BEACON VILLAGE

Velosolutions will be on site in early spring 2024, with completion anticipated by end of summer/early fall 2024.

The design and construction of the bike park is a gift from the Beacon Foundation to the community. Our goal has been to make the park accessible to the community, while also covering costs associated with running the park, like: insurance, maintenance, event planning, safety. We are working on all of this now and there will be multiple options to accommodate all types of riders and pocketbooks.

From push bikes to mountain and jump bikes to adaptive wheelchairs and one-wheels, nearly anyone on wheels can use the park. It’s built to challenge new riders as well as professional riders of all abilities and ages. For the bike nerds out there trail features will include, but are not limited to: berms, wooden features like bridges and wall rides, and jump lines. 

The natural surface 1-mile walking path will run the perimeter of the bike park and is scheduled to be open to the public by the end of summer/ fall 2024. It will be accessible for all users.

We expect to have live music start summer/early fall 2024 and will expand our event calendar in the future to include community events beyond music. Ideas for what you’d like to see or who you’d like to hear on stage? Let us know!

Keep up with what’s happening at this website and on our blog. For neighbors, we’ll also stay in close contact withFriends and Neighbors of Swannanoa (FANS) neighborhood association as the project evolves.

By taking on development of a brownfield site, we are committing to provide necessary clean up of the site to redevelop the property. In order to become stewards of this property, we are bound to a brownfields agreement in partnership with the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ), the organization that oversees brownfield agreements and remediation in North Carolina. According to the NC DEQ:

A brownfields site is any real property that is abandoned, idled or underused where environmental contamination, or perceived environmental contamination, hinders redevelopment. The problem comes from the fact that it is very difficult to obtain loans for redevelopment on these properties because they come with potential environmental cleanup liability. The N.C. Brownfields Redevelopment Section is designed to ease that liability for prospective developers of these properties so as to facilitate the redevelopment of the property.

Read more on the NC DEQ website.

The former Beacon Manufacturing Company manufactured and dyed textiles, specifically blankets, on the land that we are revitalizing, and due to those prior uses, the site is considered a brownfield. We know much more about contaminants and how they affect our environment now than we did in the early to mid 1900s when the Beacon factory was in operation. We honor that the company provided for many families in our community and trust that their intention was never to be harmful with their practices. Our goal is to remediate the site so that it can be reused and optimized for the benefit of the community and doing so takes time and investment. We are proud to be stewards of this lovely property.