Three panelists addressed the “History of Downtown Asheville: Understanding the Context” and then fielded questions from the standing-room-only audience last Thursday night at the city Public Works Building.

They agreed that knowing the history and context of downtown’s “revitalization,” which they endeavored to share, is vital in charting the future of the area. About 180 people attended the nearly two-hour program.

The panelists included Harry Weiss, Jim Samsel and Leslie Anderson, with Sasha Vrtunski serving as moderator. Vrtunski, a certified planner, is the project manager for the Asheville Downtown Master Plan.
Vrtunski introduced Weiss as a former executive director of the Asheville Preservation Society, who is now the vice president of a development firm that is active downtown; Samsel as a local architect and a member of the Pack Square Conservancy; and Anderson as a former director of the Downtown Development Office during the renaissance of downtown Asheville.

Vrtunski apologized for being unable “to secure a speaker” to specifically address the history of downtown’s East End, but she noted that each panelist would briefly address that area, which includes The Block, the commercial hub of the city’s black community.

The first speaker, Weiss, began by noting that he would attempt to give a “20-minute compressed history of downtown Asheville.”

In a fast-paced talk that included a slide show, Weiss pointed out that Asheville celebrated its bicentenial in 1997, a milestone that, he said, marks its status as remarkably old for a city in Western North Carolina.

With a note of sadness, he later added, “For a city that’s over 200 years old, there is not much left standing from the early days,” especially compared to other older cities with which he has worked — Alexandria, Va., and Savannah, Ga.

“There are very few buildings” left standing in downtown Asheville “that date beyond the early 20th century.”

The first city courthouse was located near the Swannanoa River and then moved near Pack Square, a vicinity where 10 successors have stood since, including the current one.

The earliest known photograph of downtown Asheville was taken around 1860, showing a view down Patton Avenue.

According to legend, he said, Patton Avenue and Broadway Street were Cherokee footpaths that later served as paved roadways that continue to serve today’s citizenry. However, Weiss stressed that the evidence has been destroyed that is needed to verify that claim.

Panelist Harry Weiss shares his knowledge of downtown Asheville’s history as  moderator Sasha Vrtunski keeps a close eye on the proceedings. Daily Planet Staff Photos

The earliest photos of downtown show the trees disappearing and then starting to return in the 1880s and ‘90s “as streetscapes improved,” Weiss said.

He praised George Pack, a city benefactor, who “funded for us” the square that bears his name today “as a ‘room’ in the middle of downtown.” At first, Pack Square stood bare, but later was landscaped with trees, Weiss noted.

In its early years in the 1850s and ‘60s, “Asheville’s primary function was as a seat of goverment and a market junction,” he said.

Huge droves of livestock, including hogs and turkeys, were driven through Asheville from Greenville, Tenn., en route to market in South Carolina. Asheville was a midpoint — and popular stopover — on the route.

Before 1880 and the arrival of the railroad, “then the first huge boom” in downtown Asheville’s history, “it was a small agricultural crossroads.”

Briefly, he said the city’s history has been highlighted by the three T’s— “trains, tourism and tuburculosis.”

Asheville, with its mountain locale conveniently located on the East Coast between New England and Florida, was billed nationally as a healthy place for healing and cure of tuburculosis — and was able to capitlize on that reputation, Weiss said.

In fact, Mission Hospitals, the city’s major medical center, evolved from the city’s TB industry, he pointed out. “The entire medical industry” in the city was spawned by TB, Weiss added, noting, “It was a very big industry in the 19th century.”

He then told of Battery Porter Hill, which reportedly stood  “six or seven stories high” in downtown and featured at its top the Queen Anne-style Battery Park Hotel. Built in 1886, it was widely recognized as “one of the finest hotels in the Southeast” of the United States, Weiss said.

(From the porch of the original Battery Park Hotel, George Vanderbilt first gazed on the towering peaks and lands that he resolved to purchase and make his home, now known as the Biltmore Estate, according to local folklore.)

Edwin W. Grove, the property’s owner, burned it down and leveled the site, using the fill dirt to form Coxe Avenue, “to make way for the Grove Arcade and redevelop the area,” where he owned much of the land, Weiss noted.

In 1924, Grove erected the current 14-story Battery Park Hotel, which is considerably less ornate with a neoclassical style, according to Weiss.

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Jim Samsel fields questions from the audience as fellow panelist Leslie Anderson listens intently.

Weiss noted that the hotel continued in operation until 1972. During the 1980s, the Asheville Housing Authority, a private developer, converted the old hotel into low-income apartments for senior citizens.
“Unlike a lot of Southern cities, Asheville always has had people coming in from the outside who have been embraced and asked to leave their mark,” Weiss said. With a grimace, he added, “That wasn’t exactly myx experience in Savannah.”

Asheville’s first boom occurred in 1880, with the arrival of passenger rail service (from Salisbury in 1880 and from Spartanburg, S.C., in 1886); and the second in the 1920s, when the city’s draw as a tourism and health spa destingation resulted in the addition of 30,000 people in 15 years, marking a 300 percent growth rate.

“Asheville had the reputation of being one of the fastest-growing cities on the Eastern Seaboard in the 1920s,” Weiss said. The city’s population reportedly grew from 28,000 in 1920 to 50,000 in 1930.

(As of 2006, the Census Bureau estimated Asheville’s population at 72,789. Asheville is a part of the four-county Asheville metropolitan statistical area, the population of which was estimated by the Census Bureau in 2006 to be 398,009.)

He termed architect Douglas Ellington proposal for two “bookmarks” in downtown — a uniform center city with paired city and Buncombe County courthouses standing side-by-side in a complementary bold architectural style — “one of the great unrealized plans for Asheville.”

Ellington proposed pair of buildings included complex setbacks, window groupings and overlay of Neo-Classical Revival ornamentation resulting in a distinctive building from this period, when courthouses were characterized by simple massing and conservative classical elements.
With no agreement with the county, the city went ahead with Douglas’ design and when it was completed in 1928, its eight-story colorful Art Deco-style building stood as a unique public building in North Carolina — variously described as a colorful, massive and eclectic masterpiece.

“Of course, the county had other ideas and felt Ellington’s plan was a little too avant-garde and instead” chose a conservative neoclassical design. Its courthouse also was finished in 1928.

In 1934, “the trolley lines were abandoned” in Asheville “and replaced with the bus system.” (Asheville’s streetcars reportedly began operating in 1889.)

He noted that Pritchard Park was the orginal site of a post office and a federal courthouse.

In showing a slide of the city’s downtown and surrounding neighborhoods prior to the construction in the mid-1970s of “the crosstown expressway (Interstate 240),” Weiss urged the audience to “look at how knitted the city is to the close-in residential areas — it was very walkable.”

Until 1974 with the opening of the Asheville Mall, “all of the big department stores stayed downtown,” Weiss said, noting that all of them eventually left for the mall and other locales.

During World War II, the Grove Arcade was taken over by the federal government and boarded over until its refurbishment in recent years.

He also noted that in the late ‘60s, the Vanderbilt Hotel downtown “was closed and converted to low-income housing.”

“Like most American cities, we became infatuated with aluminum,” Weiss said, as he showed several slides of previously attractive buildings covered with the siding.

He told briefly of a failed proposal for a downtown mall complex that was rejected by the citizenry in the 1990s in a key decision that enabled the area to retain its eclectic charm.

As with many American downtown areas, Asheville’s suffered “hard times in the 1970s” and “by the early ‘80s, the building and storefronts of downtown Asheville were empty,” with a few exceptions, Weiss said.

The second speaker, Jim Samsel, said a key factor to consider in downtown’s history is that “the connectivity to the surrounding neighborhoods was cut by the crosstown expressway.

“Up through the 1930s, it was very easy to get around, using public transit,” he said.

However, after World War II, “Asheville was not isolated from policies” by the federal government that sought to help the returning servicemen with education and affordable housing.

He also claimed that America’s interstate highway system “was sold to the American people as the ‘defense highway system.’”

Despite having the second most extensive streetcare system in the Southeast, led only by Richmond (Va.), Samsel said the city chose to shut it down as interstates were built around Asheville and the trend — encouraged by the government — was to use automobiles instead of public transit, Samsel contended.

“Another things about Asheville is, it was one of the few communities to pay off its Depression debt.”
However, as the downtown area went into decline, some brave entreprenuers began restoring buildings and opening news businesses, he noted.

In the midst of the renovations, including projects he was involved with on North Lexington Avenue, Samsel praised the citizenry for defeating — in a public referendum in 1979 — a proposal to bulldoze a 17-square block-area of 11 acres bounded by I-240 to Patton Avenue and from Broadway Street (the section that connects with Merrimon Avenue) to Haywood Street to put in an enclosed mall.

(Earlier, City Council had approved the proposal from an out-of-town developer who wanted the city to put up $40 million, while the developer would put in $5 million to build a suburban mall downtown.

Asheville had been in decline for years when the plan emerged in the mid-to-late 1970s. Therefore, the idea was to recapture shoppers who were reprogramming themselves to shop in the suburbs.)

He credited the referendum’s rejection on “a renewed interest in what we could do with older buildings” and the community’s realization of their importance in maintaining the city’s standing as a tourist and arts center.

From 1979 to 1985, Samsel quipped, “You could buy a building downtown” at a square-footage cost that matched the cost of buying linoleum per square foot. “Essentially, many of the privately owned buildings downtown were left in disrepair.

“Haywood Street was one of the few streets (downtown) with activity when I moved here in the mid-’70s,” he said, noting that the opening of Pack Memorial Library along the thoroughfare helped boost the street’s fortunes.

Despite the decay, “we still had a fairly amazing stock of (architecturally interesting) buildings, he said. Among these, he said, was the YMI, which was built by the George Vanderbilt family for the African-American community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

With the federal government’s approval of tax credits for preserving old buildings in 1986, “Asheville actually had the largest use of the tax credit in all of North Carolina” — and it was “for its downtown area,” Samsel said.

He added, “We also had a lot of good luck and good fortune here.” Specifically, Samsel pointed to the presence of the Biltmore Estate, the Blue Ridge Parkway and other tourist attractions “that always drew a lot of visitors” to Asheville.

“We got liquor-by-the-drink in the late 1970s. After that was passed, that’s when you started ramping up” and “downtown Asheville (eventually) became a dining and entertainment” destination.

“In sum, I think we had some early leaders who were risk-takers,”” Samsel said. “We had some folks who really believed in downtown. To that end, he singled out Julian Price for his support of “public-interest projects” that was unmatched by most American cities.

“The City Hall is unmatched architecturally by most cities, particularly in the Southeast,” Samsel said. “Those who moved here in the last five or 10 years have seen the benefits” from the bold efforts of many through the city’s history.

Samsel ended his 20-minute talk by noting an irony in which downtown’s success as a desirable locale has caused commercial and residential rents to jump and tax rates to soar, putting such “a squeeze” on locals of modest income who work and live there — and possibly forcing them to move out, to be replaced by well-healed outsiders.