A walking tour of Asheville’s downtown architecture and landscape history

US Regional Association of the International Association for Landscape Ecology 2016 Annual Meeting, Asheville, NC Field Trip Guide April 5, 2016 Steve Norman US Forest Service [email protected]

Asheville’s remarkable architecture reflects its long history as a regional economic center and as a health and tourist destination. This self-guided walk will introduce you to the history of Asheville’s built environment as revealed by landmarks from the city’s Golden Age, from just before the turn of the last century through the 1930s, and its resurgence as a destination of import in recent years.

The loop that you will follow loosely tracks a route created for tourists by the City of Asheville. While this tour builds on that and earlier efforts, this takes a broader view of Asheville’s position in the landscape to ask questions such as why did this place turn out the way it did, why here, and where is this place headed? For navigation, use the map on the back page of this guide.

1. House

North Carolina’s most famous writer, Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) grew up here as Asheville was also coming of age. Author of Look Homeward, , a novel inspired by his life here, and You Can’t Go Home Again, Wolfe has a prominent role in the 2016 movie Genius (played by Jude Law). This National Historic Landmark was built in 1883 in the Queen Anne style, and became his mother’s boarding house in 1906. The structure was restored after a 1998 arson fire.

2. North Market Street

This stretch of Market is the last street downtown that retains its historic brick surface. Paving began at the turn of the 20th century downtown, and, as many of these bricks were made by the Southern Clay Mfg. Co. of Robbins, TN, they date from after 1902 and used Pennsylvanian-aged shale from the Cumberland Plateau as raw material. Pavers slow runoff and traffic while providing an extraordinary character to this neighborhood.

Architect Douglas Ellington’s 1928 Art 3. Buncombe Co. Courthouse Deco City Hall building (right) was styled 4. Asheville City Hall after the mountains behind it. Using Georgia marble at the base and a red terra cotta tiled octagonal roof, he used Indian feather motifs above the windows. (Look for reproductions of these feathers on the sidewalk along this trail). Arriving in 1926, Ellington began his legacy with the First Baptist church on Woodfin. Prior to that he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, a leading design school where his talent was nourished by world-class inspiration. In 1926, Ellington was to have also built the adjacent Buncombe County Courthouse of matching style with a connecting arcade, but County officials found his creative designs distasteful. In 1927, they selected a firm with a reputation for more conser- vative courthouse designs, DC’s Milburn, Heister and Company. In 1928, the year of the County uilding’s completion (above, left), this 17-story Neo-Classical structure was the largest courthouse in the state. The County building was built in three tiers, using a steel frame and brick and lime- stone. Inside lies a marble staircase, mosaic tile floors and other embellishes. The extensive and irregular greenspace between these two structures and other city buildings uphill to the west reflects land use history. The prior city courthouse was a block farther uphill on Pack Square.

This 1907 building is not of particularly rich 5. Hayes Hopson Building design architecturally, but it has a diverse (Pack’s Tavern) history of practical use. Over the last century, it has been used as a lumber supplier, an automotive supply company and restaurants. Legend has it that an underground passage in the basement was used to convey confiscated alcohol here (from the adjacent police department) prior to 1933, when Prohibition was repealed. 6. Jackson Building 7. Westall Building

This impressive Neo-Gothic tower (left) was built in 1924 by 28-year-old developer Lynwood Jackson as an office building. At 13 stories (114 ft.), it was the first sky- scraper built in the city. Seventeen suicides are known to have occurred here after the Stock Market crashed in 1929. The tower sits on a small plot of land that had earlier been the site of Thomas Wolfe’s father’s monument shop. Typically used for religious structures, the Gothic style was finding its way into commercial buildings at this time. Note the four overhanging grotesques (not gargoyles) near the top. William Harrison Westall built this 8-story structure (right) in tandem with Jackson’s tower in 1924. He was an uncle of Thomas Wolfe and gained his wealth in business and lumber. This and the Jackson Building share an elevator and were managed together. The Westall Building’s magnify- cent orange brick face has accents of green and blue terra cotta and complex ornamen- tation inspired by English Norman and Spanish Romanesque styles.

8 . Municipal Building The 1925 Municipal Building was originally used for the city’s police, fire and health departments and jail. On its west side down Market, the cornucopias over the door reveal that the basement was used as the city market. Brickwork was overseen by James Vester Miller, whose mother was a slave. The Eagle Street area is a historic African American neighborhood. In 1893, George Vanderbilt constructed 9. Young Men’s Institute this building in the heart of the African American commercial district to provide a YMCA-style space for black boys and men who had worked on his mansion. Designed by local architect Richard Sharp Smith in an English Tudor Cottage style, pebble-dashed walls and red brick trim, the building be- came a center for black social life. It is now a cultural center and provides commercial space on the first floor. Development across the street will provide affordable housing and a new hotel is planned nearby. Pack square is the center of downtown 10. Old Pack Square today and it has been for the history of the city. See the cover of this booklet for a glimpse of the square from early in the 20th century. The railroad reached Asheville in 1880 from Salisbury in the east and 1886 from Spartanburg to the south. This was soon followed in 1889 by a system of electric street cars that brought tourists and the infirm up Biltmore Ave. from the train depot by the French Broad. A hydro- powered line was built to the Sulphur Springs resort west of town, and by 1915 the network had 43 cars and 18 miles of track. Running north and south through town, 11. From trail to turnpike and Biltmore (Broadway) Ave. was long the the Vance Monument primary corridor for traffic of all kind. Built on an old Indian trail, the 1827 Buncombe Turnpike let TN and NC farmers efficiently drive hundreds of thousands of pigs and turkeys to market each year in SC. The drovers found accommodations nearby, fencing their livestock near STOP 15. The 1896 obelisk recognizes NC’s Civil War governor and US Senator Zebulon Vance (1830-1894). Vance grew up near here and owned slaves, and coincidentally, this site was likely where slaves were sold prior to the War. The square takes its name from local philanthropic Michigan lumber mag- nate (and anti-slavery crusader) George Willis Pack (1831-1906) who came here to restore his wife’s respiratory health in 1884. 12. Biltmore Building Prior to 1979, 1880s-era commercial buildings lined the north side of Pack Square. These were razed to build a headquarters for the American Enka Company which had its pri- mary factory nearby. Asheville’s downtown was in economic decline at the time, and this project, completed in 1981, symbolized a re- surgence. Within a year, economic hardship forced Enka to downsize, leading to the sale of the building to the Biltmore Company to be Pei’s sharp geometric designs are used as their corporate headquarters. reminiscent of his other works, in- Designed by internationally recognized cluding the Louvre Pyramid in Paris, Chinese-American architect, I.M. Pei, the the Rock and Roll Hall of fame in structure’s floor-to-ceiling glass windows Cleveland, and the East building of provide a striking reflection of the adjacent the in DC. buildings of Pack Square. The American Enka Company was founded just west of Asheville in 1928 by a Dutch firm and became the largest rayon manufacturer in the US. During WWII, the factory expanded and made yarn for parachutes. Production re- quired coal and abundant water, which this southern Appalachian landscape had in abun- dance. The company was on the original The site of the Enka plant in West Fortune 500 list, and it moved its headquar- Asheville is now a brownfield with a ters from Madison Ave., NY to west Asheville 41-acre landfill that contains coal in the mid-1950s prior to constructing its $5 ash. Plans are to develop it as a million, short-lived headquarters (above) in recreational greenspace. 1981. Production in Asheville ended in 2008. 13. A hotel resurgence Rising high above Pack Square is the mono- lithic 1965 BB&T Bank Building. Long used for commercial office space, this 18-story tower may be the tallest building in western NC. It will soon be converted to the upscale boutique 140-room “Vandre Nouveau Hotel” with 39 condominiums. The McKibbon Hotel Group purchased this property in 2013 for $7.5 million. Meanwhile, construction continues nearby for their AC Marriott Hotel (behind the Biltmore Building) on a site that has supported a series of hotels since the mid- 1800s. These same developers recently finished the Aloft Hotel two blocks to the south on Biltmore Ave., and several other hotels are opening. While accelerated in recent years, Asheville’s skyline shifts have been a phenomenon for a century and a half. This impressively-friezed 1895 Romanesque 14. Drhumor Building Revival structure at the corner of Patton and Church foreshadows Asheville architectural heritage that was to come. Built by 22-year- old William Johnston Cocke with real estate- generated wealth inherited from his grand- father, the name comes from the family’s ancestral home in Ireland (pronounced “Dru- MOOR”). Sculptor Fred Miles who also carved the statuary on the Basilica (Stop 22) created the frieze with griffins, foliated lions, angels, seashells, a mermaid and merman (above), and richly animated faces.

The 1929 Sherrill and Webber Cafeteria is 15. S&W Cafeteria Asheville’s most extraordinary Art Deco structure. Designed by Douglas Ellington not long after he built the City Building and Baptist Church on Woodfin, its green, gold, blue and black glazed terra cotta tiles are integrated across a geometrically complex presentation. The cafeteria business had opened seven years earlier nearby and one gets the sense that this building was deliberately designed to be a colorful advertisement for the cafeteria, which operated here until 1974 when urban decline forced relocation to a suburban mall.

The look and feel of downtown still reflects 16. Chain stores the economic legacy of the mid-20th century. As businesses left the suburbs, buildings left vacant went underutilized. With the recent boom in tourism and downtown revitalization, chain retail companies are noticing. Since 2009, Urban Outfitters, at the corner of College and Haywood, is one such store and soon it will be followed by Anthro- pologie to join Subway and Mast General Store, among others. This site was formerly a CVS drug store. Rising rent can make it harder for small businesses to compete. 1 17. Miles Building Herbert Miles came to Asheville in 1913 due to the health of his wife. He purchased this 1901 Richard Sharp Smith building (that had been built as an elite gentleman’s social club) in 1919, then radically transformed the exterior with an Italianate style using red brick and white glazed terra cotta. Miles was instrumental in development of Pritchard Park, that you just passed, and the City Auditorium, now the Civic Center (US Cellular Center) at STOP 22. 18. Flat Iron Building The 8-story Neo-Classical Flat Iron Building wedged between Wall Street and Battery Park Avenue was built in 1926 and was modeled after earlier retail-office building designs by the same name of prior decades. It was built by L.V. Jackson 2 years after his tower over Pack Square was completed (STOP 6).

19. Public Services Building This 8-story 1929 structure built in the Neo-Spanish Romanesque style with red brick and glazed terra cotta was built for the Carolina Power and Light Company (CP&L) as office space. CP&L (now Progress Energy) was founded in 1908 and operated in eastern NC, western SC and the Asheville area. Prior to a great flood in 1916, most of Asheville’s electricity came from hydropower, but easy access to VA and KY coal via rail soon changed that. Prior to a century ago, this site was the 20. The Battery Park Inn and highest land downtown. That proved useful the Grove Arcade during the Civil War when cannons were placed here for defense. Then in 1886, Col. Frank Coxe, VP of the Western NC Railroad Co., was taken by the resort potential of the city and built the storied here. Advertised as “one of the best-known resort hotels in America”, it had a capacity of over 400 and charged $2.50 to $3.50 per day. With inflation, that’s $62-$86 today--a real bargain, given current hotel rates! It is said that George Vanderbilt envisioned his Biltmore Estate from the view afforded by this hotel, and Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and William McKinley were guests here. In 1921, Edwin Wiley Grove (1850-1927) purchased the Battery Park Hotel and had it removed. After lowering the hill 70 ft. (filling a ravine to the west), he broke ground in 1926 for one of the first indoor shopping malls in the US (the arcade) with a 12-story office building rising above the center. Built in the Tudor-Gothic Revival Style, the indoor floor slopes such that it loses a full story height across its length. After Grove’s death in 1927, the Arcade opened without the tower in 1929. During WWII, the federal government had the office of Postal Accounts here, and from 1951 this was home for the National Weather Records Center before moving a block away. It has been owned by the city since 1994 and reopened as commercial space in 2002 after extensive restoration. Grove gained his self-made fortune from a “tasteless” chill tonic that he began marketing in 1878 in Paris, TN, west of Nashville. Compared to other quinine mixtures of the day that were used to treat the chills and fevers caused by malaria, Grove’s success was explained by how he suspended quinine in a sweet syrup with lemon. This required the bottle to be shaken well before use. His Paris Medicine Company reportedly sold more bottles than Coca-Cola by 1890, and the Company became the largest consumer of quinine in the world by 1900. A prohibitionist, his products used little to no alcohol. With his vast fortune, he also built the iconic Grove Park Inn north of town (1913) and the adjacent (new) Battery Park Hotel (1924) that now towers above this site and is where he died (STOP 21). 21.Battery Park Hotel This is the second hotel at this site to bear the name Battery Park and it bears a resemblance to other hotels across the US from that era. Built by E.W. Grove in 1924, this Neo-Classical 14-story tower supports a Mission Revival Roof and had 220 guest rooms, all with private baths. Placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977, the building has since been used for apartments for Senior Citizens. Grove stayed here while he supervised construction of the Grove Arcade.

22.Basilica of St. Lawrence The Basilica of St. Lawrence was completed in 1909 and is renowned for its tiled dome designed by Spanish architect (1842-1908) who came to Asheville in the 1890s to work at the Biltmore Estate and then retired east of here. Guastavino was known for his patented fireproof and lightweight “Tile Arch System” that relied on self-supporting interlocking terracotta tiles and mortar. His technology can be seen in vaults in many important buildings across the US, including the Boston Public Library, NY’s Grand Central Terminal, Grant’s Tomb, Carnegie Hall, the Museum of Natural History, and DC’s Supreme Court Building. At the Biltmore Estate, his work includes the Main Gate lodge, the Winter Garden, the swimming pool and the loggia. Frustrated with Asheville’s wooden church while working at the Biltmore, Guastavino worked with prolific local architect Richard Sharp Smith on this design. The Basilica’s dome spans 58x82 ft. and it is thought to be the largest freestanding elliptical dome in North America. The parking lot that faces this treasure is among the most controversial develop- ment sites in the city. Until recently, a revenue-producing hotel was planned for this lot, but local opposition may soon lead to this space being redesigned for a mix of uses that includes a park. Designed by Richard Sharp Smith, this 23. The Asheville Hotel 1915 building was built for the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, and it served that lodge until 1923 when it was convert- ed into a hotel. It is remarkable for its 2nd story balcony. From 1932 to the 1960s, the “Hotel Asheville” touted two elevators and dumb waiters that rose to the rooftop garden. The building now houses one of three independent downtown bookstores within a 2 block radius and private condos.

The 1970s were a difficult time for busi- nesses downtown, and for this neighbor- 24. North Lexington Avenue hood in particular. In 1974, the Asheville Mall had opened east of the city on Tunnel Road, and it gradually eroded the down- town economy. In 1977, Lexington Ave. was called a “Jekyll and Hyde area” for having commerce by day, and bars, prostitution and crime by night. Plans were developed to demolish this neighborhood for a competing downtown mall, but fierce local opposition, growth of existing businesses, and a lack of city funding all prevented this heavy-handed approach to revitalization from being realized.

Asheville’s Freemasons were chartered in 25. Scottish Rite Cathedral and 1848, and in 1915 they built this four story Masonic Temple Neo-classical temple at the corner of Broadway and Woodfin for their regular meetings. Architect Richard Sharp Smith and engineer Albert Carrier worked togeth- er on this edifice, which was one of 700 buildings in western NC that they helped create. Though little known at 37, Smith (1852-1924) established himself after being appointed supervising architect for George Vanderbilt’s mansion, south of town. All recent street photographs courtesy of Steve Norman. Printed by NEMAC, UNC Asheville Recommended reading: Hansley, R. 2011. Asheville’s historic architecture, The History Press, Charleston, SC. / Greenberg S. and J. Kahn. 1997. Asheville: A postcard history. V.1 Arcadia Publishing, Dover, NH. / Ridenour, A.C., 2013 Historic Inns of Asheville. Arcadia Publishing. Charleston, SC. / Dykeman, W. The French Broad. 1955. Rinehart and Co. NY.