Asheville upgrades Pack Square lawn for heavier event use downtown

The lawn at Pack Square Park was set to close June 17 through July 5 as Asheville replaced the cool-season grass on Roger McGuire Green with hybrid bermudagrass, a change aimed at keeping downtown’s busiest civic lawn usable through festivals, concerts and weekend crowds.

The work focused on the stretch between South Market Street and Court Plaza, but the rest of the park stayed open. Splasheville, the Bascom Lamar Lunsford Stage, J. Rush Oates Plaza and the pavilion restrooms remained available while crews handled soil preparation and sod installation on the main lawn.

Asheville Parks & Recreation said the new turf was meant to handle the months when Pack Square gets its heaviest use. D. Tyrell McGirt, the department director, said the goal was to create more access for the community and less downtime between events, while also giving staff more time to improve other parks across the city.

That matters in Pack Square because the 6.5-acre park functions as Asheville’s de facto town square. City history materials say the site has served as Asheville’s public square since at least 1797, and the modern unified park project was developed by Pack Square Conservancy after it was founded in 2000. The updated Pack Square Park opened in 2010 and has since become one of the city’s premier public spaces, with benches, terraces, open areas, performance space, restrooms and Splasheville.

The city has also treated Roger McGuire Green as one of its highest-pressure lawns for years. In 2015, it hosted 55 special events and festivals, ranging from gatherings of 100 people to crowds of 25,000. In 2016, city reporting counted 68 permitted outdoor events in the Roger McGuire Green and Reuter Terrace area. The current switch to hybrid bermudagrass is meant to reduce the wear-and-tear that can leave the lawn thin, muddy or slow to recover during the warm season.

City programming was already built around the closure. Movies in the Park screened Barbie on June 14, just before the work began, Splasheville Days was scheduled for June 15 and 16, and the city planned to bring Movies in the Park back July 12 with a 10th-anniversary showing of Guardians of the Galaxy. For downtown Asheville, the turf project was less about landscaping than about keeping a public square ready for the next concert, rally, food-truck gathering or summer crowd.