My wife, Terri, and I spent this past month of March in Asheville, North Carolina. It was the second time we had been there. Three years ago we had visited Asheville for a week.
I had graduated from the University of Tennessee thirty-five years before our stay. Asheville is eighty miles to the east of Knoxville, Tennessee. During the period when I was attending U-T, as the University is known, Asheville was a decrepit, decaying city replete with empty buildings in the downtown area and had no manufacturing or industry to speak of.
Asheville did have the Biltmore Estate and the Grove Park Inn as its two major tourist attractions but little else to offer. It also had a literary history as the birthplace of Thomas Wolfe and the residence of F. Scott Fitzgerald who lived at the Grove Park Inn for two years while his wife Zelda was treated at a local insane asylum.
Four decades later, Asheville has become a jewel of the South. It is home to the University of North Carolina-Asheville which offers courses and programs to retirees. The downtown area boasts plenty of stores, shops and eclectic restaurants catering to every taste.
The area known as the “South Slope” is home to almost twenty craft breweries that serve delicious meals. Adjacent to the South Slope is the River Arts district in which many of the old abandoned factories now house artist studios of every kind.
The Biltmore Estate, built by George Washington Vanderbilt at the end of the 19th century remains a major tourist attraction. Set on 8,000 acres the mansion has two-hundred and fifty rooms still utilized by the family today. Visitors see the Gilded Age in all of its glory. The Estate has its own winery and a high-end restaurant in what were formerly stables.
The Grove Park Hotel is now owned by the Omni Chain. It has terraced balconies where you can watch spectacular sunsets over the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Asheville skyline. Ten U.S. Presidents beginning with William Howard Taft up through President Obama have been guests there along with countless other celebrities.
During the month we lived there, we rented a small house in the North Asheville neighborhood which allowed us to walk to the center city every day. North Asheville was, at one time, a crime infested neighborhood but today is in the throes of gentrification. Renovated houses are selling for over three-hundred thousand dollars. Like the rest of Asheville, it is becoming a much sought after place to live.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously observed in his work The Last Tycoon that “There are no second acts in American lives.”
He might have thought twice about that if he could see the city of Asheville today.
To see some photographs I took at the Biltmore Estate and the sunset at the Grove Park Inn, go to my Facebook page and click on “Photos” and “Your Photos”.