From Staff Reports

The new year started out with a bang for Asheville’s River Arts District, as the publisher of Frommer’s travel guide outraged a number of local residents when she largely attributed the revitalization of the area to the still-under-construction New Belgium Brewery and referred to the district, in general, as “sketchy.”

Pauline Frommer, the guide chief, made her assertions on Jan. 1 on ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America,” while she was explaining why Asheville was Frommer’s first choice for “Best Places to Go in 2015.”

Specifically, Frommer said, “We are picking it (Asheville) this year because the sketchy riverside area has been totally redone.”

Also, she credited the brewery for the transformation, implying that New Belgium’s investment has resulted in new parks, artists studios, bike paths and even farmers markets.

Frommer apparently attempted to make amends during her Jan. 9 guest appearance on FOX Business News’ “The Willis Report,” where she said of Asheville, “It’s awesome. Great music. The most craft breweries per capita in the United States, so, always a party. A great place to go.”

In the uproar that followed her original assertions, Frommer seemed to backpedal in an interview with Asheville Citizen-Times columnist John Boyle in the Jan. 11 edition of the newspaper.

“Being on live TV is very difficult,” Frommer told Boyle. “I accidentally conflated some developments. I meant to say, as we said in the article that this was based on, that the arts district had formerly been sketchy and was revitalized now.” 

However, most of the local uproar centered around New Belgium getting credit for what revitalization has occurred, when the brewery is still being built and the RAD’s resurgence has been going on for decades.

As for the improvements to the RAD for which Frommer credited New Belgium, Boyle wrote, “Those may be coming, but they aren’t there yet, and New Belgium isn’t the driving force behind them... It begs the question, has Frommer been to Asheville?”

In response, New Belgium has posted on various blogs that they were not contacted and totally disagreed with Frommer’s implication that the brewery is responsible the revitalization of the RAD.

In his column, Boyle also cited one comment posted to the AC-T’s website: “Sketchy? Obama ate in the RAD — twice — before New Belgium laid the first brick. Give me a break.”

Meanwhile, Image 420, the West Asheville graphics shop that produced the “Cesspool of sin” shirts, has created T-shirts with the slogan, “Still sketchy after all these beers.”