Work is progressing on upgrades to Pritchard Park, downtown Asheville’s triangle-shaped park at Patton and College Avenues and Haywood Street. In October, the City announced a schedule for upgrades to the park to improve visibility, including thinning of the landscape and adding new lighting.
As the City gears up for the next phase of construction, some confusion and misinformation cropped up about the impact of those upgrades to Pritchard Park.
The park will not be closed during these upgrades.
While there may be some rolling impacts or temporary inconveniences, we do not anticipate this will impact programming in Pritchard Park.
Improvements to facilities, infrastructure and community-owned assets are exciting. At the same time, the improvements temporarily interrupt the way we use common spaces. With projects like these, the goal is to minimize disruption of the public space. With this project, portions of the park may be temporarily closed as new irrigation is installed, for example.
Project update
The upgrades started last fall with the thinning of trees and shrubbery and surveying of the park for more work to come.
What remains now is installation of the irrigation, new lighting, protective fencing around ornamental beds and new signage.
Because of the many capital improvement projects Parks & Recreation has undertaken recently, the schedule for completion of the Pritchard Park improvements may extend past spring and into the summer. The City has been in contact with groups that have events in the park to assure them that the park will remain available to them during these improvements.
As a reminder, Pritchard Park’s water feature was repaired in 2015 and will remain in place.
For more information, contact Asheville Parks & Recreation Director Roderick Simmons at rsimmons@ashevillenc.gov or 828-259-5808.