Asheville Revisited

I was thinking about the summer I turned 11 and received my first golf clubs. My parents had them in the trunk when they picked me up one Saturday morning at a church camp several miles up the Blue Ridge Parkway from Asheville. From there we made the short ride into town, where my father was scheduled to attend a newspaper convention at the Grove Park Inn, a monumental structure resembling a National Park lodge or perhaps a castle from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. With dad imprisoned in meetings, my non-golfing mother and I piloted the first golf cart I’d ever sat in around the hotel golf course, a stately piece of ground bordered by avenues of Southern mansions.

The quality of our golf must have been woeful, but the setting was magical and I’ve never forgotten that weekend in Wolfe’s Old Catawba (the fictional town name), which included a visit to the novelist’s boyhood home, a restored, rambling boardinghouse on Spruce Street. Years later, at the same state university Wolfe and my father had attended some 20 years apart, I read his books and wondered what it was about Asheville that both inspired and afflicted this towering, brooding talent. I vowed to someday go back and absorb whatever artistic vibes I could—perhaps with golf clubs at the ready in case the literary experiment fizzled.

Funny how life gets away from us. It had been nearly 30 years since that English 101 inspiration and not once had I made it all the way back to Asheville; now I was headed there on a long-distance whim. In the three-decade span that elapsed I had expended my youth. Meanwhile this handsome, tidy city seemingly became young again: A cultural and artistic renaissance has boosted the population to 67,000 and made Asheville a must-see destination in many recent tour books. Whether they bring golf clubs, the sightseers dutifully tour America’s oldest Craft Guild and snap photos of some of the best-preserved 1920s- and Depression-era Art Deco architecture in the country.

The town’s narrow streets teem with art galleries and distinctive restaurants, funky clothing boutiques and one-of-a-kind designer shops, all clustered around the Grove Arcade Public Market, a restored Neo-Gothic market building from 1929. With a thriving arts community that hosts an international film festival and supports no fewer than six live theater companies plus a legendary jazz club (the Orange Peel on Biltmore Avenue, where everyone from Ray Charles to Bob Dylan has performed), it’s easy to understand why Asheville has been tagged “Boulder of the East,” a nod to the artsy college town in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies.

My full-scale reunion with the venerable Grove Park Inn didn’t quite come off, as last-minute arrangements collided with a pair of medical conventions that had booked every room of the landmark hotel. Plan B, billeting downtown in the beautiful Art Deco-style Haywood Park Hotel on Battery Park, proved a blessing in disguise, however. Out the window of my second-floor suite the streets of Wolfe’s old town vibrated with life. Not five minutes after dropping my bag and heading out to investigate this tapestry of delights, I discovered a thriving independent bookstore called Malaprops, several bohemian coffee shops and street performers who sounded like they had apprenticed under Doc and Merle Watson. All this, and not a chain-store logo in sight.