PRESERVING ASHEVILLE’S HISTORIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL CULTURE
November 19, 2021
An angel stands guard over the visitors of Pack Square in downtown Asheville. It stands just outside the north entrance of the Asheville Art Museum, a monument clothed in bronze and humility, the head downcast and the right arm raised. There lies beneath the feet a plaque which states:
“Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, towards which the conscience of the world is tending—a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.”
These were some of the final words of Asheville local Thomas Wolfe, originally written and published in a short story only a few months before his death in 1938 and editorially included in his posthumous novel You Can’t Go Home Again.
“(Wolfe) was a giant of literature in the mid-20th century,” said Tom Muir, the historical site manager at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial. “He is still today considered by many to be North Carolina’s most famous author.”
Wolfe’s childhood home, the Old Kentucky Home boardinghouse, now stands as the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, a state historic site with guided tours of the old house and a small museum and theater in the visitor center.
Yet Wolfe represents only a small part of Asheville’s rich historical culture, a culture which continues to draw tourists and new residents to the city.
Between 2010 and 2019, Asheville’s population grew by 11.3% and Buncombe County’s population grew by 9.6%, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In 2019, Buncombe County saw over 11 million visitors, including more than 4 million overnight guests, according to the Buncombe County Tourism Development Authority’s annual report.
“Right now, part of what makes Asheville such a desirable place to come visit is our historic architecture,” said Jessie Landl, executive director of the Preservation Society of Asheville and Buncombe County.
Originally from Sanibel Island, Florida, Landl moved to Asheville roughly five years ago. She said her favorite thing about Asheville is the historic architecture, but she sees problems arising due to Asheville’s popularity.
“Because we’re such a desirable place to come visit and move to - I’m a great example of that - all these people are coming to town and we’re getting a ton of development pressure,” she said. “How does the city balance this thing that makes us so special - our historic architecture - with this need and desire for more housing and hotels and the whole deal?”
Proposed park raises questions of equity and effects on local environment
In recent years, Asheville has only continued to grow in popularity as a vacation destination, and the city has seen an influx of tourists and new residents. The city’s current stage of “over-tourism” causes a number of environmental issues, according to Alison Ormsby, a lecturer of environmental studies at UNC Asheville.
During the past 10 years, Asheville lost roughly 6% of its urban tree coverage, according to the Urban Tree Canopy Study commissioned by the city’s Urban Forestry Commission in 2019.
The loss of tree coverage is not only caused by more urban development, but also due to the lack of parks and adequate tree ordinances, according to Ormsby.
Ormsby said a number of factors go into the mismanagement of parks, including the historically racist practices of redlining and urban renewal and the modern practice of green gentrification. Such practices not only displace the disenfranchised members of society, but also prevent the development of parks and greenways within the poorest areas.
“If you gave me a whole bunch of money, I would say, let’s focus on the historically under-resourced areas and put parks there, instead of in South Asheville, which is kind of the richest part in Asheville” she said.
In late September, the city of Asheville bought approximately 11 acres of wooded land adjacent to the Blue Ridge Parkway in South Asheville for a new park. This “passive” park will include modest amenities and improvements, including enhanced walking trails and a parking lot, according to the City of Asheville Parks & Recreation’s Resource Manager Christy Bass.
“This is where the opportunity was,” Bass said. “Land in Asheville is very expensive, and this was a great way to utilize 2016 bond funds that were to be used for a land purchase.”
Not everyone has equal access to nature, according to the American Forests’ Tree Equity Score, a non-profit dedicated to restoring the country’s tree coverage.
While the wealthy white neighborhoods surrounding Asheville have a high range of tree coverage, with canopy coverage at 50% or higher, the poorer income, traditionally black neighborhoods near downtown have a significantly smaller average of tree coverage, as low as 12%. Low tree coverage contributes to greater climate change and worsening health for local residents, according to Ormsby.
“There’s a lot going on, but for me, it’s all about equity,” Ormsby said. “I think we should have parks that people can walk to.”
Ormsby said the loss of urban trees causes hotter temperatures, something called “heat island effect,” and leads to more impact from climate change.
“It’s this negative feedback loop,” she said. “We really need to think about smart growth.”
Ormsby said the city should focus on ecotourism, which focuses on environmental conservation through promoting natural destinations.
“I think we need nature to be healthy and happy,” she said. “I think everyone should have fair access. I think everyone should be within walking distance or easy access of some kind of greenspace.”
City moves forward with urbanization plans
The Urban Centers initiative, which the Asheville Planning and Zoning Commission approved in early October, aims to expand the city’s urban corridors toward dense urbanization. This would mean fewer single-story, stand-alone buildings in large, empty parking lots, and more multi-story buildings combining both commercial and residential space.
“They’re catering to the developers and ignoring the concerns of the residents of the city,” said Eric Fisher, a local resident, in early October.
Fisher said a number of environmental issues concerned him, including the amount of erosion and sediment dumped into the city’s waterways. His main argument against urbanization centered around preserving Asheville’s rich and unique culture.
“The city is already being overdeveloped and is losing the natural environment that is a major part of the appeal of the city,” he said. “They are failing their citizens and continuing to destroy the beauty of the city.”
Charlotte Street Neighbors representative Bill Murphy shared similar concerns in early October when discussing the threat of development in his neighborhood.
“This is one of the oldest neighborhoods in Asheville,” he said. “Nobody wants to see this go away.”
Before withdrawing their proposal for conditional zoning on Sept. 17, RCG Development Group and property owner Hume Killian planned to demolish 12 historic homes off Charlotte Street in the nationally registered Chestnut Hills Historic District. Murphy said RCG and the Killian family refused to sit down and talk with local residents and neighborhood associations.
“Now I don’t want to see a five-story apartment building there, but I think the neighborhood would be willing to negotiate if people sit down and work with us,” Murphy said.
At the PSABC, Director of Preservation Erica LeClaire said development and historic preservation often end up at odds with each other, but they can happen in ways that support one another.
“I think urbanization can be done in a thoughtful way that benefits the community,” she said. “Infill construction and adaptive reuse are really interesting tools for preservation that can also encourage development and density.”
The Urban Centers initiative allows for rezoning certain parts of the city, and though no plans were put forth before the PZC in their October meeting to demolish historic structures, Murphy said preservation is only half of the larger issue.
“It’s an issue of both preservation and zoning, which are critical aspects of this town. That’s what draws people here,” he said. “They come up here for a different experience, and if we just become another cookie cutter community, we’re going to lose that.”
Save Charlotte Street: A small victory for local residents
Murphy lives in an older neighborhood, one of the oldest in town, exhibiting a multitude of craftsman style homes and bungalows as far back as the 1880s.
“The house I’m in now is probably approaching 100 years old,” Murphy said. “It was in tough shape, but the bones were good.”
His neighborhood stands quiet and quaint, the type of neighborhood where you find people taking a leisurely stroll, where bikes ride up and down the streets from dawn to dusk, where grandparents play with little children in front yards. This historic neighborhood - Chestnut Hills Historic District, part of the National Register of Historic Places - remains this way despite facing the threat of demolition earlier this year.
RCG’s and the Killian family’s original proposal for the neighborhood included demolishing 12 historic homes and developing a variety of mixed-use structures which required conditional zoning.
“With conditional zoning, the idea that I’ll come in and change the zoning with my project, that’s extremely dangerous because in the end you really don’t have any zoning,” Murphy said. “I mean, somebody with enough money and enough property could come in and blow up any neighborhood they want.”
Though RCG withdrew their proposal, Murphy said they will likely come back in the future - in a year and a half, two years - to try to get the zoning changed.
“Hopefully with elections coming up with city council we’ll be able to get people in there who’re preservation minded, neighborhood minded,” Murphy said in early October. “We’re not against development at all here, but you got to put the appropriate development in the appropriate places. That’s been our argument all along.”
According to Ramona Bartos, the North Carolina Historic Preservation Office’s deputy state historic preservation officer, the relationship between development and historic preservation can be tense, but it doesn’t have to be.
“It can be a fraught relationship, or it can be a very fruitful one,” she said. “Historic places stand more of a chance if the developer is aware of them, understands their value, and can be aided in seeing how to incorporate them into a project, rather than seeing them as an obstacle or nuisance.”
Murphy said he has seen a lot of support for historic preservation from local small businesses, who, according to Bartos, prefer old buildings compared to new ones.
“It’s just like everything else here in Asheville, the rents here are getting so expensive we’re losing the local stores and they’re being replaced by these big chains,” Murphy said.
Members of the PSABC worked with local communities to stop the demolition threat to the Charlotte Street neighborhood. From developing and maintaining relationships with property owners to gathering the public’s opinion on current development proposals, a good deal of their work involved interacting with the public and acting as mediators between local communities, developers and government.
“Asheville has one of the most active local nonprofit preservation advocacy groups,” Bartos said. “Having conversations and planning in place well before there is a preservation threat is key to any community’s efforts to balance the past with the present.”
Woman dedicates her life to preserving local history and culture
The PSABC works to preserve some of the county’s oldest structures, including historic homes threatened by urban development, like those along Charlotte Street, and other structures threatened by natural deterioration, like a reconstruction era freedman’s cabin known as the Boyd or the Boyd Boyd Cabin in northwest Buncombe County.
“The Boyd Cabin has been something that the preservation society has known about and has tried to figure out for years,” LeClaire said. “We’ve been working as an organization with the property owner for a long time to figure out what on earth needs to happen. Since I came on it became a little more dire because the condition was just deteriorating.”
Landl praised LeClaire for her role in the Boyd Boyd Cabin project over the summer, which included organizing a team of community members, volunteers and local organizations - such as the Appalachian Barn Alliance - to carefully disassemble and safely store the old cabin.
“It was at a point where there was no other choice other than to let it go, so we feel like this was the best step at this time,” Landl said in September. “(We’re) just really proud that we were able to get it to the point that it’s at now, where it’s safe and protected and hopefully will have a future.”
This was a unique project for the 25-year-old preservation director, who studied in Arizona, where the materials and building plans were significantly different.
“I didn’t really know what I was doing,” LeClaire said. “But I’m happy to listen to people who know more than I do and tell other people what to do based on that.”
Growing up, LeClaire said she felt a strong connection to history in her hometown, Dollar Bay, Michigan, what she called a strong sense of place - a complex, multidimensional concept regarding the emotional connection between people and their surrounding environment. This strong emotional connection to her environment led LeClaire to develop a deep and lifelong passion for history and its preservation.
“It didn’t really matter what else was going on, history was always what I loved,” she said. “History has always been what I would do, it was just a matter of what that looked like.”
During the summers, she worked for a local historic mine site, the Quincy Mine, giving tours of the largest steam-powered hoisting engine in the world. Later, after moving to Minnesota with her husband, Justin Nicholas, she found another job giving tours at the historic Mayowood Mansion. Though she said she never liked being a tour guide, she sought to work in the field in whatever way she could.
“You can have all the skills in the world, but if you don’t feel the passion for something I think you’re never going to be as strong at it as you could be,” said Landl, who interviewed and hired LeClaire. “Erica has all these fantastic skill sets, but on top of that she is so passionate about what she does that she brings that extra level of energy and enthusiasm to her job.”
Asheville redefines historic preservation
In the past, historic preservation mostly focused on places which were either architecturally unique or attached to a specific person or event, like Thomas Wolfe.
“I think people in general, no matter where they are, are sentimental about the past and having physical things in our environment reminds us of the past and it’s important to people,” Muir said. “So having a place in Asheville where he was from, where people can meet Thomas Wolfe for the first time or get reintroduced to Thomas Wolfe, it’s really something special.”
Muir said part of his job is to help people make connections with the past, a past which has caught the attention of many local residents and tourists.
“I think the writer’s job is to find the things about a place that are distinct,” said Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of A Land More Kind Than Home and alumni author-in-residence at UNCA. “Whether it’s the spirit of the people, whether it’s the landscape or the geography or the culture or the history.”
Cash, whose novels often take place in North Carolina and Southern Appalachia, moved to Asheville when he was 18 years old. He fell in love with how old the city felt and has since referred to Asheville as his home.
“This is a place - and North Carolina more broadly - that is so rich and interesting, because it’s a place that’s in such conflict with itself - politically, culturally, geographically - that I think I would never run out of things to write about,” he said.
According to Landl and her coworkers at the PSABC, the nature of historic preservation is changing to incorporate more than just the structures of famous local figures, like Thomas Wolfe.
“Now we are talking a lot more about the cultural importance of places that are perhaps less grand but have cultural significance to a community,” Landl said. “I think that broadens our vision of what preservation is.”
LeClaire said that preservation is more than just keeping old buildings from falling down - it’s a tool that helps build communities. She said history helps show people where we’ve been and, hopefully, where we’re going.
“Preservation is about a place, it’s about the community that built it,” she said.
LeClaire said she rejects the idea that preservation is automatically at odds with development and new things.
“It’s incredibly challenging to get people to think about preservation as more than just standing in front of bulldozers,” she said. “Preservation works in tandem with development, or at least it can work in tandem with development, to create even better development and better growth for places.”