The Depot District Never Stopped Being a Depot

"No pedestrian traffic, loitering, homelessness, a thoroughfare for trucks."

That's how Matthew Hickman described Seventh Avenue in front of his own storefront in a Hendersonville Lightning report, after running Underground Baking Co. there for more than a decade. He wasn't complaining so much as explaining why he and his neighbors had been asking the city for a fix for five years running. The description stuck with me because it's not the language anyone uses about a shopping street. It's the language of a truck route. Which, if you look at what Seventh Avenue was actually built for, is exactly what it is.

Most people who've lived in Hendersonville a while know the basic shape of Seventh Avenue's second act: a run-down stretch behind Main Street turned, over roughly a decade, into a cluster of breweries, a wine bar, a bakery, a bike shop and a Saturday farmers market that some weekends outnumbers Main Street's own foot traffic. What's less obvious, and more useful if you actually spend time there, is that none of this is a departure from what the street has always done. Seventh Avenue was never a browsing street. It was built to move people and goods off a train and into town, and everything that's opened there since, from the tire shop to the taproom, still runs on that same logic: you stop, you get something done, and you keep moving. Main Street was built for strolling. Seventh Avenue was built for arriving.

A Street Built by the Railroad, Not the Sidewalk

The Historic Seventh Avenue District grew up around Hendersonville's train depot, completed in 1905. The building that now houses The Brandy Bar went up a decade later, in 1915, as an addition to a grocery store, and its own history describes the surrounding blocks as the town's actual front door in that era, with a station inn two hundred feet north handling arriving passengers and a depot pulling foot traffic that Main Street, a few blocks over, didn't see. By the building's own account, it's one of only three surviving intact depot districts left in North Carolina, which is a specific enough claim that it's worth taking seriously: this isn't a generic "historic downtown" tag applied after the fact. The commercial pattern here was set by rail freight and passenger arrivals, not by retail foot traffic, and that distinction shaped what kinds of businesses made sense on this street for the next hundred years.

That history is also why the district's most recent overhaul was mostly invisible. The Seventh Avenue Streetscape Project, originally awarded as a $3.5 million contract in December 2023, ended up costing $4.2 million by the time the city celebrated its completion at a Street Fest on May 3, 2025. Most of that difference wasn't landscaping. It was underground: water, sewer and stormwater lines that had been in the ground since the depot era, replaced block by block before a single decorative streetlight went in. In a WLOS report, Carly Buntin, who owns Claywood, the wine and whiskey bar in the 300 block, put it plainly during the ten-week closure that came with the work: "It has taken a toll on all of us on this street." The toll was the point. You don't get a walkable business district out of a rail corridor without digging up a century of infrastructure first.

What Got Erased, and What Came Back

Before it was known for beer, Seventh Avenue was known as Brooklyn, a neighborhood of homes, civic organizations and Black-owned businesses that grew up in and around the depot corridor. In the 1960s, urban renewal projects displaced those residents and reshaped the area into what's now called Green Meadows, a piece of the district's history that doesn't show up in brewery reviews but shows up in city planning documents and in the district's ongoing revitalization work.

That history surfaced again, deliberately, in July 2024, when the Hendersonville Outreach Center unveiled a mural on Seventh Avenue by local artist Billy Smith. Smith told WLOS, "I am very much a part of this side of town," and said he went through roughly 40 brushes finishing the piece. The mural isn't decoration bolted onto a revitalized street. It's the district acknowledging, in public and in paint, what stood there before the breweries did. That kind of layering, new commerce built on top of a specific, named history rather than over it, is part of what separates Seventh Avenue from a generic strip of new construction.

The Businesses That Kept the Street Working

Walk the district today and the mix reads less like a curated retail corridor and more like a small town's actual utility belt, with a few taprooms mixed in:

• Southern Appalachian Brewery, which opened in 2011 and is generally credited as Hendersonville's original brewery, sits a few doors down from Guidon Brewing Co., a veteran and family-owned operation with an outdoor deck and a rotating cast of food trucks.
• Triskelion Brewing occupies another storefront in the same few blocks.
• Underground Baking Co. and Independent Beans have anchored the same stretch for over a decade, well before the streetscape work made the sidewalks wide enough to sit outside.
• Sycamore Cycles, a bike shop that relocated to the district in 2019, sits within walking distance of All Saints Animal Hospital.
• The Hendersonville Farmers Market has run here on Saturdays since 2020, and the city's own figures put summer attendance at more than 40,000 visitors, a number that rivals or exceeds a lot of what Main Street sees on a comparable Saturday.

None of these businesses are built around leisurely browsing. You don't wander into a tire shop or a bike repair counter the way you wander into a boutique. Even the breweries here lean into that same rhythm: stop in, get a pint and a food truck plate, watch a band, move on. The commercial identity of the street hasn't changed so much as it's been given somewhere to park.

What's Changing This Fall

The district's momentum hasn't stopped with the streetscape ribbon-cutting. On September 22, 2026, the Hendersonville Lightning reported that Friends of Downtown Hendersonville received a $25,000 grant from the Duke Energy Foundation to expand its Downtown Business Improvement Grant Program, which now covers both the Main Street and Historic Seventh Avenue municipal service districts. The funding is structured around small grants for facade work, signage and business improvements, and the application window for this round closes October 26. It's a modest number next to the $4.2 million streetscape project, but it signals something worth noting: the city isn't treating Seventh Avenue's revival as finished business. It's treating it as an ongoing one, with Main Street and Seventh Avenue now explicitly funded under the same program rather than competing for separate pots of attention.

If you've driven past Seventh Avenue in the last year and noticed new paint on a storefront or a sign going up where a vacant lot used to sit, this grant program is very likely part of why. The district that spent the better part of two decades being described in planning reports as underdeveloped and disconnected from downtown is now getting facade money from the same fund as Main Street, which is as close to an official acknowledgment as you'll get that the two streets are finally being treated as one downtown rather than a retail street and its overlooked back lot.

Seventh Avenue was never going to become a second Main Street, and the fact that it hasn't isn't a shortfall. It's still doing what it was built to do a century ago: giving people a reason to stop, get something handled, and keep moving through this part of town.

If you're curious what a specific block of Seventh Avenue or the surrounding Depot District looks like on paper, from lot lines to what's currently listed nearby, Hill Real Estate Group can pull that up for you.