For as long as most current South Slope apartment-dwellers have lived here, Asheville Oktoberfest has meant Pack Square Park: string lights over the plaza, a stein hoist contest in front of the fountain, the smell of bratwurst drifting toward Church Street. This year, on Saturday, October 3, from 1 to 5 p.m., that changes. The festival moves eight blocks south to Coxe Avenue, the wide, unglamorous street that runs through the middle of the brewery district. If you search for Oktoberfest details online right now, you'll find at least one older listing still pointing you to Pack Square. That's a leftover, not a mistake. The event actually moved.
The Asheville Downtown Association, which runs the festival as its biggest annual fundraiser, has confirmed the new location twice in its own Chamber of Commerce updates this September, describing Coxe Avenue as a neighborhood already known for its breweries, restaurants, and independent businesses, and encouraging festivalgoers to explore South Slope before and after the afternoon event. The move isn't cosmetic. It lines up with something bigger happening to that specific stretch of pavement, and if you live within walking distance of it, the timing is worth understanding before the street looks nothing like it does today.
A Street Built for Cars, Not Steins
Coxe Avenue has never been a natural festival street. It was laid out in the 1920s as Asheville's original auto mile, wide enough for showroom traffic and car lots, at a time when a 1924 newspaper ad called it the city's new auto business district with more parking than anywhere else in town. Before that, the land was known as Buxton Hill, a grassy rise that was home to a Black community before industrialization leveled it for factories and machine shops in the early 1900s.
That auto-oriented layout is still the street's defining flaw. City planners have flagged Coxe Avenue as incomplete for anything but cars: no continuous sidewalk, no bike lane, poor drainage from a stormwater system that was never built to handle the runoff from downtown above it. It's the kind of street that works fine for driving through and not particularly well for standing on with a beer in your hand, which makes it an odd choice for a festival that expects a crowd.
Except that's exactly the point. Coxe Avenue has spent the last decade filling in with breweries almost by accident, on top of infrastructure that was never designed for foot traffic. Putting Oktoberfest there this year is less a scheduling change than a preview of what the city is about to spend real money making permanent.
What's Actually Within Walking Distance
If you're headed down for the festival, the route itself is the map of South Slope's brewery cluster. Green Man Brewing's original taproom, Dirty Jack's, has operated on Buxton Avenue since the late 1990s and is generally credited as the district's first craft tasting room. A block over on Coxe, Wicked Weed's Funkatorium at 147 Coxe pours barrel-aged and sour beers in what used to be a warehouse, and Twin Leaf Brewing sits directly across the street at 144 Coxe with its own ten-barrel system. Asheville Brewing's original brewpub is at 77 Coxe, Bear's Smokehouse BBQ is at 135 Coxe, and Hi-Wire Brewing runs a location just off the corridor on Hilliard. Burial Beer Co., a few blocks away on Collier, rounds out the walkable cluster.
Parking on a festival Saturday is the same challenge it always is in South Slope. The eight-story deck at 40 Coxe Avenue holds 664 spaces and is the practical option after 5 p.m. on a normal day, though with the festival running through 5 p.m. itself, expect it to fill early. Entry to the deck is from Sears Alley.
The Timing Isn't Random
Here's the part that doesn't show up on any festival flyer. Coxe Avenue is headed for a construction zone that's expected to last up to two years. The city's Coxe Avenue Streetscape project, funded by a nearly $10 million grant from the North Carolina Department of Transportation along with a $2.4 million city match and close to $3 million from the Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority, will rebuild the half-mile stretch between Southside Avenue and Patton Avenue. The plan calls for a continuous 10-foot sidewalk, about 65,000 square feet of it new, a dedicated bike lane, upgraded water and stormwater infrastructure, and a 13,000-square-foot raised plaza between Buxton and Banks avenues.
The design phase, which included a public open house held at Bear's Smokehouse in March of last year, is wrapping up now and heading to NCDOT for review before construction can begin. City projections have consistently pointed to a 2026 start date, and as of a January meeting between city staff and South Slope business leadership, that timeline still holds. Hayden Plemmons, who runs the Asheville Downtown Association, has been candid about what that means for the businesses lining the street: after years of COVID disruption and then Hurricane Helene, South Slope is getting a short window of normal operations before roughly eighteen months of construction noise and detours.
Running Oktoberfest on Coxe Avenue this year, before the sidewalks come up and the bike lane goes in, reads less like a coincidence and more like a last look at the street in its current, rougher form. Next year's festival, construction schedule allowing, could be happening on a street with a plaza that doesn't exist yet.
The Corridor Is Also About to Get More Neighbors
The infrastructure work isn't the only change coming to that stretch. Buncombe County has moved forward on plans for 206 affordable housing units at 50 and 52 Coxe Avenue, with an estimated construction cost of $59.1 million and units set aside for households earning 80 percent or less of the area median income, which the county calculated at $68,019 when it announced the plan. Construction on that site was tentatively slated in that same announcement to begin in early 2026. The county selected Harmony Housing as its development partner after reviewing multiple proposals, and the plan includes ground-floor commercial space alongside the residential units, extending the same pedestrian-scale ambitions from the streetscape project into an actual building.
None of this is new thinking. A 2009 Downtown Master Plan first floated Coxe Avenue as the heart of a future residential neighborhood, walkable to downtown, with new housing filling in around the breweries that were just beginning to arrive. Seventeen years later, the sidewalk money has finally come through, the housing project has a site and a partner, and the neighborhood's biggest annual festival just relocated onto the exact block where all of it converges.
What This Means If You Live Nearby
If your daily walk already takes you past Dirty Jack's or down Buxton toward the Funkatorium, you're going to notice the next two years more than most. Sidewalk closures, temporary detours, and the general noise of underground utility work are the near-term reality once NCDOT signs off on the design. The upside, on paper, is a corridor that finally has room for people walking rather than just cars idling at a used lot, plus a public plaza where there's currently just pavement.
For now, the festival is the calm version of that future. Twenty-plus regional breweries will pour on a stretch of street that's still exactly as wide and exactly as auto-oriented as it was in 1924, with the German food trucks Haus Heidelberg and Blunt Pretzels set up somewhere between the Stein Hoist contest and the Lederhosen Relay. Entry is free this year, with an optional Prost Pass for tastings, and the event is presented by Fields Automotive, a small irony given the street's original purpose. Whatever Coxe Avenue looks like in 2028, this is what it looks like on October 3, 2026, and that's worth walking down for on its own.
If you're curious how the Coxe Avenue project or the Southside housing development are shaping up over the next year, the city's project page posts updates as they come, and Buncombe County's own release on the housing plan is a useful record of what's actually been approved versus what's still proposed.
If you're the kind of South Slope resident who tracks a street this closely because you're thinking about what your own block might be worth in two years, or whether now's the right window to buy before that plaza and those 206 units change the character of the corridor, TFM Carolina knows this part of downtown well enough to talk it through honestly.
