Mackensy Lunsford

mlunsford@citizen-times.com

ASHEVILLE - Soon, it's all getting torn down.

Gone will be the many markings of celebrations scrawled on the walls. Here, someone ate at 12 Bones on a honeymoon trip. Here's the table where a Marine ate three Hogzilla sandwiches in one sitting and wrote of his bravado on the wall. And here's where an Australian wrote about traveling across the world just to get a taste of 12 Bones ribs.

There's tragedy in these hand-written notes, too: Near the window that looks out on Lyman Street is a thank you note, written by the family of Officer Rob Bingaman, who died when his car plummeted from the Jeff Bowen Bridge in autumn 2013. Bingaman's family planned his funeral here, said 12 Bones co-owner Bryan King.

The Riverside Drive location of the barbecue restaurant, a leader in the revitalization of the once warehouse-dominated River Arts District, is now in the path of the area's unstoppable momentum. The building at 5 Riverside Drive must be empty by Jan. 13 to make way for the River Arts District Transportation Improvement Project. The last day of business in that location is Friday.

The RADTIP will bring sidewalks and greenways along the French Broad River, reroute roads and add new traffic circles, one which will necessitate tearing down the building where 12 Bones is now.

The structure is no architectural wonder. It's a squat and utilitarian place with a surprisingly unromantic view of the river, which has found its way into the building more than once and attracts flies and bees in the summer.

To call the building humble is charitable. But it's a beautiful mess. "It really is, and that is by far what we're all going to miss the most," said King, who owns the smokehouse with his wife Angela King.

The story is not over for 12 Bones, which retains a store in South Asheville and will begin the work of moving into another River Arts District location as early as this weekend.

Likely in February, that newest location of 12 Bones will open with twice the seating capacity and two new smokers, one big enough to fit a whole hog. At 5 Foundy St., 12 Bones will serve as an anchor tenant for The Foundation, a development coming together on 13 acres off Lyman Street and across from the French Broad River.

The restaurant will occupy a former office and restaurant building, which shares a wall with an old tannery. That's where the Wedge will build a second brewery and event space, sharing a courtyard and common area with 12 Bones. Right now, that property is also a beautiful mess, full of promise, largely empty and covered in bright graffiti like a technicolor dream of an abandoned space.

All in all, the Kings and their employees are thrilled about the move. "At the end of the day we were in a really unfavorable lease in a building that was held together with Band-Aids and not really enough space for us," Bryan King said.

When the Kings bought 12 Bones in 2013 from original owners Sabra Kelley and Thomas Montgomery, the landlord, Chris Peterson, raised the rent from $1,750 to $6,000 a month overnight. "It's a lot of extra money a year for sure, and it hurts us in the winter," King said.

Now they're looking forward to increased space in the dining room and a better-planned kitchen that can handle more off-site catering and give the employees room to maneuver.

That's a major benefit for chef Shane Heavner. "I'm not going to lie; I'm not going to miss it," he said over the phone Wednesday, just starting his shift at the Riverside property. "I'm ready for the new place."

Heavner used to bring a .45 pistol with him when he'd work at night by himself prepping food. "It gets pretty shady over here at nighttime for sure," he said.

There was the time when a car drifted through the window and wall, a man still passed out drunk on the steering wheel. "I called (then-owner) Tom and said 'Somebody just made a drive-thru window for us,'" Heavner recalled.

A week later, another man walked through the dark and stopped in front of the window of the restaurant, stripped down to his underwear and passed out on a bench. When Heavner told the man to leave, he asked for an application. "I told him that's not the way to go about it," Heavner said.

That's likely not the last time Heavner will encounter a drunk person in the River Arts District. He's mostly looking forward to the increased capacity, which he said will up the quality of the food. "We're going to be able to do what Franklin's (Barbecue in Austin) does, without running out of food — straight from the smoker to the table."

There will be a dessert case for Heavner's repertoire of sweets. There will be enough room to run an expanded menu of daily specials. "But we're not changing anything on the regular menu," he said. "We don't want to fix what's not broken."

"It's kind of funny how things work out," said King. "As tough as it is to leave, and you never want to be in the position where you're forced to make a move. But I do think this has the potential to be really good for us. I certainly hope people will follow us to the new spot."

The owners have made sure some of the spirit of the original spot comes along, hiring a photographer to document what can't be replaced in images that might end up framed on the new location's walls.

There are notes from celebrities like Leslie Jones from Saturday Night Live and John Daly, both filming "Masterminds" in Asheville. There's also graffiti from Kate Hansen, an American luger who competed in the Sochi 2014 Olympics.

In 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama visited 12 Bones during a stop on the campaign trail, then again as president in 2010. In 2013, the Secret Service grabbed takeout after Obama spoke at Linamar in Arden.

He never signed the wall, but he did take a picture with the staff, a photo that will make the trip down the street, along with benches and siding bearing remnants of the sign for Daisy's Diner, a previous occupant of the Riverside Drive building.

"There's a lot of history in that building that’s just going to get demoed," said Sabra Kelley, who opened the restaurant with her husband Thomas Montgomery in 2005, when that area of town was far from trendy. "It was industrial," said Kelley. "True industrial, not fake industrial."

Kelley and Montgomery aimed to target the traffic generated by industry that remained primarily blue collar. "People going to the dump and hitting the rock yard and stuff like that," Kelley said.

They hoped to feed 125 people a day at $8 a head. Since the Obama visits, the restaurant's daily record for people served is around 900.

Kelley shrugs off the visits from the president. Filming for "Good Morning America's" Best Bites segment was far more shocking, she said. "It was early on and we didn’t know what we were doing."

More emotional types might lament the loss of something so personal, though Kelley intends to try to salvage a signature from the wall. It belonged to a customer who died, she said, and she knows someone who wants it.

"It’s not like our building was that cool," she said. "It just has a lot of layers of history."

City project calls for demolition at 12 Bones, RAD warehouses

12 Bones joins Wedge Brewing at Foundation property