Lou Pollock Memorial Park gate earns Griffin Award for restoration

The restored gate at Lou Pollock Memorial Park has earned a Griffin Award for Restoration, turning a modest entrance in West Asheville into a reminder of how much of Asheville’s history survives in small, easily overlooked places. The award recognized work that returned the gate to a specific period in its history while preserving original materials whenever possible.

The project matters because Lou Pollock Memorial Park is not just another neighborhood landmark. Congregation Beth Israel identifies it as its cemetery, located off Patton Avenue at N. Louisiana Avenue in Asheville, and notes that it is the congregation’s own burial ground. The cemetery is also private and not open to the public, which makes the gate one of the few visible pieces of a site that carries Jewish family and community memory in a changing part of the city.

The restoration was completed by Living Stone Masonry, a locally owned Asheville company that specializes in restoration and repair of vintage brick and stone structures. That local craftsmanship fit the spirit of the Griffin Awards, which the Preservation Society of Asheville & Buncombe County says honor property owners as well as skilled craftspeople, contractors, architects, historians and creators behind preservation work. The society’s 2026 ceremony was the 46th Griffin Awards, held May 21 at 5:30 p.m. at Ella Asheville in the Broadway Arts Building at 49 Broadway St. Ste. 204.

Lou Pollock Memorial Park also carries a layered history of its own. UNC Asheville’s Lou Pollock Collection says the cemetery was renamed from Mount Sinai Jewish Cemetery to Lou Pollock Memorial Park in 1949, after Lou Pollock, who served as president of the West Asheville Hebrew Cemetery Association. Cemetery listings describe the site as a relatively small historic burial ground, with one database listing 362 memorials and another listing 296 burial records.

For Asheville, the award highlights a larger preservation lesson: the city’s historic fabric is not limited to downtown storefronts or major landmarks. Protecting a cemetery gate in West Asheville helps keep visible a Jewish burial ground that has long been part of Buncombe County’s story, and it shows how restoration can preserve both craftsmanship and memory at the same time.