At noon on Wall Street Plaza, a busker starts a set beside a row of bistro tables. Up the street, the blue Flour logo is painted on the building that housed Laughing Seed for 32 years. Across the way, Slava is selling poppy seed rolls and potato pancakes. On the steps, Dayna Walton's mural of Appalachian plants and animals covers the wall, and a newer row of painted barn quilts hangs beside it.
Each of these pieces showed up on Wall Street within roughly the last 16 months. They come from a mix of new owners and the Asheville Downtown Improvement District, and Lunchbox Live is the part that asks the most of the public. The series runs every day at lunch from Oct. 1 to Nov. 20, 2026. It is the first piece of the block's makeover that needs people to keep coming back, day after day, for seven weeks.
The Basics, Before the Backstory
Lunchbox Live runs from noon to 1:30 p.m. daily at Wall Street Plaza, 43 Wall St. It's free. ADID provides the tables and chairs, a featured busker plays each day, and four nearby restaurants offer a "Downtown Lunchbox Special" for under $15. The specials are meant to be simple, grab-and-go meals. If it rains, ADID plans to work with the participating businesses to move performances indoors when possible so the series doesn't skip a day.
The series also pays local buskers. ADID opened an application with details on pay and eligibility. The press release presents the series as support for Asheville's busking community as well as the restaurants.
"Wall Street has such great restaurants and shops, and Asheville has such a rich busking culture," said Erica Waltemade, deputy director of the Asheville Downtown Improvement District. "Starting October 1, we're bringing the two together with lunch specials and live buskers on the plaza daily."
Why This Block, and Why Lunch
ADID's announcement calls Lunchbox Live part of "a larger pilot initiative for Wall Street focused on Downtown business resilience." The reason it gives is plain. Downtown employees said they wanted more reasons to stay nearby on their lunch breaks.
That pilot comes from ADID's Business Resilience Strategy, which the district and the Asheville Downtown Association built with a consulting group called Public Sphere Projects. The goal was to assess downtown conditions and recommend business support, public-space improvements and longer-term resilience. In a January 2026 update, ADID said downtown businesses broadly lacked the steady foot traffic and employment base that keep daily activity going. The May 27, 2026 strategy presentation lists foot traffic and vacancies among downtown-wide concerns. None of the published documents cite block-level numbers showing Wall Street was worse off than other streets. The presentation frames the Wall Street work as a "Placemaking Pop-ups" pilot. Its proposals include refreshed planters, public art, and string lights meant to draw attention to the mural and make the stairs easier to see and feel safer for people using them in the evening.
A June 15 update described a plaza-and-stairway concept with lighting, seating, vendor space and live music. It built on what was already happening there: the Ginkgo Marketplace, the mural then in production, and Explore Asheville signage. ADID called those recommendations drafts that still needed refinement. Seating and live music are the two items from that list now set up on the plaza every day.
How the Block Turned Over
The pilot is landing on a street whose tenants changed a lot in a short time. In June 2025, Asheville Watchdog reported that about 40 downtown businesses had closed since Helene. Several of the spaces on and around Wall Street have new occupants since then. Walking the block by address shows the order it happened in.
- Third Room, 46 Wall St. A live-music and immersive-art venue on the ground floor of the former Jubilee! building. The Citizen-Times covered its opening in January 2025. It has October events on its calendar.
- Asheville Forager, 35 Wall St. A locally owned grocery and deli with an in-house bakery and butcher counter. It opened June 10, 2025, in the former Asheville Emporium spot.
- El Tesoro, 24 Wall St. A family-owned Mexican restaurant whose menu includes fish tacos, birria quesadillas, tortas and chilaquiles. The Citizen-Times reported in March 2026 that it was planned for the former Cucina 24 space.
- Slava, 37 Wall St. Svitlana Eadie catered in Asheville for almost a decade before opening this Ukrainian café and bakery, her first brick-and-mortar shop. It soft-opened July 18, 2026, and held its grand opening Aug. 5. The menu includes braided yeast breads, made-to-order crepes, potato dumplings, house-made sauerkraut, kvas and kompot.
- Flour Cafe, 40 Wall St. Flour opened its flagship on July 31, 2026, in the former Laughing Seed space.
That last address carries the most history. Laughing Seed served its final day on May 31, 2025, after 32 years at 40 Wall St. According to Eater, owners Joan and Joe Eckert pointed to five hard years of pandemic-era costs, staffing and downtown pressures, made worse by Helene. Brothers Kyle and Carter James and chef Gordon Gibbs started Flour in May 2024 at the S&W Market food hall. It soon outgrew that kitchen. In January 2026, Mountain Xpress reported that the move to Wall Street was mainly about kitchen capacity, because the small S&W kitchen couldn't keep up with biscuit demand.
Four of these businesses are offering the lunch specials: Flour, Slava, Forager and El Tesoro. Two of them opened this summer. So the series puts two of the block's newest kitchens on a daily lunch program in their first fall.
A Few Scheduling Details for Your Lunch Break
The series runs every day, but individual restaurants keep their own hours. Mountain Xpress reported on Aug. 11 that Flour was open Thursday through Monday, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., and closed Tuesday and Wednesday while the team settled in. That's the latest Flour schedule we could find. If it still holds, the Tuesday and Wednesday specials would come from the other three spots. Slava's current hours weren't posted on any page we could check, so look at its website or the restaurant's own channels before you go. ADID points people to @avldowntown for series updates.
Parking comes up for anyone driving in from outside downtown. As of the city's July 2, 2026 rate page, garage parking is free if you leave within the first hour. Stay longer and that first hour costs $2, with $2 for each additional or partial hour and a $15 daily maximum. A quick lunch fits inside the free window, but staying for a full 90-minute set means paying for two hours. The same page lists a flat $10 entry fee at the Wall Street Garage on designated event days and $12 for Harrah's Cherokee Center events. The city's garage-improvement project is phased, and its page, last updated in March 2026, says to expect limited garage availability at times.
The Art Around Your Table
Walton spent two weeks in early to mid-June 2026 painting her "Meander" mural on the Wall Street Steps, and Asheville Downtown celebrated its completion on June 27 alongside the monthly Gingko Market. It illustrates Appalachian plants and animals, and educational signage explains what's pictured. At the mural's summer celebration, ADID held free workshops where neighbors painted barn quilt panels based on the leaves of downtown's trees. Walton installed those panels on Wall Street in September as the last piece of ADID's "Fabric of Downtown" campaign. They're mounted on a building shared with Slava Bakery, and ADID says the installation will stay up for six months.
ADID has promised another round. Its Lunchbox Live announcement says more public art is coming to the plaza in October and that people at the lunch sets will be able to watch it go up. As of early October, the district had not named the artist or the medium. The barn quilt post ended with a similar line: "Our work on Wall Street isn't done yet. More to come this fall."
The string lighting proposed in the May presentation, aimed at people using the stairs after dark, hadn't been announced as installed as of this writing. The series ends Nov. 20, with the next public-art piece still to come.
When a downtown block gets new tenants, new art and a daily event, neighbors often start asking what that means for the homes and condos close by. If you own near downtown Asheville and want a clear, careful look at where your property stands this fall, Mary Sitton can walk you through it. Get your home valuation.
