West Asheville – in the News

From ‘worst’ to first, West Asheville wows its residents

By Paul Clark

It was Steve Mack’s 37th birthday last Sunday, and nearly everyone on Brucemont Circle turned out.

Next-door neighbors Rob and Mishele Fields and their kids were there. So were Steve and Alexis Rosenfelt. Gwain and Mary Cade Mainwaring showed up. Many of them just walked over from their houses.

So many of their West Asheville neighbors were there that it looked a lot like the Brucemont Olympics, the neighborhood’s annual semi-competition of games designed to see who looks the silliest riding their children’s tiny bicycles.

“It reminds me of the neighborhoods we all came from,” said Rob Fields. West Asheville has several neighborhood clusters, Fairfax and Vermont avenues among them, where residents get together, he said.

Noticed now, for a while

Once known as “Worst Asheville,” West Asheville was recently named by Men’s Journal magazine as one of the best neighborhoods in the Southeast.

“Even after nearly two decades of growth, West Asheville is still basically what downtown Asheville was like a decade ago,” Britta Waller wrote in the magazine. “Keeping it funky was a priority for a population young enough to not yet care about saving for retirement.”

In 2007, Natural Home Magazine ranked West Asheville as its top eco-friendly community. “Revitalized in the 1990s, West Asheville has affordable, renovated and fixer-upper bungalows and cottages, plus a fashionable commercial district, tree-lined streets, historic architecture and a small-community feel,” the magazine wrote.

There are two commercial hubs in West Asheville, both off Haywood Road (its main street for more than 100 years). One creative cluster is just west of Interstate 240, home of Harvest Records, Blue Ridge Biofuels, dressmaker Brooke Priddy, Izzy’s coffeeshop and The Admiral, a bar with an eclectic collection of music in its juke box. The other cluster surrounds the Westville Pub, a walk-to restaurant that’s an after-hours place for young professionals who live nearby. Orbit DVD, Digable Pizza, West End Bakery are all there, too.

North and south of both areas are tree-lined streets that are decades old (where else in Asheville will you find sidewalks on both sides of the street?). Most residents can peer into their neighbors’ side windows, but why would they, when they can talk to them from within deep porches and from the middle of side gardens growing slightly out of control? Grocery shopping for many on the west side is an easy walk away (the Grove Corner Market has moved into the space where the Haywood Road market co-op was).

“West Asheville is one of the few places you can actually walk to the restaurants and shops, and you just don’t get that everywhere,” said Steve Mack’s wife, Tacey. “I love the closeness, the small-town feeling.”

Close homes, closer neighbors

The Macks have lived in West Asheville for more than 10 years. Like other transplants, they were attracted to the look and feel of old homes in deep, shady lots. “Sometimes you get overwhelmed with thoughts of remodeling” Tacey (pronounced “Tazey”) said, “but then we look around and think we have such great neighbors.

“We had some neighbors move to a beautiful home in North Asheville, and when I talked to them last, they said they miss the neighborhood and the people. They said they were going to start coming back to visit.”

The Brucemont Circle neighborhood has a community picnic every year, but it didn’t last summer because it had the Brucemont Olympics (it’s in August this year). Winning an event like the hula hoop hoopla might net someone a “really, really ugly birdfeeder,” Tacey Mack said. Or the equally tacky Brucemont Olympic-engraved beer stein that last summer’s winner somehow left behind.

“We all talk about that when we’re outside, the kids are not inside watching TV, they’re outside playing like when we were kids,” said Tacey Mack, who grew up in Murphy. “They know we all look out for them.”

Jim Morgan looks out for everybody. He’s Lynn Hunter’s mailman on Olney Street, a route he’s had for 18 years. He greets many of the box holders by name. And they know his.

The personal touch

“There’s a sense of community in West Asheville,” Morgan said, pausing in front of Hunter’s house on Tuesday. “That’s something America has lost. It’s not like you can leave the keys in your car and your front door unlocked…”

“I did, until just a while ago,” Hunter said.

“… but the neighbors here know each other,” Morgan said. “There’s a good sense of security in that.”

It makes Hunter feel safe. A single mother whose children have grown and gone away (her son lives around the corner), Hunter moved into her house from North Asheville in 1992. Within 10 minutes of her unloading the first load, two people had walked up and welcomed her to the neighborhood, she said. One neighbor still brings her bread fresh from the oven. She knows all her neighbors and checks on the elderly ladies who live nearby. She likes that her neighborhood has a mix of older and younger residents.

“It’s nice to see this rejuvenation,” she said, pausing from digging poison ivy out of her flower garden in the front yard. “People in this neighborhood look out for each other. They’re taking me out feet first.”

Not far away, Brandy Clements was taking her old dog Jack for a walk when she saw her friend Stacey Macdonagh sitting on her back porch off Maple Crescent Street. Macdonagh invited them up, and while Jack enjoyed the break from the heat, the two friends caught up in the shade.

“I love having the front door open and having friends stop by,” said Macdonagh, who works at home, doing Internet research. Her husband works up the street, at West End Bakery. Clements is a waitress at nearby Sunny Point Café and Bakery.

Macdonagh said she can’t go for a walk in the neighborhood without running into someone she knows. Clements can’t go for a walk without meeting another dog (and dog owner). “There are probably more dogs than people here,” said Macdonagh, who knows all the kids and canines in the neighborhood. And the postman, Mr. Morgan? “He’s awesome,” Clements said.

“West Asheville is a little bubble,” she said. “I find myself not going downtown. Sometimes I don’t even start my car.”