|
On a recent trip to Boston, a taxi driver asked where I was from. When I said, “Asheville,” he immediately replied, “Ah! The Paris of the South.” I had heard that expression, of course, but thought it was chamber-of-commerce hype. Now I was intrigued it had taken root so far away.
Certainly Asheville’s mountain vistas, its limpid air, and its moderate climate have drawn visitors since the 19th century. There was such a tourist and building boom in the 1920s that it was briefly nicknamed the Miami of the North. However it is described, Asheville is a true four-season place. The summers are cool, the winters mild, spring spreads a tapestry of pink and white, and fall explodes with a blaze of ochre and vermilion.
George Vanderbilt bought 125,000 acres here in the 1880s and built a country estate he called Biltmore. He enlisted Richard Morris Hunt, architect of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Newport’s “Marble Cottages,” to design his house. Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park, laid out the grounds. Hunt, who attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, modeled the mansion on French Renaissance chateaus. Completed in 1895, Biltmore received a procession of Northern notables, including Henry James, Edith Wharton, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt. So here was Asheville’s first French connection, if not strictly a Parisian one.
When the Depression struck and Asheville’s boom went bust, city officials persuaded Vanderbilt’s heirs to open Biltmore to the public as a tourist lure. During the ’60s, Vanderbilt’s grandsons were positioning the estate to become the major attraction it is today. Biltmore is now the second-most-visited house museum in the United States (behind only Mount Vernon), topping Hearst Castle, Graceland, and Monticello. A million people come through every year.
Biltmore, however, sits in its own village in isolated splendor. When I moved here in 1970, the weekenders could also enjoy the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, but Asheville itself offered little. Stores were deserting downtown for a new mall, and once-elegant Victorian neighborhoods were beginning to fray.
As downtown emptied, however, the mountains pulled in a new generation of homesteaders. They were different from Vanderbilt and Edwin Grove, an Atlanta patent-medicine millionaire who in 1913 built Asheville’s other Gilded Age landmark, the Grove Park Inn. Hippies and urban escapees began buying old farmhouses on then-cheap mountain land. They raised children and vegetables and got in touch with their inner outdoorsman.
In my first two decades here, I watched that stream of seekers of mountain karma swell: New Agers and freethinkers, retirees and young professionals, artists, writers, performers, potheads, and punks. Their number included the laid-back and the entrepreneurial, the just-getting-by, the ready-to-get-more, and the already-got-lots. Collectively, they were tolerant and socially conscious. Although more politically liberal than their mountain neighbors, they fit in fine with Asheville’s live-and-let-live conservatism.
And while city officials offered plan after elaborate plan to reverse downtown’s decline, the newcomers got busy. They turned dilapidated storefronts and abandoned factories into galleries, restaurants, coffeehouses, bakeries, bookstores, tattoo parlors, craft shops, organic grocers, dance studios, sushi bars, black-box performance spaces, and antiques emporiums.
It all seemed to reach critical mass in the late ’90s. Asheville began cropping up regularly on lists: top-ten small towns, top-25 arts destinations, five best places to retire, 15 best places to reinvent your life, five most alive places to live, five best places to mountain-bike, 50 hot road trips. In 1979, the New York Times allotted Asheville 13 words in its travel section. Between 1992 and 2002, the paper ran four major features. It wasn’t hard to notice the results: Outsiders were flocking in. My hometown was suddenly—if a 30-year evolution can be called sudden—hip. To the tourists and the nouveau Ashevillians the city seemed folksy and sophisticated, a haven for both buckdancing and Butoh, Baptists and Buddhists.
But does this make Asheville the Paris of the South? I decided that the answer to this question would be to try seeing my hometown through a tourist’s eyes. Like any tourist with limited time, I needed a plan. The Biltmore House, with 8,000 acres and 250 rooms, needs a full day. Besides, whenever I had a visitor, Biltmore was an obligatory tour, along with Thomas Wolfe’s boyhood home and the Grove Park Inn, where F. Scott Fitzgerald stayed while Zelda was in a local mental hospital. I decided I would take a walking tour of downtown instead. Every Paris should have a lively street scene.
Downtown Asheville is a concise, strollable place. It has two modest public squares connected by short streets with the boutiques and cafes that give off its Paris (and London and New York) reverberations. There isn’t a big chain store or a major thoroughfare in sight. On any day except the coldest (which are rare), there’s an amalgamation of people that, now that I was looking more carefully, did seem more European, definitely more motley, than those in most small Southern cities.
On Lexington Avenue (yes, Asheville has a Lexington Avenue—and a Broadway), kids with fluorescent hair and nose jewelry looked as in place as they would in Piccadilly Circus. One group was hanging by a shabby-chic used-book store that would fit on Charing Cross Road. Another group lounged in front of a vegetarian cafe proclaiming itself “most excellent.” Where else in the South, I wondered, are you likely to find a cafe that is vegetarian, kosher, advertises itself as “the best place to balance your chakras,” and has a resident psychic on Saturday afternoons?
A few blocks away, on Wall Street (yes, that too, but here it’s a bricked-lined alley with benches, Victorian street lamps, and pocket-sized shops), a young woman in a tie-dyed shirt and granny skirt was sitting on the sidewalk selling hand-painted postcards. She might have time-warped in from the summer of love in San Francisco.
Around the corner, on Battery Park Avenue, people sipping coffee and nibbling pastries at sidewalk cafes resembled those near my favorite Paris hotel on the Left Bank. The pastries—multi-layered, glistening with dark chocolate—might indeed have been French. Hunched in earnest conversation or reading newspapers, these were habitués, not tourists. One young man was even writing pensively in a notebook. (Notebook computers were more the style at a coffeehouse across the street.)
Pritchard Park, a block away, was once a triangular traffic island. It later became a bus stop and a perch for vagrants. Now it’s an amphitheater of brick and trees with the bustle of a mini Harvard Square. Street veterans—male and female, young and old, rainbow-hued—clustered harmoniously near office workers and students. I wondered where the well-groomed matrons walking their dogs were from, until I remembered the tony condos that were once deserted department stores.
The city has embedded stone checkerboard tables into Pritchard Park’s paving, and a few older men, a little weather-beaten but cheerful, appeared to earn their living playing chess. Near a hot-dog cart, jewelry crafters displayed spindly things made of leather, beads, wire, and polished pebbles. Another cart sold smoothies. I’m told a free-form drumming circle materializes some evenings. A coalition of garage bands has announced a series of Friday afternoon gigs. I also saw a poster advertising an upcoming silent-film series.
I assume the films will be projected against the windowless white fortress of a bank opposite the park. Except for this and some ugly aluminum-and-glass circa-’60s office buildings, downtown Asheville’s architecture is frozen in the early 20th century. Development stopped in the Depression (Asheville’s Depressionera bonds weren’t paid off until 1976), and that proved the city’s architectural salvation. If Asheville’s distant backdrop is the ring of gentle mountains, the immediate setting for its street theater is a facade of architecture styles more wildly assorted than I’ve encountered anywhere.
Alongside early 20th-century smalltown American South (think Mayberry RFD) are a wedding-cake of an Art Deco city hall, a glazed-tile Art Deco gas station turned into a jewelry store, several Neo-Gothic office buildings complete with gargoyles, a Spanish Baroque Catholic church with the largest unsupported tile dome in the United States (the Basilica of St. Lawrence), and a soaring five-sided Baptist church that exuberantly combines Deco, Classical, and Italianate motifs. Its cupola is shaped like the Duomo in Florence. A flat-iron building bears a startling resemblance to the one in New York.
Asheville’s one significant piece of contemporary architecture is an I.M. Pei office building anchoring Pack Square, the city’s main civic plaza. Pei wisely avoided making an overstatement in favor of reflecting a vintage grouping of buildings across the square: a Neo-Gothic semi-skyscraper, a Romanesque Revival office building, and a museum that looks like a Venetian palazzo.
I finished my day of strolling with a stop at the public library to see if Zoe Rhine, one of the helpful librarians who knows local history, could identify the source of “Paris of the South.”
“Surely Charleston and New Orleans have a claim on that title,” I said. “And rightly so,” she responded with a laugh. She showed me an 1895 program from Asheville’s Grand Opera House for a comedy titled “The Parisians” with William S. Hart, who later became a silent-film cowboy star. An ad for the Asheville Steam Laundry noted that “Asheville may justly be termed the Paris of North Carolina” and advised “ladies and gentlemen to wear nice laundry” to keep up with the Parisians.
She also showed me a city directory of the same era. Its author, one Harry W. Fulenweider, proclaimed Asheville “the veritable Poet’s Corner of the earth...the Electric City, the Gem City, the Crown City, the Queen City, the Attitude City of the South,” destined to be “the most fashionable health and pleasure resort in the world.” I’ll settle for the more modest “Paris of the South.” 
 |
| WHERE TO STAY
Asheville is replete with Victorian houses that have been lovingly
turned into B&Bs. The major hotel chains, budget and luxury, are here
as well. Accommodations are booked well in advance during the spring, summer, and fall. Thanksgiving and Christmas are busy too. Recommendations for Asheville ambience:
A mammoth, rambling complex of rough-hewn native stone. Everything you’d expect in a 510-room resort: restaurants, conference facilities, golf course, tennis courts, spa, stunning views of Asheville and the Blue Ridge Mountains beyond. 290 Macon Ave. 800/438-5800; groveparkinn.com
A luxury downtown boutique hotel carved out of an old department
store, Haywood Park is adjacent to Asheville’s busy restaurants and shops. Stepping into its quiet, high-ceilinged suites is like sinking deep into a plump, well-upholstered cushion. 1 Battery Park Ave. 800/228-2522; haywoodpark.com
A Greek Revival mansion built in
1907, the Albemarle Inn is one of Asheville’s most celebrated B&Bs.
Elegant and stately, it’s surrounded by English gardens. 86 Edgemont Rd. 800/621-7435; albemarleinn.com
A quarter-mile from downtown, this B&B is noted for its warm hospitality. Large porches invite quiet times for relaxing and reading. For breakfast, three courses are served by candlelight. 176 East Chestnut St. 800/894-2955; chestnutstreetinn.com
WHAT TO READ
by Constance E. Richards Asheville’s Urban Trail is a 1.7–mile walk through the city’s history from the Frontier Period (1784-1880), through the Gilded Age (1880-1930) and the times of Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938), on to today, via 30 well-designed and often whimsical sculptures. The author explains not only the Urban Trail but points out other cultural, historical, and natural landmarks. You can purchase a copy at Malaprop’s Bookstore and Café, 55 Haywood St.
|
|
WHAT TO SEE
A visit here is a must. Allow at least a half day—a full day is just about right. 1 Approach Rd. 800/624-1575; biltmore.com
It’s only a small storefront, but it tells the intriguing story of the quirky experimental college near Asheville that nurtured many pioneers of the avant-garde, including John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, and Buckminster Fuller. 56 Broadway. 828/350-8484; blackmountaincollege.org
This sprawling 426-acre public
garden is the ideal spot to combine
the outdoors with design aesthetics. 100 Frederick Law Olmsted Way. 828/665-2492; ncarboretum.org
The ceramics, textiles, and wood works in the sales shop are mostly traditional and of the highest quality, but in the exhibition galleries you often find contemporary crafts on the cutting edge. Milepost 382, Blue Ridge Pkwy. 828/298-7928; southernhighlandguild.org
It may be a small space, but it’s an excellent, hands-on science museum. 2 South Pack Sq. 828/254-6373;
thehealthadventure.org
This is the boarding house immortalized in Look Homeward, Angel. The Wolfe Memorial Visitor Center has a good film about the author’s life and an exhibit where you lift handsets on antique telephones to hear members of Wolfe’s family. If you’ve ever wondered where the notoriously wordy Wolfe got his gift, you’ll realize it was genetic when you hear the loquacious Wolfes. 52 North Market St. 828/253-8304; wolfememorial.com
WHERE TO
FIND ARTISANS
On the banks of the French Broad River a vital artist community has risen from the dust of buildings
abandoned after the stock-market plunge of the ’20s. You’ll find an impressive array of fine art and
handmade craft items, which include paintings, prints, furniture, metal sculpture, functional and decorative ceramics, glass vessels, and garden sculpture. 828/252-2699 or 828/254-9411; riverdistrictartists.com
|
|
WHERE TO DINE
Almost every street in Asheville’s compact downtown is a restaurant row. When the weather is warm—nine, even ten months of the year—the entire downtown area looks like one huge sidewalk cafe. The quality and variety (Asian, Cajun, Italian, French, Middle Eastern, Latin, soul food, vegetarian) is big-city, as are some of the prices.
Named after a variety of tomato popular in the South, Early Girl serves sophisticated Southern comfort food made with locally grown produce. The bright dining room has a wall of windows overlooking the colorful action in Pritchard Park. Biscuits, grits, hoppin’ john, and country ham with red-eye gravy are on the menu. But since this is Asheville, so are homemade vegan sausages, bean burgers, and tofu scramble. 8 Wall St. 828/259-9292;
earlygirleatery.com
This is what “coffeehouse” used to mean: a funky cavern-like retreat, redolent of those bistros where poets and musicians hung out and neo-Bohemians read alternative newspapers and debated the meaning of it all. Beanstreets showed the way for Asheville’s other urban pioneers when downtown was just emerging from decay. The poets, musicians, neo-Bohemians, and funky decor are still there, along with the tourists. 3 Broadway. 828/255-8180
This is the Atlanta Doc Chey’s first foray outside its home city, and if it’s an experiment to see if it can translate into something that feels Asheville-grown, it’s a huge success. Low prices, huge portions, neighborhood friendliness with an urban beat, and food that’s light and fresh are just part of the experience. 37 Biltmore Ave. 828/252-8220; doccheysnoodlehouse.com
Located in a plush but windowless lower floor of the Haywood Park Hotel, the Flying Frog probably has the most eclectic menu in town. It’s primarily German and Indian (reflecting chef Vijay Shastri’s heritage), with classic French cuisine and touches of Cajun, Italian, and Jamaican.
An extensive list of wines, many served by the glass. Dinner only, but there’s a bar and outdoor cafe upstairs for lunch. 1 Battery Park Ave. 828/254-9411
A few miles north of downtown, Savoy Cucina draws fans for chef Brian Canipelli’s imaginative and gossamer touch with the freshest seafood flown in daily. (The only freezer in the place holds homemade ice cream.) Outstanding wine list. 641 Merrimon Ave. 828/253-1077; savoycucina.com |
|
Arnold Wengrow is an Asheville-based writer and theater director. |
