News

Here's the plan for South Main roundabout and HonorAir Park

Architect Hunter Marks’s drawing shows how HonorAir Park would blend with the South Main roundabout, an NCDOT project scheduled for around 2028. [WATERMARK LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE]

By Bill Moss, Published: June 11, 2024

The confluence of the Ecusta Trail and the nearby trailhead, the leveling of the south gateway mound and the construction of a big roundabout where Main, Church and King streets meet poses a landscape design challenge.

The architect hired to solve it, Hunter Marks, unveiled a design for the area and described its features at last Thursday’s meeting of the Hendersonville City Council.

“This is a real node in the city,” Marks said. “With the trail and the roads converging, with Church and King and Main and the Above the Mud connection, which will go to Jackson Park, and the new walkable connection on Main Street to the Visitor Center and downtown, this is going to be a pretty important area for pedestrian connection in the town.”

After getting input from city staff, Marks created a design that fits the pieces into one parklike setting.

“We want to make this low maintenance, we want to make it beautiful but we want to make it easy to keep beautiful,” he said. “We want to make sure that we maintain HonorAir Park” while recognizing that it’s “a gateway to town and that it's an informational node for all these different activities that are converging at this point.”

The DOT project will remove the gateway mound because “the roundabout is about where the flags are right now,” he said. HonorAir Park would move north of the roundabout.

“Within the roundabout, we've got low maintenance, native plants, something that would be very attractive — seasonal interest,” Marks said. “The interior of the roundabout would be highly landscaped, not like the one on Shepherd Street and Greenville Highway. We can do better than that.”

Councilman Jeff Miller, who cofounded the national veteran-honoring organization the park commemorates, endorsed the design.

“I just really want to thank you for preserving HonorAir Park,” he said. “I didn’t know if DOT was just going to roll right over it and it would become a nice memory. In all honesty, I think it would be an improvement. It’s going to become a little more active.”

Anyone that doesn’t like the design can relax for now. Anyone who can’t wait for it to happen, well, too bad.

Bidding for the South Main roundabout project is not until 2026 and completion no sooner than two years after that “assuming they stay on the current path,” City Manager John Connet said. “We will have the design ready and turn it over and have it incorporated in the bid documents.”

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