Pop-ups revive holiday spirit for local retailers 

Downtown Asheville businesses are rallying to share space with fellow merchants on the mend from Tropical Storm Helene. This holiday season, tourists and locals can step onto streets filled with vendors, take in the sounds of carolers and the scent of hot cocoa, follow a trail of gingerbread houses or grab a Santa photo op on special weekends — a homegrown Hallmark movie. 

This month, Wall Street is dressed up in colorful yarn creations and enveloped in the giving spirit with the pop-up initiative Miracle on Wall Street. Businesses on the street have welcomed merchants and artists from Biltmore Village and the River Arts District whose storefronts and creative spaces washed away in the storm.

The project, which kicked off Nov. 22 and runs through Saturday, Jan. 4, invites displaced retailers and artists to show and sell their inventory through special displays set up within Wall Street shops. On Sundays throughout the month, Wall Street will be open for foot traffic only, with vendors both inside businesses and on the street. 

Throughout the event, The Market Place restaurant is hosting oyster roasts on Sundays, while a DJ spins or a live band jams. A hot chocolate cart and cookies are part of the fun. Santa and Mrs. Claus made an appearance on the porch of Laughing Seed Café at the Miracle during Wall Street’s debut celebration and will return again later this month. 

The project was dreamed up by Hannah Schauer, general manager of L’Optique, an eyewear boutique that’s been on Wall Street for 23 years. The business’s Biltmore Village location, which opened seven years ago, was among the storefronts destroyed in floodwaters from Helene. 

“Since we lost our store in Biltmore Village, we felt so fortunate to have another one to work out of,” says Schauer. “Most of our neighbors, most businesses, don’t have a second location.”

Schauer maintains close relationships with Wall Street business owners. “My mom opened the store when I was 13, so I was even painting pottery at Fired Up when I was a kid and climbing the climbing wall,” she says. ”I’ve known this street very well, and I think that’s why it’s so special to me.”

A lightbulb went off, she says, when she started talking with neighbors, who were drumming up ideas to help Asheville’s flooded and displaced businesses. From there it became a matching game of who had space and who needed it. 

Schauer reached out first to Meherwan Irani, owner of Botiwalla, who agreed to lend the restaurant’s vacant downstairs space to flooded Biltmore Village business the Olde World Christmas Shoppe. Other merchants quickly extended more helping hands, and the project snowballed. 

Now, nearly all businesses on the street have committed to hosting a displaced retailer, artist or are participating in some other way. Momentum continues to grow. 

“Element Tree, the candle shop, she’s taken on nine artists that lost their space,” says Schauer. “All the restaurants have art on their walls that they’re selling of people who lost their spaces.”

Schauer also contacted Purl’s Yarn Emporium, a former Wall Street staple that moved its shop to Hendersonville Road in 2021. Her request was for a “yarn bombing’” — decking out the Flat Iron statue and Wall Street lamp posts in rainbow-colored yarn creations. Formerly a regular occurrence, a Purl’s yarn bombing hasn’t brightened up the street since 2019, according to bombers Emily Taylor and Rita Neiman who were busy crocheting “AVL Always Value Love” in big letters on the iron in late November.

Schauer says that although Miracle on Wall Street won’t fully compensate for the expense of the flooded spaces and the missed revenue from fall sales, she’s hoping it brings in locals and folks from outside the area to do their holiday shopping in Asheville.

“That’s the only way that our town will be able to [recover], and that’s the only way that these small shops will be able to make it,” Schauer says.

Overwhelming loss

“We’re so fortunate to have this opportunity to set up a small shop just to get back into more of a normal routine,” Sarah Marshall, manager of New Morning Gallery, told Xpress during Miracle on Wall Street’s Nov. 22 kickoff event. “This is the first day that we’re really open, and we’ve had a great response so far.”

Now set up in the foyer of Della Terra Beauty salon, New Morning Gallery, which carries handmade crafts from over 500 national, local and regional artisans, was a fixture in Biltmore Village for more than 50 years. On Sept. 27, floodwaters inundated the first floor of the building, swallowing 4,000 square feet of art pieces, designer clothing and jewelry.

Olde World Christmas Shoppe manager Laura Rathbone was also enthusiastic about the robust turnout of shoppers at Miracle on Wall Street’s kickoff event. But her joy was tempered by worry. Since the year-round Christmas shop’s first floor disappeared under 9 feet of water on Sept. 27, it’s among the many Asheville retail businesses now drowning in post-Helene debt. 

The shop relies on autumn and holiday-season tourists for the bulk of its revenue, Rathbone explains. “You don’t think about Christmas, if you’re local, until Christmastime. So you have to have that tourist population that wants to come in and buy a souvenir that they can take — an ornament to put out for Christmas later in the year.”

Due to overwhelming debt since the storm, Rathbone, who has been with the Christmas Shoppe for 11 years, has become the sole employee of the business, which was started by Bruce and Brenda Tompkins in 1989.

After the devastating losses, a teary-eyed Rathbone says, it’s hard to wish a gleeful “Merry Christmas” to visitors entering the shop’s Wall Street pop-up space. “It’s kind of hard to keep joy, you know, and say, ‘Merry Christmas,’ every day when you think, ‘OK, this is it.’” 

When Helene ripped through Biltmore Village, the waters swept away a huge chunk of the shop’s inventory — nearly half a million dollars worth. Tacking on lost fourth-quarter sales, a $100,000 debris removal fee, money owed on new inventory and a half-million dollar quote for the cost of preparing the shop to reopen, the business is faced with nearly $2 million dollars in net losses.

“When you add all of those numbers up, it gets scary,” Rathbone says.

The majority of the shop’s holiday inventory had been ordered much earlier in the year and was stored on the historic building’s first floor, which flooded to the ceiling. There were boxes of German nutcrackers and wooden Christmas pyramids that Rathbone hadn’t even opened.

She salvaged some decorations, holiday plushies and pastel-colored items from the store’s upstairs Candyland-themed displays to set up the Wall Street pop-up. Some boxes of Byers Choice collectible dolls and Inge glass ornaments that Rathbone had taken home for pricing before the storm also survived.

“September is the worst month in the world for a Christmas shop to flood. That’s when you have your most inventory,” Rathbone says.

Gingerbread and late nights

It’s not just retailers and artists resorting to innovative pop-up models in the aftermath of Helene. After the cancellation of the 32nd annual National Gingerbread House Competition due to the storm, The Omni Grove Park Inn reimagined the event as a self-guided Gingerbread Trail of Giving.

Though the judging of this year’s competition is still canceled, shoppers can follow a downloadable map to find gingerbread creations from 28 competitors displayed in participating business locations downtown. (There are also 13 on exhibit at The Omni Grove Park Inn.) 

At each stop on the Gingerbread Trail of Giving is a QR code for donating to the Always Asheville Fund, which supports local rebuilding efforts. The initiative continues through Sunday, Jan. 5. The resort is also showcasing gingerbread houses virtually through Thursday, Dec. 12, on its Facebook and Instagram pages.

“While Hurricane Helene impacted our traditional format for the competition, it has not hindered the participation of bakers. In fact, we’ve seen a great deal of enthusiasm from both local and national participants who were eager to be a part of this new initiative,”says Isabel Miller, The Omni Grove Park Inn’s director of marketing and communications. “While many of our participants are local to the Asheville area, we’ve also had entries from all across the country.”

In another effort to support local businesses, Denise Foy, owner and founder of web design business Zhoosh Creative, has transformed the Wine Walk Asheville initiative she launched last year into Late Night Asheville. On Thursday, Dec. 12, participating downtown shops will extend their hours to 9 p.m. to encourage night owls to buy local goods. 

The Asheville Choral Society, the Asheville Beer Choir and other musical artists — supported in part by LEAF Global Arts — will sing carols during the event, and participating merchants will offer refreshments for shoppers. Those who’d prefer to ride from place to place rather than brave a cold walk can hop aboard the Gray Line Trolley starting at 6 p.m. for a free lift around downtown, taking guests from the LaZoom Room to Grove Arcade with five stops in between.

Foy dreamed up the event pre-Helene, basing it on a holiday campaign she was part of in her former stomping ground, Chicago. “I thought this would be a really good opportunity to help promote the small businesses in the area,” she says. “All of the small businesses are invited to participate.”

Foy went door to door to 60 Asheville shops to garner interest and get information for an online Holiday Gift Guide featuring inventory from participating businesses. 

Updates and video previews of shop offerings, along with introductions to the entrepreneurs behind them, are being posted on Wine Walk Asheville’s Facebook page. “It’s surprising when you walk into these shops [to see] what they truly do offer,” Foy says. “You never know what kind of interesting finds that you can get.”

Editor’s note: This article was updated on Dec. 9.