Tuesday, October 10, 2006

The View That Made Asheville Famous

The View That Made Asheville Famous

Description: This painting is presently on exhibit in one of the world's nicest used book store, DOWNTOWN BOOKS AND NEWS, on North Lexington Avenue, in Asheville, North Carolina. This panorama is merely the WESTERN segment of the view, a hundred years ago, from Battery Hill, in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, on a June morning. I painted this in 2003 from a window on the 8th floor of the Flat Iron Building, which is very near the location [ and elevation ] of the top of THAT ANCIENT HILL. Battery Hill was purchased in the 1920s by snake-oil magnate Edwin Grove, builder of the Grove Park Inn. Less than a year after informing the citizens of Asheville that the nationally famous hotel on top of that hill, Battery Park Hotel, built in 1886, would NOT be closed - indeed, it would remain open three seasons every year, Grove had the hill REMOVED! Mr. Grove's GROVE ARCADE BUILDING was built where Battery Hill used to be . For 250 million years. [80 VERTICAL feet of stoney hill removed, from the highest part of downtown. Even the Cherokees would have advised that this was NOT a good thing to do. ] [ You can look this up in the Asheville-Citizen newspaper records.] Battery Hill was reinstalled upside down and sideways into what was referred to in the newspaper as an UGLY RAVINE to the south, and today this gently downward sloped area is called Coxe Avenue. [ Today one can find, a mile south of the area from where folks used to have a view, a fine trash littered creek to the north of the Asheville Fire Department Building at the south end of South French Broad Avenue. ] Mr. Grove announced, during construction, that people could still see THE VIEW - 'from the upper stories' of his [ planned ] 18 story Grove Arcade Building' [ which, after his death, in 1929, was terminated at the fourth floor.] [The following quote is from a descendant of Mr. Grove, Julie Beard: Before the days of the Food and Drug Administration, my great-great-grandfather, Edwin Grove, made a fortune with GROVES TASTELESS TONIC FOR MALARIA, which promised to make children and adults as fat as pigs. STL-Today, Feb. 17, 2004. ] You can look it up.

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