In February 2026, USA Today ranked the River Arts District the best arts district in the entire country. Two months later, part of it burned down.
That is not a contradiction so much as an honest description of where the RAD stands right now, two years removed from Hurricane Helene. Walk the Foundy Street corridor on a Saturday and you will find a district that looks recovered: a reopened marketplace pulling thousands of visitors, a new climbing gym, two new yoga studios, fresh investment money moving through century-old brick. Walk two blocks over to Lyman Street and you will find a different neighborhood entirely, one where the anchor building is still marked "temp closed" and the venue that was supposed to be this year's big comeback story spent April recovering from a fire instead of hosting its first show. If you live here, or near here, the useful thing to know isn't that the RAD "is back." It's that the answer changes depending on which street you're standing on.
What Foundy Street Actually Has Going for It
The Foundy Street cluster is where the district's recovery has real momentum behind it. Marquee, the 50,000-square-foot design marketplace that took on catastrophic flooding during Helene, reopened in September 2025, almost exactly a year after the storm. Since reopening, it has welcomed more than 5,000 visitors and showcased work from nearly 300 regional artists, numbers that told everyone involved the demand for this place never went anywhere, only the building did for a while.
That momentum has since turned into actual capital. In June 2026, GBX Group, the Cleveland-based real estate firm that bought Riverview Station the previous fall, announced a partnership with the ownership group known as the Foundy Team to coordinate redevelopment across the Lyman and Foundy corridors as a single strategy rather than building by building. The tenant buildouts named in that announcement are specific enough to plan a weekend around: a rock-climbing facility, several new restaurant concepts, and the relocation of an established woodworking shop into the corridor. The climbing gym is Cultivate Climbing, which opened a bouldering space on Foundy Street after its previous location was destroyed by flooding, and the woodworking shop appears to be Foundation Woodworks, visible in recent reporting photographs from the same stretch of street.
The fitness and wellness side of the district has grown too, in ways that have nothing to do with art at all. RAD Yoga opened on Artful Way under longtime instructor Kristin Mitchell, teaching classes built around strength and mindfulness. Nearby, Blue Ghost Yoga, named for the region's rare synchronous fireflies, added infrared-heated Vinyasa and kettlebell-infused strength sessions to the neighborhood's options. Neither existed in the district before this year.
If you are just trying to figure out what is actually open before you make the drive down, the district's own building tracker currently lists these as open: Marquee, NorthLight Studios, Odyssey Center for Ceramic Arts, Phil Mechanic Building, Pink Dog Creative, RAD Rendezvous, Riverside Studios, The Hatchery Studios, The Lift Studios, Warehouse Studios, and Wedge Studios.
Lyman Street Is Telling a Slower Story
Riverview Station is the building most people mean when they talk about the RAD's recovery, and it is also the clearest example of how uneven that recovery has been. The two-building complex at 191 Lyman Street was converted from a former tannery by Helaine Greene and Trudy Gould, and for decades it held studio space for dozens of working artists, including The Village Potters Clay Center, whose co-founder Sarah Wells Rolland has talked about the way painters and ceramic artists sharing a floor push each other's work in directions neither would find alone. Helene flooded the building along with most of the low-lying district. GBX Group bought it in November 2025 and has been running a phased stabilization and reactivation plan since, and the property recently gained recognition from the National Park Service as part of the Hans Rees' Sons Tannery Historic District, which opens the door to preservation-focused investment going forward. None of that changes its status today. The building is still listed "temp closed," and Village Potters has already reopened in a new location rather than wait for Riverview to come back online.
Then there is Salvage Station, which was supposed to be the district's other big 2026 story. The music venue's original Riverside Drive location was destroyed by Helene flooding and was also in the direct path of the Interstate 26 Connector project, which was already forcing a relocation. In November 2025, Salvage Station announced it would rebuild inside the old Asheville Waste Paper Company building at 304 Lyman Street, a structure locally recognizable for a graffiti mural blending Homer Simpson with Bender from Futurama. On the night of April 23, 2026, that building caught fire. Firefighters spent nearly eight hours on scene, part of the roof collapsed onto the third floor, and the fire marshal had already deemed the structure hazardous before the blaze even started. Owners Danny McClinton and Katie Hild, along with the Pace family who owns the property, issued a joint statement committing to rebuild and to preserve what they can of the mural, but as of this writing no construction timeline has been announced.
Riverview Station and the Salvage Station fire site sit on the same street, a few addresses apart. One is under new ownership working through a careful, historically minded reactivation plan. The other just watched its entire relaunch plan go up in smoke, literally, before it opened. Both are on Lyman.
Same Half-Mile, Two Different Recoveries
That is the actual shape of the story here, and it is easy to miss if all you read is the USA Today headline or a generic travel write-up that treats "the RAD" as one undifferentiated thing. It isn't. Hurricane Helene damaged an estimated 80 percent of the district, with floodwaters reaching as high as 25 feet in the lowest-lying blocks. Recovery from a disaster that size was never going to happen at the same pace on every block, and it hasn't. Foundy Street has a coordinated investment strategy behind it now, backed by a firm that has taken on 24 projects across the city of Asheville. Lyman Street has a historic designation, a patient ownership transition, and a fire that reset one of its biggest comeback plans to zero.
If you live in West Asheville, Montford, or downtown and think of the RAD as a single trip you make when you want murals and ceramics, this is the year to pay attention to which building you're actually walking into. The Wilma Dykeman greenway that threads through the district hasn't gone anywhere and remains the easiest way to see both corridors on foot without guessing which parking lot is closest to what's open. Everything else down here is genuinely in motion, block by block, and the national award doesn't tell you which block you'll be standing on.
Worth Knowing If You're Already Here
None of this is a reason to stay away. It's a reason to check before you go, the same way you'd check trail conditions before a hike. Foundy Street on a weekend afternoon is about as close to fully back as the district gets right now. Lyman Street is a construction zone with a few open bright spots, and that will keep changing over the next year as GBX Group's plans for Riverview Station and the rest of the corridor move from announcement to actual buildout.
If you're a longtime RAD resident who's been wondering what your place is actually worth now that the district has this much investment moving through it, or you're weighing whether now is the right window to sell before more of Foundy Street fills in, Carter Sowers and the team at Elevate Asheville track this kind of neighborhood-level shift for a living. Get a Free Home Valuation and find out what a district in the middle of two different recoveries means for your specific address.
