View allAll Photos Tagged ASHEVILLE
The amazing and beautiful Appalachian mountains north of Asheville, NC on the Blue Ridge Parkway. This view is looking in a westward direction from the Craggy Gardens area. Altitude here is ~ 5,600 feet above sea level, way up high.
This is a Westerly view of I 40 and the Blue Ridge Mountains from exit 94 at Dysartsville Road. I travel this route often and find this view inspirational.
Built in 1926-1928, this Art Deco-style building was designed by Douglas Ellington to serve as the City Hall for Asheville, North Carolina, replacing a previous city hall, which stood from 1892 until 1928 where Reuter Terrace of Pack Square Park is located today. City Hall stands alongside the Classical Revival-style Buncombe County Courthouse, which was built at the same time, and was originally proposed by Ellington to be a similar structure to City Hall, but the proposal was rejected by the relatively more conservative Buncombe County Commissioners, whom saw the proposed design as garish and too radical for the county. A bus station, which was to be located in a wing connecting the two buildings, was also never built. The building features an orange brick exterior, a marble-clad base, marble trim, metal frame windows, an arcade at the entrance with arched openings and a vaulted tile ceiling, Art Deco-style copper lanterns flanking the entrance, decorative trim surrounds at the windows at the central bays of the second floor of the front facade with pediments, engaged columns, and decorative sculptural reliefs, brick pilasters flanking the windows at the central bays of the building’s facades, windows in pentagon-shaped bays with pointed tops flanking decorative stone fins and pinnacles at the central bays of the sixth floor, setbacks at the corners of the sixth floor, an octagonal seventh floor, an octagonal polychromatic terra cotta roof above the seventh floor, with floral motifs and ribs, and an octagonal lantern at the top of the building’s roof. Inside, the building features a lobby with Art Deco-style pendants, decorative Art Deco-style trim, entrance doors with arched transoms, elevators with bronze doors, original operator levers, a stone trim surround, and bronze dial-style position indicators, a marble floor, a bronze letterbox, and marble wainscoting. The other areas of the building, besides the elevator lobbies and main lobby, have been modernized and updated to accommodate modern office needs. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, and remains in use as Asheville City Hall, with the building’s most recent change being the elimination of the staff positions of manual elevator operators in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, with the elevators being shifted to automatic operation.
As mentioned by my friend Michael (Leave No Clues) this is a scene on the entrance drive into Biltmore Estates in Asheville, NC
Built in 1925, this Prairie-style house features a red brick exterior, a side wing with stucco spandrels between the first and second floors, decorative wooden casement windows reminiscent of the art glass windows of Frank Lloyd Wright, with chevron-shaped mullion patterns, a hipped roof with wide overhanging eaves, a terrace wrapping around the front of the house, and a corner porch with brick piers. The house is one of the most distinctive architecturally in the historic Kenilworth neighborhood, but surprisingly little information as to its origins is easily available.
This public square became a crossroads for drovers herding cattle, hogs, and turkeys to markets further south.
A late November sunrise in my neighborhood, processed in a painterly style.
Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.
Built in 1912-1913, this Arts and Crafts-style hotel was designed by Fred Loring Seeley for Edwin Wiley Grove, and is known as the Grove Park Inn. Edwin Wiley Grove, whom had made his fortune selling Grove's Chill Tonic, used to help relieve symptoms brought on by malaria that was then endemic to the southern and midwestern United States, manufactured by his company, the Paris Medicine Company, which originated in Paris, Tennessee, before moving its operations to the larger city of St. Louis, Missouri. Grove had a summer house in Asheville, built circa 1897, prior to the construction of the inn, with Fred Loring Seeley, his son-in-law and business partner, having spent extensive time in the area with Grove and his wife, Evelyn Grove Seeley. The land upon which the hotel and nearby Kimberly Avenue neighborhood was later built was purchased by Grove in 1910, acquiring land all the way to the top of Sunset Mountain, as well as several tuberculosis sanatariums that Grove closed and demolished in order to change the reputation of Asheville’s health-focused resorts. Part of the land, atop Sunset Mountain, later became home to Seeley’s Castle, a large, Tudor Revival-style castle-like mansion built similarly of rough stone, and also designed by Seeley, but featuring more medieval appearance. The hotel went through several designs by various professional architects before Grove settled upon a design by Fred Loring Seeley, which featured a simple facade clad in rough granite stones, with a shingled cotswold cottage-style roof with dormers and curved edges, casement windows, and an all-concrete interior structure. The interior of the building was outfitted with Arts and Crafts furnishings and finishes designed and built by Roycrofters, a firm based in East Aurora, New York, and was opened in a ceremony with William Jennings Bryan as the keynote speaker. The hotel featured a large dining room in the northwest wing, with a tile floor and simple plaster walls, which sat next to the hotel’s original service wing, which housed the kitchen, laundry, and other service areas, a large Great Hall, serving as a lobby and lounge, in the center wing, with stone columns and massive stone fireplaces, a plaster ceiling, and a tile floor, and guest rooms on the upper floors, with a large atrium, known as the Palm Court, directly above the Great Hall, and four stories in height, crowned with a large skylight. The hotel was marketed as a health-conscious retreat for wealthy visitors. The hotel has hosted former United States Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama in its over century-long history. The hotel was utilized during World War II to house diplomats from the Axis Powers, and later by the US Navy as a rest and rehabilitation center for returning sailors, and in 1944-45, as a US Army Redistribution Station, where soldiers rested before being assigned duties in other parts of the army. Following World War II, contingency plans in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States involved moving the US Supreme Court to the Hotel, as Asheville sat far inland in the midst of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a far more defensible location than many major cities, and had very little strategic value compared to most cities of its size. In 1955, the hotel was purchased by Sammons Enterprises, owned by Charles Sammons, and underwent a modernization, seeing the stone columns in the lobby stripped and clad in aqua-colored vinyl wallpaper, the addition of a pool to the southeast terrace, a large two-story concrete motel structure that sat southeast of the hotel along the hillside, and later, the addition of a wing to the southwest, which appears to have only lasted about a decade and a half before being demolished. In 1976, the Sammons family purchased the adjacent Asheville Country Club and Golf Course, before embarking on a major renovation and expansion of the hotel between 1982 and 1988, with the addition of the massive Vanderbilt Wing and Sammons Wing on the south facade of the building, obscuring the original service wing, northwest wing, and heavily altering the hotel’s appearance with their white EIFS-clad facades, postmodern rooflines based on the original hotel, bands of horizontal and vertical black-tinted glass curtain walls, and minimal usage of rough stone. The Sammons Wing contains conference spaces, a parking garage, and service areas for the hotel, with guest rooms along the southern and western edges of the building, with the Vanderbilt Wing containing hotel rooms along the southern and eastern edges of the building, wrapping around a central parking garage, and also containing a large multi-story atrium and restaurants. The original wing of the hotel was restored as part of this project, with the columns in the lobby being clad in oak surrounds, the stonework and roof being repaired, the palm court being brought back to its original appearance, and furnishings from the period of significance for the hotel being re-introduced to the interior. Around the turn of the millennium, the grounds in front of the historic inn and between the two modern wings was re-landscaped with waterfalls, terraces, and gardens, with a new Spa building being constructed below the hotel, partially underground, between the two wings, with the two previous swimming pools on the hotel grounds being closed at this time. In 2012, the hotel was purchased by KSL Resorts for $120 million, whom subsequently sold it to Omni Hotels in 2013, with the hotel being rebranded as The Omni Grove Park Inn. The hotel was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973, though this would not have been possible following the massive alterations the building underwent in the 1980s, as the renovations have significantly and irreversibly altered the historic hotel, and have removed several character-defining features, though this is understandable in that it was done to keep the hotel economically viable in the modern age of larger resorts and economies of scale, which made the hotel in its previous form no longer economically viable.
another shot of our epic view during our stay in Asheville, North Carolina
Fujifilm X-t1 + Nikon 70-210 4-5.6 with nikon to fuji adapter
I had a chance to go to Asheville this last weekend to visit Nick and Jesse. Best weekend in a long time.
I met some really incredible people and saw the two best friends in the world.
Phrase of the weekend, "Yes".
Trying desperately to leave Asheville NC, after nearly killing ourselves on every train blowing through. Finally on day 2 after giving up and walking towards the railroad crossing, I spot the switchman jumping out of the van towards a sitting Unit that had just pulled up. On a whim I ask him if we can hitch a ride and without answering he jumps on his train. The conductor then pops his head out and with a southern drawl asks
" Hey! where y'all headed? Hop on in the back unit!" Two days of hell turn into a sweet Unit ride to Knoxville TN, with our conductor bringing us cans of food and then giving us a lift in his truck to a hitch able spot.
Spring 2006