Barley's Taproom & Pizzeria

The building at 42 Biltmore Avenue dates to the early 1920s and operated for decades as a commercial storefront, including a long tenure as an appliance retailer. The space was restored as a brewpub in the 1990s and has operated as Barley's Taproom & Pizzeria — known for hand-tossed pizza, craft beer, and a second-floor pool hall and music venue — since then.

The block's deeper history is inseparable from the events of November 13, 1906. On that morning, Will Harris, a 29-year-old who had escaped from state custody, purchased a Savage .303 lever-action rifle and clothing in downtown Asheville. By that evening, Harris was firing on officers and bystanders along Eagle Street and Biltmore Avenue, killing two policemen — Patrolman Charles Blackstock and Patrolman J.W. Bailey — and three Black civilians: Tom Neal, Ben Addison, and Jocko Corpening. Captain John Page was wounded in the arm during the initial encounter but survived. Multiple sources (Asheville Paranormal Society; Mountain Xpress retrospective) confirm the two officers killed were Blackstock and Bailey, and that Page survived.

Following the shootings, a posse of several hundred armed citizens — Asheville's largest ever — tracked Harris into the wooded edge of the Biltmore Estate, where he was killed in a gunfight near Buena Vista on November 15. Contemporary news coverage framed the event in heavily racialized terms; modern accounts emphasize that three of the five fatal victims were themselves Black Asheville residents and that the broader history is one of racial-violence trauma in the city's downtown core.

In parts of older Asheville lore, the block is also tied to the location of an antebellum town gallows; the Asheville Terrors writeup notes this oral tradition, though it has not been independently documented in mainstream histories.