~~ The Grove Arcade Building ~~
The Arcade opened in 1929 at 37 Battery Park. The entrance to True Confections location can be seen through the L.B.
Jackson sign, just to the right of the large "B". There are chairs and umbrellas, and an arbor on the roof across
from the Battery Park Hotel. Many of the shops on Page Avenue appear to be empty.
About 10 years later, the Arcade is little changed though the cars are
newer. Soon, the Fed's will move in -- they use the War Powers
Act, I recall -- and the merchants will be gone.
The biggest effect on Asheville was the large number of people who came
to the city to work in the Arcade. Housing was in short supply
and many had to rent rooms in private homes.
Twenty more years pass, memory of the building's origin has dimmed,
and the Arcade has become known locally as the Federal Building.
Most of the original windows and doors have been closed with brick and
glass block.
View of the East entrance, again about 1960. At right is a '59
Chevy station wagon parked
in front of where True Confections will be 40 years later. (View inside
the entrance today.)
The original Edward Hopper painting, People in the Sun. Gordon took out the people and added pies. There's another Hopper-inspired painting on the opposite wall.
The Grove Arcade building in downtown Asheville may be an architectural jewel, but it has not lived up to its potential as a retail center. The Arcade began life as an indoor shopping center in 1928, was taken over by the Federal Government in WWII, and was returned to the city of Asheville in the 1990's. Opened again in 2002 as a public market, many of the shops were burdened with high start-up costs, languished most of the year from little pedestrian traffic in or around the Arcade, and suffered while management fought turf wars over who was in charge of the building instead of aggressively marketing what could have been a destination shopping area. Envisioned as a vibrant, public market with a carefully choreographed mix of local vendors who would fill the interior arcades with the sights, sounds, and smells of their products while providing the day-to-day needs of Asheville residents, the Arcade hit its nadir when the last inside restaurant was driven out and the grocery store was finally evicted.
The Arcade does have a good mix of commercial, retail, and living spaces -- another element of Grove's vision. The offices on the second floor are all leased, and the apartments continue to have high occupancy (they start at $1365 for a 1000 sq-ft one-bedroom), and on the retail first floor, at least some businesses are doing quite well. Carole is lucky to be on Page Avenue, part of its restaurant row . Yet, the mix of retail stores is a far cry from what Grove originally thought the Arcade should be, and from what the original merchants were promised:
“I will locate stores of every kind of merchandising business in Asheville … so that a lady can park her car anywhere in this place and can let it remain just as long as she pleases, and do all of her trading in that one vicinity.“
(No comment on parking near the Arcade nowadays.) The Grove Arcade web site has a lot of interesting information about the history both of the building and E. W. Grove himself. The Foundation has published an excellent self-guided tour to the architecture of the building. You'll learn why some of the travertine was faked, that the style of the building is generally Palladian, not Gothic, and that those big creatures at the North entrance are just winged lions, not griffins.