Gingko Marketplace brings monthly street life back to downtown Asheville

Downtown Asheville’s Wall Street courtyard filled again with shoppers, artisans and local goods Saturday as Ginkgo Marketplace offered merchants another monthly test of how much street life the city center can still sustain. The market, held at 43 Wall Street, brought together local vendors and WNC artisans in a compact space that feels tailored to Asheville’s pedestrian core.

Merchants of Downtown Asheville, or MODA, has made Ginkgo Marketplace a recurring last-Saturday event from May through October, running from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. That predictable schedule matters in a downtown where independent restaurants and retailers depend on regular bursts of activity to keep customer traffic from flattening out between busier periods. Small events like this do not remake the economy on their own, but they can help establish a rhythm that encourages repeat visits and makes the district feel active again.

That is part of why the market fits Asheville so well. Downtown shopping here has long been built around independent shops, artisanal goods and a walkable mountain vibe, and Ginkgo Marketplace leans directly into that identity. It gives residents a chance to browse local products without leaving Buncombe County, while visitors get an easy introduction to the city’s maker culture and the central business district in one stop.

Wall Street itself carries a long history of that kind of street-level commerce. Buncombe County Special Collections has described it as one of downtown Asheville’s most charming streets and a lively precursor to the chain-store-free downtown that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. On the Asheville Urban Trail, the Cat Walk station ties the street to a retaining wall built for Battery Park Hill and notes that footbridges once crossed the alley before Wall Street was paved, a reminder that this block was designed for strolling long before it became a market setting.

Ginkgo Marketplace also sits inside a larger Asheville shopping and food-market network that includes Asheville City Market downtown seasonally and the Western North Carolina Farmers Market open seven days a week. Together, those markets show how deeply local shopping habits are woven into the city’s economy. For downtown Asheville, the monthly draw on Wall Street is more than a novelty. It is a small but meaningful measure of whether the city center can keep pulling people back into the street.