I love Asheville: I love the variety and quality of our restaurants, where I've had food much better than anything I've eaten even in some major cities. I love the terrain and the chaos it has begotten in a street grid that looks like a toddler with a crayon scribbled on a map, and where one neighborhood was literally laid out by a developer following a horse as it wandered around the property. I love the architecture, and I love the way that the architecture of buildings downtown seems to have been deliberately chosen to clash as much as possible. In no universe would
these two buildings ever belong on the same block, let alone cheek to cheek, for example. Nor
these two. Or
these two. I love how all roads seem to lead here, or did at one time when anybody who was anybody vacationed here, wrote here, caroused here, or
taught dance lessons here at the Battery Park Hotel. I love the ghosts and weird history to be found here, including -- really -- a group called the
Silver Shirts that in part was devoted to helping Hitler take over the world by magical means. If you search the archives at the Asheville Mystery Museum you'll find they gained a touch of notoriety when they summoned some sort of interdimensional being that was last seen bounding down Brook Street in Biltmore Village. Not to mention a haunting at the county jail that was so bad it made the news in Christchurch, New Zealand in the June 4, 1908 edition of
The Press.
This is not a normal city, and you can't say that about just any city.
I loathe Asheville: I hate the high prices, low wages, and the fact that the roads were designed for a city of 90,000 whose population doubles during the work day... They were not designed for a city whose population doubles during the work day
and the estimated 30,400 tourists who visit the city each and every single day. I hate that the rent is too high and homeownership is to dream the impossible dream for most people. The problem is so bad that the town of Canton, in the next county over, is the new affordable hotspot that people are flocking to when they're willing to settle for being near Asheville because they can't afford to be in it. And Canton is affordable because of an enormous paper mill that blankets the entire town, and the surrounding area, in the odor of fresh, piping hot fart -- so bad sometimes that you can smell it on people's clothes. To a degree, the neighboring town of Woodfin also markets itself as an affordable alternative to Asheville... because that's where the sewage treatment plant is and Woodfin stinks too. I hate that rich people are
relentless in their push to come in and take over. I hate that the city's spirit is a shell of its former self. I hate that while Asheville turns up its nose at places like Gatlinburg and Myrtle Beach, the only real difference is that Asheville is a higher class of whore than those cities, but she's still a whore: As with a whore, you pay Asheville for a good time, and as with a whore, sometimes you will go away from Asheville with a persistent but treatable infection -- particularly if you've been splashing around in that filthy river. I hate that downtown is pretty much nothing but breweries and hotels which are in the process of pushing out nearly every other business -- the conversion of the Flatiron Building from affordable office space to yet another goddamned hotel is the latest case in point. I hate that the magic is gone and that the weird, and mysterious, and macabre that used to make a day in Asheville feel like one long shiver down the spine have been scrubbed, sanitized, and put away lest they offend genteel Atlantans and Floridians. In short, I hate that interested parties took the unchained, elemental force of Creation that was Asheville, commodified it, and put it on a tee shirt and that none of us who used be a part of that force can afford to stay here anymore.
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