[Chrysler300] Altitude Affects Additude

["Charles M. Kreszock" <kreszockcm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

About the Asheville Area
Down the Road From HGTV's Dream Home 2006

By Jack Neely, special to HGTV.com

Asheville is a tough one to figure out. It is, on the one hand, a  
relatively isolated and still small county seat of only 70,000 in the  
Southern Appalachians. It's the population center of a staunchly  
Republican congressional district. Its old industries, like furniture  
and textiles, have faded.

But get out of your car in downtown Asheville on a fall Friday  
afternoon. There are people out, hundreds of them: mostly young  
adults, yuppies, hippies, gays and bohemians of every stripe. Scores  
of offbeat restaurants and outdoor-gear shops and colorfully  
unpredictable art galleries are open.

The beaux arts and art-deco architecture of the city's tall buildings  
is more extravagant than you'll find in many larger cities. But the  
first thing you might notice is the drumming. In a park at the corner  
of Patton and Haywood, hundreds of people gather for a complex and  
spontaneous percussive symphony of congas and tom-toms of all sizes.

Taken all together, it might make you think of Paris during La Belle  
Epoch. Asheville is San Francisco without the riffraff. There are  
unusual dynamics at work here; some are easier to explain than  
others. Located on the French Broad River, a shallow mountain river  
at this point, Asheville somehow became one of the more industrious  
cities in the South, and after the Civil War attracted affluent  
Northerners, both those speculating on business and those coming to  
summer in the coolest part of the South.

Somewhere along the way it developed a reputation for another kind of  
cool. Exactly where is a little bit of a mystery. Asheville's famous  
connections to literature are mostly ironic ones. Writers O. Henry,  
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Asheville native Thomas Wolfe  
(Look Homeward Angel) are all revered as onetime locals, and might  
give the impression of a black-tie Asheville intelligentsia sometime  
early in the last century.

However, it's likely that none of those famous American writers ever  
encountered each other in Asheville. Even Scott and Zelda came to  
Asheville separately. Worse, most of their connections were not happy  
ones. O. Henry didn't like Asheville, but is buried here; Thomas  
Wolfe was locally despised for his unflattering representations of  
his hometown. He said, "You can't go home again," and for him, it was  
nearly true. F. Scott Fitzgerald spent a drunk, depressed,  
unproductive and generally loutish summer here. Zelda Fitzgerald died  
in a fire in an Asheville mental institution.

However, they're all celebrated in their own way. The gorgeous stone  
Grove Park Inn commemorates, with a plaque, the room where Fitzgerald  
stayed.

The Fitzgeralds came here because of Asheville's reputation as a  
healthyâbut still stylishâmountain refuge from the discouraging  
realities of polluted, crime-infested urban America.

That reputation up North owes much to a family named Vanderbilt. One  
of America's first families of business began their extensive visits  
to Asheville in the 1880s, and by 1895, young George Vanderbilt built  
the astonishingly large Biltmore Estate on 125,000 acres in the  
countryside just outside of Asheville. Sometimes described as the  
largest private home in America, the Biltmore mansion appears as a  
background in movies and TV commercials. Its grounds are one of the  
masterpieces of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted; of all his  
work, the only one better known may be New York's Central Park.

If they did not launch Asheville's reputation as resort for the  
wealthy, they popularized it and made it permanent. Every year,  
affluent northerners follow in the Vanderbilt's footsteps to  
Asheville; some spend the summer, or longer.


ï
ïThe mountains showcase Asheville's distinctive art deco skyline.  
Photo Courtesy of the Asheville Convention & Visitors Bureau.

ïïHGTV's Dream Home 2006 is located in Lake Lure, in the Blue  
Ridge Mountains of Western North Carolina. Visit Dream Home Central  
to find out more about the home. And come back starting Jan. 1, 2006,  
to enter for a chance to win the home and a prize package worth $1  
million.

ïBiltmore Estate, George W. Vanderbiltâs historic property in  
Asheville, NC. Photo Courtesy of the Asheville Convention & Visitors  
Bureau.

ïMuch of Asheville's Grove Park Inn was built from materials taken  
from the mountain on which it stands. Photo Courtesy of the Asheville  
Convention & Visitors Bureau.

ïïThe newly restored Thomas Wolfe House in Asheville was nearly  
destroyed by a 1998 arson fire. Photo Courtesy of the Asheville  
Convention & Visitors Bureau.

ïïThe St. Lawrence Basilica in downtown Asheville contains the  
largest unsupported tile dome in the United States. Photo Courtesy of  
the Asheville Convention & Visitors Bureau.



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