The Ribbon-Cutting on Seventh Avenue Wasn't the End of the Story

If you were on Seventh Avenue on May 3, 2025, you probably remember the fiddle music before you remember the ribbon. The Stipe Brothers played, the Farmers Market opened its season a few yards away, and the city cut a ribbon at 2 p.m. to mark what everyone had been waiting years to say out loud: the street was done.

Except it wasn't, and the corner at 7th and Locust is the proof. A .14-acre lot there has sat empty since 2008, and as of this past February it was the site of a brand new four-storefront building working its way through permitting. The party already happened. The construction hasn't stopped.

Eight Years From Vision to Ribbon Cutting

The Seventh Avenue Streetscape Project has a longer memory than most people realize. The idea first showed up in the city's downtown work plan back in 2017, and design work dragged on from 2018 more or less continuously after that. A 2020 start date got wiped out by the pandemic, then by a contractor market that twice failed to return a single bid, then by material shortages and construction-cost inflation that kept pushing the number up.

Harper General Contractors finally broke ground in February 2024 under a $3.5 million contract the city council had approved that December. The Grove Street intersection reopened just before the Fourth of July that year, giving west-end businesses like Marco's Pizza, Celtic Creamery, and All Saints Animal Hospital their parking lot back. A mural at the Hendersonville Outreach Center went up that same month, painted by local artist Billy Smith, who told a reporter he went through about 40 brushes finishing the wall. By late November the street was freshly paved end to end. The city called it substantially complete by the close of 2024, with only punch-list items like traffic signal timing and streetlight power left to finish.

The gap between "substantially complete" and an actual public celebration still ran well into the following spring, all the way to that May 2025 Street Fest. If you felt like the construction lasted longer than the city's press releases suggested, you weren't imagining it.

The Storefronts That Actually Filled Back In

What's worth knowing now isn't the streetscape. It's who moved into the buildings it made walkable again.

• Hearth and Herron, 337 7th Ave, opened last summer in a former Pure Oil Company gas station that older residents still call the Chicken Shack. Chef Bradley Herron, who spent years working his way up through the Genuine Hospitality Group in Miami, built the restaurant during the construction itself. He told a reporter his first three nights open were fully booked.
• Claywood operates out of a building on the block originally constructed in 1910. It's family-run by Carly and her mother Jean, with Executive Chef Tory Bogin, a Hendersonville native, leading a menu built around Appalachian cuisine and ingredients sourced within 75 miles, including beef, chicken, and pork from French Broad Cattle Farm.
• Underground Baking Company never left. Owner Matthew Hickman kept the doors open through all eleven-plus months of the worst of the construction, when regulars had to park blocks away just to reach him.
• White Duck Taco, Yellow Cottage Antiques, The Brandy Bar, Mini Batch Bakery, and Celtic Creamery are among the storefronts the city named directly in its construction updates, each one depending on a different rotating detour route to keep customers reaching the door depending on which block face was torn up that month.

Hickman has said the bakery is now doing better business than at any point since he opened. That's a business owner who watched the sidewalk in front of his own door sit torn up for the better part of a year, now measuring foot traffic against a Farmers Market that pulls more than 40,000 visitors into the district over a single summer.

Why Empty Buildings on This Street Don't Stay Empty Long

Here's the part that doesn't make it into the ribbon-cutting coverage. A lot of the district's turnaround traces back to one investor, not a wave of independent decisions happening at the same time by coincidence.

Lyle Chariff, a Miami-based developer who splits his time between there and a part-time home in Laurel Park, has bought most of the 700 block of Maple Street and three buildings in the 300 block of Seventh Avenue with his business partner Mauricio Zapata. Those buildings now house Claywood, Art on 7th, Sippin' on Seventh distillery, Tierney Floors, and the Pasta Lady. He also owns the building Lux Salon operates out of, and the old gas station that's now Hearth and Herron.

His approach isn't complicated. As he told a local paper:

"We buy buildings and we put money into them before we even have tenants because we think if we build it, they'll come."

That's the mechanism behind why so many of the district's historically vacant buildings got new life at roughly the same moment the streetscape wrapped up. It wasn't forty separate business owners betting on the block independently. It was mostly one buyer clearing the renovation risk before a tenant ever signed a lease, plus public dollars from the city's water-sewer bond, a stormwater grant, and Powell Bill road funding covering the street itself. Between the two, the district has drawn roughly $1.5 million in private investment and $173,000 in façade grants since 2020.

The Corner That's About to Change Again

Which brings us back to Locust Street. The building that used to stand at 403 7th Ave was a two-story brick grocery store built in 1912, with an apartment above it for the family who ran it. It came down in 2008 and the lot has been empty ever since. Chariff and Zapata bought the building next door in 2023, found it structurally unsound, and demolished it too, leaving behind the black wall you can still see propped against the neighboring property to protect it from the elements.

Architectural drawings filed with the city show four new units going into that corner: three facing Locust Street and one larger unit anchoring the corner on Seventh Avenue itself. As of this past February the project was out for construction bids with a building permit pending, so it's worth a look next time you're on that block to see how far along it's gotten. Chariff has said he's not chasing new property as hard as he was a few years ago, but he's not stopping either. He plans to keep buying and building nearby.

So the honest read on Seventh Avenue right now isn't "the comeback is complete." It's that the public infrastructure piece is done, the first wave of tenants has settled in, and a second construction project is already queued up on the block's most visible corner. If you've assumed the orange barrels and detour signs are behind you for good, the Locust Street corner is the one to watch.

How to See It for Yourself

The easiest way to take in the whole stretch is on a Saturday morning, when the Farmers Market is running and you can walk from the Grove Street end past Claywood and Hearth and Herron down toward the Historic Depot, where Mini Batch Bakery and the rest of that cluster sit closest to the tracks. Grab something from Underground Baking Company while you're at it. Matthew Hickman earned the foot traffic the hard way.

Aaron Chapman, Benjamin Johnson, and Kathy Clark spend a lot of time walking these same blocks with buyers who are trying to understand what a neighborhood actually feels like day to day, not just what the listing photos show. If a street like this one, still changing, still worth watching, has you thinking about what it would mean to live near it, the team at Aaron Chapman is glad to talk through it. Start with a Get a Free Home Valuation if you're curious what your own place might be worth in a market that keeps moving this fast.