Asheville is a place I never really got. Greenville is right down the road and offers far more. Asheville seems more like an idea that someone had that didn’t pan out than a real destination. There are some decent restaurants, but nothing that I can’t live without. I do like a lot of things in the immediate area like the Omni, but the amount it costs seems excessive and that nags at me and ruins my time. And how many times can one go to the Biltmore?
Greenville is getting the Asheville overflow now. The hippies, the drug addicts, the homeless, and all the homosexuals and transexuals all come to Greenville now for the tourist attractions of downtown. The fastest-growing business in Greenville is a micro brewery Downtown. There are some large factories but they’re really not paying that much for the cost of living down here.
Asheville owes it’s architectural time warp to the Great Gatsby generation and the Great Depression.
Aside from the Biltmore house the majority of the remaining old buildings are relics of the tourist, 2nd home boom of the 1920s which was killed for decades when the market crashed.
The city did not finish paying off its Depression era bonds until the early 80s which meant it didn’t have the money for 1960s urban rehab thus the old buildings were saved from that fate.
Up through the 70s the city relied on fall leaf tourism as its major draw and still wore the mountain hillbilly image.
The current gentrification of old buildings started across from the Vance monument at Pack Square around the mid 80s. (The bastards tore down the granite obelisk at the square this past year because it memorialized the Confederate Governor of NC).