Jeffrey Burroughs strolled among crooked trees and clumsily leaning chain-link fences on a recent Thursday afternoon in Asheville’s lower River Arts District. Nearby, heaps of flood-damaged antiques dotted the ground outside gaptoothed buildings that had previously housed hundreds of working artists.
“It’s nice that at least it’s green,” Burroughs, president of the River Arts District Artists, said of the bent trees. “It was really depressing through the winter and the fall.”
Burroughs, who uses they/them pronouns, is not joking when they say they have taken just two days off in the more than 10 months since Hurricane Helene, the deadliest hurricane to strike the mainland United States since Katrina in 2005, ravaged wide swaths of the Southeast, leaving at least 250 people dead.
The storm overwhelmed Asheville’s French Broad River, submerging much of the once robust River Arts District in as much of 24 feet of water, caking it in layers of mud and destroying the life’s work and financial pipeline of hundreds of artists. Burroughs remembers watching from a nearby bridge as a winery they once frequented pinballed and crashed through buildings.
“People were prepared because this area has flooded” in the past, Burroughs said. “They moved everything up. Nobody anticipated second floors would flood. That’s not something you even conceive. All of a sudden, it was like a lake opened in the middle of our town.”
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The post An Arts District Helped Make Asheville a Destination. Its Recovery Is Slow Going. appeared first on New York Times.
