Slack

I can't believe it's been a couple of weeks since I posted. I've been so busy since I got back from vacation that I didn't really have time to blog, and this week I've been sick and have mostly just been laying around being miserable. However, I don't want to let this thing lapse too long, so here are the promised pictures from Asheville (or as K says, "Ashevegas".)*

These pictures are extremely low quality, as they were taken on a cell phone by an inexperienced photographer (me) who was more concerned with talking with his girlfriend and parents than in getting good shots. Also, hotmail is only allowing me to download them as bitmaps, which may further decrease their usefulness.

If you've never been there, let me tell you that Asheville is a great town. It's way up in the mountains, only a few minutes away from the Blue Ridge Parkway (the headquarters of the parkway is actually located here.) It also has a few colleges scattered around, most notably a branch of the University of North Carolina.

However, the most striking thing about Asheville is it's architecture. As far as I understand it, Asheville was a fairly unremarkable regional center until the late 1800's. Sometime around there, the wealthy began flocking to the area to take advantage of the crisp mountain air as a remedy for their consumption, or tuberculosis, as the vaccine wouldn't be used in the US until after WWII. Many of them came to live in sanitariums (F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife was to die in an Asheville sanitarium fire), but a lot of them built their own homes, and eventually businesses in the area. Because most of these rich folks were from New York, dowtown Asheville is very Art Deco. But honestly, it's not just the art deco style that they copied from New York, as I had spinach dip at a little cafe at the corner of Battery Park Ave. and Wall St., across the street from a big triangular office tower called the Flat Iron Building.

The biggest spender in Asheville George W. Vanderbilt, who decided to go a little further afield (and up the fancypants ladder) to build his house, and modeled his Biltmore Estate on the Chateau de Blois in France, home to several French Kings and briefly, Joan of Arc. Check out the slanted stairwell from the Chateau to see the family resemblance. There is a touch of New York at Biltmore, though, because the grounds were designed by Frederik Law Olmsted designer of both Central Park and Prospect Park, who was basically the father of landscape architecture.

Another famous rich guy in Asheville was E.W. Grove, who built this wicked huge hotel out of big slabs of granite called the Grove Park Inn, which sits on the side of a mountain overlooking Asheville. I've prowled around there when I lived nearby, and it will totally make you feel like you're in the Shining. Very creepy, yet luxurious. As my girlfriend remarked, "the furniture in the bathroom is nicer than the stuff in my own apartment."

Anyway, near the end of his life, Grove decided to build an enormous (for Asheville) building in the heart of downtown that would consist of a large shopping center on the bottom couple of floors that would serve as the base for a tall office tower. Here's an engraved glass panel that shows what it was supposed to look like.


I did say what it was "supposed" to look like because he died before it could be completed. In fact, he died right after they completed the ground level shopping center, so the builders or his kids or whatever just decided to cap things off, and they scrapped the tall tower. What remains is the Grove Arcade, a pretty nifty little mall that looks charmingly massive.
















I'll stop here for today, but I'll post some more pictures tomorrow. Promise.