1-- During World War II, several important paintings from the National Gallery in Washington, DC were moved to Biltmore House in Asheville for safekeeping. Meanwhile, elsewhere in town the Philippine government operated in exile from the Grove Park Inn which was later, along with several other area hotels, converted into a prison for Axis diplomats and their families. Other hotels in the city were used to house German POW's while yet more were converted into hospitals.
2-- The National Climatic Data Center, the world's largest repository of weather data and records, is located at 151 Patton Avenue in downtown Asheville.
3-- Asheville is mentioned in The Great Gatsby as one of the places where one may live the sporting life, and where Jordan Baker had been photographed playing golf. In all likelihood, considering the novel's publication date, she would have been photographed on the Grove Park Inn's golf course.
4-- Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott, ended her days in Asheville when the mental hospital where had been institutionalized caught fire. The Asheville Art Museum owns some of her paintings, some of which she created while hospitalized.
5-- In the mid 1960's, a fad for pop art paper dresses -- bright, colorful, and disposable -- swept America. Manufactured by Mars of Asheville, these dresses were selling at the rate of 50,000 a day at the height of the fad. The Asheville Art Museum owns some of these as well.
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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
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