Asheville had an era of grace that began when the railroad arrived in the 1880's. As soon as people could easily get here we exploded into prominence as a tourist destination, then as a health resort for tuberculosis patients, and once that medical infrastructure was in place, we then became a prime location for insane asylums. Lots of people with lots of money were passing through and spending their summers with us, and those insane asylums were a preferred place for those wealthy families to dispose of troublesome relatives.
Fun fact: Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott, ended up incarcerated in one of those mental facilities, burned to death there in 1948, and today the Asheville Art Museum owns a collection of paintings she completed during her time there.
By 1889, prominent people were summering in Asheville, some as prominent as George Vanderbilt whose mansion, still the biggest in America, was completed in 1895. After that, all the artists and architects who worked on that mansion were set loose on the city. Meanwhile, Vanderbilt's prominent friends came for interminable visits and they told their friends who told their friends who told their friends... By the 1920's we were a resort city where everyone who was anyone was coming to spend their time. In that decade alone, 65 new buildings, most of them Art Deco, went up and there were plans for new parks, new neighborhoods, new boulevards and parkways, and a subway system. A lot of it got built and a lot of it didn't.
One of the luminaries who came here to party amid all that construction was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who noted in
The Great Gatsby that narrator Nick Carraway recognized Jordan Baker from "pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach."
The Fitzgeralds were friends of Asheville's homegrown author Thomas Wolfe, who had a lot to say about Asheville in its heyday. In 1921 he wrote:
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There’s a good play in Asheville, a play of a town which never had the ordinary, healthy, industrial life a town ought to have but instead dressed itself up in fine streets and stuck hotels in its hair in order to vamp the tourist populace. There’s a good play in the boy who lets the town vamp him, who sees the rich tourists and their mode of life and thinks he must live that way …
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In 1924 he wrote:
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Look around you in Asheville. Are the most prominent there the finest — by education, personality, culture, and general character? By no means. After all, haven’t you all worshipped the long bankroll too much? Grove is a great man because he sells more pills than anyone else …
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In 1934, looking back on the 20's, Wolfe wrote of Asheville:
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The streets were foaming with a mad exuberant life, crowded with strange expensive traffic, with a thousand points of glittering machinery, winking and blazing imperially in the hot bright air, filled with new faces. … Their feet swarmed and scampered on the pavements, their bodies darted, dodged, thrust, and twisted as if the leaping energy of some powerful drug was driving them on … the incredible spectacle of an entire population which was drunk — drunk on the same powerful liquors, drunk with an intoxication which never wore off and which never made them weary, dead, or sodden, but which drove them on constantly to new heights of leaping and scampering exuberance. … The conversation was terrific and incessant — a tumult of voices united in variations of a single chorus: speculation and real estate.
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And of Asheville's nadir in 1938, he wrote:
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The ruined town! The new and splendid buildings, emptied even of the personnel they were to house …
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With the onset of the Depression, Asheville incurred the highest per capita debt of any city in the country, and that debt was not paid off until 1976. That's part of why our central city remained so well-preserved, as there simply was no money to engage in urban renewal on the same scale as so many other places. Part of Asheville's mystique is the way in which its fall from grace mirrored that of
the power couple of the Jazz Age, the Fitzgeralds. F. Scott felt his genius falling away and came here to try to write and save himself. An article about Fitzgerald notes instead...
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Swathed in an alcoholic haze, Fitzgerald turned 40 at Grove Park, broke his shoulder in a bad dive, slipped in the bathroom and was found on the floor the next morning. Hoping to elevate his reputation, he let a New York Post reporter pay a visit.
The newspaperman portrayed him as a lost soul of the Jazz Age, Railsback says. He was depicted as a "very broken man, who's physically feeble and mentally very pathetic and reaching to the highboy to have a drink — with a nurse on hand to watch him constantly because he had fired off a gun here in the hotel that same summer in '36."
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While Zelda, glamorous flapper and "it" girl of the 20's is remembered thusly:
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In Nancy Milford’s exhaustive biography, Zelda, Landon Ray, once Highland Hospital’s athletic director, recounts one of his last memories of Zelda. As they hiked together across Sunset Mountain near the Grove Park Inn in a light spring rain, “She had no complaints about her own discomfort. Once we made camp, the first thing we did was to build a fire. Zelda went for wood and I remember stopping … and just watching her going through the deep laurel and wet briar selecting the best pieces for kindling.” As Milford put it, “That vignette formed his final memory of Zelda — a disheveled and middle-aged woman bending in the dim light and rain, alone and searching for wood.”
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With the onset of World War II, things in Asheville got especially grim. Most of the grand hotels were confiscated by the federal government and were turned into prisons. One, the Kenilworth Inn, was turned into a prison, became a mental hospital after the war, and was converted into luxury apartments about a decade ago.
Here's another fun fact. Most of the hospitals, sanitariums and asylums are still standing, and have been turned into apartment buildings.
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