Asheville Lands a Temporary Skating Rink Downtown While Carrier Park Waits Its Turn

By Jon Tharp, Broker  ·  June 29, 2026

A Parking Lot Downtown Is About to Become Asheville's Skating Rink

For nearly two years, Asheville has been a city without a public skating rink. That is about to change, and the fix is coming from an unexpected spot. On June 23, 2026, Asheville City Council approved a contract to turn a downtown parking lot at 50 Asheland Avenue into a temporary public skating rink, with construction set to begin in July and the rink expected to open this fall.

The vote passed quietly, tucked into the council's consent agenda as Item J, but for the families, hockey kids, and weekend skaters who lost their rink to Tropical Storm Helene, it is a big deal. The base contract runs $682,157 with B. Allen Construction, Inc., and with a built-in contingency of up to 15 percent, the project could reach a maximum of $784,482.

Most of that money is coming from federal Community Development Block Grants, which cover $526,569 of the cost. The rest comes from the city's existing capital budget. For a region still digging out from the most destructive storm in its modern history, that funding mix matters, because it means the rink gets built without leaning entirely on local dollars that are already stretched thin across hundreds of recovery projects.

What makes the location work is simple. The city already owns the half-acre lot, currently a surface parking lot under the Transportation Department. There was no land to buy and no lengthy acquisition to negotiate. Crews will grade and prepare the site, lay the rink surface, and get it ready for skates by fall. It is a practical answer to a problem that has frustrated a lot of people for a long time.

What Helene Took From Carrier Park

To understand why a downtown parking lot is suddenly getting a skating rink, you have to go back to September 2024 and the French Broad River. When Helene came through Western North Carolina, the river rose to levels almost nobody alive had seen. Carrier Park, which sits right on the riverbank off Amboy Road in west Asheville, took the full force of it.

Roughly 50 acres of the park disappeared under mud and debris. The flood destroyed the skating rink, the velodrome, the playground, the basketball court, the sand volleyball courts, and the sports field. The damage was not limited to one park either. The flooding completely submerged more than 200 acres of riverfront parks and recreation amenities along the French Broad.

Some of Carrier Park has come back. The east side, which sits a little higher and farther from the worst of the water, reopened with its picnic shelter, wetlands education area, rolling lawn, and a parking lot. The city announced partial reopenings of riverfront parks around May 2025. But the west side, where the rink lived, remains a recovery project measured in years, not months.

That gap has worn on people. WLOS even ran an Ask 13 segment fielding public frustration over why Carrier Park has not been fully repaired yet. The honest answer comes down to scale. When a river buries 200 acres of public land, you cannot simply sweep it off and reopen. Soil has to be tested and cleared, infrastructure rebuilt, and federal recovery dollars secured and spent according to strict rules. The temporary rink is the city's way of giving people something back now while that slower work continues.

The Road to Getting This Approved Was Not Smooth

The June approval looks clean on paper, but getting here took longer than the city hoped. This was not the first attempt to build the temporary rink. The city had lined up an earlier contractor, B H Graning Landscapes, Inc. out of Sylva, but terminated and disqualified it on September 3, 2025. That stalled the project and sent the city back to square one.

The city reopened the bidding, advertising the contract again on April 23, 2026. That round produced B. Allen Construction as the selected contractor, and the council signed off two months later. So while the headline is that Asheville approved a rink in June 2026, the fuller story is that the city had been trying to get this built for the better part of a year before it finally locked in.

That kind of friction is common in disaster recovery, even if it is rarely visible to the public. Contracts fall through. Bids come in wrong. Federal funding carries compliance requirements that can slow everything down. Each delay is invisible to a kid who just wants somewhere to skate, but it is the reality of rebuilding a city's recreation infrastructure after a thousand-year flood.

The people steering it have been consistent about the goal. Parks and Recreation Director D. Tyrell McGirt has been the primary voice on the project, working alongside city spokespeople Kim Miller and the office of City Manager DK Wesley. Their message has stayed the same through the setbacks: get residents a usable rink as fast as possible, and keep the permanent Carrier Park rebuild moving in parallel.

What the New Rink Will Actually Offer

Once it opens, the temporary rink at 50 Asheland Avenue is meant to do exactly what the Carrier Park rink did. The intended uses include public and family skate sessions, youth hockey programs, roller hockey, and other skate-related recreation programming. It is not a scaled-back placeholder so much as a working replacement that happens to sit on borrowed ground.

McGirt framed it well when the project moved forward. "By preparing a City-owned site at 50 Asheland Avenue, we're creating a space where residents can once again gather, stay active, and enjoy a valued community amenity as we continue rebuilding for the future," he said. In another statement, he added that "this project provides a temporary home for those activities while long-term recovery at Carrier Park moves forward."

The downtown location actually carries some advantages a riverside park does not. It is central, it is walkable from a lot of downtown Asheville, and it is not sitting in a floodplain. For families who do not want to drive across town, and for the youth hockey and roller hockey crowd that needs a reliable place to play, a downtown rink could end up being more convenient than the original ever was.

One point worth clearing up, because it has caused some confusion locally. WLOS also reported on a separate private roller-skating venue opening in Asheville's River Arts District this fall. That is a different operation, privately run, and unrelated to the city's public rink. Asheville is, in a sense, getting two new places to skate this fall from two completely different directions. The one at 50 Asheland Avenue is the public, city-built one this story is about.

A Park With More History Than Most People Realize

Carrier Park is worth a closer look, because the rink was only ever one piece of a place with a surprisingly deep story. The land has been a gathering spot for Asheville for more than a century, and it has worn several very different hats along the way.

It started in 1900, when Edwin Carrier built the Carrier Race Track and Fair Grounds for horse racing. In 1961, the site became the New Asheville Motor Speedway for auto racing, and for decades the sound of engines defined that stretch of riverbank. Then in 1998, the environmental nonprofit RiverLink purchased the old speedway with the idea of turning it into a public park, partnering with the City of Asheville, which later took ownership.

Phase 1 was dedicated in 2003 and included the roller hockey rink, a playground, volleyball and basketball courts, lawn bowling, and trails. Phase 2 followed in 2006, adding a picnic shelter, a river overlook, a wetland interpretive area, and more trails. The park grew into one of west Asheville's most-loved outdoor spaces.

Its signature feature is the Mellowdrome, properly the Asheville Velodrome, an asphalt cycling and skating track built right on the bones of the old speedway oval. The Carrier family donated the full track to the city in 2011. A 2017 safety project added lights, an inside track, and a new concrete surface, and the Mellowdrome reopened in March 2018. The skate rink, playground, and courts all sit inside that velodrome oval, which is exactly why Helene's floodwaters hit them all at once.

Why This Matters Beyond Asheville

It is easy to read this as one city council line item, but the temporary rink says something larger about where Western North Carolina stands almost two years after Helene. Recovery here is not one big project. It is hundreds of smaller ones, each working through its own contracts, funding, and setbacks, and each one returning a small piece of normal life to people who lost it overnight.

A skating rink is not a hospital or a bridge. But community amenities are part of what makes a place livable, and they are often the slowest things to come back because they sit lower on the priority list during a disaster. The fact that Asheville found a way to stand one back up, even temporarily, while the bigger riverfront work grinds on, is a sign of a city trying to give its residents something to enjoy again.

For folks in Waynesville, Sylva, Brevard, and the rest of the region watching Asheville's recovery, projects like this are a useful gauge. They show how federal block grant money is actually being put to work, how long these timelines really run, and how creative local governments have to get when their best sites are still buried in silt. The Sylva-based contractor connection is a reminder, too, that this rebuild is regional, with WNC companies in the mix.

The mountains have always drawn people who want an active, outdoor life close to a real community, and watching a place fight to restore that life tells you a lot about its character. If you have been keeping an eye on how this corner of the mountains is bouncing back and wondering what it would be like to put down roots here, I am always glad to talk through what different WNC towns have to offer. For now, fall cannot come soon enough for a lot of Asheville skaters.

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is the new temporary skating rink in Asheville located?

The temporary public skating rink is going in at 50 Asheland Avenue in downtown Asheville. The site is currently a surface parking lot owned by the city's Transportation Department, sitting on roughly a 0.9-acre parcel. Crews will grade and prepare the lot to hold the rink surface. The city chose the location because it already owned the land, which let the project move faster than acquiring a new site would have. It is a stopgap location, not a permanent home. The long-term plan is still to rebuild the rink at Carrier Park along the French Broad River once that larger recovery effort is complete.

When will the Asheville temporary skating rink open?

Construction is expected to begin in July 2026, with the rink opening in fall 2026. The timeline follows the June 23, 2026 City Council vote that approved a base construction contract of $682,157 with B. Allen Construction, plus a contingency that brings the maximum project cost to $784,482. The opening would come roughly two years after Tropical Storm Helene destroyed the Carrier Park rink in September 2024. That means Asheville will have gone about 21 months without a public rink before the temporary one opens, which is part of why city officials pushed to get this interim site approved.

What happened to the skating rink at Carrier Park?

Tropical Storm Helene hit Western North Carolina in September 2024 and caused catastrophic flooding along the French Broad River. Carrier Park sits right on the river, and roughly 50 acres of it were buried under mud and debris. The skating rink was destroyed, along with the velodrome known as the Mellowdrome, the playground, basketball court, sand volleyball courts, and the sports field on the park's west side. More than 200 acres of riverfront parks along the French Broad were submerged. The east side of Carrier Park, including the picnic shelter and wetlands area, has since reopened, but the west side recovery is a multi-year project.

What will the temporary Asheville rink be used for?

The temporary rink at 50 Asheland Avenue is built for public and family skate sessions, youth hockey programs, roller hockey, and other skate-related recreation. In other words, it is meant to bring back the same kinds of community activities that the Carrier Park rink used to host. Parks and Recreation Director D. Tyrell McGirt described it as a place where residents can gather, stay active, and enjoy a valued amenity while long-term recovery continues. This is the city-run public rink. A separate private roller-skating venue is also opening in Asheville's River Arts District this fall, which is a different project entirely.