When USA Today's 10Best Readers' Choice Awards named Waynesville's historic Main Street the second-best in the country this spring, the write-up praised what a visitor would notice first: antique shops, boutiques, a downtown built for wandering with a coffee in hand. The panel wrote about "hunting down treasures at antique stores" as one of the district's defining pleasures. It's a fair description of Main Street on a Saturday afternoon in tourist season.
It's also not where most of Waynesville actually spends its Friday nights.
Ask someone who lives here what the town feels like in August and you'll hear about a dance that's been running for a hundred years, a creek-side brewery district built out of an old freight depot and warehouses, and a handful of restaurant honors that the antique-shop version of downtown never mentions. The award describes a place worth visiting. The people who live here have built something slightly different two blocks away, and the town's own commission chair seems to know it.
The Ranking's Language Tells on Itself
Waynesville placed second nationally, behind only Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and was the only North Carolina town to crack the top ten. The Town of Waynesville's official announcement leaned into the retail-and-architecture framing that made the award newsworthy in the first place. But when Downtown Waynesville Commission chair Jon Feichter was asked to explain the win, he skipped the storefronts. "It's the people, the sense of community, and the way folks show up for each other," he said.
That's a strange thing to say about an award for a street. Unless the thing actually being recognized isn't the street at all, but the habits that happen on and around it, most of which don't show up in a tourism citation about boutiques.
The Century-Old Habit the Award Never Mentions
Every summer, Main Street closes in front of the historic Haywood County Courthouse, the asphalt gets a light dusting of cornmeal, and a caller pulls the town into a public square dance. This year's Summer Mountain Street Dance series ran three dates, the most recent on August 7, with performances from local dance teams before the floor opens to everyone.
The caller is Joe Sam Queen, whose grandfather Sam Queen organized the Soco Gap Dance Team in the 1930s, one of the first mountain square dance and clogging demonstration teams in the country. Sam Queen was known locally as "the dancing-est man in the land," and according to Blue Ridge Music Trails, his grandson still carries the tradition forward on the same stretch of pavement. This isn't programming built for a tourism campaign. It predates the campaign by roughly ninety years.
If you missed August's run, the town's Saturday Live Music series on North Main Street continues weekly through November, a lower-key but steady reason to be downtown on a summer evening without needing a special occasion.
Two Blocks South, a Different Kind of Main Street
Walk down Commerce Street from the courthouse and you land in Frog Level, the district that grew up around Waynesville's original 1884 rail depot. According to Visit Haywood's history of the area, the name comes from the way the low ground along Richland Creek used to flood, leaving the neighborhood sitting "at frog level" when the water rose.
For most of the last century, that same low ground meant warehouses, a feed and seed store, and eventually a thrift shop and soup kitchen. What's there now is a working microbrewery scene built almost entirely around the creek. Frog Level Brewing, the anchor business, produces its own beer and also serves as the production facility for 7 Clans Brewing, one of the only female-owned breweries of its kind in western North Carolina. The building next door, once the Open Door soup kitchen, was renovated into The Green Room, a multi-purpose event space.
The people behind that renovation, Frank and Julia Bonomo along with Travis and Morgan Crisp, had acquired seven buildings in the district as of 2022, betting that Frog Level could become a genuine second downtown. Bonomo told Smoky Mountain News the goal was to make it "a very exciting, dynamic place" where new businesses could take root along the riverfront. Four years later, that's roughly what's there: picnic tables backing onto Richland Creek, a beer garden that welcomes dogs and kids, and an events calendar that didn't exist when the buildings were still boarded up.
Here's the contrast worth sitting with:
| What the award praised | What fills a local's evening |
|---|---|
| Boutiques and antique stores | A century-old street dance |
| Retail shopping on Main Street | Creek-side beer gardens in Frog Level |
| A destination for day-trippers | A monthly community ritual led by the same family since the 1930s |
| Storefronts and building facades | The Green Room, a renovated soup kitchen turned event space |
Main Street earned the ranking. Frog Level is where a lot of the town actually gathers.
This Year's Newer Additions Worth Knowing
Downtown's restaurant lineup has shifted enough this year that it's worth a quick update if you haven't been paying close attention. In this spring's Best of Haywood County reader poll, run by The Mountaineer, a few names stood out:
- Valé 243 took home Best Italian Restaurant and Best New Restaurant honors.
- Church Street Depot was voted Haywood County's Best Burger and Hot Dog.
- Watami Sushi and Noodles was named Best Chinese Food in the county.
None of these are new-new, exactly, but the recognition this year signals they've moved past the "recently opened" phase and into "this is just where we eat now" territory, which is a more useful distinction for anyone deciding where to go on a Tuesday than a grand-opening headline ever was.
If you want something with more history behind it, Panacea Coffeehouse still operates out of the old Boyd Wholesale Grocery building near Frog Level, keeping enough of the original structure that the espresso bar feels more like a preserved room than a build-out.
What's Actually Coming Up
The 43rd Annual Church Street Art & Craft Show is set for Saturday, October 10, a reminder that Waynesville's calendar of homegrown events runs independently of whatever national outlet happens to notice the town in a given year. The show has been organized by the same community group, the Downtown Waynesville Association, for over four decades, long enough that it will outlast this year's ranking cycle and whatever comes next.
That's the pattern worth noticing. USA Today's panel and its readers vote on something new every year. The street dance, the Frog Level buildout, and the Church Street show don't need an outside award to keep happening. They're not performing for a national audience. They're just what Waynesville does with a Friday night, whether or not anyone outside Haywood County is watching.
The award got the ranking right. It just described the wrong street.
Kim Gentry Justus has spent her career learning the difference between what a place looks like on paper and what it actually feels like to live there, whether that's a Main Street storefront or a wooded parcel outside town. If you're weighing a move to Waynesville, Fairview, or anywhere else in western North Carolina and want a read on a neighborhood that goes past the tourism copy, reach out to Asheville Land & Luxury to connect for a curated consultation.
