Ask a visitor what makes Grove Park distinct and you'll hear about the Inn: the red clay tile roof, the golf course winding through the hills, maybe Sunset Terrace if they've had dinner there. Ask most residents the same question and you'll probably get the same answer. Both are missing the smaller, stranger story sitting two blocks away at the corner of Macon Avenue and Charlotte Street.
That's where E.W. Grove Park sits: a modest triangle of green space that gave the neighborhood its name and has spent more than a century being almost anything except a quiet park. It's had jobs. Several of them. And right now, it's between jobs again, in the middle of a City-led planning process that most people walking their dogs past it have never heard of.
A Cottage That Kept Changing Jobs
The park dates back to Edwin Wiley Grove himself, who came to Asheville in 1897 chasing mountain air for a bronchial condition and stayed to build a summer home, a pharmaceutical lab, and eventually the neighborhood that carries his name. The stone sitting wall along the park is dated 1904. An electric streetcar once ran along Charlotte Street and up Macon Avenue, with a stop right at the park's edge.
When the trustees of Grove's will transferred the property to the public in 1949, they didn't hand over just this one park. Sunset Park, the Griffing Boulevard Rose Garden, and the neighborhood's parkways all came with it. The little office building on the E.W. Grove Park site got renovated and reopened as the Asheville Art Museum, with exhibitions running May through October when the unheated building could be used comfortably, and Sunday afternoon receptions where residents could talk with the artists on display. It also did double duty as a precinct polling location on election days.
The museum outgrew the space and moved out in 1966. The building sat empty for nine years until The Arts Journal, a monthly magazine, moved in around 1975. That's also roughly when Asheville Parks and Recreation removed two wide drives that had cut through the park connecting Charlotte Street and Gertrude Place, replacing them with sidewalks and giving the green space back its shape.
The next real intervention came in 2012, when the Grove Park-Sunset Mountain Neighborhood Association partnered with Asheville Parks and Recreation to restore the neighborhood's historic parks closer to the original vision laid out by landscape architect C.D. Beadle, the same designer behind the gardens at Biltmore. Biltmore's own horticulturalists helped select modern plant equivalents while preserving the mature pines, cedars, and dogwoods already established. The historic trolley houses and the 1904 stone wall were cleaned of algae and vegetation and carefully resecured, not replaced.
The City Is Asking Neighbors for Photos Right Now
That 2012 restoration wasn't the end of the story. Asheville Parks and Recreation is currently running a community-guided planning process for E.W. Grove Park's next chapter, and the department has an open call out to residents: if you have old photographs or memories of the park, they want them sent to help shape what comes next. It's a small, almost quaint request, but it says something real about how this particular piece of land has always worked. It has never stayed static. Every generation of Grove Park residents has rebuilt it, restaffed it, or repurposed it rather than just letting it sit as a lawn between houses.
If you've never walked the loop past the trolley houses and the stone wall, this is a good season to do it, both because the plantings reflect a decade of deliberate restoration work and because whatever comes out of the current planning process will likely change the park's next look within a few years.
Two Blocks Away, the Same Instinct Never Stopped
Walk the other direction from the Inn, down Grovewood Road, and you land at a second piece of land with the same restless history: Grovewood Village. It sits tucked among mature pines right next to the Omni Grove Park Inn, and it's easy to drive past without registering that it's there at all.
Grovewood Village was originally built for the weaving operations of Biltmore Industries, a craft enterprise founded by Edith Vanderbilt and two teachers that grew into one of the largest producers of handwoven wool in the world, worn by U.S. presidents and first ladies. When the business was downsized, local businessman Harry D. Blomberg bought Biltmore Industries in 1953 and kept it from folding entirely. He eventually converted the old weaving shed into a home for his personal collection of antique automobiles, which is why the Estes-Winn Antique Car Museum shares a footprint with a textile museum today. That car museum quietly marked its 60th anniversary this past June with a community celebration.
The same building now houses eight working artist studios alongside Grovewood Gallery, which represents more than 350 artists and craftspeople. Twice a year, the village opens those studios to the public for a free, self-guided tour, and the next one lands soon:
- September 12 and 13, 2026, noon to 5 p.m. — the fall Grovewood Village Studio Tour, sponsored by Metro Wines at 169 Charlotte Street. Visitors can walk directly into the working studios of resident artists, and the adjacent gallery is offering a 10 percent discount on nearly everything in the building for the weekend, along with pours from Metro Wines.
- October 10 through December 31, 2026 — "No Rain, No Flowers," a solo exhibition of new work by ceramic artist Taylor Robenalt, opening at Grovewood Gallery with a reception to kick things off.
Neither event requires advance tickets or planning beyond showing up. Parking is available on-site at the village, though it's limited, so carpooling with a neighbor is worth considering if you're headed over during the studio tour weekend.
Why the Small Places Do the Real Work
Put the two stories side by side and a pattern shows up that the Inn's marquee presence tends to obscure. Grove Park's actual civic and creative life has never lived in the big, photographed landmark. It's lived in the small buildings that keep getting handed a new job: a park cottage that cycled through art museum, magazine office, and back to green space; a weaving shed that became a car museum and an artist colony. Neither project waited for outside investment or a developer's masterplan. Both were kept alive by neighbors, a local businessman, and a parks department willing to ask residents for their old photographs instead of hiring a consultant to invent a history from scratch.
That's worth knowing if you live here, because it means the neighborhood's real texture shows up in September and October, not just in the summer months when the golf course and the Inn's patio get all the attention. The stone wall by the trolley houses has stood since 1904. The artist studios at Grovewood have been open for public tours twice a year for years now. Both are still doing the work quietly, and both have something new happening within the next few months.
If you've lived in Grove Park long enough to have your own memory of the little park at Macon and Charlotte, whether that's the Arts Journal days or something more recent, it's worth passing along to Asheville Parks and Recreation while the planning process is still open. And if you haven't been inside Grovewood Village since the last studio tour, the September weekend is a low-effort way to remember what's actually within walking distance of home.
For residents thinking further down the road about a move within the neighborhood, or a return to Grove Park after time away, the team at The Mike Miller Team has spent years walking these same streets and can talk through what different pockets of Grove Park actually offer beyond the postcard version. Reach out whenever you're ready to start that conversation.
