Karen Cragnolin’s crew works behind the scenes to protect one of WNC’s chief aquatic assets. photo by Matt Roseby Janet Hurley

As executive director of the Asheville nonprofit RiverLink, Karen Cragnolin’s energy and vision have been a constant current for 20 years, even when many believed the French Broad River area could not be revitalized. Like the river, Cragnolin has always found ways to flow around obstacles. With help from her board and volunteers, she’s created pools of funding and collaboration to improve the river’s health and to develop the Wilma Dykeman Riverway, a 17-mile greenway that provides spaces where people live, work and play. Few who visit these spaces understand the depth of the RiverLink organization, which is located in an old brick building next to the railroad tracks in the River Arts District. From education to advocacy, RiverLink’s staff of four (plus two AmeriCorps volunteers) works with more than 300 volunteers to connect thousands to the river through summer camps, bus tours, river clean-ups and art contests.

Originally from Boston, Cragnolin started her career as a tax lawyer in New York. After she married Bob Cragnolin, an export executive with General Electric (now retired), they moved often, crossing the Atlantic several times. (Their daughter Nikki was born in Greece.) “We would arrive some place and I’d try to figure out how to get involved,” Cragnolin says. In Washington, she used her Middle East travel experience to help establish the American Arab Affairs Council. In the new free-trade zone of Dubai, where the Cragnolins landed in 1978, she helped develop the first licensed U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the Middle East. “Then,” she says laughing, “in 1986, we got transferred to Hendersonville, NC.”

Cragnolin was quickly hired by the Asheville Chamber of Commerce as a special consultant. “They said, ‘we’ve got this river and we really don’t know what to do with it,’” Cragnolin remembers. She’d seen the positive effects of riverfront revitalization in other cities, and she knew the same could happen with Asheville’s French Broad. “I’ve always had a soft spot for rivers,” she says. Working with the French Broad River Foundation and the River Attractions committee, Cragnolin led the charge to develop a plan that addressed both environmental and economic-development concerns. When no one stepped forward to implement the plan, the group incorporated as RiverLink.

When RiverLink purchased a building on the river, the down payment was donated by the Asheville-based Janirve Foundation. Cragnolin then went to every bank in town and told them RiverLink would pay for its mortgage by renting out artist studio space—a seed for the now-popular River Arts District. “They just roared,” Cragnolin says. Not to be diverted, Cragnolin persuaded Julian Price, a local philanthropist, to give them a four-year loan.

Through the years, RiverLink has worked to purchase other buildings on the river and lease them inexpensively to artists. With the local Preservation Society, they bought the old Asheville Cotton Mill, where a children’s clothing manufacturer and a glassblower planned to occupy and renovate the space. But in 1995, an arsonist torched the mill and it blazed for a week. “That was a real low point,” Cragnolin says. The location was critical to their plans for the river, so Cragnolin got a $50,000 donation to clean up the site. A developer bought a portion of the damaged building and sold it to local potters. RiverLink intends to build a LEED-certified demonstration building in the space around the mill, complete with a “living” roof and artist live-work space. RiverLink already has grants to supplement artist ownership of the building. “With the economy, it won’t happen tomorrow,” Cragnolin says and then smiles, “but it will happen.” Recently, VERVE sat down with Cragnolin to hear more about taking the long view in a time of economic uncertainty.
     
How do you sustain yourself in an endeavor like RiverLink that has such a long-term vision?
I iron. I get immediate gratification from ironing! No, seriously, this work is so varied. On any given day, I may be dealing with artists or geologists or architects or with folks who are doing environmental testing. I try to make it clear: there’s going to be incremental, organic change and it’s going to be huge in perspective, but on a day-to-day basis, you’re not going to see big changes. We try to celebrate frequently and have fun.

What helps you make things happen?
We’ve had wonderful boards and volunteers and a wonderful community that says yes…I’ve always thought that a really good idea is going to be funded. It may not be funded conventionally, it may be something that requires a lot of creativity and rethinking, but good ideas get funded. Eventually.

What were the biggest challenges when you first got involved?
People didn’t know where the river was, and, if they did know, they were afraid to come here. There were a lot of big buildings and a lot of them were warehouses, but not a lot of people.

Did people feel threatened by the riverway plan?
The industries that had been down here had closed in the ‘50s and ‘60s. The buildings weren’t being utilized except as warehouses or flophouses, but there was a sense that if we had an industrial corridor, it was here. So, some people did feel threatened when we first started working on this. The French Broad was never a commercial river because it’s too shallow. But industry needed flat land. Trains got here in the 1880s and they put the tracks on the flat land and the factories followed. There’s an old saying—geography is destiny.

Through the years, what social issues have been challenging for RiverLink, and how has RiverLink addressed them?
When I moved here, people would say, “Oh I live in ‘worst’ Asheville,” instead of West Asheville. The river split, rather than knit, the community. We were committed to building the first park on the west side of the river to make a statement. People said, “You have Pisgah View public housing right down the street. You’re going to put a park there, and it’s going to be fancy?” We said, “Well…yeah!” The old Riverside Park that burned in 1950 and was destroyed by a flood in 1960 was segregated. When we opened the French Broad River Park, an elderly African-American woman sat and just beamed all day long. She said, “I could never go to the old Riverside Park, but I sure am here, and my daughter’s even on the board of directors.”

How is RiverLink part of the big picture in correcting the dismal economic climate we have now?
Short term: the parks on Amboy Road have created four new developments that the developers say wouldn’t be there without the parks. Long term: this could be a new economy centered on quality of life. In the old days, people would move to jobs. Now, companies are moving to where people want to be. Quality of life becomes a key indicator for sustainable economic development. We’ve had companies say they want to relocate to the river because they want to be on a campus setting where employees can walk or bike. High-tech companies have shown an interest in being here. Right now we have AVL Technologies, the world leader in satellite technology.

What do you think people in the area would be surprised to learn about the river?
There are a zillion untold, or little-known, stories. People don’t know the first airport was down here, or that John D. Rockefeller funded the roof on a church or that Lloyds of London insured the dirt racetrack on Amboy Road because nobody locally would do it.

De Soto traveled on the Swannanoa in 1540. People think its history started with the industrial era or when RiverLink got here, and that couldn’t be less true. The French Broad is one of the oldest rivers in the world. A big part of John Nolan’s urban plan back in 1920 was for Asheville to connect with the mountains and the rivers. It’s not a new idea. I think there is no great city in the world that doesn’t have a river.   

For more info about RiverLink’s events and programs, go to www.riverlink.org.