We went to northwestern North Carolina to see if the Asheville environs might be a place where we would like to spend our “golden years,” which recently have been plagued with aches, pains, hiccups, surgeries, and way too many doctor appointments. We had had only slight previous contact with the area. Decades ago, we had visited the spouse’s aunt and uncle’s retirement home in the area; we had spent a weekend at a family reunion nearby; and we had camped and gotten lost in the surrounding Blue Ridge mountains in that long ago time when we traveled with a tent, sleeping bags, and a Coleman stove.
Our research indicated that Asheville had a pleasant climate, one with a change of seasons, but with milder winters and summers than what we have been used to. The weather for our week was beautiful. We had also been told that Asheville, which had voted for Biden and Obama, was an accepting, welcoming place, and that also seemed to be true.
We were too busy viewing old folks’ homes (aka “continuing care retirement communities”; see spouse’s blog of September 19, 2023) to visit Asheville’s second most famous tourist destination. (I am assuming that “the outdoors” is first, for the area’s mountains and streams, which once entranced me, now beckon many others.) In one of our previous travels there we had visited the Biltmore Estate built in the late nineteenth century by George Washington Vanderbilt II, the grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who made fabulous amounts of money. A fabulous amount of that descended to GWV who spent a fabulous amount on the Biltmore Estate. The 250-room house, still in private hands, and the 8,000-acre grounds are open to the public. Biltmore, I thought, was an incentive to live in Asheville. I imagined that I would visit the place during all the seasons and attend programs at the Estate. A little research made me doubt that. Tickets normally are about a hundred bucks, but they go 40% higher during the Christmas season, and an annual pass for one person is $300. Maybe for the first year in Asheville, I might visit Biltmore, but after that . . .?
We did, however, visit — or almost visited — the boyhood home of the writer most identified with Asheville, Thomas Wolfe. Driving back to our hotel from a local CCRC, we headed to Wolfe’s boyhood home which the internet told us was open to the public. What we did not read, however, was that the home itself could only be viewed as part of a regularly scheduled group tour. We were ten minutes late for one and two hours early for the next. We eschewed the house tour.
The adjacent visitors’ center, however, had an informative 20-minute documentary on Wolfe’s life and another room of photographs, manuscripts, and objects concerning the writer. I knew the name of a couple of Wolfe’s novels and even one of his short stories, “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn.” (Wolfe lived for several years in Brooklyn, and I recently learned that I have unknowingly passed his old residences many times.) But I have not read a word he has written other than a passing sentence or two. I once heard that if you did not read Thomas Wolfe when you were young, you would find him unreadable. That wisdom came to me when I was no longer young and had not read him, and I decided that I would remain a Wolfe virgin. Most of my readerly friends have not read Wolfe either, but one recently tried. He announced the author “unreadable.”
The time spent at the visitors’ center did not inspire me to tackle any of his novels. I was confirmed in what I already thought I knew — that his books are egotistical, narcissistic autobiographies, not really novels with a beginning, middle, and end. The narrator of the documentary read poetic and descriptive passages that captured time and place, but the sentences also pushed on long after they should have found a period. Perhaps if I were to settle in Asheville, I would read Look Homeward, Angel, the thinly-disguised first novel about Wolfe’s early life in the town, but not until then.
We did, however, stay in a hotel that Thomas Wolfe wrote about, or more accurately, he wrote about the department store that would later be turned into the hotel. The structure was built in 1923 to house Asheville’s leading retail emporium, but when the downtown experienced a severe decline during the Depression and after World War II, the department store closed. In 1988 it was converted into a hotel, which today gives a hint of the building’s history by having displays of mid-twentieth clothing and by announcing our elevator’s arrival on the top floor with a voice saying, “Fourth floor. Women’s wear.” (This was a bit curious since a store directory on the ground floor indicated that women’s clothing had been on the second story.) Our suite with a separate sitting area had a quirky layout, but it suited us just fine for a week (except for the frustratingly intermittent internet service).
The department store was owned by the Jewish Solomon Lipinsky. This heritage was not noted in the hotel, but a plaque embedded in the sidewalk out a side entrance on a street lined with small shops noted that in the early twentieth century more than a dozen Jewish merchants owned stores in the neighborhood. Of course, there must be stories here. How did Jewish people decide to settle in Asheville more than a century ago? What were their relationships to the rest of the community? Where did they go to school? Did they intermarry with Christians? If not, what were the mating rituals? Perhaps Thomas Wolfe wrote about this, but I have my doubts, and I am not going to investigate.
The hotel was in the heart of downtown Asheville, which has many buildings from a century ago, although, like our hotel, many have been repurposed. Small shops abound. The spouse and I speculated about how the many clothing shops, mostly women’s, could survive with what appeared to be limited foot traffic, but if there were empty storefronts, they were few.
Asheville is known as a foodie haven, and the downtown had restaurants galore. We ate every night within walking distance of the hotel and especially enjoyed a place featuring the remarkable fusion of Hawaiian food and Texas barbecue. We had great ribs, and the fried green tomato was excellent, unlike the mediocre one we had had at a diner the day before. A large tapas place in a Moroccan-like setting served us several dishes we liked, including slow-roasted carrots and remarkably tasty lima beans. Not every restaurant was great. The spouse did indulge her southern roots in one place by having pimiento cheese, which she, a stern critic, anointed as excellent, but the rest of the food was mediocre, and a fried chicken place highly touted by locals was merely okay.
Strolling to the restaurants, we always passed one or two street musicians who to this untrained ear seemed talented as they played a jazz saxophone or muted trumpet. In addition to food, Asheville is known for music, and we got hints of its ubiquity. From the open windows of restaurants and bars, music of differing quality floated, and we saw many signs touting musical performances at hours usually past our bedtimes.
The downtown was enhanced by a good, independent bookstore with a public library nearby. Even so, to this dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker the downtown was small, and its charms, it seemed, could be quickly exhausted.
On the other hand, it would amuse me to live in Buncombe County (Asheville is the county seat). According to many sources (word origins are often disputed), because a nineteenth century Congressman from the area often spouted irrelevant drivel on the floor of the House of Representatives, the still useful term “bunkum” emerged. No one we met in Buncombe County mentioned that.
