Woolsey Dip -- a residential neighborhood with a two-block long commercial district named for a low spot on Merrimon Avenue.
Emma -- the city's most diverse neighborhood. I like the name because it's simple, but evocative. Who was Emma, anyway?
Head of Montford -- a small area at the end of Montford Ave
Manor Grounds -- The Manor Hotel was one of the city's most elegant hotels in its day, and on the hotel grounds were several rental cottages. The hotel is now an apartment building, and cottages are cozy homes. Together they make up the Manor Grounds neighborhood.
Town Mountain -- an area of Beaucatcher Mountain where mansions look down on downtown Asheville. This is also where two of Asheville's four castles -- Zealandia and Seely's Castle -- are located.
Beaverdam -- a pedestrian name for an upscale area of North Asheville. It features mansions overlooking Beaver Lake. The name predates the lake, which was created in the 1920's, however.
St. Dunstan's -- a residential area near the several blocks of hospitals and doctor's offices that make up the Medical District.
South Slope -- a large area of a few dozen blocks spilling downhill from downtown all the way to the Medical District. It's ripe for redevelopment as downtown expands. All the biggest residential high-rises (five of them ranging from 15 stories to 28 stories), have been proposed here over the past year. This is also where the city's historic baseball stadium is located.
Hillcrest, Deaverview, Pisgah View, Lee Walker Heights, Klondike -- innocuous neighborhood names that could even be very pretty if it were not for the fact that these are the city's most dangerous neighborhoods. They prove our weird tendency to give the worst neighborhoods the best names.
When you get away from the city you find even more unique names for communities in Buncombe County, including:
Jugtown
Juno
Venable
Sandy Mush
Black Mountain
Forks of Ivy
Jupiter
Owltown
Flat Top
Graphite
Dendron
Old Fort
Democrat
Craggy
New Bridge
Hands down though, the best community names in the metro area come from Henderson County, which contains the smaller, boring and ugly half of the Asheville-Hendersonville metro area. Some of the more noteworthy names in Henderson County include:
Bat Cave
Bearwallow
Zirconia
World's Edge
Point Lookout
Horse Shoe
Flat Rock
Lake Summit
Upward
Green Meadows -- a pleasant name for the very worst neighborhood of Hendersonville. If someone dies prematurely in the city, that's where they do it, almost invariably.
And my personal favorite...
Matilda's Folly -- This is an area in the western part of the county, that my father's family comes from. The community is named for a tombstone whose only inscription reads "Matilda's Folly." The area around Matilda's Folly is known as The Follies because of its very rough terrain, which used to eat hikers and campers for breakfast, some of whom were never found. This is changing though, as the area is developed into submission with golf courses and enormous houses for Floridian retirees who believe in their heart that the very best way to enjoy natural beauty is to clearcut it and build a house on it. I don't ever go back there because the destruction is too heartrending to look at.
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"To sustain the life of a large, modern city in this cloying, clinging heat is an amazing achievement. It is no wonder that the white men and women in Greenville walk with a slow, dragging pride, as if they had taken up a challenge and intended to defy it without end." -- Rebecca West for The New Yorker, 1947
Last edited by hauntedheadnc; May 5, 2007 at 1:15 AM.
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