“It felt … not alive to me,” says Lynn Bregman Blass about the painting leaning at her feet. Before Helene, the canvas had hung on the psychotherapist and mixed media artist’s studio wall. After the disaster, which she admits “is informing my work,” Lynn verbalizes a feeling palpable in Asheville’s River Arts District: loss.
Though by the time Helene entered the state it had weakened to a tropical storm, the damage left in its wake was catastrophic. Rivers flooded and mudslides formed. More than a hundred people lost their lives. The impact on infrastructure and in residential areas — particularly in Western North Carolina — was crushing.
The River Arts District (RAD), described by Explore Asheville’s PR manager Cass Santander as a “culturally rich neighborhood” of 300 artist galleries and studios running along the French Broad River, was especially hard-hit.
An estimated 80% of the district sustained damage.
But if anyone is equipped to process the destruction that fell with the record-breaking rain in late September 2024, it is the artist who makes meaning. The creative skilled at taking parts — in this case, damaged remnants — and reconceiving, restoring, rebuilding.
So, when the floodwater receded, Lynn took down the painting that had never felt right and “threw green paint on it, ruined it,” then came back and sanded the entire canvas, an act that allowed “what was under to come through.”
The water level of the flood is marked on a shipping container in the River Arts District.
And what came through was hot pink: the same hue found on the shipping containers stacked on the street opposite Lynn’s studio. These ordinary objects, artifacts from before Helene, now act as a gauge for just how high the water rose.
The demarcation is formed by the top of the lower container, which displays Helene 2024, and the bottom of the upper container, emblazoned with RAD RISING. They meet where the water reached: now a solid line that dissects the image of a dog captured mid-bark in pink paint.
Hot pink is the same color used by jewelry designer Jeffrey Burroughs in their color-coded Post-it organization system to represent the most pressing of recovery tasks. Although the bright pink feels less “aggressive” to Jeffrey than red, the highest-priority action items on these sticky notes have helped keep the RAD community from capsizing.
Jeffrey’s leadership as president of the River Arts District Artists has resulted in precious lifelines since the flood. Yet, even with $1 million raised, the loss from October to December is estimated at $15 million — a conservative figure, as it only accounts for 200 arts businesses.
The number of artists who lost their space is similarly hard to quantify, as some studios housed multiple artists. While there were those who planned for a foot or two of water and moved their work to second floors, “it didn’t end up mattering,” says Jeffrey, who still finds the situation “hard to even talk about.”
That’s because they lost two friends to the flood. And, to a degree, themself. “I have come to the conclusion,” they explain of driving down from the mountain and crossing the bridge into the RAD the first time after Helene, “that since I’ve been so busy since that day, I’m still there on the bridge. … I left myself there so we can get through this …”
And getting through started almost immediately, with fellow artists congregating in the RAD. There was no power. No water. No means of communication. “Without phones, we all just started coming here,” says Jeffrey. Pieces of cardboard and Sharpies were taped up and used to share information about which roads were open or where meals — like at painter Philip DeAngelo’s studio and gallery, which served as a pop-up kitchen for weeks and fed approximately 150 people a day — could be found.
The ragged banks of the French Broad reveal the fury of the flooding.
These rudimentary message boards were the only thing being exhibited in the RAD after the storm, where 700 creatives of every type and at all stages of their careers are accustomed to an artistic process Lynn describes as “torture and torment and questions and wondering if it’s relevant and if it makes any difference.”
Instead, these artists, to include Jeffrey, were reduced to passively watching their “dreams” and “opportunities” float away in “water immersed with paintings, art materials … they were just coming down the river.”
That trauma is felt acutely by Robert Nicholas, owner of Marquee Asheville, when he stares, hands in his denim pockets, into the shell of the 50,000-square-foot warehouse and asks: “Who would come back here?”
The curated art and design marketplace’s new coffee shop had only been open for a month before there was water up to the ceiling. Then, when the 15 feet of river water receded, it left behind the debris from 125,000 pieces of art and furniture. Much of the inventory had gathered at one end — dragged in the direction the water had been moving.
After being forced to wait three weeks until Marquee dried out, many of its 300+ antique dealers, artists, creatives, and small-business owners returned to retrieve what they could of their work as keepsakes. The act was, according to Robert, more than a reclamation — it was “a reuniting.”
Which is perhaps why, as he gazes at the void that had bustled with activity and burst with creativity before the hush of Helene, he’s able to say, “We’ve come a long way.”
The same is true for The Radical hotel, which opened in October 2023 and was voted the second-best new hotel in the United States in USA Today’s 10 Best Readers’ Choice Awards 2025.
Describing having to close to guests and reopen in early January without full amenities — though all the special touchpoints, like the red harmonica at check-in, are very much present — and despite not even being in the flood plain, owner Amy Michaelson Kelly considers the business impact on the boutique hotel “almost irrelevant.”
That is perhaps because she remembers how the river continued to swell, even after the rain had stopped: “We watched hour by hour, like, ‘Oh, surely it won’t overtake the railroad tracks,’ and then it started making its way up to the doors …”
Although her team barricaded the basement doors, they could see the water building behind them. When the drain couldn’t take on any more water and succumbed to the pressure, the employees “all burst into tears,” Amy says, “because they had fought so hard … just watching with anxiety and anticipation as the water was coming.”
But she also reflects that the storm has brought the community together. The question she’s often asked is whether the RAD will come back stronger. Amy’s response is stronger, certainly, but also “closer, because we are all communicating, collaborating.”
Indeed, within the days immediately following Helene, The Radical housed emergency workers. Despite being without water or light — for weeks — one would later remark to Jeffrey that he’d “never seen a community come together like this,” and that because people showed up for one another on micro levels, it allowed disaster workers to “focus on the bigger tasks.”
And the biggest task right now, according to Cass, “lies on keeping businesses open.” FEMA estimates that 40% of businesses don’t reopen after a disaster, and it can take up to two years for a community to restabilize. Which is why, Cass says, Explore Asheville is “so committed to reminding folks across the country that Asheville is open, and our businesses are here and eager for the return of visitation.”
Whether tourists choose to indulge in breakfast at All Day Darling or dinner and drinks at Table, Cass says they will still experience what they always have in Asheville: “people who share, of course, the mountains and an affinity for nature, but also a desire for connection.” She continues: “Collaboration is really intrinsic to the collective personality of our community. On the other side of Helene, we’ve seen that play out in really beautiful ways.”
One such way is when Dwayne, a tenant of Marquee, pays a visit to the current husk-like building. Clad in boots muddy from cleanup work, and after embracing Robert, he shares how excited he is to return to what Robert describes as a “turned-up Marquee” — Dwayne answering a question that Robert admits he was almost afraid to ask.
Or when poet and painter Nancy, who walks alongside the ragged bank of the French Broad, affirms that if she was younger, she’d be doing something herself about the trash hanging overhead in tree limbs that had rested on the river’s surface during the flood.
Looking into Nancy’s pale blue eyes that surge with tears when she says, “But first, we have to grieve,” and before she lifts her camera to continue capturing the images that will surely inform her future work, it’s easy to believe her.
So, although Asheville is in a “post-disaster moment,” Cass says “Travelers should know that they can come to Asheville and still have fun and still have a luxury experience or find the same beauty that Asheville is known for is still intact. More so, what is apparent is this creative and connected spirit of the community that is very tangible — it’s moving, and you can feel it.”
That creative and connected spirit is certainly flowing downtown on a Friday night at Gallery Mélange, where, instead of solo exhibitions of the first work produced since the flood, a trio of artists show together. Shared art spaces have increased since Helene and “opened up a really beautiful opportunity for folks to witness this moment of collaboration,” says Cass, who continues: “Asheville is known for food and nature and wellness, but the creative people who live here really lend to its personality. And so seeing these efforts to preserve and hold up our creative community are really empowering.”
One such effort is poignantly evident on Riverview Drive, which overlooks the bridge where Jeffrey’s former self awaits their return. Inspired by the concept of a grieving tree, artist Elizabeth Porritt Carrington and collaborators used fallen branches to create an archway. Tied to it are the notes written by Asheville neighbors invited to capture what they lost in the flood.
The location of the Riverview Gate was selected because after Helene, in the days when there was no communication, an intermittent cell signal could be found at this spot; it was here that people would come to reconnect with friends and loved ones and commune with one another. And it is from here that the River Arts District below — its hints of hot pink visible if you look hard enough — is observable. And to the east, where the arch faces, the rising sun.
riverartsdistrict.com
marqueeasheville.com
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