Visiting Our Past: Photos, relics provide glimpse of River Arts District's past
Ninety years go by, and all that remains are the power poles. There is also the street name — Depot — but the depot itself is gone.
I was commissioned more than a year ago (this was published in September 2008) to create an illustrated history of Asheville's River Arts District, the 1/2-mile-by-1-mile area now made famous by an arts renaissance. I engaged my then-17-year-old son, Henry, a photographer, to help. At Depot Street, he climbed up a kudzu-covered bank just south of where Asheville's famous Southern Railroad passenger station had once stood. He looked at a "then" photo, dated 1916.
No roadway to go by. In the 1916 photo, floodwaters covered it. In the foreground of the old photo, well-dressed folk view the debacle from a stairway. Does the present-day kudzu obscure steps?
The hotel in the "now" photo doesn't show in the old one, though it inherited its predecessor's name, Glen Rock. Not even the ridgeline in the background is the same. But the log-like power poles survive and almost make one want to go to the site and touch them.
The Glen Rock Hotel is undergoing yet another transformation, as Mountain Housing Opportunities renovates and adds to the long-vacant structure to create apartments, offices, studios and stores. On a tour of the space with Cindy Weeks, project manager, a year ago, she showed Henry and me old relics: wallets of two early 1950s boarders.
The wallets and their contents are as precious as the power poles. They are rare, unplanned-for survivors, and they now symbolize the workers to whom the city might dedicate itself as it resists, in part, the new wave of gentrification.
Ruefield Collins was a man in his 40s who liked to fish, though his fishing license was six years old and expired. His driver's license listed a Route #1, Swannanoa address. The most current item in his horse-head cameo-embossed wallet was a ticket for a V.F.W. benefit dance at a Nags Head casino, June 5, 1953.
Geary Luther Cordell kept his marriage license in his wallet along with a photo of his wife, Irma Gwynn Morgan, a brunette beauty posing in a jacket before a screen image of a lake. Geary was 29 years old, a resident of the Beaverdam area of Candler. Having registered in the army at age 22, he waited until 1950 to marry Irma. He had life and injury insurance.
While staying at the hotel, he waited on items he'd brought to Mountain City Cleaners and Laundry. He also had a receipt from Rea Auto Supply, an automotive and appliance supplier at 442 Depot St. He was charged on a regular account, a tool account and a FryRyte account. FryRyte had been the latest technology in neat, controlled home frying.
That was the then. The now? Neither Collins nor Cordell appear in the current city directory. But Cordell and his wife are in the 1987 edition, living in Arden, he the president of Carolina Truck & Body, and she as his office manager.
Rob Neufeld wrote the local history feature, "Visiting Our Past," for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published Sept. 3, 2008.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Visiting Our Past: Photos, relics give glimpse of River Arts District
