its run, the appeal was as much about the experience as the records themselves. You could watch the presses through glass, order a curried cauliflower bowl at the attached cafe, browse the record store, and catch a tour led by staff who clearly loved the building's radio-station history.
That version of the business didn't disappear all at once. Back in April 2025, still a year before the Weaverville move, Citizen Vinyl closed its cafe, event space, and record store at the O. Henry Avenue building. In a release at the time, CEO Gar Ragland pointed to ongoing challenges in the wake of COVID and the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, and said the company needed to streamline and focus on its core segments: vinyl manufacturing and studio recording. Tours kept running at the Asheville address through that whole stretch. It was only the physical relocation to 179 Merrimon Avenue in Weaverville in May 2026, built around acquiring the pressing equipment of Donaldson Record Pressing, the address's previous tenant, that finally ended the tours too. Mountain Xpress covered that second move in June, describing it as an acquisition of manufacturing assets and additional presses, not an expansion of anything public-facing.
The company's own FAQ is blunt about what visitors should expect now. Asked whether tours are still available, the answer is a flat no, since the move, with a suggestion to check out nearby vinyl-themed bars in Asheville instead if you want that kind of experience.
Here's the shift across both stages:
| 2020 to April 2025 | April 2025 to April 2026 | May 2026 onward | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Address | 14 O. Henry Ave., Asheville | 14 O. Henry Ave., Asheville | 179 Merrimon Ave., Weaverville |
| Public tours | Yes | Yes | No |
| Cafe and bar | Yes | No | No |
| Record store | Yes | No | No |
| Core function | Pressing plant plus public venue | Pressing plant, studio, and tours | Pressing plant only |
That's not a downgrade. It's a business that spent two straight years shedding everything that made it a tourist stop so it could do the one thing it's actually good at, faster and at higher volume. If you were hoping Weaverville just picked up a cool new hangout, it didn't. It picked up a manufacturer, and it took the slow road to get there.
The Rest of Main Street Is Making the Same Trade
Zoom out one block and you'll see the same instinct playing out at street level, just with less machinery involved.
Tommy's Family Restaurant, a longtime fixture at 247 N Main St, changed hands to new owner Martin Ramirez, who chose to keep the doors open through a kitchen remodel rather than closing for the work, trading a splashy relaunch for uninterrupted service. Glass Onion Tavern, the New American and Italian spot that anchors the other end of downtown, came under new management in mid-2025 and has deliberately kept the menu and format that regulars already knew, rather than reinventing itself under new ownership.
Line those two moves up next to Citizen Vinyl's relocation and a pattern emerges. Every one of these changes involved new operators or a new address, and every one of them was engineered to be as invisible as possible to the people who already relied on the place. Nobody wanted a grand reopening. They wanted the regulars to barely notice.
That's a different kind of change than the reinvention story you usually hear about small downtowns picking up energy from a nearby city. Weaverville isn't importing Asheville's cool factor and repackaging it with a bigger sign. It's absorbing capacity and continuity, the unglamorous parts of a business, while keeping the parts that made a place feel like itself.
What Actually Changed If You Live Here
For day-to-day life on Main Street, the practical takeaways are narrower than the business story, but they're real.
- If you were planning to bring visiting family to watch records get pressed, that stop is off the map now. The pressing floor on Merrimon Avenue is a working facility, not a public attraction.
- Tommy's stayed open under its new owner through a kitchen remodel, so you're eating in the same room you always have, just with upgraded equipment behind the line.
- Glass Onion's dinner service and wine list are running under new ownership but the same format, so reservations and the menu you remember should feel familiar.
- The Weaverville Tailgate Market still runs its regular Wednesday schedule at 60 Lakeshore Drive from April through October, unaffected by any of this. It remains the easiest weekly touchpoint with local producers if you want fresh produce without a drive into Asheville.
None of this changes the texture of downtown you'd notice walking it on a Saturday. The storefronts along Main Street, the ones housing Artisans on Main and the Dry Ridge Historical Museum, are still doing what they've always done. What changed is one block over, on Merrimon Avenue, where a business most people knew as a bar with a good playlist quietly became a factory.
Why This Is Worth Watching
The interesting part isn't any single business decision. It's what the pattern says about how Weaverville absorbs growth compared to its bigger neighbor. Asheville businesses that move here aren't necessarily doing it to become Weaverville's version of themselves, the cute downtown outpost with a view. Some of them are doing it because Weaverville has the square footage, the zoning, and the relative quiet to let a business grow without also becoming a spectacle.
That's a distinction worth remembering the next time a familiar Asheville name shows up on a Weaverville address. It might mean the thing you loved about that business, the tour, the bar, the browsing, isn't coming with it. What's coming instead is capacity. Whether that trade is good news depends entirely on what you wanted from the business in the first place.
If you're the kind of person who liked Citizen Vinyl for the cafe and the tour, that version now lives only in memory and in stale search results. If you're the kind of person who just wanted more vinyl pressed faster for the artists and labels you care about, Weaverville just got a lot more useful to you, even if you'll never set foot inside the building.
If you're weighing a move to Weaverville and want a read on how these kinds of shifts, in ownership, in business type, in what a Main Street address actually means, tend to play out for property values and day-to-day livability, Home in WNC is a good place to start that conversation. Rebecca Lafunor works this market block by block and can walk you through what's actually changing here versus what just looks that way from the outside. Request a Free Consultation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
