Grove Arcade

E.W. Grove wanted "a classy look to a modern palace of commercialism." He'd already built the Grove Park Inn. This time he hired Charles Parker to design a Tudor Revival and Late Gothic Revival commercial block on the site where the old Battery Park Hotel had stood — a full city block in downtown Asheville, steel frame and reinforced concrete under molded terra cotta cladding. Construction ran from 1926 to 1929. Grove died in 1927, two years before it opened.

The exterior: ivory-hued terra cotta tiles, embellishments sprawling around the roofline and windows, winged lions without claws — a symbol borrowed from Venice. The lower block is rectangular with rounded corners. Above it, a two-tier setback story, then a roof deck with a bronze semi-elliptical balcony and a ziggurat-like arrangement of ramps wide enough to move crowds or freight. The frame underneath was designed to carry a skyscraper. The tower was never built.

The building opened as one of America's first indoor shopping malls. The federal government bought it in 1943. It housed the National Climatic Data Center until 1995, then sat empty. In 1997, the City of Asheville acquired title under the National Monument Act and signed a 198-year lease with the Grove Arcade Public Market Foundation, a group founded to preserve the building's structural and historical integrity. Five years of restoration followed. It reopened in 2002: shops and restaurants on the first floor, offices on the second, residential apartments — the Residences at Grove Arcade — on the third through fifth.

Page Avenue runs along one side now. They call it Restaurant Row. The Outdoor Artists Market sets up daily outside the arcade entrance. You go for the building — it's on the National Register — but you stay because the vendors are still here.