By JOHN NORTH

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Boomtown Asheville of the 1920s was a fun place, known as “Little Chicago of the South” and boasting more Art Deco buildings than any city in the Southeast other than Miami Beach, Fla., Nan K. Chase said during a panel discussion Nov. 9 in Asheville.

“Asheville was being marketed as a destination city,” Chase said. “It was the whole idea of fun...It got completely nuts… It was like Bele Chere for weeks at a time....

 “They had party girls and party boys... They would have buses with lemonade and harder drinks — and even harder drinkers....”

Chase was one of four panelists who discussed “Glitz and Glory: Asheville in the ‘20s” in A-B Tech’s Ferguson Auditorium. The Asheville History Center at the Smith-McDowell House hosted the program. About 40 people attended.

The program particularly focused on the role architect Douglas Ellington played in shaping Asheville during that period.

“In fact, he was the creator of what we call ‘the Asheville look,’” Dr. Gordon McKinney, the moderator, said. 

Chase later noted, “What we see today, especially in Ellington’s architecture (in Asheville) is a bubble bursting.” Asheville, like most American cities, soon was to feel the brunt of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

But, she said, it was fun while lasted. And, thanks to a cash crunch suffered by the city and surrounding Buncombe County, Asheville’s architecture was preserved because the debt prevented the buildings from being demolished. 

The program began with presentations by the panelists of 15 minutes each, followed by a lengthy question-and-answer period.

Besides Chase, the other panelists included John Turk, Kirk Boyle and Clay Griffith. Chase addressed the economic climate in Asheville in the 1920s, Asheville as a boomtown and its consequences. Meanwhile, Griffith spoke about architecture; Boyle, the literary scene; and Turk, popular music of the period.

Chase is the author of three books, including her newest, “Eat Your Yard: A Guide to Edible Landscaping.” More to the point for her Nov. 9 talk, though, is her work “Asheville: A History,” McKinney, the moderator, noted.

Griffith, owner of Acme Preservation Services, holds a master of architectural history from the University of Virginia. Also, he has published a book, “An Inventory of Douglas Ellington’s Architectural Work in Western North Carolina.” To that end, McKinney asserted, “Now the purpose of today is to tie in with the exhibit in the Smith-McDowell House on Douglas Ellington’s architectural work in Western North Carolina.”

Boyle, who teaches literature and other related subjects at UNCA, addressed Asheville’s readers and writers of the 1920s. “Asheville was one of the places where literature came alive in the 1920s,” McKinney noted.

Turk, a museum curator, performing musician and author, would speak on the new music of the “Jazz Age in Asheville,” the moderator said.

“I think you’d have to agree we’re very fortunate to have these four people with us today,” McKinney concluded, as the audience applauded.

The first speaker, Chase, said that the 1920s boom period and Ellington’s architecture were the culmination of growth in the city that extended back to the 1880s. Asheville had grown from a population of 2,800 in its early days to 28,000 and then to 50,000 in 1930. “It stayed at about 50,00 for a long time — and has been rising ever since,” she said.

That period  — the 1920s —  was pre-biotics, pre-screen on the windows, pre-radio — radio only came along in 1923 — so a lot of social activities had to do with theater and sports....

“There were many parks, hunting, a horse-racing track, bicycle-racing, a motorcar track, baseball and football... In 1916, a great flood knocked out much of what was along the (French Broad) river.”

While “every hotel (that is proposed) today gets so much protest… in the 1920s, it was anything goes.”

She mentioned some of the architecturally significant downtown commercial buildings that went up in the 1920s, including (among many), the Jackson Building, the Miles Building, the Flat Iron Building, the Grove Arcade, the Public Services Building and the S&W Cafeteria. The also spoke of the “magnificent” City Building, County Courthouse and Asheville High School.

Public officials amassed $8.5 million in bonded indebtness as “the city went on a building bender… building fun things. They borrowed and borrowed… because everything was a bubble. So when it burst, it was really catastrophic.”

Chase added, “The sales atmosphere was very feverish. (Local literary luminary) Thomas Wolfe wrote about it… They had party girls and party boys. They would have buses with lemonade and hard drinks and even hard-drinkers ... When streets were exhausted, then new streets were built into the wilderness.”

City Planner John Nolan in 1925 called for 94 municipal projects and most were completed within two years, she said. “The 1926 hurricane in Florida helped Asheville (as people relocated here) …. From 1926 to the end of the decade, it got more fevered still.”

Chase noted that “one of the most interesting things I came across was the Rhodonderon Festival, which started in 1926 and ended in 1941. It got bigger year after year.” 

Despite all of the building activity, “the banks (in Asheville) were weak. There was a bank crash that cascaded down. Bank presidents went to jail, the mayor killed himself.” Chase said not much was built in the downtown after 1930 because of the city’s financial plight.

“It was discovered that all the cash departments of the city and county were gone. The street department was completely dismissed. The level of indebtedness was the highest per capita (of any city at the time) in the United States,” Chase said.

“They restructured the debt (in 1976) — 50 years later. It took another 15 or 20 years to get the restoration and revival of the downtown area going,” Chase said. “So what we see again today… in a way, it’s kind of marvelous that there wasn’t any money to tear anything down. But there was a lot of human tragedy too.”

Next, Griffith said his talk would put “Ellington into that frenzied climate of the ‘20s.”

He noted that “the architecture that we see in Asheville of the first 30 years of the 20th century, in many ways, defines Asheville today... There are many factors that play into that — many individiduals and events.”

Ellington, a North Carolina native, “had a rich educational background and studied in the the very traditional way, based on the French model. This was very much ruling architecture of the day.

“We see the classical sense of proportion — that tradition was prevalent. It pretty much dominated architecture in the early 20th century. Ellington was an exceptional renderer, painter, exceptional sense of color. In the Navy, he actually developed camouflage patents.”

While living and working in Pittsburgh, Penn., Ellington won the award to design the Baptist Church in downtown Asheville and that was the beginning of what was to become his legacy here.

However, Griffith noted that, “through the first 20 years of the 20th century, Ricky Sharp Smith was very much ‘the’Asheville architect. He was the supervising architect at Biltmore. … After Biltmore was completed, Smith went out on his own and got pretty good commissions from Vanderbilt himself, as well as cottages. He went out into residential architecture… He made his mark throughout Montford and many northside neighborhoods. He really was ‘the’ guy for the first 20 years. If you look at many of the major commercial buildings downtown, they were done by Smith.”

He added, “Ellington gets his rep as an Art Deco architect. What is art deco? It was a modern style at that time. It was a break from the classical style. It grew out of a number of things…. development of skyscrapers, setback requirements to let light through, so that skyscrapers were no longer just vertical shafts … and they looked more like birthday cakes....

“Art deco is not coined until later — 1925 — out of the French…. It seems what Ellington was doing here… He obviously knew of all the various movements,… was to take that and apply it very specifically to Asheville.

“He talks about how he wants the buildings to reflect the mountain background. He talks about using materials to blend with the mountains. The colors of city buildings were to reflect changes in the soils,” Griffith said.

Addressing the literary scene, Boyle, promised to “share some spicy stories” regarding F. Scott Fitzgerald and prostitutes, but did not get to that in his talk.

For the 1920s, “we’re talking about literary modernism. So think about these movements in the context of economics. (Henry David) Thoreau said, ‘Most men lead lives of quite desperation.’” 

Boyle said that “the first characteristic of literary modernism is phenomenological revolution. — how we receive and understand the world. What (Albert) Einstein called space-time. The world is getting faster. It’s making us experience time in a different way. Time’s more fragmentary. (Karl) Marx and (Friedrich) Engels said, ‘All that is solid melts into air.’ Everything becomes ethereal.”

He added that “literary modernism’s second aspect is spiritual. As an example, Boyle cited the T.S. Eliot poem “The Waste Land,” publsihed in 1922, “detailing this new world that has lost meaning. The traditional meanings are no longer there.”

Writers can’t escape from writing about writing itself. It’s a novel about the artist. Modernism’s trying to create meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. 

As a result, many of the era’s important writers decided to break utterly with the past. For Fitzgerald, Boyle said, it was “down with Henry James, down with ‘The Waste Land’…. Read me, I’m the new deal.”

 Turk, who spoke about the musical scene in 1920s’ Asheville, said there was no “Jazz Age” for mainstream whites here because of racial segregation and that it was hard to tell what kind of music the city’s residents liked at that time. “So the jazz age in Asheville was not the case. Have you seen the movie ‘The Jazz Singer’? There’s no jazz there” — or here in the ‘20s.