Grove Arcade

E.W. Grove wanted "a classy look to a modern palace of commercialism." He got something stranger and more lasting than that.

Construction ran from 1926 to 1929 on a full city block in downtown Asheville — the site of a demolished hotel — producing a Tudor Revival and Late Gothic Revival building in steel frame and reinforced concrete, clad in molded terra cotta. The lower block is rectangular with rounded corners. Above it, a two-tier setback story rises to a roof deck with a bronze semi-elliptical balcony and a ziggurat-like arrangement of ramps. The north side carries winged lions without claws, a symbol borrowed from Venice. The whole frame was engineered to serve as a base for a skyscraper. The skyscraper was never built.

The building opened as one of America's first indoor shopping malls. In 1943, the federal government purchased it, and for more than fifty years it housed the National Climatic Data Center — weather records and climate data in a building whose developer had imagined something considerably more flamboyant. The Center left in 1995. In 1997, the City of Asheville acquired title under the National Monument Act, then signed a 198-year lease with the Grove Arcade Public Market Foundation, an organization 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 on the third through fifth floors.

Page Avenue runs along one side — Restaurant Row, they call it now. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976. It has earned that designation the hard way: federal appropriation, decades of institutional use, near-abandonment, and then return. Go for the terra cotta. Stay because the building is genuinely strange and genuinely there.