PART 1: The RAD's Uneven Flow | Hedy Fischer, Gail McCarthy, Stephanie Monson Dahl

Hedy Fischer and Gail McCarthy have been in Asheville since the late 1970s and, along with their artist husbands, played critical roles in the evolution of the River Arts District from a neglected, polluted wasteland of warehouses into the thriving arts and commerce destination it is today. They also have thoughts on whether the scales of progress for the neighborhood have tipped too far.

Today is the first in a two-part conversation with Fischer and McCarthy, along with Stephanie Monson Dahl, the city’s manager of Urban Design, Place Strategies, and Long Range Planning. 

We talk about how 2010 marked a key turning point for the district and how vision and investments from the city and key developers turned the tide. We talk about the differing impacts of hotel vs. residential development there, managing traffic in the RAD and whether building owners beyond McCarthy and Fischer are as committed to offering artists affordable workspaces.

The second half of this conversation posts Thursday, June 20.

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Transcript

Hedy Fischer: Gail will be our historian. She's been in the River Arts District much longer than I have. 

Matt Peiken: I don't know. Cause I've read that you got there also in the late seventies. 

Hedy Fischer: I got to Asheville in the seventies, but not to the River Arts District. I didn't buy the property that has Now become Pink Dog until 2010.

Stephanie Monson Dahl: Which was a pretty key year in the River Arts District, by the way. 

Matt Peiken: How so Steph? 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: So in 2010 First of all, for the city It was when the Riverfront Commission started meeting so the city It was 100 percent bought in to working with partners down in the River Arts District to make something happen according to the Wilma Dykeman plan and other plans.

It is when, I believe this is also when 372 Depot, which was Mountain Housing Opportunities, it is when that project first opened. I think there's over 60 residential units in there and they're all affordable housing units, plus a whole bunch of new commercial on the ground floor.

It was a mini catalyst for the area, really showing that people believed in making it the place that the artists wanted to see. I mean, Affordable housing was a big deal for artists back then as well. 

Matt Peiken: Was that the first housing development in the RAD at that time, 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: The first actual investment that I remember.

I'm trying to remember their name. Ray. No. 

Hedy Fischer: Oh, yeah. Quate 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: right. Quate. It was Janet. Yes. And they actually are on the opposite corner right there on Depot Street and 

Hedy Fischer: Depot and bartlett on the corner. 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: Yep. And so they purchased that building and had a vision that it could be adaptively reused.

And that was the first time that I remember someone, not an artist is what I'm saying, going in and buying a property and saying, I want to be here. I want to provide spaces for other people. 

Matt Peiken: What was the mindset back then in the city and elsewhere? Was it. Wow, this is a fantastic Vision, we would love to have residents in the River Arts District ? You know, 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: Oh no, no, at the time. I think the city was just listening to And this is where Hedy came in. There was a group of people that had invested a lot on depot street. This is where a lot of things started off. Although we were working on some brownfields things as well, And said, we're trying to make it down here And it's unsafe. It's not clean. People can't walk around. No one knows how to get here. We have all of these problems. And so the private sector was already doing what they needed to do to make it like a vital area. And they were already coming together and meeting, obviously. And, there been this studio stroll effort since the mid nineties.

You had lots of not for profits in the area, RADA had already been started, but this is when the business association really kicked into play and people started thinking about what different infrastructure investments and other programmatic investments needed to be from the public sector in order to make things work.

So we were looking at everything from the zoning, how people could have signs and redoing sign packages. Making sure that bicyclists had a safe place to be parking was one of the number one issues in the area. Yeah, it still is it always will be but the Wilma Dykeman Riverway plan wasn't the only riverfront plan.

There'd been plans put together in the riverfront for many years, but it was adopted by the city and the county in 2004. We started working with about a million dollars of EPA brownfield grant monies to just get an idea of what was happening in the area from a contamination perspective in 2008.

And then by 2010, we were kicking off the design and planning for all the infrastructure investments that eventually became the RAD tip. 

Matt Peiken: Was it something back then? It was just, and maybe Gail and Hedy, if you can speak to this, was just piecemeal artists finding spaces in buildings at the time. Oh, I found this open room for 150 a month And this is great. And then artist friends that person knew would start renting there. Up until up to that point, was there no concerted effort to create artist studio buildings? 

Gail McCarthy: I would say so in In my mind, it was a case of build it and they will come. We obviously started looking for a space for high water clays, our business, and we had been growing out of that business, and there was a sign on the Clingman Avenue property for sale, and went to check it, sale or lease, I think The movie people had used it for costume storage for a while, seasonally, when they were doing The Last of the Mohicans.

And I went and saw it, and went back to Brian and said, Brian, you have to come. The building said something to me. You have to go and see if it says something to you.

We were on Riverside Drive, 600 Riverside Drive, around the corner from where we ended up. We needed extra storage. And Brian came back and he said, that's not our storage. That's our store. And that's the school we've always talked about. So the store moved over. We started Odyssey Center for the Ceramic Arts. 

Matt Peiken: And at the time, correct me if I'm wrong in this again, I was just alluding to this as a supposition. I imagine that there wasn't a concerted effort to I'm going to buy the cotton mill and turn this into X number of studios. Even when you bought Pink Dog in 2010. I'm wondering if 20 years prior to that, nobody was buying up buildings to turn into artist studios, right? 

Hedy Fischer: Not necessarily. There were three large buildings down there that had artist studios in them. Two of which burned down. The cotton mill burned down. And the current cotton mill is the remnants of that huge building that was there. And the Chesterfield Mill burned. 

Gail McCarthy: Oh, right. Yes. 

Hedy Fischer: And there were artists in both of those buildings at the time. There was also an artist in the Wedge. And that was owned by an investor here, a local investor, who eventually sold it to one of the artists, a guy named John Payne, who made articulating dinosaurs that he would sell or lease to natural history museums and that sort of thing.

Pattiy Torno, she was an artist. She bought her building, the Curve. John Payne eventually was able to build by the Wedge. McCarthy's had bought their building on Clingman. 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: Helene and her sister. Helene and her 

Hedy Fischer: sister owned Riverview Station. So there were already. It was building happening when we bought the building that we turned into Pink Dog in 2010, we bought it for Randy to have a studio. I mean, Every commercial building we own, we bought for Randy to have a studio. 

Matt Peiken: I didn't know that. 

Hedy Fischer: And the ones we didn't buy, we wanted to buy for him to have a studio. Yeah, so he's needed bigger spaces and bigger spaces. And that one was so big, we knew that we would rent space to other artists for sure.

And as soon as we started painting the outside of the building, people started stopping and saying, What's going on here? But when we bought Pink Dog in the early winter of 2010, they hadn't even broken ground yet on 372 Depot.

Stephanie Monson Dahl: Really? 

Hedy Fischer: Uh uh. Because I went to the groundbreaking and we went to the groundbreaking too. I thought that was in 2010. It was 2010, but it was later in the year. Okay. Yeah. So at that point, Depot Street, other than Ray Quate's building on the corner of Depot and Bartlett, it was pretty empty and deserted and it was scary and you didn't go down there at night.

Gail McCarthy: And people were afraid to even drive through there, lock their car doors if they had to go through.

Hedy Fischer: It was a frightening place. People would say to us when we started having studios there, is it safe to come down here? 

Gail McCarthy: Did you? I never felt afraid or I never did yeah, 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: but you know, People don't see activity and there's boarded up windows and all that.

It's just the perception, but there was a reality as well for When the city purchased, it was before 2010, I think? No, it was right after that. When we purchased the old Ice House, there was certainly a lot of illegal activity going on there. People were injured. One person died there last year before the city bought it. And I know when we talked to Pattiy Torno about what it used to be like in the area for her to go running, right? When she would run around before New Belgium was, you 

Hedy Fischer: know, it's so brave. Yeah. Yeah. It was just what era 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: I don't want to paint it as a completely unsafe area.

But the truth was that there weren't a lot of people paying attention and it felt like only the people that were either invested there and who were these artists that were staying there were trying to make sure that there was any activity happening in the area. 

Matt Peiken: Stephanie, it's interesting because that's not all that long ago.

We're talking 15 years ago, when this was still An artist piecemeal finding places to be, there weren't developers coming in there and you're looking like you're searching your memory, Stephanie to say, maybe there were. 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: There really weren't, there weren't developers coming in there. And There were local interested people and we did see some investment by local folks. You brought up the Wedge Building. There was a moment in time where about 12 people got together and purchased the Wedge Building off of John Payne's, then Widow and you saw different activities like that. 

Matt Peiken: From your vantage point within the city was the city worried about hey, there are a lot of people coming down there. It's not safe. We don't have infrastructure in there. We need to help manage what's starting to mushroom there or did the city not recognize what was on the horizon or in terms of making it a livable, habitable, tourist friendly area? 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: The city or at least myself and our team, we knew exactly what the area could be. And we were helped by a lot of people that were already down there. When we started working there, there were already over a hundred artists in the district. So it was very much a thriving arts district.

Albeit that people couldn't get around and they were confused, and perhaps it was too gritty for some. All of that, but the number one issue when we started working was that there was a stretch of maybe almost a mile along Riverside Drive, where there were these huge properties that hadn't seen any kind of investment, mostly, in 40 years. And the number one reason was that people believe that they were contaminated, that these were old industrial, 

Matt Peiken: like superfund sites. 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: Yeah, and they certainly were not. So the first thing that the city set out to do was to get this grant money and to perform these environmental assessments on about 10 properties in the area, including the property that eventually became where new Belgium is. So, um, there's a lot of questions about what the problem is today. And we talked with all of the owners, the historic owners and the utilities to just say what would it take for you to free these up for other people to come in and start thinking about doing something here that would help bring in more feet on the street, more eyes.

I mentioned New Belgium that came out of that. That wasn't a huge thing, but the city's number one concern was just to try to take things incrementally, step by step over time and the focus was to fix the way that people got around in the district and make that safe. 

Matt Peiken: Again, I wasn't around then. What's changed other than having Riverside looks much different. It's, you've got the roundabout there, but it doesn't look like there's a lot of new like new roads that were put in there. What's different? 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: So Riverside Drive is actually completely different.

So it used to be that the road that's called River Arts Place that goes in front of Curve and Black Wall Street. That was Riverside Drive, so we rerouted Riverside Drive and created that kind of interior little village node. And that way we were able to use the roundabouts to facilitate traffic movement, get people a little bit pulled away from At least on that side of the railroad tracks, away from the railroad tracks and try to stop some of the pileups that are happening there. And then there was this dogleg you had to make. If you're coming from the north and curve would be on the left and you would have to take a right there while all this other traffic was zooming by in order to get down to riverview station or the park system. So there's actually A very different roadway and a different network.

When we first started working down there, that side of the river, there were zero sidewalks. There was no pedestrian lighting. There was no public parking. There was no storm water system. There were Many more buildings that were in the floodway and the roads were really hard to get around on. There was also no way finding. 

Matt Peiken: You mentioned the floodway. That's one of the things I was going to ask you about. All of you, were you concerned, because flooding happens annually or almost every other year. There's some level of flooding that happens. Were you concerned about rooting your studios in a place that's prone, there were fires, floods.

Did that worry you? 

Hedy Fischer: For Pink Dog? No. We're far enough from the river that we're really not in the flood plane. And The water would also have to go over the berm that's the railroad tracks in order to get to depot Street. So I wasn't, we weren't concerned about flooding. 

Gail McCarthy: Aware of the possibility of flooding. There's even a mark on the Exterior of the river link building as to how high the water had gotten in a particular year, and it has Come up it never really hit our building or endangered the building on Clingman Avenue. There was flooding In our first home, which was down in Biltmore Village. There was flooding that went on in our second home. But nothing that was ever disastrous as far as we were concerned.

Matt Peiken: Both of you ,Gail and Hedy, you talked about how your initial impetus was finding homes for Brian's clay business and for Randy's art. You both founded destination centers for artists in a sense, you know, with Pink Dog among other buildings, odyssey clay center has seen scores and scores of ceramic artists come through there.

Was there a time when you were operating below the Larger public's consciousness where it wasn't tourist driven.

Hedy Fischer: It was initially not tourist driven business at all. It was just artists looking for a place to do their work. 

Matt Peiken: When did the pressures of the marketplace start to come into play? 

Gail McCarthy: I would say that the start of the studio strolls Started an awareness of the possibilities of being able to not only have a studio space but also sell out of your studio space.

Matt Peiken: Everybody I would imagine at the time would think, StudioStroll, great idea, right? We're going to bring more awareness to the work we do and more awareness to this area which needs support, which needs local resident support and tourist money wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. The River Arts District artists association developed right or did that already exist? 

Gail McCarthy: No, that kind of happened Bit by bit and people getting together and saying oh, let's have a studio stroll and then oh Okay, yeah, you're in the neighborhood now, Let's have a studio stroll. 

Matt Peiken: When did it start to be where our Affordable housing issue and crisis started to reach an area of the RAD where affordable Workspace, affordable arts working space became started to become an issue. When did real estate pressures start rubbing up against the hey, I found this cheap space. When did that start to be a collision? 

Gail McCarthy: I would say That the two of us here right now, it never became something that was an issue for us because our intention was not to make it market driven. Our intention was always to provide a space and a home for artists and craftspeople.

Now, of course, as the years go by, and as taxes rise, and utilities rise, there have to be some rent adjustments, but We've never paid attention to what the market value of the studio spaces should be.

Hedy Fischer: And interestingly, I have no idea what other studios rent for in the RAD. I've never asked Brian and Gail. I've never asked Pattiy. What do you rent your studios for ? 

Matt Peiken: Really? 

Hedy Fischer: No. I have no idea. I don't know if I'm high, if I'm low. The only way I know that is if one of the artists who's You know, been looking around for studio space might mention something, but generally they don't either.

They're just looking for space that they can afford. 

Matt Peiken: Have you found that your artists now, because affordable space becomes so scarce, they're holding on, they stay for many years. 

Hedy Fischer: Many years. I have some artists who have been there since we opened the building. 

Matt Peiken: Wow. So 14 plus years now. That's amazing. Stephanie, when did you and your colleagues in the city, in the planning department, start seeing, wow, there's starting to be some other pressures, some external interest in this region and more people coming in a way, not that you hadn't planned for.

You said you and your colleagues always saw the potential. When did it start to be, wow, there's a real turn of the dial here in terms of interest in the RAD from a development standpoint. 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: There's a couple different key moments that I'm thinking about.

One of them It was probably in 2016 or 2017 so it was after the city had purchased 91 Riverside Drive and was considering redeveloping it and partnered with a bunch of institutions, including what is now ArtsAVL, to look at developing affordable live work spaces for artists. We had a survey done asking people what they needed as far as space.

And this is survey was specifically done for artists. And it was really illuminating. It was really helpful for us to see that, people still, Many artists that there were in the district and it's never gone down. By the way, the number of artists has always increased up until this point, that more people still wanted to be there.

People wanted to live there. They still wanted spaces to make their art just like they did when they first started coming. People certainly weren't contacting us about affordable gallery space or anything like that. So that moment was important. Note or signal for us. And then I'd say the other thing is as much as our work with the city started as a response to the local public sector saying we need some investment, The investment that we put in which generally was completed, the whole thing was mostly completed right during the pandemic. It was great for it to have opened during that time people needed all the open space. It attracted developers 100 percent, and This is a good point that Gail made earlier. If you're on the east side of the railroad tracks, which These two women both are, you're not as concerned with the flood area and how that may impact you.

The properties that are on the west side of the railroad tracks, those are the ones I talked about being potentially contaminated. They are right outside of the floodway and very much in the flood plain. They're backed right up to the railroad tracks and have that as a constraint. It's very hard to develop there. But the city knew that if we put in a lot of open space and infrastructure, we were going to make it more attractive to people. So we also instituted a form based code that told people, this is the type of investment if you're going to invest here, this is the kind of new building that we want to see.

And it took a long time, but right around that 2020, 2021 mark is when we started seeing people come from Atlanta and Charlotte and other places. and usually partner with a local partner for some of their development, but say we want to be here too. 

Matt Peiken: You just said something that I thought was really interesting, that the development of Riverside Drive and making that A very pedestrian and bike friendly route, that attracted developers.

I hadn't necessarily thought of that because this city attracts developers. We have so many hoteliers who come in. There are lots of new residential complexes going in, not necessarily just in Asheville, but going up on that road between Asheville and Weaverville. There's some development there and elsewhere.

But it took those kinds of infrastructure improvements in the River Arts District to lure these developments. And you said you knew, you and your colleagues knew that would happen, and that you tried to help shape the kinds of that's right. Can you kind of bullet point things you and your colleagues in city planning wanted to see happen and didn't want to see happen?

What has your department been on top of in terms of RAD development to try to help steer? 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: Again, we can go back to the flooding and environmental sensitivity and paying attention to the first word of River Arts District, which is river. One of the things that the community wanted to see and the city agreed with is to try to do environmentally sensitive kinds of development.

So that means building up out of the flood hazard areas. So the type of form based code that we developed for everything that's on the west side of those railroad tracks, it doesn't allow you to have really habitable spaces on that ground level. That's all for parking and that's another kind of let's be compact and let's use our land In a really smart way. If we can't build there because it's going to flood, we'll use that area for parking but also let's try to Know that we should minimize parking and promote bicycle parking in the area, Which both of those are done in the form based code. Because we have this, you know The area's first protected bike lane.

We have the spine of a growing greenway network where people should be able to get Around. You're less than a mile from downtown Asheville, So those that's you know, just an example of some of the things that we wanted to see. We provide bonuses for people if they do affordable housing. They get to Create bigger buildings if they do that. 

Matt Peiken: How many developers and i've bullet pointed for myself a rundown from You The small 26 unit development, the RADview from The Wyre, 237 units and The Stoneyard, 263 units that have been approved.

And then I don't know what the development at 179 Riverside is called. Is there a name behind that? 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: It's just changed. So I think now it's called the residences. 

Matt Peiken: Okay. There's 240 there. That's more than 700 to 800 residents coming in. I've seen some parking structures in some of that, that are being built, but how can this area where yes, we have a Riverside drive, but we have, we don't have road widening.

We don't have other new roads. Are you looking at this Stephanie and going. Okay, we can't accommodate cars for all these residents or what do you say to that? 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: So I mentioned that the city doesn't like to promote additional parking. It's not the greatest land use for anywhere in the city, frankly.

However, it is important. That's how most people get around. All of the residential developments are providing probably more parking than they need to. So if you think about The Wyre, that's on the old Dave Steele site. They're going to have extra public parking spaces.

You mentioned the stone yard, which is being done by the same development team. They're very likely, Once they build, going to have more parking spaces that are for the public. We thought about this really hard before we did all those infrastructure investments. I am not concerned with whether or not there is enough parking in the district.

From the standpoint of people who might be driving around saying, I want to park right next to this specific business, or if they need to deliver something, that is different. I'm concerned with loading zones for artists. I'm not necessarily concerned with people who there's a, we have a trolley now.

We have this great ArtsAVL trolley that's going down between downtown the River Arts and they're probably going to expand to Biltmore Village. We do have two buses in our transit system that go on the north and south edges of those districts. We have all of these ways to get around on bicycles and walking.

So this is probably the best area for people to be making investments where we're not concentrating on cars. 

Matt Peiken: Parking's part of it, but part of it is road traffic, the traffic itself. 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: But residential uses don't create the kind of road traffic that you're thinking of. They don't.

Commercial uses create. So you just think about if we stuck a McDonald's down there, I shouldn't be using a specific name. It would just be cars in and out all day. People lining up to go through a drive through. How many times do you leave your home every day? Probably once, twice sometimes never? 

So that when you think about the amount of trips that are generated, Even if there are 600 new Residential units that are in the district many of those folks hopefully are gonna go walk to get their coffee now. They're not gonna go drive to get their coffee. So The amount of traffic that it generates is Usually, it's amazing to people when you see it. It really does get absorbed by many of our areas, so i'm more concerned long term with There are projects and we're going to have to manage this as a community.

There are projects coming up like the I-26 project. That construction is going to mean that there'll be traffic rerouted through west Asheville and the River Arts District and other places anyone who is driven On I 26 going south for the last three years knows that, if you're a local, you know how to get around and the same thing's going to get happen here.

So I want to support our local folks to be able to manage those one time problems.

Matt Peiken: i'm just foreseeing now from riverside going up to clingman just being a gridlock You know Is that what you're seeing like that? 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: If it's a gridlock, people will avoid it and they'll use other ways to get around, right? People are Smart. 

Hedy Fischer: Resourceful.

Stephanie Monson Dahl: They are really resourceful. 

Hedy Fischer: And keep in mind that the people who live in the River Arts District aren't all gonna go out Yeah, at the same time or in the same direction. Some will head towards the south and go to AB Tech or the hospital or some will head downtown. Some will go north. 

Stephanie Monson Dahl: They'll pop up to the grocery store.

Yeah. It's pretty dispersed, the residential uses are a great thing for this district I'll say. 

Hedy Fischer: And I agree a hundred percent great Fully in favor of all the residential development that's going on there. For one thing the RAD has become to a large extent Almost solely a tourist destination, right and that's not sustainable . So that in slow tourist months, Things really die down and the neighborhood doesn't seem as lively, as safe, as many eyes on the street. Whereas if we have people actually living there, we're going to have people that walk to these restaurants and walk to the galleries and walk to the Studios and take the classes and take a class and that actually live in the neighborhood and I think that is what's so sustainable,