Business

Council looks to transform 600 block of Main Street

By Bill Moss, Published: June 8, 2012

The third and final phase of streetscape improvements downtown has the potential to be the most transformative one of all, Hendersonville Council members were told Thursday night.

The city's work to update and repave four blocks downtown and fix utility lines underneath, has spruced  up the 300 and 400 blocks and helped extend the pedestrian oriented nature of downtown south of the Historic Courthouse.
"When we did the first two blocks it was largely rebuilding what was there but not really making enhancements to the streetscape," said City Manager Bo Ferguson. The Main Street improvements up to now have made the street better for businesses that were already there, he said. The last one could do more.
"The 600-700 block obviously has farther to go," he said. "We see certainly the potential in that block to bring more up there to create an environment where businesses will want to relocate," Ferguson said.

The council authorized the landscape consultant and city engineer to move forward on the project.
The city manager, and designer of the streetscape changes, Luther Smith, emphasized that they had talked with property owners and where possible gotten their buy-in to the changes, which add more trees, more visible crosswalks and a "water feature" and signage to signal to motorists on Sixth and Seventh avenues that they have reached downtown.
Smith, a landscape architect, told the council that the new gateway on the south end of Main Street was something that in a different way needed to be reprised on the north end.
"One of the key things in the design is the importance of creating that sort of gateway development on the north end as you did on the south end," he said. Contrary to what some people say, "there is a good opportunity for pedestrian connection" to Jackson Park, the Mud Creek greenway, Seventh Avenue and Hendersonville High School.
The one-way pairing of U.S. 64 through town, though, is a hurdle.
"We talked to all but two of the property owners in that area," he said. They asked them, do they go down to Main Street for lunch? No, they said. Why? "Because Seventh Avenue and Sixth Avenue scare the hell out of me. We've gotten that same sort of response from other people as well."
Crossing Sixth Avenue, "We go from an urban atmosphere to a suburban atmosphere. Instead of traffic moving parallel to pedestrian traffic you have traffic moving perpendicular to pedestrian traffic" because of unlimited curb cuts and driveways.
Price of the work is $1.383 million, counting repaving. It would cost another $120,000 to $150,000 to extend the streetscape concept a little farther north of Seventh Avenue, which the council seemed receptive to. That would bring the total to close to $1.5 million.