This district feels like Asheville telling its life story in brick, stone, and storefront glass. All around you stretches the city’s historic core, a National Register historic district that gathers about two hundred seventy-nine contributing buildings and one contributing object across the old central business district. Here, Colonial Revival, Queen Anne, and Art Deco stand shoulder to shoulder, like neighbors from different generations still sharing the same block.
Some of Asheville’s best-known landmarks live inside this patchwork: City Hall, the Buncombe County Courthouse, the Young Men’s Institute, the Thomas Wolfe House, the Battery Park Hotel, the Jackson Building, and the S and W Cafeteria. Pack Square once held the Vance Monument too, until its demolition in May of twenty twenty-one. If you peek at the before-and-after image, you can see how the Kress Building’s restored upper facade and renewed storefronts gave Patton Avenue fresh life.
The district earned national recognition in nineteen seventy-nine, then grew and shifted again in later boundary changes. Let this corner linger with you... and continue on when you’re ready.
